Here we go again. High school football players. Important relatives. Small town. Party, alcohol, rape…and it’s the girl and her family who are punished.

The Kansas City Star details how the small town of Maryville turned against a newly-arrived family after 14-year-old Daisy Coleman reported that an older athlete had sex with her while another older male videotaped, after she was given an alcoholic drink at a party that left her barely able to stand. Her friend, a 13-year-old, was also made to have non-consensual sex.

After a thorough investigation by the local police however, clearly implicating 17-year-old Matthew Barnett in the sexual assault, charges were inexplicably dropped by the prosecuting attorney. Barnett, coincidentally, is the grandson of a

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Wow. She’s still at it. Obsessive-compulsive blog-monitoring.

Sara E. Mayhew @saramayhew

The copy/paste bloggers at #ftbullies are now block quoting block quotes. pic.twitter.com/WBvpbo0cIj

The picture is of a quoted passage on my post Hold that pose, now pout from the day before that tweet. I quoted John Holbo and included a bit that he quoted.

Yes, and? So what? Is Mayhew so sub-literate that she’s never encountered internal quoted passages before? It’s normal. It’s not some loopy thing that only I do because I’m one of the #ftbullies, it’s just a normal thing to do.

They go rooting around like Périgord pigs looking for truffles, digging through every post to find something to rage about. I must be … Read the rest

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Government waste – bad thing, right? Well here’s some government waste for you.

More than 10 years of planning, $10 million of government funding and  tireless work from the team that discovered life in a lake buried beneath an  Antarctic glacier earlier this year may largely go to waste because of the  government shutdown.

Oh that kind of government waste…

The WISSARD drilling program — a collaborative effort of 14 principal  investigators including glaciologists, geophysicists, microbiologists and others  from nine institutions across the country — is one of the largest programs ever  fielded by the U.S. Antarctic Program.

The team consists of more than 50 scientists, graduate students and support  staff members, who aim to explore the underbelly of

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Mariette DiChristina offers a fuller explanation in a blog post.

Scientific American bloggers lie at the heart of the SA website, pumping vitality, experience and broad insight around the community. Unfortunately our poor communication with this valuable part of the SA network over the recent days has led to concerns, misunderstandings and ill feelings, and we are committed to working to try to put this right as best we can.

We know that there are real and important issues regarding the treatment of women in science and women of color in science, both historically and currently, and are dismayed at the far too frequent cases in which women face prejudice and suffer inappropriate treatment as they strive for equality

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Ken White at Popehat takes a slightly different angle on the SciAm-Ofek-Danielle Lee train wreck. He agrees that it’s sexist but adds that it’s also marketerist.

Many bloggers have written about this as a clear example of how sexism is pervasive in the sciences.  After all, how else can you explain the interpersonal dysfunction of someone demanding free content from a female scientist and then calling her a whore when she refuses?

But I think sexism is, at least, an incomplete explanation.

I have no doubt that the scientific community is awash in ignorant and reflexive sexism.  I’ve heard too many stories from loved ones, classmates, and clients¹ in the sciences to think otherwise.  But human douchebaggery spins

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Update: this post is confusing if you haven’t read the one before it. The article is a good article; my commentary continues from the previous post.

Another article on DN Lee and Scientific American, Nobody Ever Called Einstein A ‘Whore’. (Yes, yes, frisson, blah blah collective outrage, yadda yadda impure motives. Noted, Jeremy, now go monitor someone else for a few years.)

Danielle Lee is another one of its well-known scientific writers. Lee, a biologist who studies animal behavior, mammals and the ways organisms interact with their environment, earned a doctoral degree in biology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, was named Young Professional of the Year by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, and her urban

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So how are things going for Scientific American? Not very well, from what I can see. There’s a lot of very strong criticism of their move in taking down Danielle N Lee’s blog post about the editor at Biology Online who called her a whore when she declined to write for Biology Online for free. Most of it is coming directly from working scientists. That can’t be what they want.

I still haven’t seen any explanation of their reasons for taking down the post; as far as I know there hasn’t been one.

They can’t take refuge in the claim that their blog isn’t the right place for personal quarrels, because this wasn’t personal. Ofek and Lee were strangers, … Read the rest

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Leo Igwe writes:

I am writing to urge you to join as we protest the tour of the Pacific Region in November of the ‘General Overseer’ of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye. Pastor Adeboye is touring Canberra(November 10-11), Melbourne(12-13) New Zealand(14-15), Fiji(16-17),Solomon Islands (18-19), Papua New Guinea(20-21), Sydney(22-23), Perth(24-25).

The aim of the tour is to establish branches of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in these places. Pastor Adeboye is one of the pastors who openly used their sermons and preaching to rally public support for the anti same sex marriage bill which was recently passed by lawmakers in Nigeria.

Earlier this year he told a local Christian gathering that ‘Same sex marriage is anathema’ … Read the rest

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But what are they?

Editor in chief and Senior VP Mariette DiChristina explained on Twitter

Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.

And got what is apparently an infinite number of replies – the page is still loading and I’ve been reading and scrolling for several minutes. The replies are stinging and clarifying.

