New York’s culinary reputation is suffering

I get to spend a day in New York City on Monday. Where should I go for a nice classy New York dinner?

The Trump Tower Grill, maybe?The reviews aren’t exactly stellar.

I reflexively want to be generous in my assessment of what the post-election Trump Grill says about the Trump presidency. Perhaps it’s a sign that Trump is in over his head, and a shallow, mediocre man who runs a shallow, mediocre business empire (and restaurant) would sink and implode, crushing the expectations of millions of his hopeful supporters. But watching Trump parade his enemies through the nearby lobby, taunting them with prestigious appointments only to cruelly humiliate them, I had to look over at the human cattle herd at the Trump Grill, overwhelming a well-meaning staff with their dreams of a meal fit for a president, and wonder if he cared about any of them, either.

Nah. I can probably find a food truck run by immigrants that will get the job done.

Oh, no, I had a horrible thought flit through my head: does this mean Guy Fieri will be the next president of the US?

Join the Rebel Alliance

I didn’t make it to the midnight showing last night, so don’t worry, no spoilers here. I did run across this poster though, which for some reason speaks to me.

rebelalliance

Never mind the goofy movie, sign me up to rebel against tyranny.

I’ll probably get to the movie tonight, though, and I’ll probably be disappointed, because the whole damn universe has been disappointing lately.

“I’m saying people have gotten things wrong throughout the 5,500-year history of our planet.”

An advisor to Trump and member of the transition team just bare-faced asserted that the Earth is less than 6000 years old. This was after Anthony Scaramucci tried to invalidate modern science by arguing that scientists once argued that the Earth was flat and that the universe rotated about it. Never mind that those ideas preceded modern science and were relatively rapidly dispelled as evidence was acquired.

Watch those irony meters, gang.

Scaramucci wasn’t convinced. Later in the conversation, he said the Trump team simply wanted common sense solutions. Non-ideological.

Some of the stuff that you’re reading and some of the stuff I’m reading is very ideologically-based about the climate. We don’t want it to be that way, he said.

This has become the latest insult from the deeply ignorant: “You’re ideological!” Always said as they espouse some stupid ideological position of their own.

Rebecca Watson addresses this latest Trumpery more entertainingly.

It is that day

I give my final final exam of the semester today, in a half hour. My feelings:

After the exam, I shall retreat to my lair to grade them. I have made a cell biology final exam that is all essay questions. I’m expecting the students to synthesize all the information I have given them this turn, and to defend their arguments with details. There are some options here.

  • I will moan and weep and struggle for hours over terrible answers that tell me I have completely failed. Then I’ll have to go searching for candy canes to stab into my eye sockets.

  • I will be dazzled and impressed, and my students will vindicate all of my efforts, and I will dance with joy, and then I’ll have to go attend the midnight showing of Rogue One to restore my natural pessimism and ruin everyone’s day with spoilers.

  • Realistically, I’ll probably get some exams that are rewarding and interesting and some that will disappoint me. It’s OK. Then I’ll wonder if I should go to the midnight showing or just get some sleep.

Dilemmas. But no matter what, I intend to get all my grading done today. That will be good.

Oh no! Racist Twitter is mocking me!

They’re all amused that I don’t understand biology, as evidence by my criticisms of Boghossian’s blatant biases. Would you believe Jordan Peterson chimed in, too? Oh, how I tremble in terror and shame. I have roused a loud army of dumbasses (get used to it, Trump generation).

Except…I’m reasonably confident in my knowledge, and my opponents seem to be grossly ignorant and pandering to the twin trickster gods of prejudice and common sense. Never trust those guys. So I’ll keep it simple. They don’t understand that distinction between brute fact and social knowledge.

Here’s a brute fact: John produces sperm. Jennifer produces ova, sometimes. There’s no denying these simple, measurable observations. Further, we’ll stipulate that these are healthy eggs and sperm, and that I can extract these cell types in the lab and combine them in a dish and create a healthy, growing diploid zygote, that I could then implant in an individual who has a uterus and grow to adulthood. In fact, if I wanted to engineer a master race, I could go through the population and segregate out the individuals who make sperm and those who make ova and begin doing all kinds of interesting biological experiments.

Now, here are some social facts: John is a man. Jennifer is a woman. And Racist Twitter is saying, “Of course!” Except that that has taken a simple brute fact, the presence of organs that produce gametes, and extrapolated it into the socially loaded gender terms that carry huge amounts of baggage and imply lots of details in our heads that aren’t necessarily true. For example, you might then imagine John is a bit larger and physically stronger than Jennifer, which, on average, is probably true, but not necessarily so.

