Damn, there are such good comments on PZ’s post on Dawkins on American women complaining about being groped at work that I have to share a few extracts.

CaitieCat @ 7

How can we make the Deep Rifts wide enough so we don’t have to constantly hear his whining drone note about how muzzled he is, carried in every major media source? He’s like a bagpipe made of living cats at this point – the last thing you want to do is squeeze him or poke him, because then he’ll start playing his only tune, the MRA anthem “Restrainin’ Men”, to the tune of “It’s Rainin’ Men”.

drewvogel @ 16

I don’t understand why feminism has to be this major fault line. Atheists can disagree about other things without causing these “deep rifts”. But Dawkins (and Boghossian, and others) won’t let it go. He wants to be as alienating as possible. He wants to alienate us because he doesn’t want us in his movement. But it ain’t his movement.

themadtapper @ 24

I can’t stand that whole “but in comparison to the Middle-East…” bullshit that he’s constantly pulling. And for him to outright say that women complaining about being molested… excuse me, “inappropriately touched”, is trivial? That’s just beyond the pale even for Dawkins. I can already hear his response, too. “Oh, I didn’t say it was trivial, i said it was trivial in comparison. Surely you agree mutilation and stoning are worse than inappropriate touching right? I can say ‘X is worse than Y’ without saying Y isn’t bad. I’m not saying Y isn’t bad.” If Y is bad, and isn’t trivial, then why the fuck are you bringing X into it and lamenting that people complain about Y?

Giliell @ 34

So Dawkins, is asked to be interviewed… for an article he knows is going to be published. And in the interview he complains that he’s “muzzled”?

Well, it’s because after this he will never be able to give an interview without heavy security again. Because of the nature of this, he will have to go into hiding like Salman Rushdi, flee the country and not be able to return again like Taslima Nasreen. if he is ever caught he will not get away with a few thousand lashes like Raif Badawi, no, he will either be lynched likeHenry Smith (TW for that) or be the victim of a witch hunt(TW, too), because his opponents are just a version of Nazis like the people who killed Sophie Scholl

Maureen Brian @ 35 [posted at the same time as Giliell’s]

On the question of muzzling, does Richard Dawkins have it worse than Taslima Nasreen? No.

Belonging in a country where equal pay has been law since the early 1970s and there’s still a measurable pay gap does he have it worse than British women disrespected in the workplace? No.

Does he have it worse than women in the UK where 20% of REPORTED rapes don’t even make it into the record – http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/18/police-dismiss-one-in-four-sex-crimes-watchdog? No.

Same problem most places. Trying to divide it by country or culture is an attempt to avoid the issue. End of story.

carlie @ 83

Also, Dawkins KNOWS what he did with that coffee comment. He knows what Rebecca Watson has gone through. He knows that when he brings it up he inflames the MRAssholes. And he did it anyway, because scoring his own point in a single interview is worth more to him than what he just did to her threat count for the next month.

drken @ 91

What Richard Dawkins realizes (or is at least taking advantage of) is that sexism is much more acceptable than other forms of bias, such as racism. It’s not that you can’t get “in trouble” for angering feminists (see Summers, Larry) it’s that when feminists are mad at you, everybody has your back. Let’s remember that while Larry Summers did lose his job after implying that women aren’t as good at math as men, he was supported by pretty much everybody in the mainstream media as a victim of “political correctness” at the hands of feminists who “can’t handle reality”. Then he went on to run Goldman-Sachs and become Secretary of the Treasury. So yeah, his life was ruined. In 2 years, when Matt Taylor is still getting death threats over his shirt and major figures in astronomy are refusing to attend any conferences he’s a part of, I’ll consider the plight of the poor oppressed men who run afoul of feminists. Until then, I’ll consider feminism an easy target you can pretend to be brave by standing up to.

nich @ 99

I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial

How fucking stupid! So now that Malala Yousafzai is safe in the confines of Dicky Dawk’s benevolent Western world I can catcall at her? Accost her in an elevator at 4 fucking AM and invite her to my room for some coffee and a lil’ chit-chat? Pinch her ass by the coffee mess? Tweet out pics of her head photo-shopped onto porn stars? And she just has to shut the fuck up about it now that she has graduated from level one to level two of Dawk’s imaginary fucking scale of oppression?

“I must confess Malala, that I am getting a little impatient with your whining now that you aren’t as oppressed as you used to be…”

That’s only a small sample. A lot of great comments there.

Update to add a few:

Ibis3 @ 163

@We Are Plethora #156

It’s very interesting how Dawkins chose to use a euphemism (“inappropriately touched”) rather than the term we all know he really meant which was “non-consensual groping.”

I believe the term you’re searching for is “sexual assault”. He’s talking about women who, instead of being able to go about their jobs in peace, are targeted and sexually assaulted by their colleagues and bosses. The “at the water cooler” phrase also implies that this is an everyday, mundane, commonplace, to-be-expected occurrence for any woman in the workplace–as ordinary and therefore as trivial as office gossip and small talk about last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

tigtog @ 165

Ibis3 #163, you make an excellent point regarding the trivialising and gaslighting bundled up in Dawkins’ carefully condescending phrase, which reminds me of when DJ Grothe characterised backchannel warnings against the harassing/assaulting tendencies of certain male skeptics as “distasteful locker room banter” and bragging about “sexual exploits”, because yeah that’s exactly what telling another woman which men to be extra-wary of is all about.

