One law for white men, another law for black women

Florida, you suck. I can’t put it any other way: your state is run by evil thugs. George Zimmerman murdered a black teenager and walked off free; Michael Dunn murdered a black kid for playing his music too loud; and both of those cases were prosecuted by the incompetent Angela Corey, who now wants revenge, so she’s going to take it out on a black woman who didn’t kill anybody. Marissa Alexander was convicted for firing warning shots to dissuade her abusive from attacking her, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. That injustice got temporarily overthrown, and now Angela Corey is retrying the case, announcing that she’s going for three times the penalty.

Marissa Alexander could face a 60-year prison sentence instead of her original 20-year sentence when her aggravated assault case is retried in July.

The Florida Times-Union reports that the Office of State Attorney Angela Corey will try to put Alexander behind bars for 60 years if it is able to convict her for a second time.

Alexander, 33, was convicted in 2012 of three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to 20 years in prison by Circuit Judge James Daniel under Florida’s 10-20-life law. Daniel imposed three separate 20-year sentences but ordered that they be served concurrently, which meant Alexander would get out in 20 years.

What the hell is wrong with you, Florida? Have you no shame at all?

Oh, lord, the stupid…

In the expected counterattack from sexists defending Ben Radford’s obtuse sexism, there are now demented dingbats accusing me of being a veritable MRA and implying that I’m some kind of hypocrite, because I have in the past been subject to an abortive false accusation. I mentioned this in a comment four years ago (some people are obsessive in following my every word, and I should be flattered, I suppose — I must be very interesting). Here’s the dry account of the event that I gave then:

I won’t meet privately with students either — I always keep my office door wide open, and when I’m working with students in the lab, I find excuses to move out and let them work on their own if it turns into a one-on-one event. I just can’t afford the risk.

I was also subject to accusations of harassment, once upon a time. A female student came into my lab when I was alone, unhappy about an exam grade, and openly threatened me — by going public with a story about a completely nonexistent sexual encounter right there.

Zoom, I was right out the door at that instant; asked a female grad student in the lab next door to sit with the student for a bit, and went straight to the chair of the department to explain the situation. I had to work fast, because I knew that if it turned into a he-said-she-said story, it wouldn’t matter that she was lying, it could get dragged out into an investigation that would easily destroy my career, no matter that I was innocent.

I was in a total panic, knowing full well how damaging that kind of accusation can be. Fortunately, I’d done the right thing by blowing it all wide open at the first hint of a threat, and getting witnesses on the spot.

There is nothing inconsistent about this. False accusations do happen, and they can have extremely damaging consequences (which I said previously: “Yes, they happen…rarely. They’re important to detect.”) Obviously, I had just explained that I certainly do know of at least one case in which a desperate student tried to cheat her way to a better grade with an accusation. It happens.

How I responded to that instance is just part of a protocol for how people should work together. Here’s what I do:

  • I don’t harass women, or anyone for that matter.

  • I maintain complete transparency. Not only do I not harass women, but any accusation that I do founders on the implausibility of the circumstance.

  • I deal with any potential situation by defusing it immediately. Not arguing, not protesting my innocence, not begging the person to refrain from hurting my reputation, but going straight to departmental authorities and explaining the situation. Again, transparency: the slander isn’t going to stick.

  • I bring in witnesses, preferably women too, who can testify to my innocence. And I don’t just mean people who will say I’m a nice guy, but witnesses to the incident who can describe all the details of the event.

  • I keep myself protected against false claims, which also means that I’m keeping my students protected from any harm. We all work just fine together, with nothing to hide.

  • I don’t sexually harass my students or colleagues. Period.

Not only is my reputation spotless, and honestly so, but there’s no way to even realistically bring such a charge against me. And of course the great majority of my interactions with students bear no risk of any such problems — we can trust each other.

But then, there are always people like those slimy ones, that minority of nasty untrustworthy liars commenting on Radford’s thread, who are happy to distort and make false accusations, and I deal with them in the same way that I did that earlier incident: with transparency and honesty and frank admission of what actually happened. I don’t deny that such unpleasant people exist, especially when so many of them are already populating that thread and the existence of contemptible liars is so apparent. But when one has no interest in harassing people, it turns out to be relatively easy to maintain one’s integrity — I don’t have years of stalkerish behavior and complaints and administrative disciplinary actions to make excuses for, unlike some people.

Marthe Gautier, another woman scientist trivialized

tri21

I had known that Jérôme Lejeune was the fellow who had discovered that Down Syndrome was caused by trisomy of chromosome 21, but it seems there were many other things about him I had not known — he was just a name. But there were a few things that set me aback.

Lejeune became not just a renowned researcher but the darling of the French Catholic right-to-life movement.  You can read long flattering Wikipedia biographies in both French and English. He was showered with awards and given a prestigious Chair of Human Genetics at the Paris School of Medicine, bypassing the usual competition.

