Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • The Twitterstorm that wasn’t

    Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who started the #distractinglysexy hashtag, explains that she didn’t get Tim Hunt kicked out of anything and neither did the hashtag.

    Despite claims that the response to Hunt’s comments constituted an online “march of the feminist bullies”, no one who was part of this humorous attempt to highlight the varied and complex work of female scientists called for Hunt’s resignation or hounded him online, but that was the way it was framed.

    There were undoubtedly unpleasant people on social media crowing about the man’s downfall but as far as I could see the discussion was largely jocular and – owing to the fact that many of the female scientists were posting photos under their own names – mostly professional.

    The Hunt controversy continues to make headlines, with Boris Johnson and Brian Cox wading in this week as the backlash to the backlash. I even heard it said on Radio 4 this morning that “Tim Hunt was hounded from his job by a Twitterstorm”. This is patently not the case.

    I’ve seen serious people who should know better Twitter-moaning about the feminist “witch hunts” and the desecration of the memory of John Stuart Mill. But that’s not what happened.

    In actual fact it was clearly embarrassment on the part of the scientific community at his retrograde sexism, and that sexism being splashed across the media, which led to pressure on him to resign. University College London, where Hunt held a professorship before his resignation and which was the first university to admit women on the same terms as men, would have no truck with comments such as Hunt’s. No doubt concern about an international PR disaster played a part, but anyone who knows anything about the university’s founding principles would have expected this result, whether justified or not.

    And that’s just normal for people who have jobs and positions and titles. Tenure protects academics, but Hunt wasn’t pushed out of any tenured jobs – he has already retired from those.

    Twitter also gives the illusion of reversing the normal power dynamics. Suddenly powerful people – often men – and corporations, cannot ignore the outraged voices of the “rest” of the population. Yet this is an illusion. By blaming the downfall of Hunt on mobs of internet feminists, the media are ascribing them power, transforming everyone on social media with feelings about sexism into a dangerous monolith that threatens free speech. They must then be criticised and undermined, rendering them even less powerful than before.

    Heads we win, tails you lose, neener-neener.

  • Two of the nine

    I can’t look at this without losing it but we all should be losing it, so.

    BuzzFeed: the victims of the terrorist shooting at Emanuel AME church in Charleston:

    Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

    A 45-year-old mother of three, reverend, and high school track coach, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, was killed while attending a prayer group at Emanuel AME Church.

    Coleman-Singleton coached the girls track team at Goose Creek High School. The school remembered her Thursday with a post on its Facebook page.

    Her cousin, Constance Kinder, told BuzzFeed News that Coleman-Singleton was a “beautiful spirit.”

    She has a Facebook page. She has a bit-strips comic of herself:

    Cynthia Hurd

    Cynthia Hurd, a librarian, was killed in the shooting, the Charleston County Public Library (CCPL), confirmed Thursday.

    Hurd, 54, worked at the public library for 31 years and was serving as the manager at St. Andrews Regional library since 2011.

    “Cynthia was a tireless servant of the community who spent her life helping residents, making sure they had every opportunity for an education and personal growth,” the CCPL said in a statement.

    Cynthia Hurd

    That’s all I can do for now. God damn it.

     

  • Guest post: This is the point that cis people miss

    AMM’s very powerful follow-up comment:

    Rob @14

    @9: It’s like when my father convinced me (for an afternoon) that I could sell stuff door-to-door. I went out and canvased the neighborhood. And I realized: it’s just not me. I am not, cut out to be a salesman

    @10: AMM, I love that analogy.
    I don’t. Facile as it may seem this is because being a salesperson (in the widest sense) is a learnt skill, not a state of being. People we call naturals at sales simply have personalities that better enable them to quickly get over the hump of sucking at it and finding it hard. They probably learn how as kids. It’s closely linked to performing (acting). For the rest of us we practice, try and eventually get at least tolerably good at sales, but never actually enjoy it, even if we get satisfaction from our success.

    You missed the point. Could I have learned to be a salesman if my life had depended upon it? Probably.

    But I would have hated it. I would have had to spend every day stomping down my revulsion at what I was doing. I would have died inside, and at some point felt like dying was better than living. At some point, it wouldn’t have mattered whether I killed myself or not. I figured that out in a half-hour. And Rob, if you don’t believe I could figure that out in that short of a time, you simply have no clue, you are one of those “knows not, and knows not that he knows not.”