For anyone who wasn’t around for Grothe’s above effort in 2012, Justin Thibeault’s post on the quoted from which I’ve pulled the above phrases is a good primer.

yazikus @ 166

I work in an industry where many women remember not that long ago when men would chase them through the offices to grope them and kiss them. Where the female partner in a firm had to sit on a male partner’s lap to be allowed in the Partner’s Lounge. Where you could walk in on the boss giggling while watching porn, and he wouldn’t even turn it off. There is no such thing as harmless ‘inappropriate touching’ at a water cooler. That is sexual assault, and a hostile work environment to boot. There were plenty of things he could have chosen as an example of ‘frivolous’ complaining, and yet he chose this, something that is illegal, wrong & keeping women out of certain industries. Makes me wonder what his motive was in choosing those specific words.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh look, PZ got to the Dawkins interview before I did. I didn’t see it until now, so it didn’t influence what I wrote. Funny, we said the exact same thing about Dawkins’s claimed “passionate feminism.”

Richard Dawkins is a feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, who he praises, is a feminist … that is not a feminist at all, scarcely understanding what feminism is, and detesting every feminist cause they encounter. Anti-feminists love Sommers and Dawkins because they create a lovely gray zone in which even misogynists get to claim nominal status as being all for equality, when they aren’t.

Dawkins and Sommers should form a partnership. Peter Boghossian could be their intern.

Also this, which I didn’t say:

Islamism and jihadism are serious problems, no question there. But having great big problems does not diminish the smaller problems into nonexistence — that women in Africa are being burned as witches does not mean there is no pay gap between the sexes; you don’t get to use a ranking of social ills to pretend that the lesser ones are to be ignored.

Guess how much working to end workplace harassment in the West harms the the effort to end female genital mutilation in other parts of the world? Not at all. Empowering women at home gives them the clout and the freedom to act for others. So who the fuck are you to tell American women to grin and bear it when they get fondled at the water cooler, in the name of Islamist oppression? This is a right-wing tactic, to use an external fear to silence criticism and efforts to correct inequities at home, and is a formula for futility — when you trivialize local, incremental changes that people can make, demanding that they instead deal immediately with larger problems directly, you get paralysis. Hey, you, stop working in that women’s shelter and instead get a gun and go fight ISIS!

Yeah.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So we’ve been remiss around here. We need to get organized. We need to have a good chart of all the things that are worse than other things, so that we can talk only about the worse things and never about the less worse things.

This might turn out to be a fairly tall order, but never mind, I’m sure if we pull our chairs all the way up to the desk, and comb our hair, and wipe the grease from our chins, we will be able to do it.

Let’s see. Labor. Labor issues. Here in the US there are jobs that are badly paid, and jobs that are hazardous, and jobs that are both. Jobs that are both must be worse, so we can’t talk about jobs that are only one but not the other.

But then there are worse jobs in other places. So we have to stop talking about any US labor issues, since there are worse ones elsewhere. Bangladesh is apparently not good at making sure its factories don’t burn down with most of the workers trapped inside, so maybe we should talk only about Bangladesh? Is that the worst? Are there worse ones in Zimbabwe or Mali? I don’t know. I guess it takes some research to find out which places are the very worst so that you know which ones to ignore.

Disease. How do you rank diseases? Ebola is very bad. Cancer is very bad. Crohn’s disease is horrible. Severe respiratory diseases are horrible. Frankly I’m not sure I would know how to rank them. How do people get so confident about knowing how to rank things?

Poverty. There’s a lot of poverty in the US, way more than you would expect from a developed democracy. But there are a few other countries that have a higher proportion of their populations living in poverty. (Not as many as you might think though.) I guess for that one we can just look up the stats and choose whatever country is on the bottom. I think it might be Mali.

Mental illness. Which is worse, depression or anxiety? I don’t know. Both sound very difficult and bad, and I don’t know how to decide which is worse.

No, you know what, this isn’t going to work. I don’t know how to go about it. I can do it if it’s really obvious, like a small scratch is not as bad as an axe wound. But other than that? I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how and more to the point, I don’t feel as if it’s my business. I think it’s a really gruesome kind of officiousness to decide you get to grade and sort and rank other people’s miseries. That’s just not a responsibility I want to take on, because it’s not up to me.

I don’t understand why Richard Dawkins thinks it’s up to him. I really don’t. He explained it to Kimberly Winston as being because he is so passionate about the problems of women in places that are far from the UK and the US, but I don’t find that convincing, because so am I and so are many other people I know, but they don’t think that means problems of women more nearby don’t matter. I guess I’m afraid I think it’s just as simple as Dawkins finding American feminists irritating, for whatever reason, and then rationalizing that as his impassioned concern for women he’ll never have to sit next to on a stage or a bus.

Things are worse in Pakistan than they are in the UK. I wonder if Dawkins systematically ignores everything that happens in the UK.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by A Masked Avenger on He was backing out of the driveway.

