Why shouldn’t women serve in the military?

This is a bizarre excuse: because the men might be demoralized by learning that women poop and sweat.

Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.

Oh, horrors! Marines are psychologically delicate and would be deeply traumatized by the presence of a woman who might see them poop, or worse, might have to witness a woman pooping.

Then there’s the usual hygiene argument.

When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

I have big news for the Marines: women are animals, just like they are; they are hairy sweaty mammals, just like they are; in the absence of opportunities to groom and clean themselves, they get filthy, too.

I am surprised that Marines can be comfortable with the fact that other people are blood-filled meat sacks who can be blown apart and mangled and killed, but that their morale would crumble if they learned that women have sebaceous glands and colons.

Ryan Smith, the author of that piece, must be a real wimp.

Scientological syncretism

Nobody will be surprised by this at all: L. Ron Hubbard cobbled together Scientology from various bits of old pseudoscience, as well as by inventing things out of thin air.

The source calls them “lies”. This is an ongoing problem: we don’t have a good word for what these people (scientologists, creationists, Christians, Muslims, whatever) are doing. They are making stuff up, they are telling things about the nature of the world that are not only false but contrary to all the available evidence, yet they often fervently believe it all; even the scam artists have to half-convince themselves that they’re doing good. And if we call it lies, some pedant will start complaining that it lacks the element of intent.

So what’s a good word for malicious mind-fuckery backed by devout good intentions? I struggle with this all the time.

“It’s about misogyny. It’s about intimidation. It’s about silencing.”

Jane Fae writes about the realities of online bullying in the New Statesman.

…there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying. Yes: blokes, male columnists, undoubtedly get it too. But it feels as though there is something far more vicious, gender-related with respect to what women have to endure.

Beard makes the point well, in a blog responding to her own online treatment. It is clear that she is no stranger to tired old jokes about her appearance – but even she has been shocked about the response she evoked, describing the level of misogyny as “truly gobsmacking”. The focus of much of the abuse is sexual, sadistic even and, she adds: “it would be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public, contributing to political debate”.

In other words, it is silencing, something I get very well from personal experience. I’ve opted out of contributing online for periods ranging from hours to a couple of weeks after being subjected to this sort of online nastiness. Not just me. Many far braver women with serious contributions to make to public discourse on violence and abuse have suffered similar: been silenced simply for having an opinion.

Yeah, the guys get it, too. I thought it was ridiculous before — I had Conservapædia raving about how fat I was, whole blogs dedicated to how stupid I was, and of course, frequent accusations of being gay — but once I got associated with feminism, the hatred reached a whole new level of shrieking. I’ve basically been declared an honorary woman by a whole new category of people, online atheists, who turn out to be worse than creationists, Christians, and Muslims. There are even more rants about my appearance, my ‘irrationality’, my sanity, than ever before.

And the scary thing is that when I compare what I get to what women activists get, I’m getting off easy.

It’s not criticism, either. It’s just raving mad hatred.

It’s Gun Appreciation Day!

We’ve been missing it, and it sounds like it’s been a phenomenal success.

  • In Raleigh, NC, three people, including a sheriff’s deputy, were wounded when a shotgun gun accidentally discharged at the show’s safety check-in booth.
  • In Medina, OH, a gun dealer was checking out a semi-automatic pistol he had just bought shooting an old friend if his in the leg and arm.
  • In Indianapolis, IN, a man was loading .45 he had just purchased when ha accidentally shot himself in the hand.
  • In Tupelo, MI, an accidental discharge grazed one man and injured a four year-old child with bullet fragments after hitting a wall.
  • In Marietta, GA, an man was shot in the ankle by a friend who was showing it to a third person.

Maybe if we made it Gun Appreciation Month these idiots would end up exterminating themselves. Although I’m afraid they’d probably end up taking out a few innocent bystanders, like that four year old.

Trumped!

Lately, I’ve been marveling at the stupidity of my foes: I mean, really, the hate campaigns have been getting absurd. Reap Paden put together a crude animated video of me, caricatured with breasts (because, you know, feminist), and then another slymeclown named “Mykeru” is circulating on twitter a cheesy image he photoshopped together, putting my face on the body of a hairy fat man in his underwear. (The laugh is on him, though, because he made me look better! Trust me, if you could see the squamous batrachian horror that oozes and trembles obscenely beneath these clothes, you would all go mad.) These are their arguments; this is the quality of my opponents. They are desperately stupid.

