My mistake, it must be racist millennium

Out there in awesomely racist Pennsylvania, Coatesville Area School District superintendent Richard Como and Director of Athletics and Activities Jim Donato were just swapping knee-slapping text messages back and forth, as rednecks are wont to do on phones they barely understand how to use. One catch is that they were using phones issued by their employers, and when their IT assistants went about upgrading their phones, they discovered the messages. And whoa, the messages…don’t read them unless you really want to learn just how racist and sexist state employees in Pennsylvania can be.

Como has retired. Donato has abruptly resigned.

It’s the ugly season, I guess.

Feminism is not an excuse for your racism, Pat Condell

I confess, I liked his early anti-religious rants, but as he became steadily more irate about the brown hordes invading Britain, I tuned him out…until now, when I happened to run across his latest video. Holy crap, what a racist cretin.

He’s chewing out those

…”progressive” feminists who confidently challenge everyday sexism but who are struck deaf and dumb by Islamic misogyny…they turn a blind eye to religiously endorsed wife-beating, forced marriage, honour killing, genital mutilation, organised rape gangs, sharia courts that treat women as less than fully human, and little girls forced to dress like nuns.

Turn a blind eye to Islamic misogyny, or you’ll be a racist, you racist.

Way to go, Pat! Teach those strawfeminists a thing or two!

I really don’t know of any feminists who think anything on that list is at all acceptable. Who are these mysterious feminists who have no problem with honor killing or rape gangs?

I’m looking around at my circle of progressive feminists — is it Taslima? Maryam? Ophelia? Sikivu? Heina? He seems to be flinging about wild accusations with no basis in fact here; it’s hard to even imagine a woman not deeply indoctrinated into Islam who would excuse murdering other women for infidelity, for instance.

I don’t see anyone turning a blind eye to Islamic misogyny. I do see plenty of conservative racist dorks turning a blind eye to the fact that the majority of the victims of Islamic misogyny are Muslim women, and using the abhorrent tactics of Islamic fundamentalists as an excuse to blame all Muslims for their pain.

Really. Pointing out that many Islamic cultures formally endorse hateful policies is not racism; looking at every immigrant and assuming they’re there to rape ‘your’ women is.

This kind of backward, ugly attitude towards women prevails throughout much of the Islamic world and it’s being deliberately imported wholesale into western society unchallenged and uncorrected thanks to the insane “progressive” view that all cultures are equal, except, of course, for western culture, which is inferior, and this is making life more dangerous for women.

You know that backward, ugly attitude? Islam didn’t invent it. We’ve got plenty of it to go around in the western world as well. To assume that it’s being imported by brown people into a white civilization that is innocent of sexism and misogyny is, well, racist.

It’s also a reflection of an attitude Pat seems to miss. Saying that Western culture is not necessarily superior to other cultures is not implying that we’re inferior. The attitude I see among progressive feminists is that fundamentalist Islam is well and thoroughly fucked up, as is fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Judaism, and maybe we should reject all of that garbage.

The progressive part, of course, is that we also recognize that Muslims are human beings and they deserve equal rights. That’s the equality I endorse. Maybe Condell is confused because he thinks they don’t deserve that?

And now this is flaming racism.

Norway and Sweden used to be among the safest for women. Now they’re best known for their high levels of Islamic immigrant rape that nobody in power wants to acknowledge or do anything about that because that would be racist.

Consequently, Norwegian and Swedish women are no longer safe in their own countries, for cultural reasons. Indeed, Sweden has been so “enriched” by Islamic immigration that its women statistically have a 25% chance of being raped in their lifetime.

Oh, god. That is so dishonest; this is the kind of lies fed to a racist public by right wing tabloids. Sweden does have a remarkably high rate of reported rapes. But that’s because, as a progressive culture, they’ve taken great care to document all cases of sexual abuse. Nothing gets swept under the rug.

But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries’ records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.

"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.

"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record – one victim, one type of crime, one record."

Condell is holding the conscientious record keeping of Swedes against them. This misleading statistic has been widely reported, so there’s no excuse for this lie…unless he gets all of his news from the Daily Mail.

And to imply that this surge of Swedish rapes is a consequence of raping hordes of Muslim immigrants is simply unconscionable. Given that between one in five and one in six women in America (and one in three if you’re Indian!) will be raped in their lifetime, with the more stringent requirements for counting an act as rape here, a figure of one in four for Sweden does not sound remarkable in comparison. Remarkable that it’s so damn high, but not remarkable in that it’s so high everywhere, even in the US, where we can’t blame it on an invasion of Muslim rapists.

Wait, you do need a cherry on top of all this racism, don’t you?