That has got to be the shittiest piece of journalism ever: nothing in the report makes sense, and apparently the reporter had not the slightest interest in asking questions, and passing the answers on to us.

First, why were the charges reduced, especially to the point that no jail time was involved? In Georgia, like the rest of the United States, lethal force is not justifiable in self-defense unless you have reasonable fear of death or grave bodily harm, and a reasonable belief that deadly force is necessary to prevent same. People pulling into your driveway, or knocking on your door, do not represent reasonable fear, in any jurisdiction in the country, so it’s out of the question that this is a justifiable homicide.

Second, it says, “When Sailors saw the strange car, he came out shooting.” Did the reporter ask what the fuck that was about? When a person sees a strange car, they do not run out firing shots into the air, because they know that the odds are that this is a vacuum cleaner salesperson and not a burglar. I’d expect the reporter at least to comment that the question was asked and not answered, rather than reporting it as matter-of-factly as, “When he saw the strange car, he locked the front door.”

Third, it says, “He fired once into the air. Investigators say the second shot went through the window and struck Diaz in the head.” What the fuck does this mean? Is it saying that he fired a “warning shot” (which is illegal in most of the country, by the way, and in particular discharging a firearm at all is illegal in Gwinnett County within 500′ of a road or structure)? Is it trying to insinuate that the second shot was a “warning shot” as well, as in, “I fired a warning shot into his head”? It “went through the windshield”… by accident? By magic? Why this use of the passive voice? Is this a hint that police decided the fatality was an unfortunate accident because the shot “went through the windshield”?

Fourth, is this strange silence about motive, and why he came out shooting, intentional? The family of the victim, Rodrigo Diaz, spoke “through a translator.” Can we infer that the homeowner knew that a hispanic man was in his driveway, and that’s why he came out shooting? Can we wonder whether that had anything to do with the decision to reduce the charges?

Fifth, “misdemeanor involuntary manslaughter”? A good reporter would comment on this oddity. In Georgia, involuntary manslaughter is the unintentional taking of life while either (a) performing an illegal act that is not a felony, or (b) performing a legal act “in an illegal manner.” It is (b) that is a misdemeanor, punishable by at most one year in prison. This charge means that the prosecutor is saying that Sailors’s actions are legal, but were performed illegally–negligently, basically. And the reporter didn’t find that worth of following up on? Since firing within 500′ of a building or road violates Gwinnett County ordinances, how is this not (a) above? Are they saying that his opening fire was justified, as in self-defense? If so, see the first point above with a side of what the fuck?

And sixth, Diaz said, “I understand that it is a bullet designed to kill, that it explodes the moment it penetrates,” but the reporter made no followup or comment on that. Explosive ammunition of any kind is illegal under Federal law, so if Sailors were using such, he’d be in Federal prison already. It’s most likely that Sailors was using expanding (i.e., hollow-point) bullets, which (a) do not explode, and (b) are not “designed to kill” (more than any other type of bullet). Hollow points are designed to slow the bullet down, so that it doesn’t go right through the person and hit whoever is behind them. That’s why police always carry hollow points. A small point, but pretty glaring that the reporter didn’t bother to address the question.

Apparently reporters’ job is, as Cobert said, to type up what other people say and then publish it uncritically. Too bad; I’d like to know the actual facts of this horrendous situation.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kimberly Winston had a conversation with Richard Dawkins the other day. She notes that he declined to be interviewed about his Down syndrome and comparative rape remarks last summer, but now on a Bay Area tour to promote his memoir he agreed to talk to her.

Bottom line: He stands by everything he has said — including comments that one form of rape or pedophilia is “worse” than another, and that a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate.

Of course he does.

“I don’t take back anything that I’ve said,” Dawkins said from a shady spot in the leafy backyard of one of his Bay Area supporters. “I would not say it again, however, because I am now accustomed to being misunderstood and so I will … ”

He trailed off momentarily, gazing at his hands resting on a patio table.

“I feel muzzled, and a lot of other people do as well,” he continued. “There is a climate of bullying, a climate of intransigent thought police which is highly influential in the sense that it suppresses people like me.”

One, no it doesn’t. He’s still cranking out the shitty remarks. Just the other day he called a bunch of his colleagues “pompous idiots” for objecting to a titty shirt worn on a global tv interview about a glorious success in technology and science.

Of course, he could be cranking out even more shitty remarks, and/or even shittier ones. Maybe this climate of intransigent thought police has suppressed him in that sense and to that degree. If so, hooray for the climate of intransigent thought police.

But let’s think about this underlying idea – that it’s suppressive and thought policey to say there are some things that influential people shouldn’t say in public. In a sense, of course, it is. Saying “you shouldn’t” is inevitably suppressive to some extent, because that’s the point of it. Saying “you shouldn’t shoot people you don’t  know just because they turn into your driveway” is suppressive. Laws against murder are suppressive. There are things we’re forbidden to do, and things we’re urged not to do. That’s suppressive, in a sense. But it’s also essential to the ability to live together. Dawkins can’t be unaware of this fact. So the issue is really the kind of thing he’s being urged not to say.

Imagine if he kept tweeting that the Jews should be rounded up and killed. Who would object if other atheists and secularists and scientists and fans of science urged him to stop saying that? He would, no doubt, but who else would? Neo-Nazis, and pretty much no one else.

