Quit picking on Marissa Powell!

All right, as we’re seeing splashed all over the news now, Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, fum-fuhed a question about resolving income inequities. Here she goes:

And I say, so what? No one expects a dissertation in the feel-good blurb you’re allowed to give in a beauty pageant. She clearly hadn’t thought about the question before, and was simply floundering to come up with an answer…and the one she stumbled out wasn’t inherently bad. She’s trying to recommend education as a solution.

So, not an inherently wrong answer, poorly expressed, and contrived on the fly by a young woman who wasn’t really prepared for it. I dare any of the people who are dressing her down to get on the air before a national audience, get a question on a subject they’ve never really thought about, and answer it as well.

What’s really going on here is an effort to find supporting evidence for a bias that women in beauty pageants are stupid — and the media are happily jumping on one instance of a clumsy, misspoken answer as confirmation.

Television “science”

Are you a film crew person looking for work in the UK? Multiple opportunities have opened up for the crew for a documentary!

A new Covent Garden-based film company seeks a producer of marketing and distribution, a researcher/presenter, a camera operator, a sound person, a runner, and an editor, for its first documentary, called Laughing with Women. Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impair women’s joke-making ability? If women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or funnier than men?

If the radical and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles. The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans around the world, who, along with everyone else we intrigue, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.

Positions available…

Producer of marketing and distribution

Researcher/presenter

Camera person

Sound person

Editor

All positions paid at the minimum national wage or above, to be negotiated.

Shooting dates…

The main shoot, testing the documentary’s key hypothesis, and the kind of fireworks it will generate, will take place from August 1st, for 10 days, in central London. Eight to ten other shooting days will be organized for soon after. If interested in getting involved, please email your show-reel and/or CV, along with a paragraph or two saying hello, explaining in a little detail why you are specifically interested in working on Laughing with Women – and what your individual take on it all might be – also outlining your availability. Interesting respondents will be contacted for a Covent Garden meeting soon, where the whole plan, and a closely linked follow-up project can be discussed.

That isn’t a documentary. They’re not building a story around an established science fact, they’re inventing a premise that they simply assume is true, and are then designing an “experiment” (more likely a contrived set of sight gags) to “prove” their claims on video. I can roughly predict what they’re going to do: they’re going to approach women, insult them by suggesting that they’re venal gold-diggers, and then demonstrate that angry women don’t have much of a sense of humor about sexist assmonkeys harassing them. Hypothesis proven! Of course, if women were actually funnier than the men in their sample, you know that wouldn’t get aired — they have a prejudice, and by god, they’re going to make it appear true.

And then they hope that people will be “brave enough” to make their video go viral when it confirms conventional bigotry. If their little dog-and-pony show doesn’t get picked up any broadcasters, it isn’t because they’re afraid to pander to stereotypes — turn on your TV and look, that’s never a problem — but because this “documentary” will be so patently slanted and dishonest that it is a slap in the face to real documentaries everywhere.

Wait a minute…they’re looking for a people to do camera and sound, a produce, a presenter, and an editor, for a show that is going to be a series of confrontations and requires almost no writing. So there is basically no crew at all right now, just a no-talent hack sitting on his ass in his office dreaming of putting together a show to prove to the world that women lack a sense of humor and are all gold-digging bitches. He sounds like every MRA in the world.

I called it. This is the dream of no-talent hack Tom Martin, who brings nothing to the project other than a resentment of women.

Jonah Lehrer: he’s baaaaack

Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why.

Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so many times over. He is the surgeon who botched surgery after surgery, the lawyer who screwed up case after case, the engineer whose oh-so-pretty designs toppled after a year or two, not once, but multiple times, and on and on. Why, then, is he not seeing the consequences the way he would have necessarily done in most other professions? Why is he instead getting the equivalent of a fresh docket of cases or a new departmental job: a coveted book deal with a prominent publisher?

He’s slick. He writes with a glib authority, and is a master of superficial plausibility, able to whip out a snappy footnote with a reference just obscure enough to tickle recognition in the brains of knowledgeable readers and to wow the yahoos. He sounds smart. But there’s a real vacancy at the core.

He’s not good at the science. He’s a poor researcher. He’s not a good writer — he churns words around and knows the form, but the content isn’t there.

So now he’s going to paste together another book that will clutter the shelves and deprive better writers of support. Konnikova suggests an action we can take:

And that’s why we, the readers, are the only possible villain—that is, if we choose to be, by continuing to pay attention to Lehrer, by continuing to cover his work, by buying his new book and reviewing it and drawing attention to it. By making it possible for this book of love to be another best-seller.