When prenatal diagnosis became available Lejeune campaigned against it on religious grounds. He became a friend of Pope John Paul II and was appointed President of the Pontifical Academy for Life (Wikipedia), the Catholic think-tank for medical ethics.  He died in 1994.  The Fondation Jerome-Lejeune was established in his honour; there’s an American branch too.  This foundation provides funds for research into Down syndrome and support for families and patients, but only in the context of very strong opposition to abortion.  They’re also campaigning to have Lejeune beatified by the Vatican.

Uh, OK. Ick. One of those Catholics. I am entertained by the thought that if you do good science and happen to be Catholic, though, the church will try to get you beatified.

But then I learned something that really kind of pisses me off. He’s not the guy who discovered trisomy 21. He’s the guy who stole credit for discovering trisomy 21 (sleazy behavior like that may have just fast-tracked him to Catholic sainthood now).

The real discoverer was a woman, Marthe Gautier, who had done all the cell work that led to the identification of the chromosome abnormalities. She got a bit of space and some rudimentary equipment, and cultured cells using serum derived from her own blood. Man, we’ve got it easy nowadays.

For this work she was given a disused laboratory with a fridge, a centrifuge, and a poor quality microscope, but no funding. And of course she still had her other responsibilities. But she was keen and resourceful, so she took out a personal loan to buy glassware, kept a live cockerel as a source of serum, and used her own blood when she needed human serum.

So she set up normal human cells, prepped them for the chromosome squashes, grew Down syndrome cells and did likewise, and was held up by her primitive gear at that point…when Jérôme Lejeune showed up and whisked all of her data away to get it photographed. And then went off to a conference where he announced that he had discovered the cause of Down syndrome, and then published the story with Gautier’s name as a middle author — a paper she did not get to see and knew nothing about until the day before publication.

Lejeune is dead now, but the sleaze continues in his name. There was to be an award ceremony for Gautier — she’s 88 now — at the French Federation of Human Genetics’ (FFGH) seventh biennial congress on human and medical genetics in Bordeaux. Guess who is trying to intimidate the attendees by having a bailiff sent to film the proceedings? Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, of course, because Gautier was intending to give a speech that would affect the memory of Pr. Jérôme Lejeune. I think his foundation is doing a fine job of that already.

It’s very nice that Lejeune at least gave credit to Gautier in the authorship of the original paper, but if you browse the Foundation web page, you discover that (in the creepy mix of pro-Catholic and anti-abortion sentiment mingled with worthy appeals for care and tolerance for Down syndrome people), they repeatedly state that Lejeune is the “discoverer of Down syndrome” — so much so that it’s clear that they attach a great deal of importance on the identity of the discoverer. They don’t seem to attach much importance to the fact that he appropriated the hard work of a woman laboring away under primitive conditions, and do think it very important that she be denied recognition. Lejeune also thought the discovery was worthy of a Nobel prize (no, he didn’t get one), so…Very Big Deal. But not big enough to demand honesty and integrity in its appreciation of who did the work.

By the way, you should read the Lejeune Foundation’s excuses. They are intrinsically horrible. They ask who profits from the dispute, and the answer is…anti-Catholic terrorists.

Is this an attempt at proving that Jérôme lejeune surely can’t have made a major scientific discovery, as he is opposed to abortion and is considered as an “intransigent catholic” (horresco referens)?

…

This ideological terrorism, currently very popular but whose origin is easily traceable, does not come as a surprise to anyone. The Foundation and the Pr. Lejeune will handle the matter the way it deserves to be handled.

Popular but…easily traceable? handle the matter the way it deserves to be handled? Paranoid persecution complex much?

Also, Gautier is an old woman and her claims are late and not trustworthy.

Who?

Somehow, I follow a lot of science fiction people and UK residents on twitter, and my feed erupted with convergent outrage this morning. Some guy named @wossy (Jonathan Ross) has been announced as the host for a British SF convention, Loncon 3, where he’ll be handing out the Hugo Awards. Who? Had to look him up.

He seems to have a bit of a reputation as a sexist boor who, as a “comedian”, likes to punch down, especially at women, and substitutes profanity for humor. I know the type; I’m sure he’ll have the lads all sniggering.

One person has already resigned from the Loncon 3 committee, with a quite clear declaration that this was an entirely inapproporiate choice for an organization with a membership a bit larger than the boys down at the pub. It sends a message that your harassment policies are just for show when you take someone who has made a career out of violating boundaries with women and rewarding them with the prestige of being the host for an international award.

The World Science Fiction Convention looks like one to skip this year.