But he’s not saying women should be rounded up and killed – he’s just saying it’s their fault if they’re raped while drunk.

Yes, there are differences of degree. But that doesn’t make it a slam-dunk that people should not be urging him to stop saying things like that. It’s not a slam dunk that saying a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate is a trivial thing, or is such an important part of the debate that he should be blatting it out on Twitter.

And then there’s the “climate of bullying” thing. Horseshit. This is a guy with 1.2 million followers on Twitter. This is a guy adored by countless misogynist bullies who feel validated by him. This is a guy who is using his fame and influence to do his best to trash feminism (while claiming to be a “true feminist” himself). He is not being bullied.

Recent criticism of Dawkins has come from women, many of them within the atheist movement, which has long drawn more men to its ranks. His online remarks, some women say, contribute to a climate they see as unwelcoming to female atheists.

Yup. We do say that. They do. His online remarks contribute to a climate unwelcoming to female atheists. You bet they do.

Kimberley quotes Amanda Marcotte and Adam Lee on the subject.

Dawkins, however, disagrees. He is, he said, not a misogynist, as some critics have called him, but “a passionate feminist.” The greatest threats to women, in his view, are Islamism and jihadism — and his concern over that sometimes leads him to speak off-the-cuff.

No, Richard. You are not a passionate feminist. You may think you are, but you’re not. Feminists don’t constantly quote Christina Hoff Sommers approvingly. It’s only anti-feminists who do that.

“I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial,” he said.

Boom! So much for the very belated apology for Dear Muslima last summer. He just took it back. Fucking hell. He thinks he’s a “passionate feminist” and he also thinks he gets to decide what “American women” get to “complain of.” He thinks it’s up to him to compare and measure and decide and rebuke. He even thinks it’s only “American women” who object to sexual harassment.

“And so I occasionally wax a little sarcastic, and I when I have done that, I then have subsequently discovered some truly horrific things, which is that some of the women who were the butt of my sarcasm then became the butt of really horrible or serious threats, which is totally disgusting and I know how horrible that is and that, of course, I absolutely abominate and absolutely repudiate and abhor.”

Oh really? He does? Where, when, in what words? That’s literally the first time I’ve ever seen him say that. I wish he had put it that way in the joint statement. I wrote the joint statement and I carefully worded it as minimally as I could, lest I put him off the whole idea. If that’s how he feels I wish he’d said so last July.

On the other hand it’s not only threats that are the problem. It’s a lot more than that.

Todd Stiefel says it’s great that we have anti-feminists like Dawkins in the atheist movement, because that way we get to forgive him. (Doesn’t that sound a little Christian? Or is that just me.)

Todd Stiefel, president of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, has worked with Dawkins on numerous projects, most recently teaming up to launch Openly Secular, an anti-discrimination campaign. He says that despite the controversies, Dawkins continues to be a worthy spokesman for atheism.

But Stiefel knows not everyone feels the same — and that is an asset to atheism. Dawkins, he said, is just one voice within atheism — and the more different voices the movement includes, the stronger it will be.

“It is wonderful that we have such a brilliant asset with a keen, logical mind and passion for integrity,” Stiefel said in a phone interview. “But he is not perfect. He has flaws and weakness, just like we all do. I forgive Richard his faults and try to care for him as a human being, just like I would any other person. I think it is OK to admire Richard for his strengths and forgive him his weakness.”

Easy for him, isn’t it. It’s not his rights that Dawkins is constantly pissing on. It’s not his class of human that Dawkins is constantly showing his contempt for. He’s not an American woman complaining of something Dawkins thinks unimportant.

Hemant Mehta helps too, in his friendly way.

“What we’re seeing is a bad combination of a celebrity who speaks his mind about issues he’s not necessarily an expert on and a horde of well-intentioned people ready to vilify him instead of educate him,” Mehta said.

Right. No one has ever tried to talk to him. Thanks, Hemant – that’s very “well-intentioned” of you.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another occasion for feeling ashamed of the United States. Such occasions are all too abundant.

In Georgia in January 2013 a guy called Rodrigo Diaz, age 23, went to pick up a friend to go rollerskating. He was using his car’s GPS and he accidentally turned into the driveway across the street from his friend’s house. The guy who lived in that house, the wrong house, came outside and shot him through the head.

The shooter plead guilty to a misdemeanor.

Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh was in the courtroom as Philip Sailors plead to the misdemeanor charge for the January 2013 shooting in Lilburn.

Channel 2 Action News broke the news Friday about the plea deal which reduced a murder charge to the misdemeanor charge of involuntary manslaughter and spared the homeowner any jail time.

People Kavanaugh spoke with were surprised that Sailors made no statement and offered no apology to the victim’s family during the hearing.

Diaz’s family are ok with the sentence.

After the hearing, Diaz’s father, Rodrigo Diaz Senior. told Kavanaugh that Sailors could have received a stronger punishment, but he believed that would only end up destroying two families.

His eldest son, David, agreed.

“There is no point for him to be in lifetime in prison. What we get from that? Nothing,” said David Diaz.

