Update: this post is confusing if you haven’t read the one before it. The article is a good article; my commentary continues from the previous post.
Another article on DN Lee and Scientific American, Nobody Ever Called Einstein A ‘Whore’. (Yes, yes, frisson, blah blah collective outrage, yadda yadda impure motives. Noted, Jeremy, now go monitor someone else for a few years.)
Danielle Lee is another one of its well-known scientific writers. Lee, a biologist who studies animal behavior, mammals and the ways organisms interact with their environment, earned a doctoral degree in biology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, was named Young Professional of the Year by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, and her urban science blog was named as a finalist for the 2011 Black Weblog Award in the best science and technology category. When not blogging, Lee works for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. By all accounts Lee is well-known and well-respected in scientific circles…
It’s good to have some background.
Then there was Ofek, then Mariette DiChristina removed Lee’s blog post…
That’s when things really got ugly. Besides the ethical considerations of journalists removing whole stories from websites without warning or fuller explanation, Scientific American apparently failed to take into consideration how readers would react, especially those who had already seen the post. Not only was the initial story picked up by the ever popular Buzz Feed, the website specializing in viral content, also implicated Scientific American’s complicity in the controversy. Scientists around the globe are now protesting the magazine, taking to Twitter and other social media platforms to demand that their content also be removed from the site, stating their refusal to now use Scientific American’s materials in the classroom, and are dropping subscriptions. And they are calling on colleagues to take similar actions.
Aka the frisson of collective outrage. How dare scientists around the globe protest! How dare they make Danielle Lee feel supported instead of isolated and dismissed? How dare they, I tell you! It’s much better to steer clear of all possible frissons and leave everything as it is, including random people calling women whores when they feel like it.
…the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States should have known better, even more so (one would think) since its editor is a woman. If nothing else editors should explain its relationship with Biology-onlineand the editor who is accused of calling Lee out of her name. One would also think that editors at Scientific American would be empathetic about scientists getting riled when their work is not respected, but something tells me that Einstein never had to worry about being called a “whore,” let alone an urban one.
Uh oh. Is that a reference to privilege? It’s all over.
Off-topicish, sorry:
I’m curious about this idiom…
It was in the original of this series of posts as well…
I never heard that before! What does “calling [someone] out of [their] name” mean? Is it the same as “he called me a name”?
Sorry if it’s a dumb question, it just strikes a non-American as an odd construction.
The other day I was walking by the river when I saw a drowning man. I was about to dive and help when I realised that doing so would give me a frisson of self-satisfaction, so I let him drown.
Silentbob, in this case I think this is the most likely interpretation beyond simply ‘insult’ ‘disrespect’ or ‘call names’:
http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2013/04/11/on-being-called-out-my-name/
Please do speak out about this and other situations, folks. One voice in support for those wronged (Ms. Lee, Miri) may not do much alone, but it adds up when enough people do it (re: getting fascistbook to remove the page). Silence doesn’t help – the person wronged isn’t getting support, and those who did wrong take silence as assent and approval.
I think you’re misreading. the article, it’s clumsy, perhaps, but the author seems to think the outrage and response to Scientific American‘s suppression of Dr. Lee’s blog are justified. Where do they suggest the collective outrage isn’t reasonable or suggest that anyone had “impure motives”? Frisson is your term, not the author’s.
However, the last sentence is particularly interesting.
It’s particularly badly-written too- it isn’t Dr. Lee’s work that is not respected- after all, wanting to republish it, even without payment, shows respect for the work- but Dr. Lee herself, but I wonder whether we are also supposed to remember that even if Einstein never had to worry about being called a “whore”, he was called a “hun”, a “communist”, a “jew” and other offensively- intended terms..
Discourtesy, dishonesty and bad manners have a long tradition in science, even if they are more rapidly exposed now.
Actually, sc_mess, I think you misread somewhat too. “Frisson” is not Ms Benson’s word but Dr Jerremy’s (see previous post) and she uses it here as a sarcastic rebuttal of his objection to “collective outrage” – in this particular case, even.
And perhaps look a little deeper – the last few posts of this blog can cast some light on what went before.
“Di-i-i-ig a little deeper in the well, boy. If you want a good cool drink of water you gotta dig a little deeper in the well.” -Eric Bibb, from the so-titled album.
Hope this helps.