So let’s make a choice. Let’s not do it. Let’s show Simon & Schuster that they backed a losing horse that has run its last. Let the book flop, not sell. Don’t buy it, resist the urge “just to see” what the fuss is all about. We make Jonah Lehrer. Without an audience, he is nothing, plain and simple.

Won’t work. She’s preaching to the choir — the people who read science blogs already know Lehrer’s reputation, and won’t be tempted in the slightest to buy yet another bit of hackwork from the guy. I have no plans to every pay a penny for that book, that’s for sure.

Lehrer has made a brilliant move, actually. He’s writing a pop psych book about love. He’s going to wave the tattered banner of his past science writing to argue that he has the authority to speak for science on a matter of everyday importance, and his precious scholarly style will add weight to that claim in the minds of his new target audience. And that audience isn’t us. His new audience will be the people who watch Oprah to learn about science.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Oprah was part of his pitch. This is a book tailor-made for that show: the flawed writer seeking redemption (who also happens to be young and attractive), the pseudo-highbrow style, the subject matter, the “counter-intuitive” pronouncements that will actually line up well with what the audience wants to hear.

I’ll bet you that right now the publicists are thinking up copy to send to the weekday afternoon talk shows, and that by this time next year Lehrer will be working that circuit. And that he’ll make big buckets of money selling off the sad bleeding shreds of his integrity.

But what about capitalism, Rush?

Rush Limbaugh’s network has lost millions of dollars this past quarter, and he may be on the way out. Apparently, the problem is that advertisers have fled his show in droves, especially after his rages against Sandra Fluke. But you knew he’d have an excuse: it’s all the women’s fault.

Despite sources close to Limbaugh that accuse Dickey of scapegoating the radio host for a bad quarter, Limbaugh himself has addressed his advertiser woes in the past. But Limbaugh doesn’t see his offensive bloviating as the problem driving mainstream advertisers away; instead, he accuses media buyers who are ”young women fresh out of college” and “liberal feminists who hate conservatism” of “trying to harm” him.

I had no idea that women now controlled all the media; did you women reading this know you had such immense power?

Now I have a few requests. Right after you’re done flushing Limbaugh’s career down the toilet, could you shut down Fox News and Glenn Beck (well, you’ve been doing a good job on him so far), and perhaps redirect some small fraction of those advertising dollars to Freethoughtblogs.com? Thanks, much appreciated.

It’s Matthew Yglesias’ world: we just get blown up in it.

I haven’t had much use for The Lizard of K Street since he posted this sociopathic little gem in 2004:

Did the president really gut the Endangered Species Act yesterday while no one was paying attention? So I’ve heard, at any rate. If so, good riddance. You’ll all yell at me, I suppose, but really: Who cares? Species die, shit happens, get over it.

It is not exactly news that Matthew Yglesias is a tepid thinker. Poking holes in Yglesias’ vacuous, self-absorbed puffery has long been a popular pastime among bloggers from the progressive left to the hard right. He’s got himself a cushy gig these days, squirting out incontinent posts with no detectable logical or factual value, and as long as people give his outlets page views it’s all good. Eyeballs are eyeballs, and it doesn’t matter much if those eyeballs are rolling upward hard enough to burst blood vessels.

But this shit? This shit is inexcusable.

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum.…

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody.

There are three main problems with Yglesias’ argument.

  1. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly immoral. People are willing to take bigger risks to feed their families when they’re burdened by poverty, yes. But arguing that we should use that unfortunate fact as a basic design feature of global workplace safety regulations is vile.
  2. Yglesias’ argument is profoundly ahistorical as well. Workplace safety regulations — and environmental laws, and education for women, and all of the thousands of other social goods we fight for — don’t magically appear when societies’ wealth passes a certain threshold as a result of the airy  fapping of the invisible hand. Those regulations come into being because people fight for them, often dying in the process, against the opposition of the entrenched powers that make the regulations necessary in the first place.  And here Yglesias is on the side of the entrenched powers, willing to wave away yet another workplace disaster so that he can continue to enjoy the cheap cotton shorts, running shoes, and tablet computers he sees as his birthright.
  3. Yglesias’ argument is essentially plagiarized from a 1991 memo by Laurence Summers written when the latter was the chief economist at the World Bank. A salient sampling from that memo:

I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. … The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand.

An individual human life is worth fewer U.S. dollars in Bangladesh, and so betting that lower-value life against the possibility that you might actually survive your $432 per annum minimum wage job just makes better sense there than it does here, eh Matt? Hell, if the typical Bengali minimum wage worker survives his or her job for three or four years before they get crushed to death by an unsafe building, they may actually have come out well ahead of the game!