During the hearing, Diaz addressed the court saying he still had two questions. He asked why Sailors used a bullet which he claims is particularly lethal.

“I understand that it is a bullet designed to kill, that it explodes the moment it penetrates,” Diaz said through a translator.

He also said it was his son’s dream that his little sister come to the United States. He asked the court if any doors could now be opened for that to happen.

Diaz got no response to either question.

Guns. Gun culture. Stand your ground. Shoot first then find out who your victim is. Your driveway is the same as your bedroom. When in doubt, shoot.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Gosh, who turned on the time machine and threw us all back to 2008? Some genius came up with a poll on “the most influential non-believer” with a long long list to choose from, including some dead guys, and guess how many women.

Three.

Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins
Sam Harris
Daniel Dennett
Steven Pinker
Victor Stenger
Richard Carrier
Lawrence Krauss
Michael Shermer
Peter Singer
Paul Kurtz
Steven Weinberg
Susan Blackmore
William Provine
Jennifer Hecht
EO Wilson
David Sloan Wilson
Barbara Forrest
Peter Atkins
Philip Pullman
PZ Myers
Ray Kurzweil
Stephen Hawking
Kai Nielsen
Penn Jillette
James Randi
Bill Maher
Ricky Gervais
Matt Dillahunty
Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist)
Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist)
Thunderf00t (YouTube Icon)
Aron Ra (YouTube Icon)
Dan Barker
Bart Ehrman
David Silverman (American Atheists)

33 men, and 3 women.

Staggering, isn’t it. No Susan Jacoby, Katha Pollitt, Taslima Nasreen, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, Amanda Knief, Polly Toynbee, Sikivu Hutchinson, Louise Antony, Kate Smurthwaite, Maryam Namazie, Julia Sweeney, Jamila Bey, Vyckie Garrison…

Why do we even bother.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How about those canals on Mars?

I was just wondering how widespread the belief in their existence was. A 2011 article by Richard Milner in Astrobiology Magazine gives some background.

About 120 years ago, however, at least one prominent astronomer was convinced that Mars not only supported life, but was home to an advanced civilization. Martians, the theory went, had built an extensive network of canals to draw water down from supposed icecaps at the Red Planet’s poles to irrigate a world that was drying out.

Imagine really believing there were “Martians” on another planet. It’s not a particularly outlandish belief given the available information…but it seems like quite a dramatic belief.

Martian canals as depicted by Percival Lowell.
Credit: Public domain

These immense illusory earthworks (Marsworks?) had been studied in detail by one of the greatest astronomers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the wealthy and socially prominent Percival Lowell.

In his day, Lowell was far and away the most influential popularizer of planetary science in America. His widely read books included “Mars” (1895), “Mars and Its Canals” (1906), and “Mars As the Abode of Life” (1908).

Lowell was not the first to believe he saw vast canals on Mars. That distinction belongs to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 reported the appearance of certain long, thin lines he called canali, meaning channels in Italian. But he stopped short of attributing them to the work of intelligent Martians.

Channels can just happen. Canals, not so much.

Lowell carried the matter much further. Captivated by these sketchily observed — and ultimately nonexistent — phenomena, Lowell spent many years attempting to elucidate and theorize about them. The lines, he thought, must “run for thousands of miles in an unswerving direction, as far relatively as from London to Bombay, and as far actually as from Boston to San Francisco.”

He thought the Red Planet must once have been covered by lush greenery, but was now desiccated; the “canals” were an admirable attempt by intelligent and cooperative beings to save their home planet. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

The Canals of Mars became one of the most intense and wrongheaded obsessions in the history of science, capturing the popular imagination through dozens of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as such classic science fiction as “The Princess of Mars,” a pulp classic by Edgar Rice Burroughs…

With us it’s Roswell and alien abductions.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Philae has found organic molecules on Comet 67P.

Carbon-containing “organics” are the basis of life on Earth and may give clues to chemical ingredients delivered to our planet early in its history.

The compounds were picked up by a German-built instrument designed to “sniff” the comet’s thin atmosphere.

Other analyses suggest the comet’s surface is largely water-ice covered with a thin dust layer.

Very very frozen ice, as hard as sandstone.

And landing where it did may have been useful after all.

After bouncing off the surface at least twice, Philae came to a stop in some sort of high-walled trap.

“The fact that we landed up against something may actually be in our favour. If we’d landed on the main surface, the dust layer may have been even thicker and it’s possible we might not have gone down [to the ice],” said Prof McCaughrean.

The drill apparently didn’t get a sample though, which is disappointing.

A key objective was to drill a sample of “soil” and analyse it in Cosac’s oven. But, disappointingly, the latest information suggest no soil was delivered to the instrument.

Prof McCaughrean explained: “We didn’t necessarily see many organics in the signal. That could be because we didn’t manage to pick up a sample. But what we know is that the drill went down to its full extent and came back up again.”

“But there’s no independent way to say: This is what the sample looks like before you put it in there.”

Pesky science, always refusing to give dogmatic answers.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

TIME magazine, fresh from its triumph at electing the word “feminism” as the Worst Word in the World, has given the job of reporting on sexist shirts in the workplace to Katha Pollitt Amanda Marcotte Soraya Chemaly Cathy Young. Cathy Young of Reason magazine, Cathy Young who is Christina Hoff Sommers’s favorite colleague in feminism-bashing.

