Another science conference, another old white man getting honored

Unpleasant stuff is trickling out of the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

Just because you study scaleys and slimies doesn’t mean you have to be slimy yourself.

The story has already made the news.

Adam Summers, an ichthyologist in attendance, wrote on Twitter: “Herp League decided the most distinguished herpetologist they could find was Dick Vogt. His talk included scantily clad female students. Blue box cover ups were added without Vogt’s knowledge.”

Showing scandalous slides, she said, “is something he’s been doing for 20 years. … There’s a big difference between what he does and just (pictures of) students in normal field garb.”

So the guy is notorious for doing this, he’s been doing it for decades, and women have been avoiding him…and yet the society still goes ahead and gives him an award.

Latest word: the award has been rescinded.

They dream of becoming the thought police

I watched scattered bits of the Strzok grilling yesterday (if you weren’t paying attention, Wonkette has the most interesting interpretation/”transcript” of the day). The one thing that struck me was how all the Republicans were hammering on one point: Strzok had his own opinions of Trump, and that his presence in any investigation means they were biased and unfair. It reminded of how the media goes flocking to “undecided voters” in every election, as if ignorance and vacillation and equivocation are some kind of ideal state of mind. As Strzok pointed out over and over, what matters is how he acts; does he act objectively, does he work with others who have different biases to reach a consensus? You are not going to find any intelligent person whose mind is devoid of opinions.

But there the Republicans sat, insisting that everyone who participates in any difficult analysis is not allowed to have any kind of independent perspective. There seems to be a total lack of understanding that everyone has biases, including goddamned Republicans, and that we have mechanisms to try and overcome them. But no, they want mindless lackeys doing all the work for them (which does, I admit, tend to give Republicans an edge in working for the government).

What we really have to worry about, though, is more mind-reading dentists running for congress.

I had no idea dental schools were a predecessor to the Psi Corps.

Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya has been arrested

But he’s such a holy man!

The guy who authored that genuinely bizarre creationist text, The Atlas of Creation, and who ran a weird television program featuring heavily made-up “kittens” robotically endorsing young earth creationism, seems to have fallen spectacularly in a bust by the Turkish government. Singing the praises of the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, doesn’t seem to have helped him.

Notorious Muslim televangelist Adnan Oktar, known for leading a cultish group, was arrested by Turkish police in Istanbul on Friday over a number of serious charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.

Police said they are conducting a widescale operation led by the financial services department spanning five Turkish provinces. Authorities are looking to detain 235 of Oktar’s followers, and police said they had detained around 150 so far.

It’s clearly not just the arrest of a single man, but a huge crackdown on the entire cult. I have no sympathy for Oktar and his perversity and foolish ideas, but I also don’t much care for tyrannies and totalitarian police states. He’s a crook and a fraud — fine, arrest him for financial improprieties. He’s running a sex cult — pick him up for human trafficking and assault. I’m not too keen on arresting him for violating religious purity.

Following the court ruling, the head of Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, Ali Erbas, criticised his TV show.

“There are certain religious references [on his TV show] and he makes belly dancers dance. Is such a thing possible? He has most likely lost his mental balance. He now says he is a freemason but he was punished previously for his remarks about freemasonry,” Erbas said.

“He was also jailed for insulting [founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kamal] Ataturk in the 1980s and 1990s, But now he speaks of himself as the greatest Kemalist. He’s a corrupted person.

“It is not right to watch a TV channel like his,” Erbas added.

You know, it’s not as if they lacked sufficient grounds to charge him on serious crimes without arresting him for featuring belly dancers.

Other charges Oktar faces are sexual intercourse with minors, kidnapping children, sexual harassment, blackmailing, holding people captive, menace, political and military espionage, fraud by exploiting religious feelings and beliefs, money laundering, violation of privacy, forgery of official documents, opposition to anti-terror law, coercion, slander, alienating citizens from mandatory military service, insulting, false incrimination, perjury, aggravated fraud, opposition to law against smuggling, opposition to tax regulation law, bribery, preventing one’s right to education and civil rights, torture, illegal recording of personal data, and violating the law on the protection of family and women.

Wow. Wouldn’t want to be him. I think we can now say that the biggest organization in Islamic creationism has been thoroughly crushed.

Facebook lies

Facebook claims to be cracking down on “fake news”, but in a press conference with journalists to announce their great progress, the Facebook flak was asked one simple, penetrating question. What about Alex Jones’ InfoWars site? Is that going to be blocked?

Guess what…no. They aren’t touching this one extraordinarily prominent source of patent bullshit. Nope. This one is an obvious no-brainer, yet somehow they make excuses to avoid an easy target that would demonstrate a real commitment to cleaning up their service.

During yesterday’s session, Su argued that Infowars operates in a gray area — often toeing the line of provably false but not always crossing it — and, according to CNN, suggested that the company was focusing its takedown efforts on outlets that “can be proven beyond a doubt to be demonstrably false.”

Huh. Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?

I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.

The word you’re looking for is “officious”

assertive of authority in an annoyingly domineering way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters: a policeman came to move them on, an officious, spiteful man.

• intrusively enthusiastic in offering help or advice; interfering: an officious bystander.

Isn’t that perfect? I’m just getting tired of these stories coming up every day about white people reporting black people for mowing a lawn, or selling candy, or picnicing, or walking in a neighborhood. Use it more often.

Use it in a sentence: White people, why are you being so fucking officious?