But then it stopped being funny, and it sank in that women are always going to get it worse than I do. You should see the comment Ophelia got.

Maybe a vial of acid would do you some good. You already look like you were set on fire and put out with a wet rake.

That’s from some slymeguy named Jerry Conlon, and it’s chilling. Throwing acid at women who offend them…why, that’s what evil barbaric Muslims do!

Nope, now it’s what atheists threaten to do.

That’s my great disappointment. I’d once thought that atheism was a good first step on the path to living a rational, tolerant life. Clearly it’s not. That’s been demonstrated to me on a daily basis for the last couple of years.

I was wrong. Atheism is not enough.

North Dakota, chickenshit capitol of the world (plus a bonus poll!)

Professors Molly Secor-Turner and Brandy Randall of North Dakota State University were recently awarded a $1.2 million federal grant. Good news, right? The state should be happy, the university should be happy.

NDSU is turning it down and returning the money.

WHY? Because this is a grant to provide comprehensive sex education to teenagers in the Fargo area, in collaboration with Planned Parenthood. The state legislature, stacked as it is with regressive conservative jerkwads, freaked out and went scrambling to find a legal way to forbid it. And the president of the university, Dean Bresciani, is going along with it.

“Whether technically or not, in my evaluation, it’s not respecting the intent of our Legislature,” he said. “And that’s close enough to me. We’re not looking for loopholes to work around our Legislature; we work in respect of our Legislature.”

Bresciani said the recent discovery prompted him to freeze the funding. If the money can’t be redirected appropriately, he said, it will be returned to the federal government.

“What we’ve found is a very specific codicil of the law that makes it clear that it cannot be with Planned Parenthood,” he told Hennen. “And unless we can work around that, and again I’m not holding out hope on that, we’ll have to go to the direction of returning the resources.”

I have some words for you, Bresciani: your mission, as the president of a major university, is to improve the knowledge of the citizens of your region. Your faculty know that. Your students are going to your school for that purpose. When your legislature is actively working to undermine the mission of a university, it should be your job to oppose them. I know, they hold the purse strings; but that’s why you get paid the big bucks, because you have the difficult job of negotiating with idiots to serve a higher purpose. If you’re just going to cave in and do their bidding, well, the legislature could save even more money by simply hiring a dullard who would say “yes” to everything they ordered. Or did they already do that?

Oh, wait. Maybe that’s too many words, too long, too difficult. How about one word?

Chickenshit.

That’s a chickenshit move by a chickenshit administrator serving a chickenshit legislature.

Better?

What’s also rotten, as the paper makes clear, is that the North Dakota legislature is dishonestly strong-arming the university. There is no specific law that says the university cannot receive this federal grant. Here’s the stretch they made:

In 2011, North Dakota lawmakers approved a law effective as of July 2012 that requires K-12 schools in the state to ensure any sexual health curriculum “includes instruction pertaining to the risks associated with adolescent sexual activity and the social, psychological, and physical health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity before and outside marriage.”

However, the NDSU professors awarded this grant previously told The Forum that law wouldn’t apply to their program because it was to be taught outside of the schools and only to those teens who voluntarily agreed to participate with parental consent.

Not only is that a chickenshit law, it doesn’t apply. And man, but North Dakota really wants to keep their young people ignorant.

Oh, look. The paper has a poll to go with the article.

Do you agree with the NDSU president’s decision to freeze funds for a sex ed program in partnership with Planned Parenthood?

Yes 37.7%

No 54.1%

Don’t know 8.3%

Chandra Wickramasinghe replies…and fails hard

After the public scouring of Wickramasinghe’s claims that he’d found diatoms in a meteorite, the godawful HuffPo has, of course, given him a free and credulous article in which to defend himself. The amazing thing is that even in a puff piece that doesn’t challenge him at all, he shoots himself in the foot.

Plait claims that the diatoms Wickramasinghe found, "a type of algae, microscopic plant life," are simply a freshwater species found on Earth. Wickramasinghe doesn’t deny that the meteorite sample his team studied contains freshwater diatoms.

"But — there are also at least half a dozen species that diatom experts have not been able to identify," Wickramasinghe said.

