What do you call your hoohah/diddly-dingle/whatchamacallit?

I just ran across this jaw-dropping thread on Reddit, where medical personnel talk about the most uneducated thing they’d heard from patients. The whole thread is horrifying, but one story struck me as particularly relevant to modern politics. It’s about teaching children what to call their genitals.

I used to teach genito-urinary exams.

Med student asks this hillbilly guy to lift his penis out of the way so she can examine his testes.

“My what?”

“Your genitalia,” she says. “Your penis.”

“My what?”

At this point I intervene. I point to his crotch. “What do you call that thing there?”

“Thomas.”

“Well, get Thomas outta the way, would ya?”

EDIT: Since people are asking.

  1. To do a testicular exam right really does take two hands. Also, we ask the patient to lift it out of the way himself because it gives him a sense of control over what can be a very embarrassing procedure. There’s a lot of the steps in GU and DR (digito-rectal) exams that are mostly just there to establish patient comfort, not to give meaningful information.
  2. This is not the only time I’ve asked someone what they called their genitals because they did not recognize the proper names. Most people are only taught euphemisms for their genitals growing up. Once upon a time, it was not discussed in school for reasons of propriety. It remains an anatomical grey zone for a lot of people – they know their thumb is their thumb because their momma called it a thumb, but their momma never told em what to call the thing between their legs.
  3. Which, BTW, time for a PSA: teach your children the proper names for their genitals early on and make sure they are comfortable discussing their genitals frankly. Which sounds weird. But when their crotch stays a gray zone, associated with embarrassment, then they are (1) less likely to examine it for irregularities, (2) less likely to tell someone in a timely manner if they find irregularities, (3) less able to communicate exactly what’s wrong, and (4) less likely/able to communicate it if an adult touches them inappropriately.

You know what a Republican would call that? Grooming.

Here’s another response.

ref: #3. This. Source: I am a detective in Crimes Against Children. When a child is interviewed and they use the non proper name for their penis or vagina it means the interviewer then has to spend time clarifying this with this children and making the child more uncomfortable having to discuss it. Also, if children understand that these are normal body parts they will be more willing to learn about body safety and won’t view it as simply a “bad part”. This makes your child safer.

Groomer!

Preschool Teacher here: If you tell your kids it’s a bad spot, they’ll think they’re bad if something happens, and think they’ll be the ones in trouble. Seriously, don’t fuck your kids up because you’re too embarrassed to say penis and vagina, you dips.

Oh my god, a pre-school teacher talking to students about their genitals? GROOOOOMER!.

Jesus, I hate this timeline.

Kent Hovind whacked off to me again

Explain this, bozo.

Also to Jerry Coyne. Now there’s a fantasy trio that ought to send shivers of revulsion down your spine! Anyway, I was once again featured on Hovind’s “Whack-An-Atheist” series, and he once again avoided my challenge.

Way back in January, after repeated demands that I debate him, I offered a different alternative: that Kent Hovind should read a book. I even suggested one, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, because it’s a good general overview of the evidence for evolution, and would give him something actually said by an evolutionary biologist to sink his teeth into.

He responded by…not reading a book, but just regurgitating the same tired, false points he’s been making for decades. Come on, Kent, at the very least I expected this would compel him to get some new material! But nope, it was same ol’ same ol’.

Then he did it again yesterday. Still not reading a book, but instead digging up a YouTube video of Coyne presenting a summary of some of the concepts in the book, and whining about that with the very same slides he’s been using for years.

My god, but Kent Hovind is the laziest creationist on the circuits. It’s not a thick book, it’s written for a popular audience, it’s a relatively easy read. Reading it might have spared him from making a few ludicrous errors.

What Hovind did was focus on a tiny part of the story, which is generally a good idea, but he clearly picked the part where he thought he had a good gotcha. He drilled down into Haeckel. Coyne talked about how some embryonic features reveal their evolutionary history, like the presence of hind limb buds in dolphin embryos — retention of conserved features in development is evidence of evolution. Hovind, though, went on a familiar tirade about Ernst Haeckel, and his discredited theory of evolutionary recapitulation from the 19th century.

It’s totally irrelevant. That a scientist advanced a wrong theory about evolution 150 years ago does not change the fact that embryonic similarities are observed, that they make no sense in terms of modern function, but do make sense in the light of evolution as relics of their ancestry. It would be a bit like me attacking Hovind’s interpretation of the Bible by citing the Book of Mormon at him; I don’t think Hovind considers Joseph Smith to be a significant contributor to his ideas. Going on and on about the invalid Biogenetic Law to refute Coyne’s discussion of embryonic atavisms is basically the Wookie Defense.

