Speaking of coddled white guys…

The usual suspects are currently howling and thrashing and having temper tantrums over Steve Shives, another white guy who thinks we ought to welcome diversity, but they’re also taking the opportunity to fling accusations of hypocrisy my way. It’s simply amazing how triumphantly they are spamming my email and twitter account with this irrefutable proof that I lied.

harassment

Gosh. They got me now…oh, wait. Read that last comment. It might help.

No, I have never been accused of sexual harassment. If you were to have access to my employment record, you’d find it was completely clean — I simply do not harass women (or men, for that matter), and never have. It’s also not that I have been exonerated of charges — I’ve never been charged with harassment, because I’ve never done it (note that this does not imply that being accused means you are guilty), and I’ve scrupulously avoided circumstances where there is even an opportunity for such an accusation.

They love to make much of that incident in the 1990s — in which a young woman thought she could get a better grade by extortion. I responded by immediately removing myself from the situation and making the situation open to investigation by authorities. She did not accuse me because she couldn’t.

So I have been threatened with extortion, but no extortion took place. Similarly, I get weekly murder threats, but I have not been murdered. I am conscious of the distinction, but these wackaloons apparently are not.

By the way, these loons have also sent wild accusations of harassment to my university employers…who have treated their baseless bullshit with the respect they deserve. Those also are not credible accusations.

Solnit sings

Rebecca Solnit has written a wonderful essay that resonates beautifully, especially after wading through the rage of white men in my mailbox (which, as a white man myself, is really weird.)

There has been a lot said this year about college students—meaning female college students, black students, trans students—and how they’re hypersensitive and demanding that others be censored. That’s why The Atlantic, a strange publication that veers from progressive to regressive and back again like a weighty pendulum recently did a piece on “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It tells us that, “Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke,” with the invocation of these two white guys as definitive authorities.

But seriously, you know who can’t take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage, the pettiness, the meltdowns and fountains of male tears of fury, you’re seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they’re wonderful all through the days. And here, just for the record, let me clarify that I’m not saying that all of them can’t take it. Many white men—among whom I count many friends (and, naturally, family members nearly as pale as I)—have a sense of humor, that talent for seeing the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they are and for seeing beyond the limits of their own position. Some have deep empathy and insight and write as well as the rest of us. Some are champions of human rights.

But there are also those other ones, and they do pop up and demand coddling. A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.

Exactly.

A small request to the Russian people

This is the Transsiberian Railway.

Transsiberianmap

It stretches across the whole of Russia, cutting through places with incredibly cold, barren reputations. It’s the middle of winter.

Our crazy brave daughter Skatje is off to that place today. She’s going to spend three weeks visiting St Petersburg and Moscow, and then boarding that train and crossing Siberia, in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why? She loves Russian culture and the Russian language, and she wants to learn more and see more, and this is her opportunity. So she just decided to go.

Now, while I’m quite proud as a father to have a child who has grown to be so fearless and confident, her parents are going to be a bit anxious for the next few weeks. So, to any Russian readers out there: if by some slender chance, you’ve both read this mention and also encounter an enthusiastic and adventurous American woman on a journey across your country, say hello and remember that she’s there as a friend. And we need more friends around the world.

Taking a phylogenetic approach to the law

billevolution

Nick Matzke has just published a very amusing analysis of American anti-evolution efforts. Evolutionary biology has all these tools that allow one to, for instance, assemble trees demonstrating lines of descent for molecular characters, which are ultimately just strings of letters. And what is a law but a string of letters? We can relatively easily map out patterns of similarities and differences, and catalog which bill was modeled after which other bill.

So Matzke put together the history of creationist efforts to adapt their legal strategies.

The analysis of dozens of bills introduced in state legislatures around the country reveals how a single innovation from a small Louisiana parish (population 156,325) was incorporated into 32 subsequent bills through a process the study describes as “descent with modification.” Two of those 32 bills became law and now “negatively affect science education” for students throughout Louisiana (population 4.7 million) and Tennessee (population 6.5 million).

It’s also being discussed on the Panda’s Thumb.

Oh, but most entertainingly, you can tell that the Discovery Institute is furious. They’re trying to claim now that it was a criminal misuse of NSF funds.

A more serious issue is whether Matzke misappropriated taxpayer funds in order to write his article. Matzke discloses in the article’s acknowledgements that his research was funded by two National Science Foundation grants. But if you look up those grants, they appear to have nothing to do with the article he published.

Indeed, NSF Grant 0919124 is a $422,000 grant intended to “develop bivalve molluscs as a preeminent model for evolutionary studies….” And NSF Grant DBI-1300426 is a $12 million+ grant for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, which told the NSF it would “provide scientific insights into problems such as the control of invasive species, limiting impacts of infectious diseases, and suggesting new methods for drug design.”

Neither of those awards are directly to Matzke. The larger funds an institute, the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, which by its nature would support diverse projects. The smaller one includes citations to 5 papers with Matzke as an author, all relevant to the grant, so there’s certainly no evidence that he’s been neglecting his responsibilities.

Creationists: science doesn’t currently endorse slavery. A grant award buys you a piece of a person’s time and effort, but does not give you full-time ownership of their brain. In fact, granting institutions encourage awardees to explore new ideas creatively, because that’s what will lead to the next research proposal. That a scientist has found a way to use his skills and his tools in a novel way, without compromising the funded specifics of a grant, is always a big plus.

So once again the Discovery Institute reveals their total ignorance of how science works while reaching for excuses for their own failure. No surprise there at all.

The depths were insufficiently plumbed

You may recall that terrible conversation between Sam Harris and British neocon, in which I pointed out a very few appallingly stupid things that were said, and then we got that delightful influx of Harris fans who insisted over and over again that he was taken out of context, he didn’t really say that, and that he also covered his butt with contradictions, so none of it really counted…you know, the usual Harris song and dance. Well, we’re probably going to get some more two-step and soft-shoe, because I didn’t cover half of it. There’s much more awfulness to be exposed to the light.

For instance, Sincere Kirabo calls him out on blatant transphobia.

[Read more…]

How to be one of the cool kids

NPR is giving lessons in how to do the Minnesota accent

. I should probably practice so I can blend in better.

One nice thing about it is that they’re emphasizing the subtleties–it’s inspired by the television series, Fargo, but all the people in that show have the extreme version of the local accent — they all sound like they’re straight out of the Iron Range, way up north. Around where I live, the accent is recognizable but much, much softer.

We should all work on our accents while I struggle with a few other things: it’s a heavy grading day for me, and my computer is still mostly dead and unreliable (I’m pecking this out on my iPad, which is totally unsuitable for writing of any length). My goal is to get all the exams graded today, and reward myself wit the local showing of the new Star Wars movie.

Don’t worry, my keyboardless state means I won’t be able to dump spoilers on you. I’ll be reduced to short texting style one-liners by then. “WORST STAR WARS EVER.”