I’m feeling really filthy now

Mississippi has horrific rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, so they’re slowly waking up and realizing that they have to have better sex education in the schools … and they’ve actually adopted a sex-ed curriculum in some of their school districts. Unfortunately, it’s not what most of us would consider good education.

Marie Barnard was delighted when, after decades of silence on the topic, Mississippi passed a law requiring school districts to teach sex education. But the lesson involving the Peppermint Pattie wasn’t what she had in mind for her sons.

The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.

"They’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex — that she’s been used," said Barnard, who works in public health. "That shouldn’t be the lesson we send kids about sex."

Oh, no! I’ve been having sex for about 40 years now, so I pictured a piece of candy — in my case, a Tootsie Roll — getting passed around and stuffed into various damp places and given a hot shower every day, for forty years, and I’m sorry, it didn’t even make it a week before it had melted away and gone down the drain. Now I’m having castration anxiety.

Wait! It only applies to girls? What a relief, for me, at least — my wife is going to be dismayed, though. Maybe we can change the message a bit: lady bits are just like a piece of sweet chocolate candy that never ever disappears, no matter how much you nibble on it.

Unfortunately, the dirty scary chocolate trick still doesn’t work. The outcomes they want to prevent are actually being worsened by their evasive silly little abstinence-only games. So they have a new threat that they make:

Johnson thought he had made a good case for contraception education when he shared disturbing statistics: The local birthrate was 73 out of 1,000 females between 15 and 19; the national rate is 29.4 per 1,000.

He encountered the usual gasps of shock when he revealed that the rate of chlamydia, at 1,346.8 per 100,000 people, was nearly double the rest of Mississippi, and approaching triple the U.S. rate.

But later Johnson got a call from someone who had attended the board meeting — telling him that people who have sex before marriage don’t go to heaven. The board voted for abstinence-only.

Apparently, most of the state of Mississippi is damned to hell, so why is anyone paying attention to those sinners?

It’s been a good day

I’ve spent a long day in a dark quiet room with a red pen in my hand slogging through a mountain of grading, but at least you got something significant accomplished — it only took you 8 hours to completely meet Karen Stollznow’s initial legal fees. Don’t stop now, keep on going! This ink-stained wretch looked up from his labors and felt a twinge of hope, like that there really are good people in this movement.

There was also a bit of schadenfreude. Adam Lee has posted some of the slymey comments he’d been getting after Ben Radford’s premature ejaculation — you know, where some of the gullible haters who succumbed to some motivated reasoning, saw the unsigned ‘apology’ written by Radford in Stollznow’s name, decided the whole thing was over now, and started sniping about, demanding immediate apologies, claiming that they had the confession in hand, etc. I have some of the same noise in my spam queue, so I thought I should share it, too.

Do you think that retraction letter was a fake? Are you a birther as well? Was 911 an “inside job”?

Yeah, they went there, claiming that rejecting the ‘apology’ was equivalent to being a conspiracy nut and denialist. Of course, I was sitting here with inside information — I knew that Stollznow hadn’t signed it.

Guess what, annoying troll? The retraction letter was a fake. Stollznow had nothing to do with it.

For PZ’s rabble: Carrie Poppy, what a piece of work. I bet Herr Myers is regretting ever trusting that ditzy bítch.

Carrie Poppy has been doing good work sharing her knowledge of what happened. Turns out she was right. No regrets, I think I’ll keep trusting her.

This message from Amy Stoker on Ben Radford’s facebook, regarding the retraction letter.

“It’s signed by Karen and notarized. Ben was over at my house tonight. I’m sure Ben will address this in the morning or at some point. For tonight he wanted to focus on those family and friends that have been by his side.
about an hour ago ”

I’m not sure who Amy Stoker is, but I’d believe her over anything that lying sack of crap PZ Myers says.

But…the letter wasn’t signed and notarized. That comment from Stoker has since been curiously memory-holed. I don’t think I’ll trust her at all — but that’s OK, I’ve still got Carrie Poppy.

Are you going to apologize to Ben Radford now, PZ? You witch hunting moron. Always believe the accuser, right? Hahahaha.

No.

There’s a lot more, but it gets old fast, and I think my point is made. These loons were just making stuff up and were utterly convinced by a ginned-up, unsigned document. Skeptics. Yeah, right.

Karen Stollznow needs your help

Karen Stollznow has started a defense fund to help her fight off the legal harassment she faces right now. Time to donate!

My name is Karen Stollznow. I am an author and researcher with a PhD in Linguistics. In recent months, I wrote an article for a Scientific American Mind blog in which I spoke out about sexual harassment I’d endured from a male colleague for several years. I did this to highlight the wide problem of sexual harassment in the workplace for women, including those in scientific and academic fields. Many people who read the article immediately identified my harasser by name, and spoke publicly about my situation on their own blogs and other social media. They knew who my harasser was because he had recently been disciplined by his employer for his behavior.

As a result, my harasser filed a defamation suit against me, trying to bully me into silence. Although he’s spent thousands of dollars on a lawyer to clear his name, he knew that I could not afford the same. In my attempts to settle out of court he has tried to bully me into signing a retraction, which claimed that I had lied about the whole ordeal, including his ongoing harassment of me, and assaults at one of our professional conferences. Although I didn’t sign the retraction, he posted the document on his very public Facebook page and announced victory over me. This also lead to false public edits being made to my Wikipedia page.

