Unproportional! Vicious! Hypocritical! Hysterical!

RIPscience

There’s a letter going around, in support of Geoff Marcy. If you’d rather not read it, just see panels 4 and 5 of this cartoon.

Dear Colleagues,

Due to my outrage concerning the disgusting attack of the (mostly) US1 astronomical community against Geoff Marcy, and the apparent lack of any counter movement against this madness, I would like to draw your attention to the danger of remaining silent in this situation.

What we can gather from the newspapers and web sites discussing the issue, it is clear that the reaction of the community was unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical2. The unleashed hate3, clearly blowing out of proportion the weight of his behavior and leaving wide open space to any further accusation against anybody showing some level of casual interaction4 and furthermore, endanger normal and friendly contacts in the community and in the society, as a whole. I hope you recognize the great danger of accepting the total destruction of someone’s undeniable contribution to science5 because of the hypocritical attitude the community seems to accept these days.

Considering the pace of events, I think that the clock is ticking very quickly. If the mature and free-thinking part of the community does not act right now, I am sure that the game ends very quickly, and those who initiated this dirty, unethical and disgraceful attack6, will win. Today Geoff, tomorrow you or me.7

Sincerely,

Geza Kovacs, DSc
Konkoly Observatory

p.s.: You are free to circulate this letter to anybody you think might be willing to act. This letter has been sent also to other researchers.

1I’ve seen this same weird displacement activity among atheists, too. It’s just Americans who are too sensitive. I have never heard Americans accused of “sensitivity” in any other context. Either there is no sexism in Europe, or European men are especially oblivious.

2Speaking of unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical, isn’t the accusation that people who are unhappy with the lack of consequences to Marcy kind of unproportional, vicious, hypocritical and hysterical?

3Ditto. I haven’t seen any expressions of hate at all — mostly regret, dismay, and anger at both the behavior and the timidity of UCB.

4Ahem. Casual interaction? An official investigation at Berkeley found:

After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.

I just got out of lab with my cell biology students. I managed to help them do measurements of enzyme reaction rates with no massages, kisses, or groping. I would not call such activities casual interaction.

5Marcy’s contributions to science have not been destroyed. Neither has Marcy’s career.

If we’re going to talk about destruction, how about the careers of the women who fled astronomy because of the disrespect, or how about their potential contributions to science?

6Again, official, formal investigation by the university in response to a decade of bad behavior by Marcy, with at least four clear victims. If I had to name who was dirty, unethical, and disgraceful, it would be someone whose name begins with “G” and ends with “eoff Marcy”.

7It might be you tomorrow if you are massaging, kissing, or groping your students. It might also be you tomorrow if you’re in the habit of robbing banks; that you might be thrown in prison for that crime if you were to rob a bank is not an argument that bank robbers need to be treated leniently.

At any rate, Kovacs was too late. Marcy has resigned.

I guess all Kovacs can do now is help him land a new position somewhere less concerned about Dr Handsy fondling the undergrads, and more enthused about getting grants and fame. I’m sure there will be no shortage of positions available, and may Cthulhu have mercy on the students8 at his next institution.

8Cthulhu will show no mercy.

Others are coming forward. Would you believe his bad behavior goes back 30 years? Of course you would.

His inappropriate behaviour goes back a good thirty years, when he was teaching at San Francisco State University.

This is where I met him in 1985 when we both worked in the Physics and Astronomy Department while I was a Master’s student and a lecturer. It was well known that he had intimate relationships with several of his female students. But it is not the only aspect where I felt Marcy’s ethics were questionable.

In 1987, Marcy’s colleague in the search for exoplanets realized that he had handed her a revised copy of their joint grant proposal. On the copy Marcy had given her, both their names appeared, his as main investigator and hers, as co-investigator. But Marcy’s official copy, the one he had submitted to the funding agency, bore only his name.

She reported this to the department head, who fired her on the spot. Marcy was the rising star of his department. She then filed a formal complaint for professional misconduct against Marcy. But she was unable to recover her position and she left the field of astronomy. Following these events, a few people tried to draw the University’s attention to Geoff Marcy’s inappropriate behaviour with his female students.

Guess what the university did?

What modern weapons do

msfdestruction

Here is a photo essay of the inside of the MSF hospital in Kunduz that was attacked by US air power. The destruction is chilling.