Apologies for misattributing frisson. All the same, I don’t think it’s relevant here. I’d assumed “Jeremy” was the author of the article quotes here. The article (it’s been revised since I first read it, maybe even more from when O.B. did) seems to regard the general outrage and hostility to <Scientific American as understandable and reasonable. What did interest me was that the author chose Einstein, who was also personally insulted and even threatened with death, as a contrast to Dr Lee, which suggests a certain ignorance of history.
The other thing I still find curious is that Ofek was so stupid as not to realise the consequences of what they did. The personal hurt they could cause to Dr. Lee was obviously far outweighed by the professional damage they would do to the site they work on and this is so obvious that even in the moment between typing and posting they should have realised it. this has nothing to do with racism, sexism, pure malevolence or even bad manners. It’s a matter of common sense.
Misreading / missing context aside,
Actually, the only thing demonstrated is a desire for publishable content from a scientist in a relevant field whose name happened to be accessible. Anything beyond that is pure speculation. Ofek may be a publishing person with no interest in science at all. Not saying that this minimum is necessarily the case, but respect is not necessarily demonstrated here either.
But back to context: Yeah, I had to go and check the previous post (only) to understand what was going on in the opening paragraph. Otherwise, I’d still be all “WTF?”, as there is no Jeremy involved in the central story or the linked article. Sometimes, you have to minimally investigate what you are reading to get the picture, especially in formats like blogs.
Do go have a look. Stangroom is another “interesting” piece of work.
Bah. My comment 8 was in late. Consider I had not seen 7 yet by the time I posted.
Your point about Einstein is correct. The author is clearly ignorant of the facts in their choice of example.
Well we can’t all know everything, you know 🙂
For example, I hadn’t heard about bigoted threats and insults to Einstein, or maybe forgot.
On your last point re: stupidity of Ofek, we agree. Hard to see how anyone could not! Although I strongly suspect it does have everything to do with all four factors.
And now I did an “F” — my #10 is also in response to #7.
That’s the polite description,@8. I think OB read the post here as if it were by someone like Stangroom when it isn’t. It’s clumsily sympathetic to Dr. Lee and other scientists’ responses.
10:: the thing that puzzles me about Ofek is how a moment’s rage could so easily overwhelm personal and pro2fessional self-interest. A computer isn’t a place where people have irresistible impulses. Saying someone is an “urban whore” takes a moment. Pressing “reply”, typing the words, pressing “send” takes time and it only takes a moment’s thought to realise that that is stupid and self-destructive behaviour and to cancel.
@1 Silentbob: Saying you were ‘called out of my name’ is similar to ‘them’s fightin’ words’. In the U.S., there’s ‘fighting-words doctrine’ that can be applied to specific types of speech.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/fighting-words
I doubt that. You might come to the same conclusion if you look up who called him what, where and especially: when. You might also find out—to your surprise, I s’pose—that he never got called anything just because of his gender and/or the color of his skin.
PS: the use of the gender-neutral plural is not necessary if the actual gender is known. I hope you didn’t do it intentionally.
Well, anyone can strike a nerve in anger. Some have a hard time apologizing for it afterwards.
What seems so incredibly unprofessional to me is that the editor took sides against Dr Lee and then doubled down. Sawing off the branch you sit on – don’t do that.
But he was insulted for his place of birth and his ancestry, Christoph Zurnieden. A whole school of physics- Deutsche Physik- was founded partly on the basis that Einstein was a jew so his theories must be false or even lies.
This isn’t an attempt to excuse Ofek. merely to point out that science free of personal prejudice is an ideal that has never been achieved. It’s even harder now, when people don’t or won’t think about what they say, but that doesn’t make it any more forgivable.
Sorry about being confusing. I wrote this post very soon after the previous one and in a moment of forgetfulness about other minds, wrote it as if it were obviously a continuation of the previous one. My bad.
Interesting how old-fashioned the US still is. Short of the occasional politician and most of the silly royalty noöne is addressed by anything but first name over here.
No. She realises that the post is sympathetic to Dr. Lee. She’s just responding to it with the same “argument” that Stangroom tweeted with, to show how absurd Stangroom’s attitude is.
@Silentbob #1 I’d never heard the phrase before either (I’m Canadian btw). After a bit of research I conclude it means something like “call someone by something instead of their proper name as a means of insulting or degrading them”.
And now Popehat Ken has engaged:
http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/13/biology-online-org-urban-whores-and-the-many-axes-of-douchebaggery/
Not spamming, I promise, just want to keep lines open:
http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/15/biology-online-and-marketeer-entitlement-revisited/
That must do for now.