Stalker!

It’s like she’s following me everywhere. Stephanie has a summary of upcoming conferences, and I seem to be at all of them.

This year I have resolved to NOT write a whole new talk for every event I go to, because it was killing me*, so she’s probably going to skip my sessions at least a few times.

*Also, somehow, over the last few years I’ve ended up developing and teaching a brand new course every year, and this coming term is no exception (at least it’s a core course with a long history, but I still am new to teaching it). There’s nothing quite like having to compose three or four new lectures every week for my job and, oh, by the way, do another one for fun for the weekend.

Comedy is dangerous

Abdi Jeylani Malaq Marshale must have been an awesomely brave person. He lived in Somalia, he was a comedian, he made fun of Islamists, and he worked to dissuade young people from joining the insurgency.

So someone shot and killed him.

And it’s not just comedians!

So far this year, at least one Somali journalist has been targeted and killed each month.

The Jack D. Ripper School of Reproductive Biology

So I got in this odd twitter argument — arguing against a point so stupid, so against reason and biology, that I didn’t bother to bring it up here. The source of this argument was an MRA site, AVoiceForMen (home to the odious JohnTheOther and Paul Elam, if you recall), and the discussion was about the relative biological cost of sex. The standard biological view is that sex is cheap for men, and expensive for women; men produce numerous small, cheap gametes, most of which are disposable and thrown away, and do not have to bear the cost of pregnancy and lactation, and can often dodge the bother of child-rearing altogether, while women produce very few large, metabolically expensive gametes, and by necessity bear all the costs of pregnancy and lactation. And of course, in our culture, they also get saddled with most of the work of raising children.

The MRA argument was a perverse inversion of reality. It argued that men are the costly sex, because they have to ejaculate their precious sperm during intercourse, while the ladies just lie there and have fun.

We have this attitude toward hookup culture because we are convinced that male sexuality has no value. Not even no value, we think male sexuality has negative value.

Men sow their seed hither and yon; women guard their vaginas like Fort Knox.

But is this true?

Let’s think about it logically. With each act of sex a male ejaculates semen into the female. This is an investment of physical resources that takes time for the male to replenish. So male animals are limited in how often they can have reproductively viable sex. Female animals, on the other hand, are not. The sex act has zero cost to them.

Now, the reason this obvious truth is invisible to us is because we lump in the cost of carrying young with the cost of sex. Yes, carrying young is high female investment but the sex act itself is higher male investment.

It really is the ‘precious bodily fluids’ argument presented seriously. Men are the ones who should guard their essence, while women shouldn’t care.

Why? Because, quite simply, his sperm is in limited supply. He wants to prioritize delivery of sperm to a.) high quality females and b.) less mated females.

I don’t even…

Men spontaneously produce approximately 100,000,000 sperm cells per day. We make them whether we have sex or not. They have a limited shelf life; there is good evidence that mature internally stored sperm begin to decline in quality after about a week.

There is no sperm shortage at all.

Women, on the other hand, produce one gamete per month. If you want to make the “limited supply” argument, and an economic claim that a scarce commodity will be marketed much, much more carefully, it ought to be applied not to the menz but to the womenz. And also note that the only way the author can make her (yes, her) claim at all is by intentionally neglecting all the costs of pregnancy.

There are a couple of commenters there arguing with this patently bogus rationalization — it would be hard not to, it’s so absurd — but other commenters are just unbelievably gullible.

Epicness sauteed in awesomesauce!

As long as you ignore the fact that it’s, like, wrong.

And if you’re fond of word salad, how about this?

Best written post on Female’s Hypergamy & their polyandrous relationships, Female sexuality is pretty much distorted, When sexual revolution was forced on to become the social and cultural norm, WOMYN in majority never repelled it or rejected it, they gladly accepted it and have made it their daily routine (To fuck more men) their so called pair bonding in ancestral time was “Forced” pair bonding but with new innovations like “NO FAULT” divorce and incentives, cash prizes and child custody they are now pretty busy shaking up more dicks after breaking up with their “now” ex’s.

But overall MGTOW are catching up with that, Maybe PUA are mindless drones but even though male sexuality is also becoming more like female sexuality, Even more males are now calling out their inner “ape” or “gorilla” because of this new CULTURAL and SOCIAL Norm of sexual revolution, but as i said Women were the starter of all this insanity and they are now reaping what they sow.

I’m sorry, but I feel queasy at the thought of linking to AVoiceForMen (officially declared a hate site by the SPLC!), but here’s another article that effectively shreds their idiocy. Read that instead.

Why I am an atheist – QB

I know I am an atheist because when the dive team found my friend’s 8 year old daughter after being underwater for almost 15 minutes, my first reaction was NOT to plead and bargain with some godly being, but rather to hope that the science was on our side. While I drove to the hospital, I counted minutes. I calculated the water temperature, hoping that the natural springs and recent rain fall had made the lake cold enough to preserve brain function. I recalled every article, every journal, and every medical book I had ever read about the survival rate for children in drowning accidents.They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but in the panicked, 25 minute, 90 mph drive to the hospital, I realized I thought of everything…except to pray. 

[Read more…]

The only abortion argument that counts

We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.

For the sake of your sanity, do not read the comments. The Catholics have descended upon it.

Ark Park news

Ken Ham’s boondoggle in Kentucky is still mired in sluggish fundraising, but he still believes they’ll be open in 2014…only now with an incomplete park. They’re now talking about building it up gradually over a decade, starting whenever the can begin construction. Looking at AiG’s numbers, though, I don’t see why they’re at all optimistic.