When I first heard about the outrage over a scientist from the Rosetta Mission, which landed the Philae space probe on a comet, wearing a “sexist” shirt for a press appearance, I racked my brain wondering what the offensive garment could have been. A T-shirt showing a spacecraft with a “My secret fort—no girls allowed” sign? An image of a female scientist with the text, “It’s nice that you got a Ph.D., now make me a sandwich”?

Right – if it’s not spelled out as literally and unmistakably as possible, then it’s not sexist at all. If it doesn’t say “no women allowed” then it’s not sexist. Hooray! Feminism has won and we can all move on – because people don’t put “no women allowed” signs on the doors any more, except in religious institutions. But guess what: actual signs saying “women get out” are not the only form of sexism there is. There are others.

This is true of so many things – of everything that social and political, in fact. A workplace where the men are always grabbing the women’s butts but there is no sign anywhere saying “women get out” – that is still a sexist workplace. There is such a thing as implication. I don’t believe that Cathy Young is genuinely so stupid that she doesn’t get that. I think she chooses to pretend she doesn’t get it.

Dr. Taylor’s shirt may not have been in great taste. But the outcry against it is the latest, most blatant example of feminism turning into its own caricature: a Sisterhood of the Perpetually Aggrieved, far more interested in shaming and bashing men for petty offenses than in celebrating female achievement.

No, that’s not true. The question of how to make STEM fields more attractive to women is not petty at all. One way not to make them more attractive to women is to ignore low-level sexism. Sure, it is low-level. That shirt is far from the worst kind of sexism or the worst thing anyone could have done. (Mind you, paired with “I didn’t say she was easy” it gets a bit worse.) But low-level sexism also matters, and when it’s amplified by being the face of an exciting event like this, then it matter more. It’s not petty.

[T]his particular brand of feminist ideology, which inevitably stigmatizes straight male sexuality, is at the center of the recent culture wars.

It doesn’t “stigmatize straight male sexuality” to say “not in the workplace.”

Sadly, the brouhaha over Dr. Taylor’s shirt overshadowed not only his accomplishments but those of his female teammates, including one of the project’s lead researchers, Kathrin Allweg of the University of Bern in Switzerland. More spotlight on Dr. Allweg, Dr. Grady, Dr. Alexander and the other remarkable women of the Rosetta Project would have been a true inspiration to girls thinking of a career in science. The message of ShirtStorm, meanwhile, is that aspiring female scientists can be undone by some sexy pictures on a shirt—and that women’s presence in science requires men to walk on eggshells, curb any goofy humor that may offend the sensitive, and be cowed into repentance for any misstep.

Thanks for ruining a cool feminist moment for us, bullies.

Thank you TIME magazine for joining the war on feminism.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh good, a “girls can” book that actually says girls can’t. Helpful.

The latest affront to basic decency in gendered toy marketing comes from a Barbie book that tells girls they can’t be game developers or programmers.

The book is bafflingly called Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. It was written by Susan Marenco and published by Random House. Despite its encouraging title, Marenco’s book actually tells pre-teen girls that Barbie can only contribute to the design of the game she’s building.

…

As [blogger Pamela] Ribon describes in an increasingly cringe-inducing writeup about the book, Barbie is introduced as the designer of stereotypically “girly” games featuring cute little animals. Barbie’s work resembles Pet Rescue or similar mobile games—you know, not the ones “real gamers” make.

That’s okay, though, because Barbie is apparently perfectly happy with her second-class status. “I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie tells Skipper. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”

Subtle!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

At Slate: Phil Plait on The Shirt and the fallout after The Shirt and the apology and the moving on.

To be clear, I don’t think Taylor is a raging misogynist or anything like that; I think he was just clueless about how his words might sound and his shirt might be interpreted. We all live in an atmosphere steeped in sexism, and we hardly notice it; a fish doesn’t notice the water in which it swims. I’ve lived in that environment my whole life, and I was well into adulthood before I started becoming aware of it and figuring out how to counter it. I’m still learning.

*raises hand* I notice it!

Boy do I notice it. I so notice it. I’ve been noticing it my whole adult life, and somewhat even before I was an adult. That’s why I get called all these names: for noticing it, and then saying I notice it, and saying what it is and what’s bad about it. I notice it I notice it I notice it. I notice the water.

And then came the backlash.

If you think this is just women complaining, you’re wrong. Certainly many have, and rightly so. But the fact is, I’m writing about it. I can point you to many men, friends of mine, scientists and science communicators all, who have spoken up about it. It’s important that men speak up, and it’s important that we listen, too.

If you think this is just complaining from wannabes who can’t hold a candle to someone who just landed a probe on a comet, you’re wrong. Talk to my friend, the cosmologist Katie Mack. Or the planetary scientist Sarah Horst. Or geologist Mika McKinnon. Or planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla. Or radio astronomer Nicole Gugliucci. Or professor and science communicator extraordinaire Pamela Gay. Or Carolyn Porco, who worked on the Voyagermission and is the leader of the Cassini imaging team, the space probe that’s been orbiting Saturn for over a decade now.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Blake Stacey on The most shameful ontological status.