I never lied about the harassment I endured and I have evidence and witnesses to attest to my experiences. The only crime I have committed is not being rich enough to defend myself. If you believe in justice and in protecting victims who are bullied into silence, please dig deep and help support this legal fund. I must raise $30,000 in the next two weeks in order to find legal counsel to fight these allegations and clear my own name. If my harasser succeeds in bullying me into silence, it will only serve to embolden harassers, and teach victims that they should never speak up, lest it ruin their lives.

Any money raised through this campaign that is not spent on these legal expenses will be donated to Colorado’s Sexual Assault Victim Advocate Center.

Thank you for listening to my story, and please give as you can. To contact me about this fundraising campaign, email stollznowlegaldefense@gmail.com.

You know what’s really tragic about this? She’s trying to end the harassment, and you just know that asking for help will make the harassers redouble their efforts.

The Eugenics Creed

Salon has a good essay on Charles Davenport, a prominent American biologist from the first half of the 20th century who was one of the loudest voices promoting the eugenics movement. Oh, let’s call it what it was: the Wealthy White Racist movement. It begins with the tale of Carrie Buck, as was previously told by Stephen Jay Gould (pdf) — a young woman, raped by the nephew of her foster parents, who was then punished by sterilization for being one of the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South. It’s all part of the ongoing war on women, especially poor, minority women, that has been going on for a long, long time.

Davenport’s awful and influential work is discussed — read it and gag — but one thing that jumped out at me as particularly creepy was Davenport’s Eugenics Creed.

I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.

I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring.

I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by that less carefully selected.

I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation.

Oh, my, his precious germ plasm — it must be promulgated to fend off the brown hordes. Blech. Must take a shower now. It’s like reading vdare.com…it just incites extreme disgust.

Good essay on the propagation of sexist culture

Nate Silver’s new tech journalism startup is catching some flak lately for promoting a sexist attitude that excludes women — which he denies. They’re nerds, he says, they can’t possibly be anything like the piggish jocks who picked on them in high school. Not so, says Zeynep Tufekci. That logic doesn’t follow.

How does that relate to the Silver’s charged defense that his team could not be “bro-y” people? Simple: among the mostly male, smart, geeky groups that most programmers and technical people come from, there is a way of existing that is, yes, often fairly exclusionary to women but not in ways that Silver and his friends recognize as male privilege. When they think of male privilege, they are thinking of “macho” jocks and have come to believe their own habitus as completely natural, all about merit, and also in opposition to macho culture. But if brogrammer culture opposes macho culture, it does not follow that brogrammer culture is automatically welcoming to other excluded groups, such as women.

Oh, man, so familiar. If atheist culture opposes religious culture, or skeptic culture opposes woo-ey culture, it does not follow that they’re automatically inclusive. If anything, atheists and skeptics have tended to be more male-focused (admittedly, that is changing fast now) than the religious or New Age culture they opposed.

It takes effort by the oblivious majority to include an excluded minority. Doesn’t matter who the majority are. It’s a rule.

I’m not willing to trade one woman for the entire membership of CPAC

That’s what I don’t get about American Atheists courting CPAC. I could see it as an attention-getter, to highlight and criticize the right-wing religiosity of an organization of nutbags, but as outreach? No way. Dana Hunter won’t compromise on some things, and trading one Dana Hunter for even a million freakish conservatives wouldn’t be a fair deal.

Amanda Marcotte is bored by the bad arguments from the prolifers. Why do we want dishonest phonies and irrational kooks in our atheism, anyway?

GitHub sounds rather…dysfunctional

Read Julie Ann Horvath’s story about what it’s like to be a woman and an engineer at a tech company.

Horvath has given TechCrunch her version of the events, a story that contains serious allegations towards GitHub, its internal policies, and its culture. The situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.

I don’t understand any of this. You’ve built a company that does something you’re excited about, that makes lots of money, and because you’re a nerd-boy you completely ignore the social and psychological glue that keeps your team functional? This is not rational.

Weapons-grade projection

Wow. Some loon yelled at me on twitter that it’s progressives who are really the racists here, not conservatives, and to prove it, he sent me this mind-blowingly stupid article. It’s textbook projection: he lists a series of progressive issues, recites what we say is the reason, and then carefully explains what he claims is our actual reason.

So, under gun control for instance, he says that our claimed reason is Gun violence is a scourge on society; easy access to killing machines unnecessarily facilitates murder and crime, which is actually pretty close to what I think…but then, at length, he expounds on our True Reason:

White urban liberals are deathly afraid of black gangbangers with guns, but are ashamed to admit this publicly, so to mask their racist fears they try to ban guns for everyone, as a way of warding off the perception that their real goal is to target blacks specifically.

There aren’t any black gangbangers where I live, and even when I lived in Philadelphia, I could point to crime-ridden areas I avoided that were totally white. You know who really scares me? Wayne LaPierre. I had no idea that maniac was black.

He’s got the most twisted ideas about everything. Did you know opposition to global climate change is a racist plot?

The civilizational “white guilt” motivating the voluntary wealth transfer to undeveloped nations derives from deep racist assumptions about the innate shortcomings of backward peoples.

Don’t ask me to explain that. Don’t ask me to explain anything on that guy’s site — he’s so nuts, he has to hide out of fear of squirrels.

I was just reminded that today is the day of the White Man March. Who knew that the slogan “Diversity = White Genocide” was liberal?