I just looked up all bleary-eyed from staring at papers all day to notice that we suddenly have an inch or so of snow piled up on the ground. I was wondering why my wife was so late getting home from work — she’s probably creeping along on slushy roads trying to make it home safely.
And—oh, no—I have to drive to Minneapolis tomorrow!
All violence in this video is intended entirely metaphorically.
Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?
Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?
Be honest now.
I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.
That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?
What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.
And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.
And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.
I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.
It isn’t at all unusual for the authors of scientific papers to leave a comment at a blog discussing their work — it’s happened here quite a few times, and it’s a good thing. It’s a plus when they confirm what you’ve said or add more information to the discussion, and it’s also wonderful when they correct you on errors. I think most scientists are getting the idea that blogs are tools to help disseminate scientific ideas to a wider audience than the science journals can. They certainly don’t replace the journals, but add a way to inject the results into the public sphere, where they can be part of a popular conversation.
Sometimes you do find scientists who don’t quite get it. Dr Isis wrote a critique of a paper in the NEJM that reported a correlation between the change to daylight savings time and heart attacks; she thought the data was interesting, but the interpretations were sloppy. She pointed out some observations that were glossed over, suggested that some specific interpretations were a bit off, and listed some other articles on similar topics.
The authors took exception to the criticisms and left a comment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of informative comment, pro or con, that advances an argument — it was more of a condescending dismissal that ignored her comments and suggested that she needed to learn some basic epidemiology. And then there was this bit:
There can be many other explanations and pathways not written here (again we had a strict limit). The reviewers and editors agreed to our interpretation as probably the most likely one. So were experts in this field all over the world who commented our study so far. We would actually encourage you to write a comment to NEJM. NEJM is well known for its devotion for scientific debates on recently published papers. That would be a normal way to debate and discuss scientific findings. We would also have a possibility to answer on an “equal ground”.
The first part is a particularly annoying misconception. Peer review is only a first, preliminary hurdle for a paper to cross; passing peer review and getting published does not mean that your work is right. Some incredibly awful papers get through the review process, somehow. Getting published only means that now your paper is going to be opened up to wider criticism. Don’t take the attitude that publication means vindication; I know reviewers, and I’ve reviewed papers, and I know that reviewers are sometimes lazy, sometimes susceptible to croneyism, and always overworked, and that publication doesn’t mean you are right.
The last part shows that the authors have the wrong idea about blogs. A blog post is different from a letter to NEJM; it can reach a much wider audience, for one thing, and uses a little more stylistic variety than dry academic writing to appeal to a larger group (Dr Isis is definitely guilty of that — she uses humor, which is often sadly lacking in medical journals). I get the impression that the authors would prefer criticisms be made in the journal, not because it would directly target the best people able to understand the argument, but because it would limit the number of people who would see the disagreement.
The attitude that this is the “normal” way to discuss science is also aggravating. It is a restrictive view that contributes to the popular conception of scientists as aloof and unengaged with the culture, and it’s not true. We need to change the idea of normal so that talking about science over breakfast is normal, that having a conversation about science around the watercooler at work is normal, that guys at the bar get into arguments over science instead of football (sometimes) is normal. Change normal!
And finally, a blog is equal ground. The authors could have easily thrown in a few observations and explanations that supported their position, rather than treating Dr Isis like some ignorant nobody they could swat away by telling her to take a course in epidemiology. Explain your answers as you would to an undergrad or bright high school student. If you can’t, it implies that you aren’t looking for an equal opportunity, you are looking for a way to avoid probing questions.
(via DrugMonkey)
Besides spending some time with the good people of Americans United, I’ll be giving a talk at George Mason University at 7pm on Saturday night. Here’s the flyer:
If you can’t quite read that tiny print, the information is also online at the Beltway Atheists Meetup Group and on Facebook.
Say, does anyone want to invite Obama to show up?
By the way, you should read AU’s post-election analysis of the state of the religious right. You will be disappointed to learn that they did not simply evaporate after the election.
I don’t know that I should be encouraging the troop at Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge to compete with me, but OK, it’s a poll, anyone can join in. This one asks, Do you agree with the gay marriage bans?. It does have an interesting twist, in that the poll also displays the states of respondents, so you can see where Redneckistan is. Or another way to look at it is that you can vote to defend the honor of your state.
I don’t know what it does with you non-Americans. Those bits of geography don’t seem to exist on this map.
At least there seems to be one in Montana: candidate Roy Bown was accused of being…a vegetarian.
“I am not and have never been a vegetarian,” Brown said. “I am disgusted by the baseless allegation that I am a vegetarian and that my personal eating habits should somehow be construed as opposed to the economic interests of Montana’s livestock industry.”
So…would a compromising photo in Montana be one catching a politician eating peas and carrots? Are cholesterol levels and a history of heart attacks advantages in races there?
Some people are getting a bit cranky about the fact that I pissed in their cornflakes this morning, so here’s a little more exposition.
A charismatic new face appeared on the political scene, somebody who was honest and sympathetic and intelligent. So he was a little more religious than I liked; he’s still a good man who promises to repair the damage of the former presidency. He’s running against a relic of that previous corrupt administration, his campaign slogan is all about change, and I am so relieved to have a promising choice. I campaigned for him, I stayed up all night with my friends on election night cheering him on, and I woke up the next morning optimistic for the future, glad that we finally had a progressive president.
Obviously, that wasn’t this year’s election. It was 1976, the very first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote, and the candidate was Jimmy Carter, a man I still think was probably the most honorable and decent president of the 20th century. But optimism and good intentions were not, are not enough. What followed Carter’s election was well-meaning bumbling, a dismal and unaccomplished presidency, and Ronald Reagan, the catastrophe that paved the road to our current state.
This election was so much like that one, only even more so. And I dread the possibility that jubilation will lead to complacency, that moderation will produce stasis, and that what will follow an Obama presidency could be something far, far worse than we can imagine.
So no, no ebullience from me, no brief relaxation into celebration. I’m charging up my cattle prod, because I want to goose the Obama administration into actually getting something done in the coming years. I think Obama could be a great president, especially since greatness in that office is measured by the magnitude of the challenges faced (which are off the scale), and the ability of the leader to rise to them. There is reason to have hope, but hope doesn’t get the job done.
Ten years from now I don’t want to be praising Obama by commenting on his generosity and his carpentry skills.
The New Humanist Bad Faith Award poll is now open for voting. I nominated Sarah Palin, but I think she’s well on her way to negligible irrelevancy now, so you might as well pick one of the others.
We didn’t have to wait long for right wing brains to explode into loopy, tangled strands of conspiracy theory nonsense. Creationist brains, already in a state of disarray, are already predisposed to this kind of inanity, so don’t be too shocked at what Cynthia Dunbar, creationist, Christian, and member of the Texas State Board of Education has to say:
So we can imagine the blatant disregard for our Constitution, but what other threats does an Obama administration pose? We have been clearly warned by his running mate, Joe Biden, that America will suffer some form of attack within the first 6 months of Obama’s administration. However, unlike Joe, I do not believe this “attack” will be a test of Obama’s mettle. Rather, I perceive it will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny.
Apparently, Obama is going to have the terrorists he loves so much carry out some awful action, which will excuse the use of martial law and the subsequent abridgment of our constitutional rights. Talk about projection — has she looked at the Bush record since 2001?