I felt a little of that when the Mars Rover landed safely. I was disappointed there weren’t more women in the room. I hoped there would be more in the future. I was glad to see the few who were there.

This reminded me of something, so I went and looked it up. Everyone open your hymnals to St. Carl of Ithaca, Pale Blue Dot (1994), p. 243, describing the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter:

The impact of the millennium was beginning to look very much like a fizzle.

Then there was a report from a ground-based optical telescope in La Palma in the Canary Islands, followed by announcements from a radiotelescope in Japan; from the European Southern Observatory in Chile; and from a University of Chicago instrument in the frigid wastelands of the South Pole. In Baltimore the young scientists crowding around the TV monitor—themselves monitored by the cameras on CNN—began to see something, and in exactly the right place on Jupiter. You could witness consternation turn into puzzlement, and then exultation. They cheered; they screamed; they jumped up and down. Smiles filled the room. They broke out the champagne. Here was a group of young American scientists—about a third of them, including the team leader, Heidi Hammel, women—and you could imagine youngsters all over the world thinking that it might be fun to be a scientist, that this might be a good daytime job, or even a means to spiritual fulfillment.

Emphasis mine.

This stuff matters. And people who the trolls probably claim to admire agree that it matters.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kiran Opal has a brilliant post on the most recent uproar and its meanings.

She quotes something Josh said that I hadn’t seen.

Official SpokesGay @SpokesGay

Crying is feminine and weak. Being feminine is the most shameful ontological status. Bitches made Matt Taylor weak and feminine in public.
3:46 PM – 16 Nov 2014

Shock of recognition. Yeah.

She provides a lot of resources:

Here are a few articles/resources talking about sexism in science/STEM fields.

(I don’t expect misogynistic dudebros to bother reading things that don’t agree with their views on women, but I hope others will):
Issues Affecting Women in STEM A repository of peer-reviewed research (a huge fucking repository at fucking Harvard for all the people who only believe things institutions like that tell them)

…

Academics Anonymous: sexism is driving women out of science

Many people on Twitter I need to follow.

The feminists’ point was that this was ONE manifestation of sexism in science. How wearing a shirt that had objectifying images of women was not something that was considered inappropriate at work during an interview that was broadcast around the world. A broadcast that young girls and women would watch and see that the science guy wears a shirt that has images of women reducing them to sexual objects. A broadcast that young boys and men would watch reinforcing the idea that even in science, looking at women as mere sex objects is a thing and totally cool.

One. Just one. Not the only. Not the worst. Not the hugest. Just, one – but a highly visible one, and painful because an obstacle in the rejoicing. (I felt a little of that when the Mars Rover landed safely. I was disappointed there weren’t more women in the room. I hoped there would be more in the future. I was glad to see the few who were there.)

Matt Taylor’s apology was accepted by just about everyone who had originally found the shirt inappropriate, in bad taste, or sexist.

The people who didn’t accept his apology are the anti-feminists out here on the internet for whom a man saying, “I’m sorry I did something that perpetuated sexism” to a bunch of women is EMASCULATING. Their fragile egos were hurt. Thus began the immense mindfuck of a backlash that you can see summarized in these articles/posts:

With ‪#‎GamerGate‬ floundering, the Internet Douchebag Squad whips up a ‪#‎Shirtstorm‬

Scientist apologizes for his sexist shirt, but the Internet still wants women to shut up and die

A list of resources at the end:

More from reliable, scientific sources about the sexism women face in science/STEM fields today:

Why Science Is Sexist

Women in science: ‘Whoa, what are you doing here?’

Science Is Institutionally Sexist. Here Are 4 Ways To Help Fix It

Women in science: Women’s work

Sexism In Science? UK Study Finds Women Scientists Get Fewer Grants, Less Funding Than Male Counterparts

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students

Astronomical Sexism: Rosetta #ShirtStorm and Everyday Sexism in STEM

Female Physicists Worldwide Fight Sexist Stereotypes

I wonder if Richard Dawkins would think Kiran is a pompous idiot.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

From Science Daily: This just in: Political correctness pumps up productivity on the job.

Political correctness, loathed by some as censorship awash in leftist philosophy, actually boosts the creativity of mixed-sex work teams, according to new research published in Administrative Science Quarterly.

I can’t begin to tell you how thoroughly unsurprised I am to read that.

Of course it does. Why? Because the absence of “political correctness” equals the presence of political putdowns and sneers, and what does that do? It distracts the people subject to them, and diverts their energy to being annoyed and defensive and resentful. That is useful to no one.

Ok I’m opining before reading the whole article. Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Maybe it’s something else that I couldn’t have expected.

“Our work challenges the widespread assumption that true creativity requires a kind of anarchy in which people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence,” said Jack Goncalo associate professor of Organizational Behavior at the Cornell ILR School and lead author of the study.

Still not surprised.

These results highlight a paradoxical consequence: A term that has been used to undermine expectations to censor offensive language as a threat to free speech actually provides a foundation upon which diverse work groups can freely exchange creative ideas.

“Political correctness facilitates idea expression by reducing the uncertainty that people tend to experience while interacting with the opposite sex,” Goncalo said. “The PC norm, by establishing a clear guideline for how to behave appropriately in mixed-sex groups, made both men and women more comfortable sharing their creative ideas.”