It’s a repugnant argument.

Matthew Yglesias should be ashamed of himself.

Oh god yes yes

Oliver Knevitt has compiled his Top 5 Most Irritating Terms In Evolution Reporting. Read it, science journalists! They are:

  1. “Survival of the fittest.” Up yours, Herbert Spencer!

  2. “Living fossil.” What does that even mean? Do you really think modern coelacanths look anything like the ones from 100 million years ago?

  3. “Missing link.” It assumes a chain, and implies it’s broken. And worse, it’s always getting used when a scientist discovers a new transitional form!

  4. “More evolved/less evolved.” Darwin himself rejected this view, and it’s also one that makes no sense. A clam is as “evolved” as I am.

  5. “Adaptation.” Ooh, interesting choice. Adaptation is real and important, but journalists do tend to overuse it and apply it inappropriately. There are people who’d call male impotence an adaptation.

I’d add “Darwinism”. We aren’t using Darwin’s model anymore; he had no accurate notion of how inheritance worked, for instance — genes and alleles, the stuff of most modern theory, are not present anywhere in his works.

“Darwinian” is also problematic. It does have a specific, technical meaning, but it’s often applied thoughtlessly to every process in evolution.

Let’s also add the usual yellow journalistic trait of turning everything into a “revolution” or a complete disproof of all that has gone before. Asking the question, “Was Darwin Wrong?” is stupid and misleading. Claiming that evo-devo or epigenetics or genomics or molecular biology will completely “revolutionize” or overturn antiquated notions or throw the entire field of evolutionary biology into complete chaos are also nonsense — so far those sub-disciplines have reinforced and modified appropriately an understanding of evolution that was forged in the 1930s. If something really revolutionary comes up, you’ll know it because the mobs of excited scientists flocking to the new idea and turning it into significant advances in our understanding will make it obvious.

Can we at least fire this one media lackey?

When the revolution comes, media lackeys will not be lined up against the wall. I have a better idea, inspired by Robert Johnson of Business Insider, who actually wrote an article titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GITMO STRIKE: Detainees Are Treated Absurdly Well. He had the gall to write this:

While indefinite detainment without trial may be morally offensive…

Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Robert, I’m going to have to stop you right there. Indefinite detainment without trial IS morally offensive, so why are you writing a defense of it? Don’t you think that clause just brings your whole argument to a screeching halt? The “While…” tells me already that you are about to completely ignore the morality of the issue.

But go ahead, continue.

…the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well. Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. I’m talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games.

OK, you seem to think that is sufficient to offset the immorality of indefinite detainment. Which is where my idea comes from: after the revolution, you, Robert, will be confined in a small room with a television, some holy books, a healthy but bland diet, and some video games. You’ll be happy, I presume? It’ll be just like a long, very long, vacation at a secluded island resort!

Except, you know, you actually wrote that the detainees are treated absurdly well, and also wrote this about the guards’ custom of taking apart copies of the Koran.

Zak demonstrated why Koran inspections are important, taking a hardcover Koran, flipping it upside down, and showing the wide opening under the spine.

Last time they stopped Koran searches, he explains, several detainees stashed medication in these tunnels of paper and then took the medication all at once in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Suicide is another effective way of getting media attention, and there remains a rumor among detainees that three simultaneous suicides would force the Pentagon to close Guantanamo — despite three suicides already happening in 2006.

It’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that while on this long vacation with good food and lots of video games, the residents are in such despair that they’re trying to kill themselves.

I’ll warn my wife. Next time I get a few days off and am lounging about eating and playing video games, it’s really a sign that I’m miserable and should be on suicide watch.

Relax, everyone. It’s only a metaphor.

The Telegraph’s environment denier James Delingpole wants us to know he really doesn’t think environmental scientists and journalists should be executed:

Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science?

Should George Monbiot be hanged by the neck for his decade or so’s hysterical promulgation of the great climate change scam and other idiocies too numerous to mention?

Should Tim Flannery be fed to the crocodiles for the role he has played in the fleecing of the Australian taxpayer and the diversion of scarce resources into pointless projects like all the eyewateringly expensive desalination plants built as a result of his doomy prognostications about water shortages caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?

It ought to go without saying that my answer to all these questions is – *regretful sigh* – no. First, as anyone remotely familiar with the zillion words I write every year on this blog and elsewhere, extreme authoritarianism and capital penalties just aren’t my bag. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it would be counterproductive, ugly, excessive and deeply unsatisfying.

