Another familiar story

I’ve heard variations on this theme so many times now. When will we wise up?

In 2010 I went to a prestigious invite only conference in the tech world. I was, at this point, widely welcome in those rooms I’d dreamed of going in. I counted. My heart soared — it really felt like we’d turned a corner. It wasn’t just that there were more women. There were, but also they were talking. It was like pushing on a giant stone for all my life, then one day feeling it finally shift underneath my fingers.

On Saturday night I was sexually assaulted. Specifically, I was groped. I hit my aggressor in the chin and knocked him back. Despite having probably 100lbs on me, he stumbled drunkenly and barely kept his footing. “Touch me again and I’ll break your nose,” I told him. He laughed lightly, still finding his feet, and said “I like this one!” I looked at him, to catch his eye, and replied calmly, matter-of-factly “No. If you touch me again, I will break your nose.” He laughed again, but wandered away from me, looking to grope easier prey.

This is how I’d felt all my life, like my job was to not be easy prey. But this was a professional field, not the fucking Serengeti. I walked a little later with the conference organizer, a woman older then me, and of much stature in tech. I told her I was so happy to finally see women in my field. “But,” I said, “I think these incidents will be more common for a while. These guys don’t know how to behave around women.” To myself, I added bitterly, or other human beings at all.

In part, the tech community had allowed in women, but in part it had also only failed to keep them out.

I think her reaction was spot on. Fewer antelopes, more lionesses.

The ENCODE delusion

I can take it no more. I wanted to dig deeper into the good stuff done by the ENCODE consortium, and have been working my way through some of the papers (not an easy thing, either: I have a very high workload this term), but then I saw this declaration from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

On September 19, the Ninth Circuit is set to hear new arguments in Haskell v. Harris, a case challenging California’s warrantless DNA collection program. Today EFF asked the court to consider ground-breaking new research that confirms for the first time that over 80% of our DNA that was once thought to have no function, actually plays a critical role in controlling how our cells, tissue and organs behave.

[Read more…]

Mocking Mormon underwear, unironically

Oh, yuck. Look, the Mormon underwear thing is ridiculous, but so is wearing a crucifix, and dunking your baby’s head in water, and dotting your forehead with ashes once a year, and praying. The Mormons I’ve known never make a big deal of wearing it, and it’s generally not a huge issue — it’s silly and they know it, and it’s more like a baseball player wearing his lucky socks during every game rather than a dominating part of doctrine that will influence political policy.

I can enjoy a good mocking of the goofiness of it all, except that in this video, their sources are motherfucking Bob Larson and an evangelical Christian street preacher. And the irony of their complaints goes completely unremarked.

Bob Larson, for those who don’t know of him, is a radio preacher best known for doing demonic exorcisms over the air, and for fueling the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s that baselessly ruined so many people’s lives. I could not go on to poke fun at an idiotic religious ritual after watching goddamned evil Bob Larson shoveling pancakes into his mouth. It would be like going on a hunt for wicked Unitarians by first consulting the Witchfinder General.

Alien bodysnatchers and spiritual zombies…my favorite people

Dwight Longenecker is apparently writing some awful book that includes a discussion of atheists. He has some very strange ideas about us, as this excerpt shows. [Oops, wait! That page has magically disappeared! Good thing I grabbed a copy before he deleted it.]

Is there really such a thing as an utterly authentic atheist? I think so. I have a dreadful feeling that there exists a sort of human sub-species who have lost their spiritual capacity completely. These authentic atheists do not profess belief in God, nor even disbelief. Instead they seem entirely deaf to such ideas. They do not hate the Church or say the Bible is a fairy tale. They do not spit out bigoted remarks that blame the Pope for the holocaust or missionaries for murder. They do not attack the arguments for the existence of God, say the universe is random, or call Rick Warren a simpleton. They do not rage against God, any more than someone born blind has dreams in color. These are the authentic atheists. They plod through life eating, working, shopping, breeding and sleeping, and God never seems to flit across their consciousness. Members of this sub-species may be sparkling sophisticates or ill-bred boors. They may be the decent and moral folks next door, or they could be despicable murderers. In a frightful way, it doesn’t matter. If they exist, perhaps they have bred and spread like the alien bodysnatchers, and exist in our midst like spiritual zombies—indistinguishable in the teeming mass of humanity except to those few who see them and tremble.