It’s horrible that this devastation and death was wrought on a hospital, but we need to keep in mind that this is what follows every time our military decides that a point on the map needs to be obliterated. This is the wreckage we leave behind with every mad venture we engage.

We just don’t see the detailed images of the ruined lives and buildings afterwards.

We need to encourage more youtubers to engage in progressive atheism

YouTube is generally a blighted mess for atheism — but I’m seeing more people pushing back (but the comments there are still full of fulminating argle-bargle from the usual noisemakers). Here’s an example:

I do want to mention one thing I see a lot. You’ve heard it: tell a self-labeled proud atheist that they should value equality and other progressive ideals, and the immediate rebuttal is “Atheism just means I don’t believe in god. Go be a humanist if social justice is your thing.”

Humanism is not your get-out-of-jail-free card. The existence of humanism does not mean that calling yourself an atheist exempts you from all responsibilities to normal human concerns — you don’t get to foist off all the obligations involved in being a functional member of a healthy society on those humanists over there.

It’s as if they’ve carried the negativity of the minimal definition one step further: atheism means disbelief in god, and disbelief in any concept of social justice. We’ve been making some great strides in improving the cultural perception of atheism over the last decade, but there are still way too many atheists who are committed to associating atheism with sociopathy.

And they all seem to be hanging out on YouTube.

So someone finally actually read Walden

Never having been able to make it through the book myself, I have to admire Kathryn Schulz, who read the whole thing, and thinks Henry David Thoreau was a wanker. Like Ayn Rand, it’s a mystery how such an obnoxious thinker became so revered.

Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.

Schulz does explain why he’s popular. His nature writing, when not soured with his philosophy, is excellent, and he appeals to something in the American psyche.

Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.

Ah. He was a primordial Republican.

The Democrats are easy, at least

I watched the Democratic debate tonight, sort of. I wasn’t paying close attention, but here are my impressions, anyway, ranked in my order of preference.

5. Chaffee: why is this guy even here? Muddled and goofy.

4. Webb: Beetle-browed bellicose buffoon.

3. O’Malley: Meh. Not awful, not very interesting.

2. Clinton: The confident moderate. Will probably win. Don’t expect much change.

1. Sanders: The revolutionary. Would shake things up, if he had a cooperative congress…otherwise, nothin’.

Just send 5, 4, and 3 home — I can’t imagine them making a decent showing in a debate with the blustering clowns in the Republican party.

You probably have a different impression.

Generically full of win

Maki Naro has done something very clever: he has created a generic comic that we can use over and over again every time a Famous Scientist does something bad.

Read the whole thing. Every panel encapsulates perfectly the standard reaction we always get.

In other, related news, UC Berkeley announces that they did too do enough.

The university has imposed real consequences on Professor Geoff Marcy by establishing a zero-tolerance policy regarding future behavior and by stripping him of the procedural protections that all other faculty members enjoy before he can be subject to discipline up to and including termination, the university said in a statement Monday.

Right. Over a decade of bad behavior that affected multiple women and generated multiple complaints, and now their response is to say One more time, and you’re really gonna get it!.

I am also unhappy that their solution is to strip him of “procedural protections that all other faculty members enjoy”. That’s not right. He should have a reasonable defense against future accusations; I also don’t believe the university, because from their current procedures, their default is always to doubt the accuser’s claim. They aren’t suddenly going to change their mode to disciplining a professor if a student says anything.

Besides, he was already wrung through their “procedures”, and found to be in the wrong. He ought to be disciplined for what he has done, and what has been determined by their process.

It was all China’s fault

If you noticed some really annoying slowdowns here on FtB over the last few days, we were being effectively ddos’ed by China. Not because we were a threat, but apparently because a Chinese search engine was being a bit overzealous and repetitive in slurping up links.

This situation has been corrected thanks to the efforts of our clever technical person, Alex. All hail Alex!

The untenable situation of guns in America

In South Carolina, a two-year-old found a gun in his car and shot his grandmother.

Bollinger noted that investigators had already determined that the child was not in a car seat at the time of the shooting, enabling him to reach the .357 that was hanging in a pouch on the back of the passenger seat.

“We’re still trying to figure out how the child pulled the trigger,” he said. “We’re encouraging folks as always, keep your weapons secured, especially around small children.”

I have to ask…why did this person need or want a deadly weapon hanging off of their car seat while they were running routine errands? Did it make them feel more safe than putting their child in a car seat, because that also seems irresponsible and dangerous?

[Read more…]