So why does he bring it up?

Indeed, it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg. But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.

A metaphor, let me explain – I can because I read English at Oxford, dontcha know – is like a simile but stronger.

There’s something that tickles the back of my brain about him using a simile to explain a metaphor by comparison to a simile. Why not go the whole way, and say something like “a metaphor is like a simile because each is analogous to an allegory”?

Anyway, Delingpole was engaging in hyperbole in response to criticism of a paywalled piece of his in The Australian, in which he said:

The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer: preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.

For those of you not well familiar with the intersection of fashion and British jurisprudence, the black cap is a black square of fabric worn by a judge when ordering an execution. (Which hasn’t happened since 1973.)

I almost certainly need not explain what’s completely criminal about Delingpole’s disingenuous hate speech, whether or not he appends the condescending Oxford grad equivalent of a winking emoticon at the end. Technically speaking, Hutu “journalists” referring to Tutsi people as “cockroaches” was also just a metaphor.

It’s hate speech, plain and simple, uttered with the express intent of riling those who agree with Delingpole to suppress science.

Delingpole should be careful what he pretends he isn’t really wishing for. Life on this planet is likely to get very nasty for a large number of people in the next decades. At some point, as Britain suffers the third or fourth or fifth triple digit summer in as many years, and crops fail and people go hungry and the urban aged drop dead when the power goes out, there may well be calls for a “Climate Nuremberg” — and it’s doubtful that prominent denialist writers who call metaphorically for executing scientists and climate change activists will go unsummoned.

A note to my friends, family, colleagues and readers of color

Joan Walsh doesn’t speak for me.

I mean, I get her. I get the fear, the desire not to be lumped in with those bad other people who do the bad things. I get the desire to continue to enjoy the privilege of not having to think about my race day to day. I’ve been a straight person in the group of LGBT folks, the man in the group of feminist women, the cis guy talking to transfolk. Hell, I’ve been the only white person at the dinner table more often than I can count. I get that desire to start out each interaction with a pat on the back to assure me that I’m “one of the good ones.”

Don’t do me that favor.

I’ve been exceedingly fortunate in this life to have met people who have been willing to school me when I get something wrong, when I make assumptions about people’s lives based on my own experience. I’ve been fortunate to have people willing to instruct me out of my ignorance about the world outside my skin, and to do so mostly patiently, but not always. Sometimes that instruction came with justifiable peeve, or even anger.

And like Walsh, I’ve occasionally wanted to wave my lefty bonafides in front of my critic of the moment to defuse the topic, to make it more academic and a bit less uncomfortably about me. I’ve protested that just because I’m white doesn’t mean I’m conservative, or rich, or racist — and if I am racist, it’s at least not the kind that prompts me to drag people behind my truck. Like Walsh does somewhat academically in her essay, I have protested that far from being a racist, I am in fact a Nice White Guy.

But I’m learning that that criticism, as has been said here before in other contexts, is a gift. That the person taking the time to engage with me is, to appropriate a phrase from this important 2007 essay by the blogger Nanette, giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Like I said, I get Walsh’s desire to protest that we’re not all bad. I suppose I’m kind of doing it myself with this post, making my views distinct from her seeming ignorance of race privilege. Except that my goal here isn’t to separate myself from Walsh the way she wants you to separate her from the Klan. She and I are basically the same, after all, with our defensivenesses and privileges worn slightly differently.

Rather, my intent here is to thank you for the hard work you’ve put in to change the whole conversation, which you continue despite prominent people like Walsh telling you you’re doing it wrong. In ways incremental and massive; whether you were a one-time commenter on my blog with a sharp word or, well, my ex-wife who offered me two decades of private instruction in precisely where my white privilege lay; whether we’ve spoken directly at all or you’ve dissected a post of mine on your Tumblr or I’ve read something you wrote about something else and didn’t weigh in…

Well, I’m weighing in now. Thank you. You’re making the world a better place by speaking your mind candidly. Eventually, more of us will listen more of the time.

And don’t be too unnerved by Walsh’s admonition that whites need to be insulated from the scorn of people of color because “Democrats still need white support.” It’s an ugly threat on her part, but it’s an idle threat. Some of us don’t change our basic sense of ethics just because someone called us a name. I’m pretty sure Walsh is one of us, deep down. Yesterday’s essay just wasn’t some of her best work.

Fair’s fair

I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America.

Why, look here: they also include European white dudes! Racial diversity for the win!

20130319-093023.jpg

That’s Jesus, by the way. After the Sermon on the Mount, I think he took a break to go surfing off Malibu.