    This is the point that cis people miss. They don’t seem to understand what it is like to feel revulsion at having to live as one’s assigned sex to the point that one has to deaden oneself and become an empty shell and maybe come to the realization that being alive is worse than being dead. Most trans people learn to act out their assigned gender role and to believe that that’s what life is like. Many go to extraordinary lengths to silence that inner voice and squeeze themselves into being what everyone tells them they are. But at some point, it just doesn’t work any more. At some point, there is nothing that society and life can reward or threaten you with that makes it worth going on that way.

    How much of it is biology? How much is social gender BS? How much of it is one’s nature? Would I feel less alienated from myself if I lived in some sort of feminist gender-free utopia? Who knows? And who cares? We are what we are, however we got that way, and we have to live (or not) in the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. If transition (medical and/or social) makes us feel less alienated from ourselves, if living as genderqueer or asking to be referred to as “It” makes us feel less revulsion at ourselves, then I don’t care what the theorists and scientists and feminist pontiffs and Dr. Knowitalls have to say, we’ll take it.

  • Guest post: A person, not an abstract

    Next, a comment by besomyka.

    We seem to conflate sex and gender in these discussions even though we know better. When we say I feel or don’t feel like a woman, for example. Do you mean woman in the social constructed sense, the stochastic physical sense? What?

    When I say I’m a woman, I happen to mean both. I think that if you considered me a woman, that your mental shortcuts about what that meant would be more true about me than the other option. Is it perfect? No, of course not. I’m a person, not an abstract. But it IS more accurate.

    I also mean it physically. I am quite sure that if we destroyed the concept of gender completely, that I’d still have dysphoria centered on my body. My heart would ache seeing a pregnant woman, knowing that it could never be me. I would have still felt so rigid hugging people without a bosom of my own. I know I’d still feel like a hollow mannequin when I looked in the mirror.

    I know that within 3 weeks of starting HRT, even when other people still saw me as ‘a guy’, my depression and dysphoria all but vanished. Instead, over the last few years, I’ve grown into myself. I’ve become real. A person.

    Here’s what I know is true for me. When society said pretty girls shouldn’t have body hair, something deep inside whispered, “Hey, they are talking about you.” Like everyone, I internalized the messages that society forces on us, and like everyone some of those applied to me, and some didn’t. What I, instinctively, applied to myself is remarkably similar to what other women my age applied to themselves.

    To say I’m not a woman is to deny that essential part of me. I mean, look, I spent literal DECADES trying to deny that part of myself, to rationalize it away… all that did was cause me pain. I am a woman, that’s the truth.

  • Guest post: That something just doesn’t fit

    Now I’ve caught up somewhat after the conference, so I can do what several people requested and make guest posts of some of the comments from the Discomfort with the more social aspects of gender discussion last week.

    I’ll start with one by AMM:

    There’s something that a lot of trans people report and I’m becoming aware of in myself that doesn’t get mentioned in feminist discussions of gender.

    It’s that feeling that at some fundamental level, you just don’t belong with the people you share a birth gender with, and in many cases you don’t feel right in your body. That something just doesn’t fit, no matter how perfectly you may seem to fit. And when you transition, medically and/or socially, you just feel right for once.

    I haven’t transitioned yet, so I can’t say for sure how I’ll feel, but I know that I have _never_ felt at home with being a man or having a male body, and I’ve tried every way I can think of for 60 years. It’s like when my father convinced me (for an afternoon) that I could sell stuff door-to-door. I went out and canvased the neighborhood. And I realized: it’s just not me. I am not cut out to be a salesman. It’s the same thing with being male. I have yet to find anything about being a man (as opposed to a generic human being) that I can relate to. I can intellectualize it, but I can’t feel it. Whereas when I read about or hear women’s experiences, it fits.

    Julia Serano describes this a lot better than I can in her book (Whipping Girl), and besides, she’s transitioned, so she can compare before and after.

    I get the impression that cis people don’t experience the same sort of not-rightness. Maybe there’s something deep inside, independent of all the social constructions, that just works right for cis people and doesn’t for trans people, and, for lack of any better language, we call it gender.

  • Mr Pinckney came from a family of civil rights activists and leaders

    The BBC profiles pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney.

    A church pastor and a state senator, Clementa Pinckney spoke of his politics as an extension of his religious mission, as another way of serving the people around him.

    “Our calling is not just within the walls of the congregation,” he said. “We are part of the life and community in which our congregation resides.”

