The inconsistency of Hamza Tzortzis

This is an interesting clip of Tzortzis first rebuking Lawrence Krauss for his lack of an objective morality in admitting that there are certain conditions under which he could not condemn incest, and then, in a different debate, Tzortzis defending sex with children and rationalizing the lack of a taboo in the Qu’ran against it.

It’s so hypocritical, and so lacking in a rational morality. Krauss’s argument has a clear foundation in mutual consent and a lack of harm; we should not prohibit private actions of consenting adults that do not cause harm to others.

Tzortzis tries to claim that the Qu’ran uses similar principles in accommodating sex with children, by claiming that it should only be done when the child is physically and emotionally ready. But he ignores the concept of consent, and in fact flouts it when one of his points in favor of some cases of child marriage is that the father was willing to give away the child. And of course he doesn’t bother to mention the disturbing fact that he’s not discussing cases of kids exploring their sexuality together (I suspect he’d be dead set against that), but of grasping old men taking ownership of little girls and using them as sex toys.

Some academics in literature apparently have a lady problem

So, so familiar, and so, so tiresome. Professor of literature at the University of Toronto David Gilmour:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Let me guess. He thinks his opinion of woman writers is an objective fact, and not at all colored by his own personal sexism.

Also, what kind of teacher only teaches the work he personally adores? Shouldn’t the point of a literature course be to broaden students’ minds, rather than imprisoning them in the limited scope of the instructor’s prejudices?

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.