Weird. He recognizes that atheists have the same range of variation that theists do, and do everything believers do, and even admits that the differences don’t matter (and isn’t that frightful!), but still, the fact that god-thoughts don’t flit across their brains all day long makes them zombies and something to fear.

I can see his concern. I understand that there are people who plod through life eating, working, shopping, breeding and sleeping, and squid never seem to flit across their consciousness, either. That I manage to avoid categorizing these poor afflicted individuals as members of a different subspecies or as scary zombies is simply testimony of an inherent decency that Longenecker lacks. Of course, there are a few differences between squid and gods: squid exist, and people don’t look at people who love marine organisms and use their beliefs as a reason to forgive them for raping children, or thinking that Rick Warren is not a dangerous simpleton.

By the way, one good thing about deleting the post is that he also wiped the comments. I have a real problem with reading blogs written by Catholic priests: it’s all the sycophantic commenters who insist on calling the author “Father”. There is only one man who I loved and respected who earned the right to be addressed as “Father” by me, and he didn’t do it by being an example of gullibility or by teaching me to worship ghosts. It’s a title that resonates strongly with me, and I hate to see it used for people who don’t deserve it. It’s like seeing Kent Hovind called “doctor”, only worse.

Also, it’s fucking Patheos. Patheos, the web portal that didn’t have enough bullshit on display, so they opened an astrology portal.

Follow @Spa_YediMonster today!

She’s going to be live-tweeting the Creation Evidence Expo in Indianapolis this weekend. It looks awful and hilarious; Carl Baugh will be there with his hair, and John Whitcomb, the guy who poisoned a generation’s minds, and and a host of lesser intellectual vacuums who will do their best to reduce the knowledge in the lecture rooms over the next few days.

Also, if you don’t do Twitter, she’ll be posting a post-catastrophe brain dump on Biodork. I can kind of guess what ‘evidence’ for creationism they’ll be dragging out, but it’ll be good to be updated on what the loons are thinking is important nowadays.

Telepathy doesn’t work, but it’s your fault if you can’t read my mind

So in the interest of learning more about the environs hereabouts I’ve been digging into a little of FTB’s history, and I’ve noticed that this place has a handful of detractors. (Which, you know: good work, everyone!) And there’s a little logical kink at the heart of some of that detraction that has me amused. That little logical kink, summed up in logical bullet points:

  1. People in the general community of skeptics agree that action at a distance/prayer/telepathy/ whatever you want to call it is useless at best, that mere intent in and of itself makes nothing in the physical world happen.
  2. Some of those same people strongly object to the Schrödinger’s Rapist trope first promulgated at Kate Harding’s blog, which basically says that a man’s intent with regard to his conduct toward a nearby woman is not always physically obvious.

Surely skeptics who dismiss claims of telepathy cannot logically then get angry when it’s pointed out that women are not telepathic. Surely free-thinkers who ridicule those who pray for positive outcomes without doing more to make those outcomes happen can’t then turn around and say it’s unfair for women to be wary of a strange man because he merely fails to want a negative outcome to their encounter.

And surely people devoted to dispassionate logic would never tolerate such blatant contradiction in their own minds, let alone in their movement.

Speaking of Kate, if you haven’t ventured over to see her new Tumblr venture about victim blaming, “Don’t Get Raped,” you ought to — and those of us who value trigger warnings would do well to keep in mind that the site, as you will no doubt have guessed from the name, is probably triggering for thirty or forty distinct things.

I need to send Kate a link to this story so that she can post it with the title “Don’t Go To Burning Man.”  That link bears a trigger warning for those of you triggered by victim-blaming colonic irrigation devices.