Still at it. Still muddying the waters by saying Tim Hunt was sacked by UCL, when he was never employed by UCL in the first place. Simon Heffer in the Telegraph:
How to silence Sir Tim’s bullies
Except that it didn’t “sack” him.
Also, the claim that “silly” dismissive contemptuous remarks about women are “entirely harmless” is highly debatable. (I think they’re just flat-0ut wrong, but then that’s what I think, and it’s debatable.)
UCL acted after a particularly nasty display of mob rule by denizens of Twitter, where it is too easy to vent bovine opinions first and reflect later, rather than treat these grandstanding bullies and halfwits with the contempt they merit.
No it didn’t. There hadn’t been any big Twitter uproar at that point. He’s just making it up as he goes.
When will the Government defend Sir Tim? Now he is available, why don’t they give him a great position in the world of science or higher education, and show the bullies they can’t win?
You know what I think he should do? Offer his services to do outreach to girls or young women or both, to encourage them to go into science. I think that would be great.
And this business of calling it “bullying” when underlings push back against contempt from their upperlings – that’s a very ugly business indeed.
‘Bovine opinions’?!
Am I being overly sensitive by seeing that as a sexist slur? ‘Cow’ is a phase usually directed towards women. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a man referred to as a cow (unsurprisingly as male cattle are bulls). If he wanted to talk about how everyone arguing against Hunt did so unthinkingly then the more usual epithet would be sheeplike or, if he wanted to use the proper collective term, ovine. But he chose bovine. Interesting choice of words, especially given the context.
It’s possible that “bovine ” in this context = “bullshit.” That’s not necessarily a gendered slur, or maybe I’m ignorant on that score.
I read “bovine” as a “cow” reference. Cow is used as an insult toward women more often in the UK (where of course this asinine statement came from) than in the USA.
But it’s not entirely harmless, is it. We know it isn’t.
Sure one comment by one guy on one occasion can be called entirely harmless in isolation. But it’s not in isolation, is it. That remark came from somewhere. It’s like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, giving a clue to the great mass hidden beneath. And you can’t get away with saying, “while we condemn the huge mass of male chauvinism floating in the sea of science, we’ll ignore that little bit poking above the surface, because that bit’s harmless”.
Re “bovine”:
FWIW, the Latin word “bos”, from which “bovine” derives, is common-gendered and thus can refer to animals of either gender. Not that this tells us anything about what Simon Heffer meant by it, of course.
Not that I’ve heard it often, but from my experience, bovine in that context has always been a sheeple-type word – more about the status of the people expressing opinions as cattle, than as having anything to do with gender. It probably works either way, though, and neither interpretation portrays him in a particularly flattering light. Looking at the article, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find that both of those portrayals are accurate.