    On Wednesday evening, Mr Pinckney was shot dead among those he had pledged to serve – one of nine victims of a gun attack on the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

    …

    The 41-year-old pastor had begun preaching at the age of 13. He was also a rising star of Democrat[ic] politics in a state long dominated by Republicans.

    He was the youngest African-American in South Carolina’s history to be elected to the legislature. He had been a student at the state university, a Lutheran seminary, as well as at Princeton University.

    Now all that’s gone, thanks to a young racist whose daddy gave him a gun for Christmas.

    We’re right up there with Bangladesh for hateful murderous targeted violence.

    Mr Pinckney came from a family of civil rights activists and leaders. Among them were campaigners for the desegregation of school buses and for electoral reforms that would pave the way for the emergence of black politicians.

    In 1998, the veteran Washington Post political reporter, David Broder, met Mr Pinckney and described him as a “spirit-lifter”.

    “Our people expect the best of us,” the young politician told the reporter. “They send us to take care of the people’s business, and those of us who take hold of that responsibility understand that’s what it’s really about.”

    Earlier this year, Mr Pinckney appeared at rallies to protest at the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot dead by a police officer in Charleston.

    So the young racist with the gun executed him, just as the theocrats with machetes executed Avijit Roy and almost executed Asif Mohiuddin.

    Mr Pinckney left a wife and two children.

  • TyWanza Sanders

    Murdered in the Charleston AME church shootings.

    Shaun King ‏@ShaunKing 24 minutes ago
    This is TyWanza Sanders. Killed in the #CharlestonShooting.

    A great young brother. Recent Allen University grad.

    I’m reminded of the photos of the Garissa victims – so many young vibrant hopeful students with plans and dreams.

  • In custody

    Dylann Roof has been arrested. As many of my friends are pointing out on Twitter and Facebook, he won’t be tortured or raped or murdered in custody. He’ll be safe and sound.

    The Post and Courier ‏@postandcourier 2h2 hours ago
    .@FBI confirms that Dylann Roof, 21, of #Columbia area is suspect in #CharlestonShooting. #chsnews

    Embedded image permalink
     The SPLC has been providing information:
    2 hours ago

    Photo of #CharlestonShooting suspect Dylann Roof shows patch of South African apartheid era flag

  • Your yard is becoming RELENTLESSLY GAY

    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.


    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:

    Eleanor Justice's photo.

    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:

    Embedded image permalink

  • Charleston

    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.

  • Sing it

    Ensaf Haidar reports that U2 spoke up for Raif Badawi at a concert:

  • The end stage of a metamorphosis in which the idea took final flight

    Now it’s just getting funny – all the bolts and sprockets flying off the “Secular Policy Institute” and landing in the middle of the banana cream pie.

    Last week I was busy getting rid of a whole bunch of assholes so I missed Edwina Rogers’s comment at Almost Diamonds. I wish I’d seen it then, because if I had I would have known about it when I was accidentally introduced to her at the conference. (I did mention that I was accidentally introduced to her, right? I was. Her smile shrank quite a lot when she heard my name. I wasn’t very effusive myself.)

    Rogers starts off by saying the post is fiction – which is amusing, given all the references in the post.

    The blogger spins a story of the transformation of GSC into the GSI and its eventual emergence as the Secular Policy Institute (SPI). This is a breezy reconstruction of the actual events that almost suggests that the Secular Policy Institute is the latest incarnation of what began as the Global Secular Council, the end stage of a metamorphosis in which the idea took final flight. The account reads as an improbable and serpentine transformation of projects and organizations precisely because it is improbable and, well, untrue, too.

    Oh yes? Then why is there so much overlap? So many of the same “experts” and “thought leaders” and “Fellows”? So many of the same photographs of the same people?

    SCA participated fully in the development of GSC. Amanda Metskas and the Board participated in, and approved, its development as an SCA project (see March 27 board minutes). Amanda wanted a name without the word Institute, drafted part of the press release for it, and selected the term “expert” for the members of its Think Tank as she thought Fellow as sexist. It is fair to say that Amanda and I were collectively spearheading the implementation of the GSC at the time that she terminated me, assumed my position as Executive Director, and then discontinued working on the project.