Boom, we’re done. That is an open admission that his sample is contaminated. It doesn’t matter that some portion of his sample is unidentifiable — and most likely, it’s the stuff he calls ‘filaments’ and ‘red rain cells’ that aren’t even biological … he cannot claim that the only possible source of that material is outer space.

And then there’s this vague bit:

Critics have also asserted that the meteorite in question may not, in fact, be from outer space. Could it simply be an Earth rock?

According to Wickramasinghe, "This was also the guess of the Sri Lankan geologists who first looked at the rock. They had considered the possibility that the rock may be … a rock that was struck by lightning. We examined this possibility and found it to be untenable. From all the evidence we possess (and we are planning to publish this), I personally have no doubt whatsoever that this was a stone that fell from the skies."

So the expert geologists tell him it’s a terrestrial rock, and then declares on the basis of unpublished evidence that he won’t describe that it can’t be. Right. I’m unconvinced. It doesn’t even matter if it is a meteorite or not at this point — it’s contaminated, and he published it as if it were not.

Well, now you know what to blame

Michael Savage, the rabid far-right talk radio loon, has gone on a tear against vaccination. He’s ranting about how those damned Democratic politicians aren’t getting any flu shots (really? I kind of doubt that).

But then he also goes on to make claims of dire outcomes.

But when you’re older, he argued, “and you get ALS or Alzheimer’s disease or MS, or you watch your kid develop seizures, or your kid becomes autistic, God forbid, what are you going to say?”

You know, I’m getting older, and I’ve been getting my flu shot every year for years…but I just realized that’s not going to convince any of those kooks, is it?

Is football as corrupt as Catholicism?

I don’t know, it seems like the same stories: priests raping people, football stars raping people, neither one being held accountable. And what happens when you combine Catholicism and football? You get Notre Dame. You get cover-ups and suppression. You get this bizarre Manti Te’o publicity stunt.

mantigod

Maybe we need to stop believing in football as much as we need to stop believing in gods.

Ankylodillos and other chimeras — another crackpot alternative to evolution

It’s all Matt Dillahunty’s fault. He tells me he’s carrying on a correspondence with some guy who claims to have an alternative theory of evolution, and asks me to help him wade through the gobbledygook…so I did. I just didn’t realize how much gobbledygook there was.

The guy is named Eugene McCarthy, and he calls his alternative “Stabilization Theory”. Apparently he does have some scientific background and has studied hybrids in birds; the problem is that now he sees everything in terms of species hybrids. And I mean everything. I downloaded his book — it’s free — and skimmed through all 400 pages.

Oh, man. It was like a timewarp.

The first half of the book is a total snooze. It’s endlessly wordy, tedious rehashing of basic genetics — polyploidy, heterosis, karyotypes, yadda yadda yadda. There’s nothing novel there at all, and if you know any basic biology at all, you can skip it. If you don’t…well, there are more lucid texts you can read. He sets up various controversies, but they’re all ancient history: he goes on and on about Darwin’s work with pigeons, the saltationist-gradualist debates (no, not the recent ones — this is stuff from like 1910-1920), and approvingly cites Arthur Lovejoy (!), author of The Great Chain of Being, and other authors from the 1930s-40s as if their concerns were current. The first part is the kind of book I can imagine being written in 1940 and being taken semi-seriously before being forgotten…and here it is being written in 2008.

And then it starts getting weird.

His theory is rather like Goldschmidt’s saltational theory of systemic mutations that produce abrupt transformations of form…except Goldschmidt was a piker. McCarthy claims to have a mechanism for producing those kinds of mutations. Sure, the familiar point mutations we know about in molecular biology and genetics occur, and genes can gradually change, but these changes are independent of speciation, and in fact have nothing to do with the kind of evolutionary change we see in the fossil record. Instead, the only things that can produce the morphological changes we observe are large-scale genetic changes, like polyploidy and hybridization.

He pooh-poohs Darwinian trees of descent, like the one on the left in this diagram. That’s not how evolution occurs, he claims; it’s like the diagram on the right, where every novel species is produced by hybridization between two species.

stabilizationtheory

He doesn’t like the concept of adaptive radiation, where a lineage branches and diversifies. It doesn’t happen, he claims; instead, it’s more of a combinatorial phenomenon, where different species hybridize to spawn novel, stable forms nearly instantaneously, which will then persist unchanged for long periods of time until there is another hybridization event.