Or you might assume John would be a better scientist than Jennifer, which is not at all true.

In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

Having functional testes is not a requirement for a lab manager, yet our society as a whole has this mental shortcut that categorizes the suitability of individuals to particular jobs on the basis of a raft of irrelevant, but usually easily detectable, characters. This is a reality that those who want to reduce people to a definition based on sex are ignoring. Even when a social fact is turned into a brute fact by social scientists like Moss-Racusin, they deny. It’s kind of depressing.

Furthermore, I snuck in another social fact in that paragraph introducing John and Jennifer. Did you notice?

Why is the sperm-producing person named “John”, and the ovum-producing person named “Jennifer”? These are arbitrary signifiers that we associate with a gender, and then to their roles in culture, and to traits like their qualities as lab managers. Imagine if I’d started that paragraph “Jennifer produces sperm. John produces ova, sometimes.” Many people would be confused. They’d think I’d made a mistake. I’d created a conflict between their social assumptions and the brute fact of biology. But there are people named John who have ovaries.

Hmm. I wonder how good they are at lab management?

By the way, allow me to introduce Jessie*. Jessie doesn’t produce sperm or ova, or maybe they do, but their behavior intentionally prevents reproduction. They do not dress in a socially conventional way for either gender. They do not engage in any of the standard courtship and mating customs of their culture. They ask you to use the non-gendered plural pronouns when addressing them.

But…but…there are only two sexes! We will struggle internally to fit Jessie into one of the two gender boxes convention allows. We must. We need to find some indication to help us accommodate our stereotypes.

Then we learn that Jessie is employed as a lab manager, and we are relieved. Jessie must be a “man”, then. We’ll be polite and continue to use the non-gendered pronouns, though. Or perhaps we’re an asshole like Jordan Peterson, and we’ll insist on forcing them into our biased pigeonholes.

And thus do we close the loop in our stereotypes and maintain the fiction of a binary reality, despite all the complicating evidence otherwise.

*Note that I snuck in yet another social fact for you to deal with: I chose what we consider a gender-neutral or ambiguous name for this person. But it can also be that someone named Jane or Joe chooses to defy those gender stereotypes, and then what happens? Everyone assumes Jane is female, of course. Even if Jane has testes hidden away under their school uniform. Because the gender binary must be served.

P.S. I forgot to mention the other criticism they’re shouting at me: “Myers is all ideological!” They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their position is blatantly ideological, too.

I admit to it. My ideology is to consider all of the evidence, even the stuff that makes my understanding of a situation more complicated.

Their ideology is to always make the evidence conform to their prior assumptions.

Is that in my job description?

Lance Wallnau explains what college professors do:

Anything we do regarding abortion, prayer, marriage, he said, anything we do that doesn’t get into the educational narrative that is affecting the minds of students will be lost within eight to 10 years because you’ve got gatekeeper priests, there are priests of Baal at the top of the university mountain, poisoning the minds [of young people.] They’re like intellectual pedophiles molesting the virgin territory of your children’s imaginations.

Funny. That stuff isn’t in any of my classes. I guess Wallnau just needs to lie about us molesting brains and worshipping Baal because he thinks it sounds less idiotic than admitting that we, for instance, teach that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 6,000.

If we’re going to allow piano lessons, we must also allow penis-chopping

It must be fun-with-philosophers day, because Ron Lindsay has written an article for CFI declaring that male circumcision should not be a major concern for humanists. He has several bad arguments to support this idea.

One is that he doesn’t think it’s very important. No, really; he’s in charge of ranking our priorities.

The head of the affiliate said they were going to concentrate on making an all-out effort to ban circumcision. I remember thinking to myself: of all the ills of a society on which a humanist organization could concentrate, this organization is going to focus on saving the foreskin?

STOP EVERYTHING. I say the biggest crisis looming over our heads is climate change, so of all the ills our society faces, why is the Center for Inquiry wasting their time opposing religion? Get some perspective, people!

Another reason he gives is that the foreskin is so teeny-tiny, and people aren’t seriously harmed by lopping it off, so it’s a trivial matter, especially compared to real problems (don’t forget, Ron Lindsay is the arbiter of what matters).

