It’s too much to hope that the NY Times will ever get rid of their awful opinion columnists. At least it gives us something to gripe about every week.
The latest bit of irrational conservative nonsense comes from Ross Douthat, who doesn’t like abortion. He is saddened and appalled by those absurd anti-Planned Parenthood videos that have been released. He dismisses the idea that these are trumped-up and phony.
Jonathan Merritt, who has these amazing qualifications,
Senior Columnist, Religion News Service @RNS; Contributing Editor, @TheWeek; Author of Jesus is Better Than You Imagined (2014)
has announced that Planned Parenthood should be defunded. He was asked by a woman what she should do for her “medically necessary birth control, pap smears, and tests”, which was like an open invitation to mansplain to a lady where she can take her lady parts. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so painful. Would you believe he sent her a list of alternatives to Planned Parenthood that included a bunch of CPCs? Bless his little Christian heart.
Paul Nurse, friend to Tim Hunt and co-recipient of the Nobel prize, had a few things to say.
Sir Tim Hunt deserved to lose his job over his infamous “trouble with girls” speech, the President of the Royal Society has said.
Sir Paul Nurse, a joint-Nobel Prize winner and friend of Sir Tim, told the Telegraph the embattled professor’s “chauvinist” comments had “damaged science”.
Of course, he didn’t really lose a job — he lost an honorary position, as I’ve been saying repeatedly. I have learned that he lost the accompanying photocopying privileges at UCL, which is the biggest cost to him I’ve heard yet.
I thought it was clear. The case is closed. UCL released their official statement.
But strangely, I’m being bombarded with claims that the statement was ambiguous
, that it didn’t say what it seems to say, that I’ve misquoted it. Really? What’s ambiguous about:
Council unanimously supports the decision taken by UCL’s executive to accept the resignation.
and
Council acknowledges that all parties agree that reinstatement would be inappropriate.
Probably not, if you’re one of those people whose response to the Tim Hunt situation is to see conspiracies and witch hunts and a desire to destroy a scientist’s career. But the truth is that critics of Hunt have not been baying for anyone’s blood, but have been saying that sexist jokes at a women’s science meeting speak to a kind of arrogance that is not appropriate for an ambassador for equality. University College London has released a plain-spoken statement, confirming that the council unanimously found his comments entirely inappropriate for an honorary professor, and they have affirmed that his position is retracted.
The push-back against equality is now trying to rewrite history and retroactively rehabilitate Bora Zivkovic. In a terrible article that ignores all the facts and instead throws around sexist terms (“witch hunt”, “bitches”, “pussies”, “harpies”) utterly oblivious to the fact that they undermine her own argument, we get this ignorant bullshit.
As I noted above, what Bora did in no way met any legal or reasonable standard for sexual harassment — a crew of harpies who accused him just said it did; and all these supposed “skeptics” who make up the science-writing community just piled on.
He’s at it again, as Phil Plait notes in a post that says all the smart things.
And now another attack piece on St. Louis has been posted on the far-right-wing Breitbart site, saying she has become immune from criticism because she’s black.
Yes, you read that right. And that’s not all. In a sentence so tone deaf I’d swear it’s parody, the author, Milo Yiannopoulos, writes*:
St Louis is responsible for the sacking of Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize-winning biochemist who became the target of an online lynch mob after his comments about women in science were taken out of context.
Yes, again, you read that right. You might ignore the obviously incorrect statements in that one sentence (Hunt wasn’t sacked, he was asked to resign from an honorary position; and as we’ve seen his comments were not taken out of context), but it’s much harder to ignore that, in an article attacking a woman because she’s black, Yiannopoulos used the phrase “lynch mob.”
Amanda Marcotte’s article on the opposition to marriage equality is very good. It’s always been strange to hear their arguments — I couldn’t believe they were so stupid to think that seeing gay men getting married would destroy heterosexual marriages. And they’re not! They’re just afraid to come right out and say what really frightens them.
I’m embarrassed for them. You’d expect that with the importance of evidence and logic, they’d understand the words they use and the reasoning behind them. In the case of Tim Hunt, we’ve now had frenetic attempts at vindication based on:
Her words ought to have some weight, I think, and they represent a rational response to the issue.
His remarks at first seemed to me just a drop in the bucket of millions of similar ones made every day about women in the workplace, often by decent men who would be horrified to be regarded as misogynists. For me they confirmed an age old stereotype of women as trouble, so old that it goes back to Adam and Eve. But they were the drop that finally caused the bucket to flow over. They became a catalyst for a deep-seated bitterness to pour out of people, not only women, who simply felt that enough was enough. This was an outpouring waiting to happen. It needed just that little drop.
What is the bitterness about? Injustice, plain and simple. And it coincides with my own anxieties as chair of the Diversity committee. The bitterness is sustained by the strong feeling that women have not had a fair chance to succeed in science. This is a serious problem in science in general, but it is also a problem for the Royal Society. It is a fact that only 105 out of 1569 Fellows are women (6.7%). It is a fact that only 22 out of 106 of the awards and medals given by the Society over the last 5 years were given to women and that over those five years only 22% of the successful candidates on the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows and Sir Henry Dale Fellows were women.