So forgive me for being blunt about this, girls, but there are more important things to get angry about than offensive language on twitter or sexist comments about your appearance.

Fuck you, too, Pat. We can be angry about genital mutilation and honor killings at the same time we’re angry about cranky old racists who are still fussed about every new wave of immigration since the Normans, and about sexist dudes who think they should be given a free pass on calling women “bitches” and “cunts” because they can find someone else who did something worse. We’re also quite capable of evaluating the relative harm of each of those without you falsely telling us that some of them do zero harm and must be ignored. You don’t get to tell me what I’m allowed to be enraged over, and let me assure you, I’ve got enough anger at all of these cultural toxins to go around. My fury encompasses whole worlds, and you’re right there in the list with mullahs and popes and KKK members and Republicans and assholes on youtube and members of UKIP and the English Defence League.

Boy.

Rebecca Watson seems to be somewhat sarcastic, but wow there are some similarities here.

Why are all your speakers older white men?

We asked several women and people of color to participate but unfortunately none were able to make it. We’re not sure why, but it’s a shame because we were planning a workshop with Richard Dawkins titled, “Things Marginalized People Should and Should Not Be Angry About: Everyday Bigotry (No) and Religion (Yes).”

That isn’t how diversity works

Some people didn’t like Bill Nye’s appearance on “Dancing With The Stars”. That’s OK, maybe he’s not such a great dancer…oh, wait, they didn’t like it because it was bad for science? What?

Nye wore a lab coat while he and his partner did the chachacha to the song "Weird Science," while dancing through a set of life-sized beakers. Nye’s appearance on Dancing was so bad it has him facing elimination, after getting the lowest score in the bunch.

His dance did end with fans cheering his name, and he had the biggest social media buzz of any contestants.

But I think his over-the-top performance on "Dancing With The Stars" on Monday night was a disservice to the science community by reinforcing stereotypes that scientists are nerdy, old white men who can’t dance. These stereotypes are what keep women and minorities out of science.

Hang on a minute there. I’m all for more diversity in science, and think there should be more women and minorities in the game. That does not mean that we nerdy old white men have to go crawl into a closet somewhere. The idea is that more women and minorities can get opportunities to do science and get promoted within their disciplines, not that old white men have to stop dancing. I don’t even see the connection here: is it the stereotype that black men are better dancers? That women are prettier on the dance floor? That dancing has anything at all to do with success in a science career?

Bill Nye is a very famous science popularizer (that the audience was chanting his name is a good sign of what he has done for science), and he apparently also likes to dance. Unless he beat up or intimidated a better woman to earn that slot on the show, or some kind of silent discrimination kept a more worthy black scientist from getting a chance to hoof it on the dance floor, I say good for Bill Nye, and yes, nerdy old white men are still allowed to be scientists and to dance. And that’s good for science, because it humanizes the people who are doing science.

Also, I thought Nye was a pretty good dancer…maybe not the best ever, but far, far better than I am. Are we really going to oppose the stereotype that nerdy scientists can’t dance by telling them to not dance?

Why is it always the berries?

I presume this essay about how women make better programmers was intended as satire…but it fell flat for me. I am so tired of this cartoon version of human evolutionary history that emphasizes the dichotomized roles of men and women, built entirely on grossly oversimplified views about our ancestor’s lives and contrived to reinforce stereotypes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s done to bestow Science’s favor on male or female — it’s bad.

The roots of this division are sadly rooted in humanity’s pre-history. On the plains of our ancestors, male hunters roamed the savannah, chasing down prey, while women remained home to nurture families and gather berries. The males adapted for big movements and fast action, while the women adapted for slow, methodical searching. The traits that made women expert bug-huntresses in the dust have carried forward and given them an advantage at hunting bugs in code. Men simply aren’t adapted to that kind of patient searching. They live for the thrill of the chase.

We’re wandering in Ray Comfort territory here, with this conception of the two sexes evolving and adapting independently. I don’t know about you, but I had both a mother and a father, and they contributed equally to my genetics, and I have fathered both boy and girl children myself. There are differences between the sexes, of course, but to assume that the differential responses to a couple of steroid hormones is so finely tuned that it completely segregates social roles, no crossover capabilities possible, is absurd.

No one has evolved to program. Maybe that’s the point of the joke, but it never ceases to annoy to see biology mangled.

Like cattle

Christopher Jackson of Chandler, Arizona needs to be put away for a long, long time. He has some peculiar notions about how to interact with women.

The woman told police the two of them went to a baseball game together, and after the game, Jackson wanted to go dancing. The woman told Jackson she was too tired to do that. He "offered her a pill to energize her," according to court documents.

Not feeling energized after taking the pill, Jackson gave her two more. The woman passed out shortly after taking the other two pills, according to court documents.