For humanists who are concerned about how the bodies of children are permanently shaped by their parents, I suggest they concentrate on how children are educated. We need tougher regulation of homeschooling and we need to prevent public funding of religious schools— something which seems quite possible under the new administration. The appropriate response to male circumcision is a shrug of the shoulders; it’s just not that significant an issue. We have other work to do.

I agree that education has a greater effect on children than circumcision. But this is just the fallacy of relative privation: that problem A has more severe consequences than problem B does not mean you should ignore B until A is completely solved. There’s always other work to do. It never ends. I taught two courses this term, but when the work piled up in one I couldn’t just tell the other class to stop meeting and stop learning until I’d caught up. You make do.

I’ll also point out that Lindsay was head of an organization of many people, and that he didn’t do all of CFI’s work. Ron Lindsay could ignore one cause; that doesn’t mean the entire organization isn’t allowed to work on it.

Then he dismisses the entirety of the autonomy and consent arguments!

The other reason I think many humanists are so opposed to circumcision is their adherence to a philosophical principle which, superficially, has strong appeal, namely that no permanent changes should be made to someone’s body without that person’s consent. Seems eminently reasonable—the problem is that it is impossible to comply with this principle with respect to the most important part of our body, namely our brain, and the possible harm that may be done to us via the shaping of our brain when we are young makes the loss of a foreskin trivial.

Yes. The universe is not perfect. We have to compromise all over the place. The fact that we cannot control what people teach their children means, what the hell, let ’em make any ol’ cosmetic change to their children’s bodies that they want. They have the right to teach children that Jesus is real, so we shouldn’t complain if they want to tattoo a picture of Elvis on their forehead. Or snip off the end of their penis.

Because piano lessons.

Most developed countries do exercise some control over the training and education children receive, imposing various legal standards and restrictions, but even so, wide scope is given to parents in terms of how they raise their children. Homeschooling is permitted in the United States, for example, with minimal oversight in most states. (Interestingly, homeschooling is forbidden in some European countries, such as Germany—again a significant cultural difference.) With respect to training in music or sports, parents can subject their children to extensive training, just short of physical abuse. Hour after hour of piano practice or swimming lessons. When grown, these children might be grateful for their training, or they may resent the physical or psychic pain they had to endure while forced to pursue an activity which they never liked. On the other hand, some children will receive no training in music or sports, something which they may regard as a handicap in later life. Either way the bodies of these children will have been permanently altered by their parents.

It’s true! Excessive focus on one discipline, whether it’s football or piano, can be damaging to a child’s development, especially if they have no talent or interest in the subject. These wrongs therefore justify another itty-bitty wrong, docking their penis. Or tattooing Elvis on their forehead, as long as we’re building arguments around hypotheticals.

He wraps it up with this pile of garbage: we should impose limits on what parents can do to their children, but elective cosmetic surgery doesn’t cross that line, because maybe it helps something.

Nothing in the foregoing analysis should be interpreted as saying we should allow parents to change their children’s bodies in any way they regard as suitable just because their role in shaping these bodies is inevitable. Clearly, limits should be— and are —imposed on what parents can do. Parents cannot inflict disabling injuries on their children. But, as indicated, the evidence regarding male circumcision is that it provides some small benefits. It cannot plausibly be characterized as medically necessary, but, with appropriate use of analgesia, it’s not harmful. The energies that some devote to opposing male circumcision might be better spent lobbying for tighter regulation of homeschooling. The cerebral portion of young male bodies should receive as much attention as the genital portion.

I’ve read the CDC summary, and some of the papers that claim there are benefits to circumcision. I’m unimpressed. There are multiple reasons why those arguments of a benefit are weak.

  • They fail to show any benefit to American children. Some claim to have found significant benefits to some African populations, which are under a very different regime of infectious diseases.

  • Even those effects in African populations are inconsistent. Some claim statistically significant reductions in infection rates, others don’t.

  • The studies that do show an effect show that late, voluntary circumcisions are as effective as post-natal circumcisions. So why force it on babies?

  • All of these studies are carried out under a complicated set of biases. Americans have high rates of circumcision, Europeans don’t. Strangely, American studies say it’s not a problem, European studies find it harmful. Isn’t that odd? It’s almost as if cultural biases influence the results, although we know that can’t possibly be.

