It’s the stereotypes that are toxic

Digby finds some interesting quotes. Did you know that this presidential election is about masculine vs. feminine values?

Harry Enten: I think it has more to do with society overall. A ridiculously high 68 percent of Trump supporters say society is becoming too soft and feminine. Cruz and Kasich supporters come in with 57 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Now compare those numbers with the Democratic side, where Sanders supporters were slightly less likely than Clinton supporters to say that (28 percent vs. 31 percent).

I don’t even…my first objection has to be the equation of “feminine” and “soft”, which is simply taken for granted in the question. I don’t even know what “feminine” means, or should mean — the women I know have all sorts of personalities, as do the men, and it’s simply silly to assign one stereotypical set of traits, especially an implicitly negative set, to an entire group of people and the entirety of society.

In a country where only 19% of the members of the house of representatives are women, 20% of the senate are women (an all-time high!), a third of the Supreme Court are women, and no woman has ever been president, I fully support the increasing “femininization” of our government until representation is fair and equal.

And then Digby finds another quote from a 2003 article that elevates the stereotyping to a new level of ironic absurdity.

In the House, Dennis Hastert is the Republican speaker, Nancy Pelosi the leader of the Democratic minority. Mr Hastert, a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: he is against abortion, gay marriage, the Kyoto protocol; for the invasion of Iraq, the death penalty. Ms Pelosi, a tiny bird-like woman, is an unabashed, card-carrying liberal.

So is child molestation one of those masculine qualities we want to increase in society?

I’d also like to know how a high school wrestling coach became a multi-millionaire. Perhaps corruption is also manly?

Are we done with homeopathy yet?

osciollofuckyou

Yet another study has been done to show that homeopathy doesn’t work.

After assessing more than 1,800 studies on homeopathy, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council was only able to find 225 that were rigorous enough to analyze. And a systematic review of these studies revealed “no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy is effective in treating health conditions.”

The verdict is in — actually, it’s been in for over a century. It doesn’t work. It can’t work. It’s been shown over and over again to not work. It ought to just be done with.

But it isn’t. I can still walk down to my local grocery store, and there next to the real over-the-counter medicines that actually relieve pain, clear up congestion, make my nose stop running, and reduce fevers, there are little bottles of homeopathic pisswater that claim to do those things, but don’t, and would still cost me $7 if I were stupid enough to buy them.

I take that back. Pisswater would have more substance to it than these things, and cost less.

What has become of the good Texans?

The latest in absurd prudishness to come out of the Republican party is Ted Cruz’s opposition to masturbation, which is exactly what you’d expect of an advocate of small government.

In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz’s office declared, There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship. That is, the pursuit of such happiness had no constitutional standing.

You have no right to touch yourself. I don’t know how he would intend to enforce such a prohibition. but all I could think of was the work of another Texan who, unfortunately, is no longer around to respond appropriately to this nonsense. Molly Ivins is the exception that probes the rule about Texans.

That woman was a treasure.

Creationists completely divorced from reality

dinoselfies

Ken Ham is still babbling about the giant fake boat he’s building with taxpayer support in Kentucky.

The creationist said the ark — which will be the largest timber structure in the world when it’s completed — is a jaw-dropping experience for visitors who have been able to see it already.

These guests often stop in their tracks. They contemplate the massive beams and the craftsmanship, Ham said. They talk to me about the obvious complexity in the Ark’s engineering and architecture. In doing so, they begin to think about Noah in a correct way. You see, many people have (even unwittingly) adopted an evolutionary view of history, thinking that ancient people were less intelligent and less advanced than we are today. They wondered how Noah could have built such an impressive ship.

[Read more…]

Nye smack-down

I told you that Bill Nye was not going to be debating Sarah Palin on climate change, but that instead science denialist Marc Morano was going to be showing clips of Bill Nye to publicize his no-doubt horrid new “documentary”. It probably won’t be this clip. Bill Nye did meet with Morano, briefly, and made this little video.

I don’t think Morano knows how to deal with the issues outside of his little bubble of denialists.

Liars and monsters

zappaquote

Robert Lewis Dear, the asshole who shot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and murdered three people, has been flapping his wretched yap again. He’s been talking about how much he admired that other asshole, Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor, and he’s been saying that he was hoping to be welcomed into heaven by a swarm of grateful aborted fetuses. And of course he was influenced by those phony videos from the “Center for Medical Progress” made by sick fuck David Daleiden.

