Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Update: this could be faked; see karmacat’s comment.

The butterfly on Taslima is no fake though. I was there, and they really were landing on people.

Another item from the Annals of Bigotry – the kind of bigotry that leads, at the extremes, to murders like the ones at the Charleston AME church, and the ones at Charlie Hebdo, and the ones in Bangladesh.

Eleanor Justice‎—>George Takei

My friend found this note taped to her door after hanging some colorful jar lights in her yard with her daughters. She’s responding to this nonsense with whimsy and has started a campaign to paint her whole house in rainbows — is there any chance you might share her info? http://www.gofundme.com/x6dkw9h

— with Julie Baker in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dear Resident of [REDACTED] Avenue,

Your yard is becoming Relentlessly Gay! Myself and Others in the neighborhood ask that you Tone it Down. This is a Christian area and there are Children. Keep it up and I will be forced to call the police on You! Your kind need to have Respect for GOD.

Later Eleanor Justice posted a photo of the lights:

So pretty, so festive, so friendly and neighborly and decorative and colorful and indeed gay – it’s fascinating to learn that they’re haram in Christianity. Fascinating, but more horrifying: hatred of color and decoration and art and joy is anti-human. Why invent a god that hates pretty things? Does god hate flowers and butterflies and tropical birds too?

Speaking of butterflies…Sunday afternoon at the Butterfly Conservatory:

The New York Times is doing live coverage.

What We Know

• A gunman identified by city and federal law enforcement officials as Dylann Storm Roof, 21, opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s oldest black churches, on Wednesday evening, killing nine.
• The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, was killed, according to the minority leader of the State House of Representatives.
• The police said the other victims were six women and two men.
• The Charleston police chief, Greg Mullen, called the attack a hate crime.

And then – a completely nauseating eyewitness account:

Sylvia Johnson, one of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s cousins, said in an interview with NBC that she had spoken with one of the survivors of the shooting, who gave her this account.

The gunman arrived at the church and asked for the pastor, taking a seat next to him for the study meeting. At the end, the survivor told Ms. Johnson, they suddenly heard loud noises. The gunman had opened fire, and reloaded five times.

“Her son was trying to talk him out of doing the act of killing people,” Ms. Johnson said.

According to Ms. Johnson, the survivor said the gunman replied.

“He just said: ‘I have to do it. You rape our women and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.’ “

I need to throw up now.

Michael Eisen took a look at the angry reaction to the angry reaction to Tim Hunt’s “joke” a few days ago (the day I was staring at Niagara Falls and gossiping with Taslima, to be exact – Sunday).

I happened to met Tim Hunt earlier this year at a meeting of young Indian investigators held in Kashmir. We both were invited as external “advisors” brought in to provide wisdom to scientists beginning their independent careers. While his “How to win a Nobel Prize” keynote had a bit more than the usual amount of narcissism, he was in every other way the warm, generous and affable person that his defenders of the last week have said he is. I will confess I kind of liked the guy.

But it is not my personal brush with Hunt that has had me thinking about this meeting the past few days. Rather it is a session towards the end of the meeting held to allow women to discuss the challenges they have faced building their scientific careers in India. During this session (in which I was seated next to Hunt) several brave young women stood up in front of a room of senior Indian and international scientists and recounted the specific ways in which their careers have been held back because of their gender.

The stories they told were horrible, and it was clear from the reaction of women in the room that these were not isolated incidents. If any of the scientists in positions of power in the room (including Hunt) were not already aware of the harassment many women in science face, and the myriad obstacles that can prevent them from achieving a high level of success, there is no way that could have emerged not understanding.

Tim Hunt was there, remember – he was sitting next to Eisen. Tim Hunt was there, yet…

When I am thinking about what happened here, I am not thinking about how Twitter hordes brought down a good man because he had a bad day. I am instead thinking about what it says to the women in that room in Kashmir that this leading man of science – who it was clear everybody at the meeting revered – had listened to their stories and absorbed nothing. It is unconscionable that, barely a month after listening to a women moved to tears as she recounted a sexual assault from a senior colleague and how hard it was for her to regain her career, Hunt would choose to mock women in science as teary love interests.

I wish Richard Dawkins had read this piece instead of the execrable one by Brendan Predictable O’Neill.

That a person as smart as Hunt could go his entire career without realizing that a Nobel Prizewinner deriding women – even in a joking way – is bad just serves to show how far we have to go.

Oh well, it’s only women.

Hemant reported in an update yesterday that Phil Zuckerman had asked to be removed from the Secular Policy Institute’s list of Fellows; today he is off the list.

Two more have left: Ron Lindsay and Stephen Law.

CFI is no longer a member of the SPI. (Or possibly never was – at any rate it’s not now. We know they have a history of adding organizations without asking, and then balking when asked to remove.)

