Two steps forward, one step back

Most Minnesota high schools have settled something well: there will be no further discrimination against transgender students in athletics.

Capping months of emotional debate that brought tens of thousands of e-mails, the board overseeing high school athletics in Minnesota overwhelmingly said yes Thursday to opening up girls’ sports to transgender student-athletes.

The decision by the Minnesota State High School League will take effect in the 2015-16 school year, making the state the 33rd to adopt a formal transgender student policy.

The board set out criteria for determining whether transgender students who were born male but identify as female can be eligible for girls’ teams at the nearly 500 schools in the league’s membership. State law already permits girls to compete in boys’ sports.

Except (there’s always an “except”)…

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It’s like asking, “if we remove the cancer, what will we replace it with?”

Philip Kitcher is interviewed about his new book, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. It sounds interesting, and I’ll probably pick it up…but two things annoyed me about the interview: the misrepresentation of the position of some New Atheists, and the religious apologetics. It’s nothing personal about Kitcher, but they’re just two things I bump into all the time, and it’s exasperating.

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The onslaught begins

I haven’t been slacking — next week is the last week of classes, and everything is coming due. I just got a stack of lab reports to grade by Monday; I’m giving a lab final next week; I’m giving two unit tests at the end of the week. The students are freaking out a little bit, realizing that all their sins are coming home to roost and they only have a few shots at redemption. So it’s going to be a crazy week and a half.

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How can a black person be racist?

Chris Rock has been brilliant on race issues lately — he’s been saying some of the smartest stuff on Ferguson, cops strangling black people, and all the other injustices that plague this country. So what’s a no-name white conservative comedian (those two words do not go together) like Stephen Crowder to do? Accuse Chris Rock of being the real racist.

Aamer Rahman has a few things to say to Stephen Crowder.

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Aren’t we all more than a little tired of Michael Behe?

He keeps saying the same ol’ debunked crap over and over again, and nowadays when a paper comes out that shows he was completely wrong about something, he spins it into a triumphant vindication for his sycophantic fans, who are all, apparently, abysmally innumerate. The hobby horse he’s been riding for the past few years is the evolution of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite: he claims it is mathematically impossible. And that’s the secret of his success: he dazzles creationists with bad math. Really bad math. The kind of math creationists have been fallaciously using for decades.

Ken Miller has a tidy new article exposing Behe’s ridiculous rationalizations.

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Troll logic

Alanah Pierce has been responding to trolls who harass her with threats, abuse, and sexual slurs in what I would have thought was an effective way: she retweets their comments to their mothers. Does your mother know what you’re saying with that mouth?

I thought it was brilliant. But I’ve never understood the mind of a troll, and now some of these boys, with their mothers’ approval, are suing her for defamation. That’s nuts — the only defamation is exposing their own public words to another member of the public. But look how they rationalize it:

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Quiet morning

I’m about to go off to the local clinic for a visit with a specialist, who’s going to figure out all the things wrong with me. It could take days, weeks, or months, who knows…but if I don’t make it back this afternoon, just figure I gave up and have donated my body to science.

That went unexpectedly well. I’m in good shape, the infection that was making me miserable is clearing up, I’m not getting shipped off to the body farm just yet.