The National Abortion Federation released a report last week documenting what should come as no surprise to anyone: that anti-abortion harassment, threats, intimidation and violence have spiked dramatically since July 2015 when the Center for Medical Progress began releasing deceptively edited videos aimed at discrediting Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation practices.

Despite the Center for Medical Progress’ videos having been widely discredited, and the indictment of its leader, the group continues to release videos — which federal and state politicians are using to justify invasive government investigations into abortion clinics and further abortion restrictions. This one-two punch of anti-abortion activity almost guarantees that the increased violence against abortion providers NAF documented in 2015 will continue into 2016 and beyond.

Now if you want further evidence of the hypocrisy of the Republican vermin who hate Planned Parenthood, look no further than these telling laws. Samantha Bee has noticed something strange: did you know that food stamps can’t be used to purchase disposable diapers? It’s not just punishing babies (you know, those critters they don’t want aborted, and that will be greeting Robert Dear in heaven by shitting all over his shoes), but it’s also a clever way to shackle parents, especially mothers, to their homes and making it impossible for them to find jobs.

How can you be adamant that all babies must be born, yet so callous and uncaring that you deny their mothers basic supplies for hygiene? If the Republicans were actually sincere about caring for children, you’d think they be all over bills to allow poor people to use their food stamps on something as unglamorous and useful as diapers.

After all, it’s not as if they’d be using them to buy red potatoes or spaghetti sauce.

That’s the other thing: the scum of the Republican party in Wisconsin, which is fast becoming a desolate hellhole of smug selfish bastards under Scott Walker, is now trying to pass a bill to control what things poor people are allowed to buy with their food stamps. Why? I don’t know, except that being Republican means you are compelled to meddle in the lives of others to make them more miserable. It’s a kind of psychopathy, I think.

What are we to do with online comments?

The Guardian takes a look at the problem of online comments, using an enviable database of 70 million comments, which they’ve dug into to try and tease out the sources of the conflicts. I have a database of a bit over 900,000 comments here (and another 800,000 at the sadly gutted comment database at scienceblogs), but unfortunately the way blocks are handled in wordpress means blocked comments are eventually completely purged, so I can’t compare them as the Guardian does. They report that about 2% of all comments are abusive, trolling, or otherwise blockworthy, which sounds about right — that’s probably in the high end of the ballpark of the percentage of filtered comments here. When you look at it through that lens, just the percentage of all discussions of all types that are abusive, you’re typically going to get a very small number.

It’s also the case, although the Guardian didn’t look at this, that the number of abusers is even smaller. There are a relatively small number of obsessive, dedicated individuals who do their damnedest to poison conversations all over the place — I see pretty much the same tiny rat’s nest of tedious trolls popping up in the sites I like to read — so it’s safe to say the majority of humanity is really decent online. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take many to wreck a discussion thread.

That’s especially true for the targets of abuse. Another thing the Guardian finds is that the trolls are focused: they tend to be racist and sexist.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

It’s an interesting series. They’ve made a good effort at identifying the problem, but then they go looking for a solution, and unfortunately, their answer is that they don’t have one. So they throw up their hands and ask their readers to leave a comment suggesting one. Unless that’s a trick to get some more comments to analyze, that doesn’t sound like a good approach. It’s a bit like polling a cancer to ask it how we can make our body a little more pleasant to live in.

Bill Nye vs Sarah Palin? Nope, sorry to say, it’s not happening

All day long I’ve been hearing that Sarah Palin and Bill Nye were going to appear together on a panel to discuss climate change. I looked into it and didn’t believe it: it was going to be some one-night media blitz to promote a “documentary” about global warming by denialist Marc Morano, with an in-person introduction by a gang of bozos.

With welcoming remarks by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, cinema audiences will learn more about the topic through a panel discussion headlined by Sarah Palin, 2008 Republican Vice Presidential Candidate and Governor of Alaska from 2006-2009, moderated by Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the Media Research Center and including other notable experts. This riveting discussion will focus on climate change and issues brought up during the event.

Lamar Smith? Brent Bozell? Sarah Palin? I know Nye is willing to charge right into the lion’s den, but his name isn’t even mentioned there, and it would be total folly to leap into such a one-sided event.

Fortunately, it’s not going to happen. They’re going to play video clips of Bill Nye, no doubt so they can argue against him while he’s not there.

May I suggest, instead, that they put an empty chair on the stage? It’s a common Republican tactic, and it’s the only way they can win a debate on science.