David Koepsell has a beautiful piece at the CFI blog which you must read right this minute. It’s in the form of a letter to his daughter.

Dear Amelia,

It broke my heart last week when we were talking as I drove you to school. You saw the poster for the Avengers movie and asked who “the girl” was. When I explained she is Black Widow, and that she is an Avenger, you laughed and said “how can she be an Avenger? Avengers are superheroes, and she’s a girl.” It horrifies me to know that already, there are forces at work on you that convince you that somehow, girls and women cannot be anything you want. And I meant it when I told you that yes, women can be superheroes.You can be.

The world is full of people who will try to tell you that you can’t be or do something, sometimes due to you background, sometimes due to other things that don’t matter. Many members of your father’s family, my grandparents and their relatives, were despised, imprisoned, tortured, and killed because of our ethnicity, because we are descended from Jews. Millions of people were judged as unworthy, unclean, unfit. While the nations that tried to wipe us out lost in a world war, the battles over prejudice continue. Captain America cannot save us from the ongoing harm that those who judge others due to ethnicity, religion, skin color, and gender pose to every child who wants to be exactly what she wants to be.

There, that should be enough to make it impossible for you not to read the rest.

Updating to add: I had it in mind all along that Hunt was pushed out of a non-tenured position, but the post doesn’t reflect that. He wouldn’t be pushed out of a tenured position because of his remarks, and I wouldn’t advocate that he should be.

Many of the usual suspects – Dawkins, yes, but not only Dawkins – are raging about the illiberal attacks on Tim Hunt. But they’re doing it by ignoring the time and place at which he made his oh so funny “joke.” They’re ignoring the fact that he said it in a work environment. Picture an admiral trash-talking about women in the Navy, at an official Navy event. Would that be generally considered a mere joke? Picture a CEO making racist comments at a company banquet – would that be seen as just some yuks among buddies?

I don’t think so.

Dawkins in his tweet cited this awful article in Reason by the always-awful Brendan O’Neill. (Yes really, Our Brendan yet again.) The whole piece is deeply dishonest, because it does that pretending it was just a joke on a social occasion thing.

Hunt is a British biochemist. A really good one. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work on cells. He’s a fellow of the Royal Society in London, founded in 1660 and thought to be the oldest scientific research institution in the world. And this week he was unceremoniously ditched by University College London for telling a joke.

No. Not just “for telling a joke” – for telling it when and where and to whom he did.

But Our Brendan takes that line throughout.

In a normal world, a world which valued the freedom to make a doofus of oneself, that should have been the end of it. Seventy-two-year-old man of science makes outdated joke, tumbleweed rolls by, The End.

No. That’s staggeringly disingenuous. He wasn’t being a “doofus” and it wasn’t just an “outdated joke.” It was a top man expressing (“jokey”) contempt for women in his field, at a work conference in that field. It was, in short, a hostile work environment. Saying it was “just a joke” hasn’t cut it in about thirty years.

But we don’t live in a normal world. Certainly we don’t live in a world where people are allowed to make off-color comments. And so with tedious, life-zapping predicability, Hunt fell victim to the offence-policers, to the machine of outrage being constantly cranked up by self-styled guardians of what we may think, say, and even joke about.

Nope, and nope, and nope. All wrong. All ignoring the salient points.

His comments were branded “shocking and bewildering.” (You find a silly joke bewildering? You really should get out more.) And then came the denouement to this latest outburst of confected fury: Hunt “resigned” from UCL, where he was honorary professor.

“Resign” is in quote marks because it’s pretty clear he was elbowed out. Consider UCL’s statement about his leaving. “UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome [Hunt’s resignation] is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.”

Quite. That’s part of their job, do you see? To make sure there isn’t a hostile work environment for women and other despised groups at UCL. They have every right to say what they did, and in fact a duty to.

That’s another way of saying that Hunt’s penchant for making un-PC jokes was incompatible with life at UCL. So he had to be excommunicated. Professors of Britain, be warned: tell a funny that irritates the right-on, and you shall be cast out.

No. Again, it’s not about mere irritation, it’s about a hostile work environment. I don’t believe O’Neill is too stupid to grasp that.

What is truly alarming, what should really send a shiver down every liberal’s spine, is not the words that came out of Hunt’s mouth but the haranguing of him that followed, the shunning of him by the academy and possibly by the scientific elite itself.

Nonsense. The academy needs to ensure that casual sexism and racism aren’t just business as usual. That’s part of their job.

The response to Hunt is way more archaic than what Hunt said. Sure, his views might be a bit pre-women’s lib, pre-1960s. But the tormenting and sacking of people for what they think and say is pre-modern. It’s positively Inquisitorial.