    The donor, Lloyd Rubin, was understandably incensed that his 50K was going to be squandered in my absence and with the discontinuation of the GSC project. He rattled his sabers and threatened to sue SCA (no surprise there) and in response, SCA gave the Secular Global Council with its Experts to Mr. Rubin, at which point he renamed it the Global Secular Institute. I know because I was a volunteer Fellow of the Global Secular Institute. Mr. Rubin put out a series of newsletters- yes, with pictures of this cats!- and soon tired of the work involved in the running of the Institute and allows it to lie largely fallow to this day. My understanding is that he discontinued its newsletter but that the organization still exits. It is a Think Tank Group. Not a coalition of organizations, but a stand-alone think tank group.

    Oh, well then. That’s all very straightforward and respectable. The saber-rattling, the threats to sue, the cats, the getting bored, the convicted felon – nothing to see here folks, move along.

    The Secular Policy Institute is not the reincarnation of the Global Secular Institute or GSC. Yes, SPI has a secular think tank of scientists and scholars dedicated to the separation of church and state in public policy making, but it is also a coalition of international groups; the world’s largest coalition, in fact.

    Really? How many of those groups are part of the coalition voluntarily? How many of them were simply added without being informed they were being added? How many have asked to be removed with no success?

    Also I just plain don’t believe that “world’s largest” claim, on the grounds that it’s Edwina Rogers making it plus it’s absurd.

    It is a separate legal entity. It is sponsoring the World Futures Forum and drafting the World Future Guide, and has assisted in the implementation of a wide variety of projects nested within other secular organizations, including a website for UnitedCoR, a table at CPAC for American Atheists, a website for Freethought Film Festival, a website for Hispanic Freethought, a cash grant to the Youth Atheist Conference, a cash grant to the Association for Atheism in Turkey, a website and demonstration campaign for the United Church of Bacon, a website and Congressional visits for the Foundation for Critical Thinking, and a range of others. By contrast, the Global Secular Institute and GSC were never coalition organizations, never had any national or international affiliates, never had any projects or initiatives, and were (and still are) completely separate legal entities (although not actually even legal entities with any nonprofit status under any U.S. or foreign laws). In short, GSC/GSI and SPI are simply different organizations. SPI is a U.S. Charity approved by the IRS and exists legally while GSC and GSI are simply just names.

    That’s what I said last year – they’re just names, with lists of people; they’re not doing anything. Nice of Rogers to confirm. But this business about how totally separate they are – don’t make me laugh.

    5. The blogger makes all kinds of hay over Mr. Lloyd Rubin’s felonious background and his unsavory involvements with secular start-ups. Actually, Mr. Rubin mostly funded standing groups, not start-ups. He donated to groups like the American Humanist Association, American Atheists, the Secular Coalition for America and Americans United. The blogger is quizzically critical of my bringing Mr. Rubin into the donation scene for SCA without mentioning his donations to a wide variety of other secular groups who relished his support. Of course, other groups, such as Amanda Metskas’ CampQuest organization, were not successful in their efforts to lobby Mr. Rubin for support; he supported only those that he viewed to be worthy secular projects.

    Wait. Where’s the part where she explains why “the blogger” is wrong to point out Lloyd Rubin’s felonious background? I completely missed that part, and I can’t find it how hard soever I look. She says nothing at all to explain that. Too busy wrapping party favors in sheets of dollar bills?

    6. “Lloyd Rubin was gong to give 2,333 paintings to the Vatican”.
    Actually, that was a joke. A cruel joke because he was angry. He was angry because he had given 2,333 pieces of art to SCA and we worked for a year to find a donor to bear the considerable expense associated with cataloging, packing, shipping, housing and building a website for this 1.5 millions dollar’s worth of art so that the proceeds could go to the various member groups of SCA. When SCA terminated me, however, that donor in Ohio who had pledged $250k for these expenses withdrew his support out of protest (as did MANY donors to SCA) killing the project (and the 1.5 million of donations) and leaving Mr. Rubin holding his art work after a year of brokering its liquidation for a suitable cause.

    Money. Money, you see. Mr Rubin had lashings of money. That’s really all that matters, don’t you agree?

  • He’s done his time in prison and is now funding secular start-ups

    Nostalgia time. Let’s look back at the first blushing days of the new Global Secular Council, later to be the Secular Policy Institute – by which I mean, let’s look back at what I had to say about it starting in May 2014.

    In Global shmobal, for instance, the first whisper of its arrival.

    Oops. There’s a thing called the “Global Secular Council.”

    global

    First? It’s not so global. They’re nearly all American or Ukanian, and the whole thing is clearly Anglophone.

