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.
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.
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.
Both Dana and Adam are quite right, that the self-appointed leadership of the atheism movement have a record that leaves quite a bit to be desired on the equality front. But I would not say they’re as bad as the Christian Right. Behold, Rachel Alexander, responding to the recent catcalling video:
Did you know there are Six SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN ways women can be more attractive to men? Would you be surprised that they’re all about looking slender and youthful and smiling a lot? I kind of gagged at the suggestion that they’re supposed to use less makeup, because the natural look is in, and they should wear bright red clothes.
Watch him interrupt. Watch him tell a woman that he’s more of an expert than she is, because he’s a guy. Watch him tell all women how they’re supposed to respond to catcalling. And as the pièce de résistance, watch him yell that if women are afraid, they need to get a gun!
The New York Times has declared that Academic Science Isn’t Sexist. What a relief! The authors are reporting the results of a broad study of many different parameters of the career pipeline, and are happy to report that there are no problems in academia. None at all, no sir.
Our analysis reveals that the experiences of young and midcareer women in math-intensive fields are, for the most part, similar to those of their male counterparts: They are more likely to receive hiring offers, are paid roughly the same (in 14 of 16 comparisons across the eight fields), are generally tenured and promoted at the same rate (except in economics), remain in their fields at roughly the same rate, have their grants funded and articles accepted as often and are about as satisfied with their jobs. Articles published by women are cited as often as those by men. In sum, with a few exceptions, the world of academic science in math-based fields today reflects gender fairness, rather than gender bias.
The Toronto Star has interviews with eight women who were abused in various ways by Jian Ghomeshi, and here’s a personal story about the conspiracy of silence. Almost everyone knew about Jian, almost everyone whispered warnings about Jian, but no one would stand up and shout about Jian, so Jian thrived.
That’s depressing, the way it always works.