My sordid history of showering with gay men

Jack Burkman is a lobbyist who is trying to get a congressperson to support his idea of a good law: one that would ban gay people from being in the National Football League. It doesn’t sound constitutional, and although it wouldn’t surprise me if some of our congressvermin wouldn’t approve, it’s so toxic that I’d be surprised if they wanted to touch it. But it’s still a bizarre peak into the mind of a homophobe.

We are losing our decency as a nation, Burkman said in a statement. Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man. That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?

I should call up my mom and ask her. I took showers in high school with every guy in my PE class; not only am I statistically confident that some were gay, I knew specifically that some were. I was unconcerned. They never caused me any trouble or embarrassment, but you know who did? The aggressively macho asshole of a coach who would stroll through the shower area and make comments on the size of the kids’ penises, or how much pubic hair they had. That guy was loudly heterosexual, and a real perv. There were also more than a few towel-snapping swaggering jocks who would disparage us nerds, but it is unimaginable that any of the gay kids would do anything but shower up and get out as quickly as possible.

I suspect my mom would be more horrified by that story than about the nice young man who respected his fellow students.

If the NFL has no morals and no values, then Congress must find values for it, Burkman said.

I hate to defend the morals of an organization that profits on traumatic brain injury to men, but…I think Burkman’s “morality” would only make the NFL worse.

Some people are speculating that this is just obnoxious noise to stir up interest in his lobbying firm, JM Burkman & Associates, which signed up 70 new clients last year, as the article at the link discloses. I would hope that those clients would only see that Burkman is poison to work with, and drop his firm immediately.

But my hope is tenuous and unlikely to be fulfilled.

Amazon’s inhumanity

Is it really worth it to order from Amazon? Read this exposé of Amazon’s labor practices — they are ruthless, demeaning, and evil.

At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.27 At the Seattle warehouse where the writer Vanessa Veselka worked as an underground union organizer, an American Stakhnovism pervaded the depot. When she was on the line as a packer and her output slipped, the “lead” was on to her with “I need more from you today. We’re trying to hit 14,000 over these next few hours.”

Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and Stakhnovism, laced with twenty-first-century IT, there is, in Amazon’s treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust—for customers, but not for the employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through scanning checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots, to guard against theft, and sets up checkpoints within the depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon’s German employees call Pausenklau (break theft), shrinking the employee’s lunch break from thirty to twenty minutes, when they barely have time to eat their meal.

That’s just a small sample. If you work for Amazon, you’re a modern serf, relentlessly monitored and given increasingly unreachable goals.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of 27 billion dollars. Do you think he works even a tenth as hard as the wage slaves he’s got working in his “fulfillment centers”?

One thing this story makes clear, at least, that a key element in the process of achieving some kind of equality is a vital labor movement.

Can we kill chivalry a little faster?

It’s always amusing to see sexists pretending to be rational. Martin Daubney tries so hard to be reasonable when he argues that chivalry is dead and feminism is to blame.

There is an abundance of male behaviour that is deserving of fierce criticism. But I lose the will to live when feminist bloggers find sexism in places where it doesn’t exist, and draw a line from something trivial and stupid (say, a pink child’s bib with the logo “born to shop” on it) to something serious and frightening (eg rape culture). [I think you’ll find that most feminists are quite conscious of the degrees of sexism. But who are you, Martin Daubney, to say where the line is to be drawn? Do you have the privilege to say what is acceptable sexism?]

Wolf whistles, the “pinkification” of children’s toys, The Sun calling high-profile women “fillies” – these seem more sad and silly to me than genuinely sexist.[Uh, you know that sexism can be sad and silly, right?]

The problem is, this remorseless public shaming of men doesn’t just out the morons. [It’s done a pretty good job of outing Martin Daubney.] It drives the rest of us [Seriously? You think you’re not one of the morons?] into hiding. As the This Morning survey showed, the broader collateral damage is that men are not as nice towards women as they were. [I’ve never gotten this argument. Shouldn’t we be nice towards our fellow men, too?] Chivalry is withering on the vine. [That sounds like good news to me!]

I think our problem is our definition of “nice” is different. I think it’s “nice” to treat other people as equals. Martin Daubney thinks it would be nice to exercise a patronizing chivalry that makes him a better person than those helpless little women.

Gamifying and scientifying your sex life, badly

There’s a new app called Spreadsheets. This is not new; there are millions of apps, and 95% of them are crap. Spreadsheets purports to use the accelerometer and microphone in your smartphone to measure your sexual performance — a kind of fitbit for sex (do not tell my wife, she’s already slightly obsessed with her fitbit stats).