  • The CDC summary is not without strong dissent.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have announced a set of provisional guidelines concerning male circumcision, in which they suggest that the benefits of the surgery outweigh the risks. I offer a critique of the CDC position. Among other concerns, I suggest that the CDC relies more heavily than is warranted on studies from Sub-Saharan Africa that neither translate well to North American populations nor to circumcisions performed before an age of sexual debut; that it employs an inadequate conception of risk in its benefit vs. risk analysis; that it fails to consider the anatomy and functions of the penile prepuce (i.e., the part of the penis that is removed by circumcision); that it underestimates the adverse consequences associated with circumcision by focusing on short-term surgical complications rather than long-term harms; that it portrays both the risks and benefits of circumcision in a misleading manner, thereby undermining the possibility of obtaining informed consent; that it evinces a superficial and selective analysis of the literature on sexual outcomes associated with circumcision; and that it gives less attention than is desirable to ethical issues surrounding autonomy and bodily integrity. I conclude that circumcision before an age of consent is not an appropriate health-promotion strategy.

Lindsay is comfortable with dismissing people’s objections to circumcision because he thinks it is a trivial problem, but somehow, a trivial and disputed positive effect is enough to justify disregarding any concern about an unnecessary surgery routinely performed on infants for no good reason at all. Does he even realize that circumcisions were not performed because there was evidence that they helped at all?

This makes no sense.

But then, Lindsay also put a priority on chastising women at a feminist conference. He also, as a humanist, thinks the death penalty is just fine. He knows what issues are really important.

You know what’s much more important than circumcision, or state executions, or the ongoing harassment of women, women in his own organization?

Chupacabras, that’s what. That is the other work CFI must do. Valuable and scarce resources must continue to be invested in debunking this plague on our nation, while the only appropriate response to those other nuisances is a shrug of the shoulders.

Even so-called “moderate” Republicans are unfeeling reptiles

Case in point: Kasich has signed a law outlawing abortion in Ohio after 20 weeks.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is not a moderate or a doctor, today vetoed Ohio’s proposed “heartbeat bill,” which would have effectively banned abortion altogether by outlawing it at six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don’t know they’re pregnant. This isn’t good news, by the way, just a distraction from Kasich’s decision to sign off on another ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And because we live in the Republic of Gilead now, the ban includes only one limited exception for the health of the patient—but not for cases of rape or incest, or for fetal abnormalities.

The 6 week bill was insane — not only are most women unlikely to know they’re pregnant, but even if they are, they’re unlikely to have any indications of potential problems, and some of the tests that can detect subtle problems take weeks to process…and you’re not going to have them done if you think it’s a routine pregnancy.

The 20 week bill isn’t much better. The standard recommendation for prenatal care is a check up once a month, and that check up is typically a simple pelvic exam and a measurement of external growth — it will detect gross problems in development but not the sneaky ones that will become apparent later. You might get one ultrasound examination, but it depends on your goddamn insurance. If you’re poor or have lousy insurance, you’re going to get nothing but the routine checkup, and we already know what Republicans think of health care.

The first fetal movements the mother can detect are at 13-16 weeks. Say there’s a problem; Mom and her doctor are going to be unconcerned if there is no quickening at the 12 week visit, but the doctor is going to get worried at 16 weeks and might give the pregnancy extra scrutiny, and might ask for extra tests (if the insurance will let you), but the alarm bells might not start ringing loudly until that 20 week visit. I kind of expect Ohio doctors will be putting a lot of extra effort into the 16 week visit from now on, but even then, it’s hard to justify extra tests if there are no apparent negative indications. Maybe Kasich is also investing much, much more money into prenatal care and screening for all Ohioans to catch problems earlier? (Hah. We know that’s not going to happen.)

There are going to be a lot of poor Ohio women — and well-off women whose pregnancies develop late problems — who are going to be told their pregnancy is life-threatening or non-viable, and who are simultaneously told that it can’t be terminated because it’s past the arbitrary deadline John Kasich decided would be the time he could get away with legally forcing them to host a dead or dying fetus. This is extreme ratfuckery. It is heartless and arbitrary. It is the act of an ignorant dumbass and a Republican…but I repeat myself.

I can guess at the political calculus going on right now. Women are less likely to vote for Republicans anyway. Pregnant women are only a small fraction of all women. Pregnant women with serious fetal problems are even rarer, so this is a negligible fraction of the electorate. Meanwhile, white male evangelicals who reflexively reject any expectation of bodily autonomy among their feeemales are the major electoral force that must be appeased. So, balancing intense, acute suffering of a few women vs. fostering the smug piety of Christian men, we know which one wins in Kasich’s mind.

As if that mind can empathize at all with women, that is.