Now if he’d actually read Coyne’s book, he’d have known that trying to attack him via Haeckel was inappropriate. Coyne also rejects the Biogenetic Law, as he explains in chapter 3:

This “adding new stuff onto old” principle also explains why the sequence of developmental change mirrors the evolutionay sequence of organisms. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one.
Noting this principle, Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionist and Darwin’s contemporary, formulated a “biogenetic law” in 1866, famously summarized as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This means that the development of an organism simply replays its evolutionary history. But this notion is true in only a limited sense. Embryonic stages don’t look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel claimed, but like the embryonic forms of ancestors. Human fetuses, for example, never resemble adult fish or reptiles, but in certain ways they do resemble embryonic fish and reptiles. Also, the recapitulation is neither strict nor inevitable: not every feature of ancestor’s embryo appears in its descendant, nor do all stages of development unfold in a strict evolutionary order. Further, some species, like plants, have dispensed nearly all traces of their ancestry during development. Haeckel’s law has fallen into disrepute not only because it wasn’t strictly true, but also because Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar that they really are. Yet we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Embryos still show a form of recapitulation: features that arose earlier in evolution often appear earlier in development. And this makes sense only if species have an evolutionary history.

Yeah, fallen into disrepute. So why try to play gotcha with Coyne on that point? Coyne is actually presenting a von Baerian perspective here: von Baer, who did not accept evolutionary theory, had observed how similar early vertebrate embryos were to one another. That fact is not in dispute. I can go into my lab right now and pull up slides of sectioned and stained chick, mouse, and frog embryos that all show these shared developmental features. Pharyngeal pouches are a real thing! You can’t make them disappear by citing someone’s flawed pet theory for them.

Bonus! There’s a footnote in the passage above, and here it is.

Creationists often cite Haeckel’s “fudged” drawings as a tool for attacking evolution in general: evolutionists, they claim, will distort the facts to support a misguided Darwinism. But the Haeckel story is not so simple. Haeckel may not have been guilty of malfeasance, but only of sloppiness: his “fraud” consisted solely of illustrating three different embryos using the same woodcut. When called to account, he admitted the error and corrected it. There’s simply no evidence that he consciously distorted the appearance of the embryos to make them look more similar than they were. R.J. Richards (2008, chapter 8) tells the full story.

Coyne is a little too generous here. I think Haeckel demonstrated an over-zealous commitment to his theory, and while it may not have been conscious, he did bias his examples to favor an incorrect idea. He is correct, though, that it is really common for creationists to dig up the dead corpse of poor old Ernst Haeckel and wallop on it for a bit while telling everyone they’re defeating Darwinism. They aren’t.

By the way, the bit in the Origin where he discusses “the strongest single class of facts in favor of change of forms”, consists of Darwin discussing, among other things, von Baer’s observations of embryos, not Haeckel’s. Hovind misses the mark again, but I don’t think he’s read the Origin, either.

America, where corrupt criminals are just funny characters on a TV show

I have never watched this show, The Masked Singer, in which celebrities are dressed up in silly costumes to sing songs, and then celebrity judges try to guess their identities. It sounds insipid. From the few short clips I have now suffered through, it is deeply, painfully, agonizingly stupid. Do they pay the audience to put on over-the-top expressions and squeal excitedly over banalities, or is it just that the kind of people who get tickets to see the show are selected for idiocy?

Anyway, they unmasked one “singer” in the most recent show. It was Rudy Giuliani.

Is this the new path for rehabilitating the reputations of deplorables, letting them caper and dance like court jesters for the mob?

Fuck that evil clown. Fuck that show.

The Florida brain drain begins now

Not content with denying the existence of gay people, or policing the kindergartens, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is going after the universities. He wants to abolish tenure.

Every five years, he said, tenured faculty would be required to go before their university’s board of trustees, which could part ways with them. The text of the bill does not give that level of specificity but rather states a five-year review would take place to be determined by the state Board of Governors. Each state university already requires tenured professors to take part in an annual review.

“Tenure was there to protect people so that they could do ideas that may cause them to lose their job or whatever, academic freedom — I don’t know that’s really the role it plays, quite frankly, anymore,” DeSantis said. “I think what tenure does, if anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy. For people that have dissenting views, it becomes harder for them to be tenured in the first place and then, once you’re tenured, your productivity really declines, particularly in certain disciplines.”

House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the legislation a way to prevent “indoctrination.”

Here we go. Here’s where they reveal their real agenda.

He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”

How dare those professors “smuggle in ideology and politics”…into political science courses. How dare they teach about other political systems than Republican-approved ideologies! That’s what this is really about, not to protect dissenting views, but to enforce their ideology.

The tenure system as it currently stands absolutely does not allow one to be denied or stripped of tenure for political reasons — you cannot fire someone for voting Republican. DeSantis plans to change that so you can fire someone for being a Democratic activist, or for teaching about “socialism and communism”. Tenure is specifically about keeping political biases out of the hiring & firing process. Florida Republicans are aiming to inject those biases back in.

Florida faculty are trying to fight back.

Currently, the boards of trustees must approve all faculty who receive tenure, Gothard said, adding it is not a lifetime appointment. Faculty can still be fired with cause.

”Tenure allows for due process and a hearing and has typically protected people from being fired for political reasons,” he said. ”From where we stand, the only indoctrination happening right now is coming from Tallahassee.”

Tim Boaz, president of the University of South Florida’s faculty senate, said he believed the legislation resulted from misconceptions about higher education.