The first phase of the project will cost $73 million to build, and $6 million has already been spent on land acquisition and design. So far, Answers in Genesis has raised $7.5 million, with private investors pitching in an additional $15.5 million to the LLC, leaving $22 million left to raise before they have enough money to break ground, and $44 million left to complete the project. Boone estimates it will take 12-24 months to secure the funding to break ground, then it will take another 24 months to complete construction.

The company will then have to raise $53 million for additional phases of the park throughout next decade.

So just the initial phase will cost $73 million, and they’ve raised, over the last couple of years, a total of $23 million? That’s a big puddle of money, but the rate of growth suggests that they’ve pretty much already drained the existing pool of willing donors. And after that $73 million, they need another $53 million before we get to see that exciting ’10 plagues of Egypt’ ride!

They also discuss some of the other crap they have planned.

Outside the ark, Marsh details the proposed “parade of animals,” in which Noah leads dancers and musicians dressed as animals “in a spectacular choreographed hybrid of ‘world dance’ and music to create the unique flavor and experience of a pre-Flood culture,” all while being heckled by actors playing Pagans who doubt Noah.

Oh, boy. Cheese and corn, two great flavors that go great together! And just what is pre-Flood culture? Anything that existed more than 4400 years ago? And what are they celebrating, the imaginary ruthless annihilation of all those singing and dancing variety acts?

They also say that PBS has a three-part documentary on building the Ark Park in the can, that will be aired this fall…does anybody know anything about that? What kind of documentary can you build out of a gang of preachers dunning churches for money, and is Ken Burns making it?

Hey, Thunderf00t fans: stuff it!

Ah, it’s another bright crisp summer morning, and I wake up to birds singing, the distant sound of the freight train moving through Morris, and the mad dinging of my email software, alerting me that there’s another flood of new hate mail on twitter, on youtube, and in my mail. Yes, it is August, and Thunderf00t has created a new video denouncing feminism. And me. And the accusations flooding in are so stupid and so wrong. I shall address them one more time, and then, please, slip on your nicest toe shoes and tutu and pirouette up your own anuses.

Here are a few of the bloody idiotic complaints I get.

  • “I am so disgusted with you and your war with Thunderf00t.” Aside from this post here, today, I have completely ignored Thunderf00t for the last several weeks. He, on the other hand, is making videos and twitter comments about me. There are certain people who, I think, don’t understand the internet: if I made a post two weeks ago or a month ago or a year ago, it persists. It doesn’t mean I’m sitting here right now, obsessing over something I wrote yesterday, even.

  • “How dare you violate Thunderf00t’s right to free speech!” This one is especially ironic, given that it’s made in response to Thunderf00t blithering away loudly and freely on the internet, again. We’ve done nothing to compromise his ability to express himself. We have said that this organization does not support his views, and will not give him our space or resources to do so.

  • “You and Rebecca Watson banned Thunderf00t!” No, we didn’t. We refused to support Thunderf00t’s dumbass crusade against feminism on our blog network. Also, do you realized that freethoughtblogs.com and skepchick.org are completely different entities? Rebecca Watson has no input at all on our management, and vice versa.

  • “You banned Thunderf00t for simply disagreeing with you!” No, we get disagreement all the time, and bloggers here have issues with each other frequently. What Thunderf00t was fired for was joining a network he clearly detested and immediately launching a campaign to tell everyone to stop talking about subjects he didn’t like. He hates freethoughtblogs, in case it wasn’t clear to you by now, so why the hell did he join at all? If it was to undermine it from within, his overt antagonism from day two onward made it clear he wasn’t going to be persuasive in the slightest. Dumbest fifth columnist ever.

  • “You promised you wouldn’t meddle with what he wrote!” Yes, and we didn’t. We didn’t edit or censor one word that he wrote: his blog is still here, completely intact and untouched. What we didn’t promise is that we’d give him space on our network forever and ever. I know he’s fond of complaining in academic terms about this, so digest this: he was never granted tenure here. He doesn’t get to complain that his tenure contract was violated, because didn’t have one. Now maybe if he’d built up some social capital with us, and demonstrated some ability to make an intelligent contribution, we’d have been more reluctant to let him go…but he didn’t, and showed no interest in doing so. He had no friends among the established bloggers here, and didn’t want any. That wasn’t a very collegial attitude.

Let me add one more thing: there’s this unfortunate idea that these attacks have to be personalized and focus on just me. I’m the guy who recruited Thunderf00t to join the network. He immediately raised the hackles of just about everyone here; we had a review committee that looked over his raw contempt for everything here, and the pile of disgusted emails we were getting, and his atrociously childish writing, and said, “Uh-oh, this was a huge mistake, this guy does not belong here.” And I was then the guy who asked everyone to hold off on kicking him out, he’ll settle down and start writing good stuff. And then he didn’t. And he didn’t. And he got worse. And every day I felt guiltier and guiltier, not to Thunderf00t but to this collective here where we’ve otherwise done such a good job in gathering good, intelligent writers…so when the whole group decided they could take no more of his abuse, I volunteered to deliver the axe in expiation. I was Thunderf00t’s sole advocate here (my big mistake). If you have a beef here, it’s not just with me, it’s with the whole damn network of about 40 writers who were unhappy to be saddled with a flaming asshole.

Now we’re done. We have been done for a long time. Thunderf00t is not and will not be a part of this network, and it’s quite clear he doesn’t want to be part of it, except to destroy it. I’ve addressed the complaints of his ignorant and indignant followers, so I’m putting it to rest — I’ve blocked him on twitter, I’m not reading his blog or watching his videos, so if you want to complain further, do your posturing for Thunderf00t, not me, because I don’t give a damn.