It must be Ray Comfort Day on twitter or something, because he has his followers whipped up into a fine froth. Among the recent noisemakers was someone called Republican Mom (I already dislike her) who said this to me:
The atheist scientists are richer than Ray is silly little boy! Big business evolution is! $$
Then I did nothing, but someone else looked it up. In case you’re curious, here’s Ray Comfort’s worth in 2008. I’d have to say he’s doing quite a bit better financially than I am.
I used to hide in a back room in our basement where I had a stash of roadkill, and I’d … study … anatomy without telling my parents.
Parents, talk to your children. Don’t let them go down my path. You can point to me in public and whisper, “If you keep playing with bones, you’ll end up like him.”
Ooh, a roundup of all things Lovecraftian. Lots of weird cool stuff here: may I recommend The Call of Cthulhu as if drawn by Dr Seuss?
Also, to whet your appetite for FtBCon 2 (coming on 31 Jan-2 Feb), I’m organizing a session on atheism and the Cthulhu mythos, and have already lined up some great speakers for it.
I mean, do read the comments! In an article titled Why Atheists Have a Serious Problem With Women, the commentariat perfectly exemplify why women have a serious problem with atheists.
I would just point to those comments and say, “That. There. That’s exactly why the movement is having this dispute: because so many of our members are in denial of reality.”
The guy who has been pestering Skeptics Guide to the Universe to fire Rebecca Watson, and is also associated with the always lovely pro-harrasment site A News, and who created the anti-Rebecca Watson facebook page, has been revealed. It’s Cecil Fuson. Mr Fuson really, really hates Rebecca. He’s really disgusted with this feminist stuff.
Mr Fuson is also a registered sex offender who was convicted and went to prison for “indecent liberties with a minor” in 2003.
It was probably those damned feminists who railroaded him.
<Cue shrieks of “Dox!” and “Free speech!” (oh wait, not that last one, this time)>
The name “Flamboyant Cuttlefish” is perfect, and if you watch the video you’ll see even better why they deserve to strut.
Hmm, maybe I should retroactively get my kids’ names changed to “Flamboyant Myers”. Or at least their middle names. It’s got to have an effect.
Something that really, really annoys me is reading a paper discussing a rich and complex data set in which the authors squink their eyes tightly and use statistics to zoom in and stare fixedly at one parameter. It happens all the time. It’s as if some scientists think it’s a triumph to reduce a phenomenon to one single simple cause, rather than appreciating the diversity of inputs.
The latest example is a study pegging yet another medical procedure as the cause for autism, in this case, early induction of labor and augmented delivery. Autism is probably a perfect target for these kinds of silly approaches; it almost certainly has a wide range of contributory causes, and it’s always a mystery to the parents of affected children, who look for answers. It’s the vaccines, they say. No, it’s the drugs we took during pregnancy. No, it’s the doctors who did funny business in the delivery room.
Fortunately, we’ve got Emily Willingham to actually look at the forest.
When she looks at the data, she finds that the authors are right, that there’s a correlation: if a mother gets both induction and augmentation, there’s a 27% increase in the chance that the child will later be identified as autistic.
What they don’t tell you is that the same data set shows that having a college-educated mother increases the odds of autism by 30-33%. And that smoking during pregnancy decreases the chance of an autism diagnosis by 14%.
Wait, stop! If you’re pregnant, don’t take these numbers as an indication that you need to start watching more Glenn Beck to make yourself stupider, and that you need to take up a tobacco habit. You’re looking at the tree again and ignoring the forest. What these correlations suggest is that we should be looking into some property of the population that unites them — that each one in itself is not necessarily causal, but that they are common symptoms of the true link. We need to see the big picture to puzzle out the answer.
And sometimes interpreting the phenomenology of a single parameter analysis would lead to a bad result: I can pretty much guarantee you that being a heavy smoker during pregnancy is much worse for the fetus than non-smoking.
Willingham does see the bigger picture.
This study didn’t show that induction or augmentation during childbirth substantially increases the risk for autism, although it hints at a greater influence of socioeconomic status and by implication, healthcare access. If anything, based on earlier literature, it adds a slight if only mathematical confirmation of the perception that births involving autistic children can be associated with more complications, such as the presence of meconium, gestational diabetes, and fetal distress, than births involving non-autistic children. And that points to induction and augmentation as useful in these situations, not as problematic, and certainly does not affirm them as a risk.
Oh, look, it’s practically a jungle!