“Women’s lib”??? It’s sheer affectation – he’s nowhere near old enough for that absurd label to be a natural part of his vocabulary – it’s been dead as a dodo since 1971 at the latest. And again, it’s not about what Hunt thinks and says in general, it’s about what he thinks and says on the job.

The Hunt incident is quite terrifying. For what we have here is a university, under pressure from an intolerant mob, judging a professor’s fitness for office by his personal thoughts, his idea of humour. Profs should be judged by one thing alone: their depth of knowledge. It shouldn’t matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever. All that should matter is whether they have the brainpower to do the job at hand.

Nope. They have other duties as part of the job. Their “depth of knowledge” is not a free pass to be dismissive and scornful (however jestingly) toward subordinates. Professors don’t have a golden permit to say anything they feel like saying merely because they’re professors. Professing is a job, and it has requirements.

UCL and the mob’s hounding of Hunt echoes the university of the pre-Enlightenment era, when only those who were 100 percent Good Catholics had a hope in hell of getting a job. Only now, academics must be unflinchingly in accordance with the commandments of PC rather than with Biblical thinking. A Nobel Laureate has been broken on the wheel of PC. This is bad. Really bad. For if even a Nobel winner can be treated like this, what hope is there for lesser professors? The chilling effect of the Hunt debacle on the Western academy is likely to be pretty intense.

No, it’s not “PC.” It’s the rules of the workplace. Deal with it.

And more from the Department of Please Please Please Please Stop, Dawkins Division:

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins Jun 14
“A moment to savour”? Really? Please, Guardian, could we just lighten up on the witch-hunts? #ReinstateTimHunt. http://reason.com/archives/2015/06/13/the-illiberal-persecution-of-tim-

Again with the putative witch hunts – again used by a man, to rebuke women for rebelling against casually contemptuous treatment. Wouldn’t it be nice if Richard Dawkins actually came out against some item of casually contemptuous treatment of women? Wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t keep insisting that because stonings and forced marriages are so horrific, therefore women in places like the UK and the US should stop rebelling against casually contemptuous treatment? I think that would be nice. It would make a change, too.

And he didn’t say it in haste and then withdraw it, either. He said it and then defended it.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins Jun 14
@SquashedLumps I didn’t like Tim Hunt’s joke. But I loathe and detest mob rule and witch hunts and politically correct feeding frenzies.

And that’s the important thing. It’s never the important thing to say, “my dear fellow, with all the respect in the world, you really mustn’t talk about our women colleagues  in that way; it’s not right.” No. That’s not the important thing to do. The important thing to do is to protest against the women colleagues’ protests, by calling the women witch hunters and mob rulers and PC piranhas.

So I wish he would Please Please Please Please Stop. But I know he won’t; he’s made that crystal clear by now.

He was at the CFI conference this past weekend. He was – naturally – at the awards banquet Friday where he was among those receiving an award. His was a lifetime achievement award. I naturally kept wishing he hadn’t mucked up the appearance of his lifetime achievement by indulging in so much hostility to rebellious women recently. It doesn’t adorn his record. It makes it harder to read his books with unalloyed pleasure.

In his remarks after receiving the award, he made a “People’s Front of Judaea” reference. For the millionth time, I wished he wouldn’t. It’s not petty little squabbles over nomenclature, it’s the horrible sexist bullshit that women still have to deal with and that he is encouraging. And now here he is again, back at work, belittling women and complaining of witch hunts. What a pity he won’t stop.

Via Sarah Tuttle, via Jen, a useful sign:

Sarah Tuttle ‏@niais
Ok. I made a lab sign, if anyone needs one. #TimHunt #DistractinglySexy #WomenInScience #STEM #SafeLab

Our friend Jen Philipps:

jen phillips ‏@ClutchScience Jun 12
Collection protocols may vary, but tear production is reliably abundant. #DistractinglySexy

As luck would have it, the tears of girl scientists make excellent embryo medium #DistractinglySexy

Sarcastic Rover (whom I have a crush on):

SarcasticRover ‏@SarcasticRover Jun 15
Can being a woman prevent others from doing their job? No… that’s stupid. #distractinglysexy

And a couple more floating around –

More on Hemant’s post about the “Secular Policy Council.”

He starts with pointing out that a lot of their content is identical to content from the Secular Coalition for America – where she used to be Executive Director until she…erm…left it a year ago. Mary Ellen Sikes points out in a comment that the content has a Creative Commons agreement. That sounds benign until you remember that Rogers used to work for them. Quoting Mary Ellen:

If you check the bottom of page 3 of the SCA’s Model Secular Policy Guide, you’ll see the following: “Permission is granted for the reproduction of this document in whole or in part without consent of the authors and the Secular Coalition for America.” [The website terms of use state, “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.” — but the specific statement on the Guide itself seems to override that.]