    Last? Its team of experts – 23 of them. Five women. Five.

    Look at the glam picture at the top of the front page – what do you see? Four men and three women – not parity, not more women than men, but close to parity. Funny how the conspicuous glam photo on the front page looks as if there are almost as many women as men when in fact, there are not.

    That’s not all you see, but I won’t go into that.

    In The adorbs Secular Council.

    They’re adding stuff, the Top of Their Field geniuses at The Global Secular Council. We get to watch them add stuff.

    They’ve added a page for something called The Bella & Stella Foundation, which has a link at the bottom of the Team page. It’s some sweet whimsy-whamsy so that we’ll know they don’t take themselves too seriously. (Right, because a few US/UK white guys declaring themselves a Global Council has no trace of taking themselves too seriously.)

    adorbs

    These two furry heathens do not suffer fools lightly, as they are both staunch proponents of the separation of church and state. When lounging in direct sunlight, they have a propensity for summoning the unwitting to their soft stomachs. A simple enough gambit, they let others pet them for the perfectly calculated amount of time, before the naïve are swatted at with more speed than a Hitchens one-liner.

    Both have advanced degrees in the theory and practice of self-cleansing, and follow in the pursuit of each other’s genius to Ph.Ds in cat-naptology.

    Isn’t that just adorable? Doesn’t it make you forget all about wondering what the hell this handful of white mostly-males from the US/UK has to do with anything global? Aren’t Bella and Stella just a perfectly fine substitute for people with some actual global reach and experience? Why wonder where Taslima Nasreen and Maryam Namazie and Gita Sahgal and Pragna Patel are when you can have Bella and Stella?

    We understand about the cats now. It’s Lloyd Rubin. Who? Stephanie pulled it all together a couple of months ago:

    It took Edwina Rogers being fired by the Secular Coalition for the money behind Bella and Stella to come forward.

    “I can be a good and generous friend, or I can be a very effective adversary,” wrote one major donor, Lloyd S. Rubin, in an email to board members and the heads of member organizations last week.

    One enterprising commenter on Ophelia’s blog made the Panamanian connection. Who is Lloyd Rubin?

    One day in the mid-1980s, Rubin, a portly American in his 50s, steps off a plane. In no time, he is ensconced in opulent offices, complete with an imitation jungle brook. He proceeds to filch millions from visiting countrymen, despite repeated complaints to the U.S. embassy. He tools around in a wine-colored Jaguar. Even after Noriega falls, Rubin continues to con with impunity. He seems untouchable…but is he?

    In June, 1991, Rubin travels to Thailand with his new Panamanian wife, Rachell Constante. They drive to a dusty village, where Lloyd is admitted to a drug rehabilitation center run by Buddhist monks. Constante returns to Panama alone. Some weeks later, a New York judge hearing a fraud case against Rubin gets a Thai death certificate in the mail. It states that Rubin died on July 26 at the rehab center and was cremated. As translated, the cause of death is listed as “complication disease, unhealthy.” He was 60.

    Rubin is back in Panama now, having failed to convince anyone that he died. He’s done his time in prison and is now funding secular start-ups.

    Classy, classy stuff.

  • Underneath

    I plan to post a few bits and pieces about the conference last weekend, if I get around to them.

    One item…Saturday afternoon between the sessions and the evening events, Taslima and I went outside to the pool area to talk. We found a nice table under a tree and sat there in the shade gabbing away…and after we’d been there a good while a woman came up to us. I was thinking she was someone attending the conference who wanted to greet Taslima, but no – she was part of Taslima’s security detail, come to ask what her plans were for the evening and how to find her or (while she was on a break) another officer.

    She was very…I’m not sure what to call it. Very firm, calm, fit – soldierly, you might call it. I liked her.

    I wanted to post about it at the time but didn’t; I waited until we were all long gone.

    I hadn’t noticed any security before that day, but at the start of the afternoon sessions I got off the elevator and approached the hall and there were two burly guys with guns at each side of the doorway.

    All weekend I kept reminding myself not to mention that Taslima had decided to join me on the Niagara Falls trip until after it was well over.

    We live in strange times.

  • The stories they told were horrible

    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.

  • The list of Fellows gets shorter again

    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.)

  • All the superheroes

    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.

  • Never cite Brendan

    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.

  • The witch-hunt under the bed

    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.

  • Mixed Gender Lab

    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

    Embedded image permalink