You know what’s weird about the video below? The media are more indignant about the video than they are about Mayor Bob Filner’s behavior! How dare people re-appropriate a sexist song to mock a creeper?
Wait, that’s not weird at all. This seems to be the standard line: when a powerful man is accused of sexual misconduct, the source must be discredited by any means.
I’ve compared him to Dennis Markuze before, and it’s exactly the same: using internet protocols and an abundance of free time to constantly harass people he doesn’t like with pointless, content-free noise. The offender goes by the pseudonym “@elevatorGATE” on twitter (right away, you can tell what inspired him), and he’s been doing this for years now, obsessively dunning his targets with noise. There are some differences: Markuze aims his vitriol at skeptics who questioned the existence of paranormal powers.
@elevatorGATE hates women.
Another difference is that Markuze is a despised loner, while @elevatorGATE is surrounded with a little cloud of filth, people who share his hatred and use @elevatorGATE as an amplifier and who love to cloak themselves in the indignant mantle of FREE SPEECH! What they really want is the opposite, though: their goal is to drown out dissent with persistent shouting, and preferably to drive their victims out of social media altogether. They’re more of the trollish toxin that’s poisoning the internet. They’re also the first to squawk if anyone makes an effort to personally block their intrusions — these are privileged idiots who feel it is their right to demand that we listen to them.
Their latest tool is to use Storify. @elevatorGATE constantly gathers up tweets into a little bundle and echoes them back repeatedly; it’s especially easy because when he does that, all of his targets get a little notification (I’ve had to set up my accounts to automatically trash all notifications because the noise is deafening and useless). Imagine dealing with a junior high snot who’s brilliant strategy for harassing you is to follow you around and repeat everything you say, over and over: that’s the brain of @elevatorGATE. And there’s the newest offense: he thinks he has the right to do that. And worse, the CEO of Storify has agreed.
Ana Mardoll and John Scalzi have posts up about this. Scalzi has published a letter he received about this problem.
A Twitter and Storify user who goes by the handle “@elevatorGATE” is a well-known cyberstalker of women via social media. His latest method of doing this is to compile thousands of pieces on Storify, often including every single tweet sent by his chosen targets, and then publish them, which notifies the women in question that he had published yet another piece archiving their every word. After repeated complaints and requests for help, Storify temporarily deactivated the notification feature on his account, which doesn’t actually solve the problem.
In a conversation yesterday with Xavier Damman, the Storify CEO suggested that the women @elevatorGATE is targeting turn off all notifications from Storify, which essentially suggests that they withdraw from the medium if they don’t like being stalked, and which also wouldn’t solve the problem of this user archiving everything these women say. One of the users pointed out that this is very much like telling a woman who is being harassed via telephone to never answer the phone. It was at this point in the conversation that Damman went from passively enabling a stalker to actively assisting one. He tweeted, in response to the women, that they “…can’t do anything about that. It’s @elevatorgate’s right to quote public statements…”
Prior to this point in the conversation, the women had named their stalker, but not used the @ symbol in front of his username. You know enough about Twitter to know why that’s a big deal. Damman either carelessly or deliberately notified a man stalking multiple women that they were seeking some way to prevent him from continuing to harass them, and then claimed it was no big deal because anyone searching for the information would have been able to find it. But there’s a very big difference between information existing and that same information being directly brought to a person’s attention.
If you know much about stalking, you’ll know what happens next. @elevatorGATE has substantially stepped up his harassment of the women who had asked Damman for help. Men who follow him on both Storify and Twitter have been bombarding these women via Storify notifications and Tweets with additional harassment. He has also increased his harassment of known online associates of the women in question, making it difficult for them to seek out help or support from fear of his beginning to stalk their friends as well. It’s the reason I’m contacting you privately, via email, rather than via social media: I’m afraid. I don’t want to be added to his list of targets.
Think about that. Damman runs a company that is utterly dependent on social media, and he’s so incompetent or so heedless that he doesn’t recognize the responsibilities or potential for abuse in his own software. He is unaware that his product is easily misused by stalkers. That should be a cause for a lack of confidence in Storify.
I do have to correct the letter above on one point. It refers to “Men who follow [@elevatorGATE]…”, but I also know of several women who also defend him and chortle along with his barrages.
@elevatorGATE should be getting the same treatment that Dennis Markuze got. His followers should be ashamed of themselves. And Damman should either work to correct his company’s product’s flaws, or he should go bankrupt.
OK, that’s not saying much. Lots smarter. Here she takes apart his stupid video.
