Glenn Reynolds has always been a hack

But he can be a useful hack. In his recent column in which he sneered at feminists, he distilled down the entirety of his complaint to a single paragraph. This is the part where he described ALL THE TERRIBLE THINGS feminists had done to Matt Taylor. ALL OF THEM.

The Atlantic’s Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don’t care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

Oh My Gourd, the feminists lynched him? Dragged him out to a nearby tree and hanged him until he was dead?

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The Young Turks sound a bit like Old Codgers

Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks weighed in on That Evil Shirt, and she got everything wrong: she ranted about feminist extremists, and how you’d have to be really weak to give up on science because of one shirt — it was an embarrassing exhibition of non sequiturs. I was disgusted, and would have let it go, but a youtube commenter (!) named florzinnha3 did an excellent job answering it, so I thought I’d just steal her comment and post it here.

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It’s like getting a disillusionment enema every morning

Is everyone’s morning like this? You get up, you get dressed, you get a stimulating beverage, you knock back the giant pill your doctor is making you take, and then you open the Email and the Twitter and get reminded again that humanity is a great big complex organism that is pocked with suppurating ass pimples, and they’ve all got your address. Today I got to meet @Auto_Math.

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How not to run a public health program

Apparently, India has these ‘voluntary’ sterilization drives to reduce overpopulation. I put ‘voluntary’ in quotes because these kinds of programs have an ethical catch: they pay women a small amount to have the service done, so for some desperately poor women, it may be more of a necessary sacrifice they have to make to survive. There may be another catch, too: at least one of them was incompetently run.

More than 80 women underwent surgery for laparoscopic tubectomies at a free government-run camp in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday. Of these, about 60 fell ill shortly afterwards, officials in the state said.

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Two white dudes spend an hour talking about how racist and sexist it is to criticize other white dudes

It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.

And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.

So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.

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