In other words, Edwina Rogers oversaw the development of a Model Secular Policy Guide that lacked a copyright, thus allowing her to republish it at another organization. As well, the Creative Commons license for the site as a whole represents a change which I believe (but am not positive) came about under her direction.. Perhaps the SCA Board can explain its thinking about these alterations to its intellectual property status.

Jeezus.

Back to Hemant:

It all looked very familiar… and the CEO of this new group was Edwina Rogers.

It appeared that, after parting ways with the SCA, she was setting up her own organization with a lot of overlapping parts.

This new organization didn’t lack credibility. In addition to that large coalition of supporting groups, she had a number of big-name “Fellows” — “distinguished scientists and scholars dedicated to the idea that policymaking should be informed by scientific evidence.”

That list of fellows included: Lawrence Krauss, Peter Boghossian, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein, Carolyn Porco, Michael Shermer, and Andy Thomson.

All of those people have now left, and Hemant did an update to say Phil Zuckerman has now joined the leavers.

Hemant wonders why they left, and if it was their doing or the SPI’s.

Last week, I reached out to all the former Fellows I just named to find out if they could shed some light on those questions.

While some of them did not respond, the ones who did, including Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, told me they asked to be removed. They have no formal connection with SPI anymore.

It’s my understanding that Sam Harris left a while ago, but the rest of the names have all asked to be taken off the list over the past week or two.

And that’s the point at which he dropped the Dennett bomb.

Richard Dawkins — who is the subject of one of the damning accusations in Rogers’ lawsuit — said that he requested to be taken off the list after hearing from Dennett.

He also told me, “I have no recollection of how I [came] to be on the list in the first place.”

That’s pretty interesting considering how his image was used to promote the organization from the get-go:

Yes, yes it is.

That’s actually what I’ve thought about it all along – thought and said – that it’s basically just a list of Top Names, of “Thought Leaders” (never forget it was the Global Secular Council / Secular Policy Institute that started calling them that), for no particular purpose other than having a list of Top Names. It was just some ridiculous Look At Me project engaged in an infinite loop of adding people so as to draw in more people who would draw in more people repeat forever. Look at us being important. Bow.

And at least for now, the cover photo for SPI’s Facebook page still features both Dawkins and Krauss, neither of whom are Fellows anymore:

I asked Rogers about this situation a few days ago (and again over the weekend), but have not yet received an on-the-record statement. If she provides one, I’ll post an update.

Well, she was at the CFI conference over the weekend, being important.

So there you are. A large number of their Top Names have bailed, at least one of them having been added to their list of Top Names without his knowledge or permission. More are likely to follow suit as they find out what’s going on.

The whole thing is an embarrassment.

Oh my god.

You know I’ve always wondered why all those Big Name atheist and secularist types signed up to the “Global Secular Institute” now more modestly named the Secular Policy Institute. You know I wondered it very loudly and without muffling or disguise.

Now we know.

Hemant has a post today titled Notable Atheists and Scientists Are Disassociating from the Secular Policy Institute. I did a loud sustained intake of breath – “gasped” is inadequate to describe what I did – when I reached this bit:

Daniel Dennett in particular told me he asked to be removed from their list after learning that Rogers had filed a lawsuit against the Secular Coalition for America(which made some damning allegations about the SCA and several people associated with it).

Not only did Dennett inform many of the other Fellows why he was leaving (prompting them to do the same), here’s the most shocking part of what he told me:

I didn’t know I was a Fellow of SPI until I saw my picture and name on the website.

Oh.my.god.

The BBC tells us:

Female scientists have been sharing “distractingly sexy” photos of themselves after a feminist website encouraged them to respond to comments by a Nobel laureate.

Here’s one:

Andrea Bidgood ‏@Andreabigfoot Jun 11
#distractinglysexy hot science at work. Haven’t cried all week

Whoaaaaaaaa throw some cold water over me.

Many of them are hilarious, such as:

Morgan Kelly ‏@MorganWKelly Jun 10
Smelled like dead oysters at the faculty meeting. Hope I wasn’t too #distractinglysexy

They distract in India too:

Jane Evans ‏@jede39 Jun 10
@rhiannonlucyc @VagendaMagazine Indian rocket scientists #distractinglysexy

And Stephanie Evans, whose feed is full of STEM and women in STEM goodness:

Stephanie Evans ‏@StephEvz43 Jun 10
Idk how any men were able to function when I was in this bunny suit and integrating a satellite. #distractinglysexy

Makes it hard to think straight, doesn’t she.

A genius tweets:

Mark J. Perry ‏@Mark_J_Perry Jun 12
Cartoon of the Day: The Gender Disparity in STEM explained
(HT: @stevenfhayward) @CHSommers @AsheSchow @instapundit

No.