That is somewhat different. It reduces the uncertainty, as opposed to the hostility.

Ok, so the reduction in hostility is an excellent side effect. (But actually this is just a report on a forthcoming article, so I’m going to guess there’s more to it than just a reduction in uncertainty. My bet is that knowing for certain that men would be sneering at women in these mixed groups would not be great for productivity.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A photo from the ISS:

Fire on Earth (left) vs. fire in #space (right); without convection drawing the flame up, flames form spheres.

How cool is that?!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Wait what now? Possible future protest is now a reason to declare a state of emergency? So the cops will be there with clubs raised before the protesters even arrive?

That sounds more like intimidation than a state of emergency.

Citing “the possibility of expanded unrest,” Gov. Jay Nixon today declared a state of emergency and prepared to send the Missouri National Guard to help maintain order in the St. Louis region when a grand jury decision is announced in the Michael Brown case.

Nixon’s executive order puts the St. Louis County Police Department in charge of security in Ferguson “in areas of protests and acts of civil disobedience, should such activities occur.”

Well great, because the police have such a fine upstanding history in Ferguson, and the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case is all about that fine history. Way to pour gasoline on the house fire.

The order also establishes a unified law enforcement command consisting of the county police, the St. Louis Police Department and the Missouri Highway Patrol. The agencies will operate together “to keep members of the public safe and protect property while allowing citizens to exercise their constitutional rights,” Nixon said in a news release.

Their constitutional rights to stay home.

A grand jury has been hearing evidence in the shooting of Brown, 18, who was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. The shooting sparked months of protests.

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch has said the grand jury’s decision whether to charge Wilson is expected in mid- to late November.

Nixon’s spokeswoman, Channing Ansley, said the governor had no detailed knowledge of when to expect the grand jury decision, other than McCulloch’s public statements.

He just thought he might as well put people even more on edge. Good thinking.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The ACLU has a report on life sentences in prison without parole. Many such sentences are for non-violent crimes.

The number of people sentenced to life without parole
has quadrupled nationwide in the past 20 years, even
while violent crime has been declining during that
period. Not only has the use of life-without-parole sentences
exploded, but the punishment is available for a broader
range of offenses, and those sentenced to LWOP include
people convicted of nonviolent crimes, including low-level
nonviolent offenses.

According to data collected and analyzed
by the ACLU, 3,278 prisoners are serving LWOP for drug,
property, and other nonviolent crimes in the United States
as of 2012. Our data on the people serving LWOP shows
marked geographic and socioeconomic patterns, and reveals
stark racial disparity in life-without-parole sentencing for
nonviolent offenses.

Let me guess – lots more white people? No?

Life without parole used to be extremely rare in the US, until the Supreme Court banned the death penalty in 1972. Since then the numbers have exploded.

LWOP has not only expanded to nearly every state but also
is an available sentence for many more crimes. In 37 states
and in the federal system, a life-without-parole sentence is
available for non-homicide offenses, including convictions
for selling drugs, burglary, robbery, carjacking, and battery.
In 29 states, an LWOP sentence is mandatory upon conviction
of particular crimes, thus denying judges any discretion to
consider the circumstances of the crime or the defendant.

(There are reference notes in the original.)

The net result of this expansion is that LWOP is now used
at historically high levels to punish people who at one
time would have received much more lenient sentences.
In addition, people sentenced to LWOP are robbed of the
opportunity for release, which is rooted in the belief that
people have the capacity for growth and rehabilitation and
the ability to successfully reintegrate into society. Indeed,
studies show that lifers who are released are very unlikely
to commit new crimes. A sentence to life without parole,
however, means the prisoner has no prospect of release
in his or her lifetime, regardless of his or her efforts at
rehabilitation: virtually every person sentenced to LWOP dies
in prison.

What can possibly be the point of that? Just brutality for the sake of brutality?

Honestly on so many criteria the US cannot be considered an advanced developed democracy. In many ways we’re anti-development and hostile to advancing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Naturally Christina Hoff Sommers is contemptuous of TIME’s cowardly failure to tell feminists that they are pompous idiots for doing something Christina Hoff Sommers doesn’t approve. Naturally the only True Feminism™ is that approved first by Richard Dawkins and then by Christina Hoff Sommers.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers · Nov 16
TIME caved to pressure. Has stopped poll on most cringe-inducing word because “feminist” was winning by a landslide. http://time.com/3576870/worst-words-poll-2014/

How dare TIME cave to pressure? How dare anyone cave to pressure? How dare Little Rock Central High School cave to pressure and allow African-American students to enter the building? How dare the mobs outside Little Rock Central High School cave to pressure and stop screaming at those students? How dare anyone ever pay attention to what an oppressed marginalized group says about how it’s treated?

Pressure is annoying or worse when you disagree with the reasons for it, of course. But that’s what the issue is: the reasons for the pressure, not the pressure itself. Sommers applies pressure herself, constantly, relentlessly, all the time. So do I (but without the clout of the American Enterprise Institute behind me). Pressure we agree with is just persuasion or argument or at most polemics.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)