It doesn’t seem to register on him that if every species were the product of two parent species, then that would show up in the genome — that modern molecular genetics would rather readily test his hypothesis. That’s no problem, though, because like I said, this book is in a timewarp from an age before molecular biology. It isn’t on his wavelength at all.

Actually, data isn’t much on his wavelength. Near the end of the book, we get to specific examples, and he chooses to discuss the origin of mammals. You know that conventional theory, where mammals arose in the Mesozoic and underwent a rapid adaptive radiation to fill niches vacated by the extinction of the dinosaurs in the Tertiary? Nonsense! Didn’t happen!

His alternative explanation is that the dinosaurs did not go extinct, but instead there was a kind of combinatorial reshuffling of species via hybridization that produced new forms.

“Say whut?”, you’re thinking. What does that mean?

He gives examples. Look at the Mesozoic ankylosaurs: squat, armored herbivores. Now look at Tertiary armidillos, especially things like the extinct giant glyptodonts. They look kind of similar.

ankylodillo

Therefore, says McCarthy, ankylosaurs evolved into armadillos. And pangolins are the descendants of stegosaurs.

The modern giant armadillo is so similar to the ancient ankylosaurs that it is only reasonable to suppose it is descended from them. The same is true for pangolins and stegosaurids (although the case is somewhat weaker because the exact external form of stegosaurids is a point in dispute). These similarities strongly suggest that two of the most common “dinosaurs” of the so-called Age of Reptiles—ankylosaurs and stegosaurids—were in fact mammals, and, even more remarkably, that their direct descendants exist even today. So in their cases, it seems, there was no “extinction of the dinosaurs”—there was merely a reconceptualization and reclassification (both may be cases of residual dwarfism).

So in addition to being completely ignorant of modern molecular methods, McCarthy stands stupidly in defiance of comparative anatomy. The only way to claim that an ankylosaur is an armadillo is to be utterly oblivious to any details of the skeleton.

He continues in this vein. Bats are descendants of pterosaurs. Whales came from mosasaurs. Seals are the children of plesiosaurs. Dinosaurs weren’t actually giant reptiles, they were big mammals. These ideas are contrary to all of the evidence, of course, but one thing you’ll learn from this book is that the evidence doesn’t have to be considered. It’s all about McCarthy’s belief in the fixity of species — species don’t change at all, ever, and all evolutionary novelty comes from the sudden production of new species by ‘stabilization processes’, like hybridization.

To me, organisms have a far greater value when they are seen as ancient and unchanging, existing today much a they did when they came into being long ago, in the remoteness of time. They become something more than mere pawns, forever changing at the behest of a tyrannical environment. When a new type of organism comes into being via a stabilization process, the primary selective factor is reproductive stability—a stable reproductive cycle must be established or the new form will fail to maintain itself in existence. If it survives, the new type spreads into all geographic regions to which it is suited and has access. If it ceases to have access to a suitable environment, it simply goes extinct. It does not gradually change into a new type that can tolerate a new environment. Under this view, a form’s genetic make-up plays at least as great a role in determining its characteristics as does the environment. In fact, it generally plays a far greater one. Once a new type of organism has stabilized, the environment may place limits on growth, health, and activities, but it does not significantly change the nature or potential of that type of organism, even with the passage of time on a geological scale. Living forms, under this view, are beyond and above the environment.

Well, that’s…different.

It’s also pure crackpottery. If you search the web, you’ll find almost no references to McCarthy and stabilization theory; I think I’ve just increased his notoriety a thousand-fold. No scientist is going to touch it, because it is simply laughable and bizarre. There are a few positive references from creationists, who like it because it defies science, but don’t see how to reconcile it with their biblical bullshit. Here’s one example, where it’s cited as a “possible crack in neo-Darwinism”:

From a perspective of Christian apologetics, the models presented by Schwabe and McCarthy do not directly help our cause, for they are but more claims to naturalism with no connection with the supernatural. But they at least lead in the right direction: humans appear suddenly, the genetic material was widespread at the beginning, the racism of evolution is denied, and individuals benefit from cooperation, not competition. And in the end, science might be better off, for perhaps the field will take off the blinders and consider some alternate theories.

You know, if creationists see McCarthy’s crap as a reasonable and viable alternative scientific hypothesis, they’re dumber than I thought.