The Republicans are also trying to jigger the accreditation agencies, forcing the universities to change agencies every few years. That is insane. Accreditation is already a bureaucratic nightmare, with outside regulators demanding a complete accounting of every detail of the university’s machinery — which is a necessary nightmare, and making universities accountable is good practice. But right now we go through the cycle and we get suggestions from the agency about what needs to be improved, and get goals to implement before the next cycle, and we can use prior recommendations in our next review to show that we’ve been addressing the criticisms. Pull the rug out from under us and change agencies, and you’ll be greatly increasing that bureaucratic workload.

Also, you know where this is going: suddenly switching in the American Bible College Accreditation agency for a secular agency is going to wreak havoc.

Good luck, Floridians. I wouldn’t recommend taking a tenure track job in Florida to anyone anymore. The universities are going to be packed with Liberty University graduates from now on, and they suck.

It’s not real, Ted

Ted Cruz thinks we have to worry about “space pirates”. Really. I’m not making this up.

During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space discussing space policy, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cited the threat of space pirates as a reason to back Trump’s unpopular “space force” idea. Cruz is the chair of the committee.

Discussing threats to commercial and governmental space assets, Cruz then veered off course into the realm of the fantastic.

“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors,” Cruz said. “Pirates threaten the open seas and the same is possible in space.”

The threat of space piracy, Cruz said, now means America must recognize “the necessity of a space force.”

He’s quite annoyed that those danged Leftists are making fun of him, and is trying to defend his argument.

The threat of nations destroying commercial resources in space is not space piracy. The pirates he’s talking about were independent, lawless adventures robbing ships of cargo. There are no people living in space who might decide to start looting passing spaceships; there is no significant commercial cargo transport in space.

Coincidentally, the video game No Man’s Sky has just come out with a new update called “Outlaws” in which you have to fight off the depradations of space pirates. I’ve found that if you upgrade your phase beam and positron ejector they’re easily fought off.

Also, it’s a game. It’s not real, Ted.

Fighting back

Lana Theis: a horrible person who shouldn’t be in politics.

This is inspiring. Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow was accused by another politician, Lana Theis, of being a pedophile and a groomer — get used to it, this is the preferred tactic of Republicans everywhere, and every Democrat is going to get labeled “groomer” in the next campaign season. McMorrow decided to fight back with a fierce rebuke, which I think is the best strategy. It’s analogous to another great reply to Joseph McCarthy by Joseph Welch, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It ought to be our standard reaction when a Republican lifts their slimy head up from the muck they wallow in.

I sat on it for a while wondering why me?

Then I realized…

I’m the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of “parental rights” if another parent is standing up and saying no.

So you dehumanize and marginalize ME. You say I’m one of THEM. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.

Here’s a little background on who I really am.

Growing up my family was active in our church. I sang in choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations, b/c she was divorced, and because he didn’t see her w us at mass every Sunday.

Where was my mom on Sunday?

She was at a soup kitchen. With me.

My mom taught me at a young age that Christianity and faith was about being a part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others –

especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less…often unfairly.

I learned that SERVICE was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing “Christian” in your Twitter bio and using it as a shield to target and marginalize already-marginalized people.

I also stand on the shoulders of people like Father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame who was active in the civil rights movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution – and who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten, and reached out and locked arms with Dr. Martin Luther King when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching with them to say, “We got you.” To offer protection and service and allyship, to try to right wrongs and fix the injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one is this room is responsible for slavery.

But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. We decides what happens next, and how WE respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

I want every child to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted if they are not straight, white, and Christian.

People who are different are not the reason our roads are in bad shape, or healthcare costs are too high, or teachers are leaving the profession.

We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they’re not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact peoples lives.

I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

And I want to be very clear right now:

Call me whatever you want. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment.

We will not let hate win.

I’m glad that Christians like McMorrow exist, but I fear that there are a great many wretched, hate-filled, repressive Christians like Lana Theis. I hope that the people of Michigan make Theis’s political career a short one.

In recovery mode, bring more spiders

Yesterday was a lost day. After my booster shot, I experienced the usual phenomena accompanying a challenge to the immune system: aching eyeballs, aching bones, fever, muscle weakness, etc. Man, my immune system was angry and spoiling for a fight, so SARS-CoV-2, I’m warning you, don’t come around here or you’re going to get a whuppin’.

I’m feeling a little less battered today, so here’s something to cheer everyone up: a whole page of charming and cute spider pics. As you might guess from the adjectives, these are all “cute”, which means they’re almost all jumping spiders. Everyone likes jumping spiders. Appreciation of the terrible beauty of, say, Latrodectus is something that has to be learned.

Did anyone get the license number of that bus?

It somehow ran over me in bed. It might have something to do with whatever was in that needle yesterday. I think the problem is compounded by the fact that Mary cheerfully offered up her left deltoid for the shot, and I unthinkingly did the same…forgetting that I sleep on my left side. I was waking up sporadically all night long as I rolled on that painful shoulder.

Today I’m booked up with appointments until 7pm.

Stupid bus.

Boosted again

Mary & I got our second booster shot this afternoon, a Moderna chaser to our previous Pfizer shots. We better be safe against COVID now! I also think that if we get one more, making 5 injections, we ought to either get a free coffee refill, or we should start to transform.