A few:

Christie Wilcox @NerdyChristie

.@mdichristina Since when does @sciam censor blogs for lacking science content? No one took down my posts like this: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/11/12/musical-monday-stay-near-me/ ….

Maggie Koerth-Baker @maggiekb

Expectation of free work is big deal. Treatment of women who refuse paradigm, even more.

Seth Zenz @sethzenz

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Ah, nice – Sean Carroll (the physics one) has a post on the how not to address a colleague who has the bad taste to be a woman issue, and Scientific American’s response to same.

Where I grew up, when people politely turn down your request for free stuff, it’s impolite to call them a “whore.” It’s especially bad when you take into account the fact that we live in a world where women are being pushed away from science, one where how often your papers get cited correlates strongly with your gender, and so on.

DNLee was a bit taken aback, with good reason. So she took to her blog to respond. It was a

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Good grief. Scientific American actually pulled DNLee’s post from their site yesterday. Wow.

I knew it was gone, because I clicked links to the SciAm post via three different tweets of DNLee’s and each one got a 404 – but I assumed it was a glitch, not a removal. Then DNLee tweeted the link to Isis’s post, and I put SciAm behind me. But now, also via Isis, via a comment at PZ’s, I learn that Scientific American deliberately took the post down and explained on Twitter why it doesn’t want it. Isis gives the details:

I was glad later in the day to see that DNLee had posted about her experience on her Scientific American blog.

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We’re requested to repost this to amplify its signal, so I’m doing that. DNLee is asked to write for a blog, politely declines, and gets a less than polite response.

DNLee reports:

wachemshe hao hao kwangu mtapoa

I got this wrap cloth from Tanzania. It’s a khanga. It was the first khanga I purchased while I was in Africa for my nearly 3 month stay for field research last year. Everyone giggled when they saw me wear it and then gave a nod to suggest, “Well, okay”. I later learned that it translates to “Give trouble to others, but not me”. I laughed, thinking how appropriate it was. I was never a trouble-starter as a kid and I’m no … Read the rest

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Some Christian groups in Kansas are suing the state board of education over science teaching in schools.

There’s the Pacific Justice Institute for example. (Wha? The Pacific is nowhere near Kansas.)

Topeka, Kansas–Families across Kansas became one step closer, today, to protecting their children from forced atheistic teaching in their public school system. Pacific Justice Institute filed a complaint in Federal District Court challenging the State Board of Education’s (BOE) adoption of certain science standards which would create a hostile learning environment for those of faith. The standards being challenged are the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by the BOE June 11, 2013, and the corresponding Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas.

In

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So there’s one bit of progress perhaps.

A judge has ruled that sisters aged 15 and 11 must have the MMR vaccine even though they and their mother do not want it, BBC Newsnight has learned.

The High Court decision, made last month, came after the girls’ father brought a case seeking vaccination.

The parents, now divorced, had jointly agreed not to vaccinate the girls in the wake of the MMR controversy.

But the discrediting of concerns about an MMR autism link and recent measles outbreaks changed the father’s view.

A step.

When outlining her decision in the latest case, Mrs Justice Theis emphasised it was a specific case “only concerned with the welfare needs of these children”, but lawyers

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Originally a comment by SallyStrange on “The rules”.

Funny, I was having a conversation on FB yesterday along these lines. Nice guy, uneducated about feminism and the ins and outs of dehumanizing language. People were explaining why it’s not okay to use “female” as a noun to refer to women.

“So are you saying that I’m not ALLOWED to do that?” He’d respond. Or, “I see, so, saying cunt isn’t permitted because it doesn’t fit with civil discourse.”

No, people would say, you’re ALLOWED to do whatever you want. It’s just that this kind of language is inadvisable for the following reasons. And again he’d fall back on the allowed/permitted/forbidden paradigm.

I think I actually ran into an authoritarian who’s … Read the rest

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No.

Jack Vance of Atheist Revolution seldom misses an opportunity to fume about you-know-what – the divisive dogmatic atheoplussoFTbullyo bloggers and their friends. He always misrepresents the facts when he does so. (For instance he casually said I misrepresented Michael Shermer. Not true. I quoted exactly what Shermer said.) He drags the subject in again now when one would have thought the subject was something quite different.

If you read Hemant Mehta’s (Friendly Atheist) recent post about how the London School of Economics (LSE) recently freaked out over two atheist students wearing Jesus & Mo t-shirts during a student organization fair, you’ll know that the title was a perfect description of the take-home message: Wearing Jesus & Mo Shirts

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What’s wrong with invoking “the rules” when you’re trying to explain a perceived problem with certain kinds of speech or action or display or performance? Is there anything wrong with it? I think there is, yes, so I’m thinking about why. (This started with a reply to Minnow on The proud tradition of a free press.)

What’s wrong with it? It’s that it doesn’t get at the issues. It’s a shortcut, and shortcuts aren’t good for getting at issues. It doesn’t help significantly to talk about unwritten rules, because the rule quality remains, and that’s what falls short.

There are things I strongly think people should not do, though, so doesn’t that amount to rules? No, I don’t … Read the rest

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