I find the whole idea a little weird, and have zero interest in the thing, but whatever floats your boat, ‘k? But here’s what I find offensive and stupid: calling the noise from these smartphone stats a study of sex duration in America. It’s basically a sex toy that will be used sporadically and idiosyncratically, and you’re not going to get anything that could be called “information” out of it. Case in point: look at the data on intercourse duration.

sexduration

That makes no sense. Why would you even expect variation to fall in the arbitrary boundary lines of the states? For instance, the part of Minnesota where I live is, culturally and geographically, very similar to the Dakotas, yet somehow I’m supposed to believe that there’s some kind of remarkable transition in sexual behavior over there? Why? Show me the variance in the data. Give me a somewhat finer grained breakdown. What these data show is that what they’re measuring is patternless and random.

The one message I take from that figure is this: dudes, your app doesn’t work.

Et tu, Chemistry?

Quick, everyone! Get out your Bingo cards!

The International Congress of Quantum Chemistry is going to be held next year, and they announced their preliminary speaker list: it was entirely made up of men. This is not surprising. It’s held by the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, which is almost entirely made up of men, too.

Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott.

I’ve highlighted the bit about how this kind of sexism is perpetuated. It takes a real effort by existing members of the organization to break up bad habits…and it doesn’t sound as if some members are interested, despite the fact that there is an online list of women in quantum chemistry that would make it easy to find interesting women to invite.

Cue the excuses:

Zhigang Shuai, a professor at Tsinghua University in China and chair of this year’s ICQC, wrote a letter to explain that one woman had been among the original invitees, but had not responded

There might be women in our second choices!

many of the people on the original list were obligatory selections

There aren’t any women of obligatory importance in the field.

And then, of course, the Asshat Backlash. Here’s Professor James Kress, complaining about all those people complaining about discrimination on a chemistry listserv.

If you INSIST on discussing this on CCL, the please place an identifying header on all your emails so that those of us who care about SCIENCE, as opposed to trendy whining about supposed “gender inequality” and other fashionable modes of Political Correctness can at least have a hope of filtering out all of the nonsensical content and peruse the SCIENTIFIC content.

Oh, Dr Kress cannot shut up:

Inequality is a fundamental characteristic of any collection of more than one human being, he said, and suggested that if people don’t like the current conferences they should start their own. You’re not entitled to excel. You have to earn it. I guess that’s kind of an old fashioned perspective but it’s certainly mine.

Kress doubled down in a followup email. Given that everyone has unique DNA, it is scientifically certain that no two people will be identical in terms of capabilities, he wrote. ALL SORTS of differences in capabilities exist in Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Math, etc. Those who work harder, overcome their capability deficient and make themselves equal to or better than their colleagues. Hard work is the way to address the capability issue and thus achieve equality.

He’s got his, and by god, he deserved it, and if you aren’t getting invited to speak at conferences, it’s entirely because you are a lazy slacker with female DNA.

So, what conferences have a problem with rampant manly privilege so far? Atheist, skeptic, science fiction, literature, philosophy, technology, and now chemistry? Did I miss any? Yeah, probably. It seems to be all of them.

Christianity has always endorsed gay marriage? WTF?

This long-winded Christian apologist (well, that was redundant) Damon Linker has been making bizarre arguments for some time: he’s one of those deeply dishonest twits who argues that god is the transcendent source, the ground, or the end of the natural world while simultaneously ignoring the specifics of Christianity — and his primary argument against atheism always seems to be that old canard, that good atheists are supposed to be miserable, like Nietzsche — it’s always Nietzsche. His specialty seems to be making overwrought counterfactuals based on how he thinks the world should be…that is, Christian and pious.

His latest? Christianity invented gay marriage. Somehow, he manages to mention the near-universal Christian unity in opposing gay marriage, waves it all away, and then declares,

The ultimate source of the democratic revolution — the motor behind its inexorable unfolding — is the figure of Jesus Christ, who taught the equal dignity of all persons, and declared in the Sermon on the Mount that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Nothing in the history of the Christian church suggests that they ever followed this rather idealistic interpretation of doctrine. Would the Jews of his time been tolerant of gays? Don’t you suspect that when he said, “the meek shall inherit the earth”, he was actually preaching to a conquered people and promising that the conquerors will get their comeuppance?

But stretching the truth is not an activity Linker confines only to his Bible readings. He’s got a strange view of American history.

They already did touch in the United States, the world’s first nation settled by egalitarian Christians (the Puritans) and explicitly dedicated in its founding documents to the principle of universal human equality.

Puritans were egalitarians? Only if you were a man.

The US was founded on universal human equality? Only if you were white.

Marriage equality is inevitable. It’s also inevitable, I guess, that some Christians are now maneuvering to take credit for it.

Wait, who’s right, Damon Linker or Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, United States Army, (Ret.)? Boykin has made some interesting comments about Jesus.

The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A might warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.

And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.

I guess I’m going to have to bet on Boykin’s Jesus. Good, bad, he’s the one with the gun.

For further historical revisionism, guess who wrote the second amendment to the US constitution?

Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? … From the Founding Fathers, it’s in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus…

I’m not handing out prizes for guessing correctly, you all saw that one coming.