She woke up in Jackson’s bed in severe pain, and discovered that Jackson had branded her. She said she saw Jackson with the branding equipment and butane torch, according to the documents.

The woman told police that Jackson "bragged" to her that he’d done that to other girlfriends in the past and explained to her that he wanted to do the same thing to her because "her vagina was his," court documents state.

How can a human being in 21st century America reach middle age while holding these indescribably vile attitudes? And he claims to have done this multiple times?

I think I’ll pass on This vs. That, too

Skepchick earlier reported on This vs. That, a poor man’s version of Mythbusters that was actually more like a reanimated version of the thankfully deceased Man Show. The creators have since turned to twitter in a manic campaign to get people to watch their awful show. Take a look at their feed — it’s spam city. I’m surprised it hasn’t been taken down already.

They sent me a couple of tweets offering a discount code and HUGE SAVINGS and urging me to watch their show. I turned them down, rudely, saying they were cheesy sexist shit. They replied.

@thisvsthatshow: @pzmyers I’m now aware you’re a cantankerous fuck. You’ll find my response to your baseless allegations, here: http://ow.ly/oMXXB

Hmmm. I find your approach enticing. Who’s in charge of your PR?

I did check out their response. It’s actually a reply to Phil Plait, who said exactly what I said, but much more politely, because he’s Phil Plait.

Thank you for the note. However, I have decided not to watch the show. I watched the trailers, and found them to be off-putting, to say the least. I know they were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sexism in the trailers completelye dissuaded me from wanting to see the show. Also, the use of “booth babes” at Dragon Con (and the tweets promoting them) pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I have written several times about sexism – and sometimes outright misogyny – in the skeptical and scientific communities. I want to promote getting more young girls interested in these topic so they can grow up to be scientists, and not have to deal with institutional and cultural sexism. Given the way you promoted the show (as well as only having men as guests, apparently), I don’t see “This Vs That” as furthering this cause, and in fact would appear to impede it. For that reason, I won’t be promoting it.

That Phil. He’s a pretty good guy. Seeing his email is the only thing of worth in the This Vs. That reaction.

Hotchkiss’s (the creator of the show) response is complaining that he needs to parade around booth babes in skimpy outfits (with two of them wearing lab coats!) because it’s the only way to get his show noticed. He really wants to get more women in science.

But…when he lists his participants and advisors, they are all men. He has an excuse!

@thisvsthatshow: @futilityfiles We invited more than a dozen women scientists to appear on This vs That. ALL of them turned us down!

Yeah? I wonder why. Maybe we can see part of it in his twitter campaign.

@thisvsthatshow: @rickygervais Finally, a TV series that will help you get laid. Promise. http://ow.ly/oFWso

And he denies that he’s a sexist. Right. This is the approach that will get more women in science — tell the men that it will get them laid.

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This crap is everywhere

One question I got at my CFI-DC talk was about the prevalence of sexist/misogynistic scumbags in the atheist movement — aren’t they just a minority? And my answer was that I don’t know what percentage they are, but that it’s a mistake to dismiss it as a fringe phenomenon; it’s too common, and the people who are doing it aren’t some bizarre handicapped aberrant group, they’re people you wouldn’t look at twice if you saw them in the street. And some of them are your friends and family.

And then I get home to discover the latest misogynistic screw-up in the tech industry: a conference called TechCrunch which features presentations about quick hacks had a couple of, to put it generously, inappropriate presentations, including one called “Titstare”. This is the entirety of the talk.

Let me just say that not only was it grossly sexist, but it was unimaginative, uncreative, incompetently done, and terribly presented. These two guys ought to be deeply embarrassed to have thrown up such a pathetic joke on a public stage — even if it hadn’t been a sad attempt at a breast joke, it was a total failure.

These people are all over the place. There’s just something wrong with the culture.

My theory: boys are brought up with a lack of sexual responsibility. The aggressive aspect of male sexual behavior is celebrated and treated as entirely natural, and therefore excusable, while girls are brought up with all of the responsibilities. Crude sexual humor is an outlet or venting, rather than a mistake or exhibition of ineptitude.

You know that right now those two guys are back with their bros, who are not telling them, “you fucked up.” They are being told that bitches are crazy, women have no sense of humor, grim somber feminists are ruining everything because they hate men and don’t know how to laugh. All blame is being placed on women because men are not accountable for what their testicles make them do.

You know who else ought to be really outraged at that spectacle? Comedians. Because boys are also brought up to think the most stupid crap is hilarious, as long as it’s about getting sex (see also that crass young man who was yucking it up on camera about the Steubenville rape), and it really lowers our expectations for humor.