I don’t think Elon Musk reads Pharyngula

But he did suddenly announce that he was going to fix Flint, Michigan’s water problem right after I suggested it here. It is kind of an obvious ploy for a glory hound, and it seems other people suggested it at the same time I did.

Of course, he also declared that the problem was mostly solved already, so that he’s leaping into a problem he thinks is already fixed, just to get some of the credit — especially since he’s only announced this on Twitter and hasn’t bothered to contact anyone in Flint.

“Most houses in Flint have safe water, but they’ve lost faith in govt test results,” he said in another tweet. “Some houses are still outliers. Will organize a weekend in Flint to add filters to those houses with issues & hopefully fix perception of those that are actually good.”

Candice Mushatt, Flint’s public information officer, said in an email that neither Musk nor anyone representing him had contacted the city. Flint is replacing pipes and covering the costs involved with that process, she said.

The article also points out that shareholders are getting a little peevish about his grandstanding.

Jesus, Piers Morgan is a terrible person

Watch this embarrassing spectacle: he berates Ash Sarkar for protesting Trump’s visit to London because he claims she didn’t protest Obama’s immigration policies enough. This is a regular “Dear Muslima”: let’s rank offenses so we can tell people to shut up if they haven’t protested everything. Sarkar, at least, hammers back, which was satisfying.

As a teacher, the worst bit for me was when he asks her how many people were deported under Obama, she says she doesn’t know the number but she was aware of the expansion of repressive immigration policies under Obama, and Morgan just badgers her incessantly to name a number when she’s plainly said she doesn’t know. That’s the worst kind of gotcha game. And then he uses the fact that she doesn’t have this one number at her fingertips to claim that Obama is her “hero” — which leads her to point out that she’s a communist and doesn’t support the American Democratic party.

He is just a terrible person. We Americans drove him out of the US by not watching his obnoxious, awful program — maybe the UK needs to catch up with us in this one regard.

Can you have him deported?

Shermer will slide out from under this — it’s like slime on a slug’s back

Here we go again, another exposé of Michael Shermer’s deplorable behavior. He’ll just shrug this one off, too, and no one will care and no one will abandon Shermer. But it does have some interesting points.

If you want to make Shermer cry, hit his pocketbook.

That evening, Shermer told me, he noticed his talk was poorly attended. At dinner afterward, his faculty host told him about Napoleon’s message. Upset, Shermer responded by sending a long email to the SBCC all-campus list in which he accused Napoleon of defamation, said that both Wallace and Napoleon had aimed “to personally harm me,” demanded that The Channels retract its “libelous article,” and told both the school and the student newspaper that they “will pay” for any book sales affected by the coverage unless they pulled the piece.

Carol Tavris disappoints, deeply.

Napoleon says that this was not her intention, and while she did hire a lawyer, she was unimpressed by the threats from Shermer and his legal team. “If they specialize in libel and defamation,” she told me, “they should know that me sharing public articles about you from 2014 is neither libel nor defamation.” Napoleon says she was also surprised to receive an email from Carol Tavris, a prominent psychologist and a writer for Shermer’s magazine, asking her, “in the spirit of feminism and fair play,” to consider that Shermer had been falsely accused, and to apologize for her email.

In the spirit of feminism and fair play, how dare you try to silence women who complain about Shermer’s sexism.

And surprise! Shermer claims not to be litigious, and to have never sued anyone!

“Shermer is notoriously litigious,” said PZ Myers, who received legal notice from Shermer after originally posting the allegations in 2013. “You know that as soon as you say something, he’s going to come down on you with his lawyers.” (In an email, Shermer responded to Myers’ claim by defining litigious as “prone to engage in lawsuits,” and adding: “I have never sued anyone.”)

Right. He just threatens people with lawsuits to bully them into silence. I wonder how many times he has done this and succeeded? Does it outnumber the times he has tried and failed, as he did with me? It’s also ironic that he’s making this claim in an article about the time he tried to threaten a school paper with a lawsuit.

Still, good to know for other people he blusters at: by his own admission, he has never followed through on his threats.

Also interesting that the faculty member who invited Shermer and angrily defended him was, at the time, already under Title IX investigation.

What everyone seems to agree on is that events quickly veered in unexpected directions, and the interaction set off campus-wide discussions at SBCC. Prolonging the controversy, the school recently chose not to rehire the professor who hosted Shermer on campus, Mark McIntire, an adjunct philosophy instructor who taught at SBCC for more than 20 years. The college, McIntire says, told him that he was not being rehired because of deficiencies in teaching. McIntire was also under a Title IX investigation at the time for personal emails he sent to female faculty members after the Shermer incident, which some women reported as threatening. Shermer and McIntire have characterized it as political retaliation.

Birds of a feather. Although McIntire was eventually cleared, sort of.

The Title IX investigation, which was completed in June, cleared McIntire of wrongdoing in his emails to faculty members, but did reprimand him for unethical behavior.

I wonder if he learned his ethical behavior from reading Shermer’s books?

The paper tiger, though, once again admits to his impotence.

Meanwhile, Shermer says he has racked up $3,000 in legal fees. “From where I sit now, I wouldn’t have done anything,” he said, expressing concern over McIntire’s situation.

I also have to sympathize with Raeanne Napoleon, the chair of the chemistry department at SBCC, who posted the letter that got Shermer so upset.

“I didn’t think twice about sending that email,” Napoleon said, adding that she now feels naïve. “I sent that email thinking this is the right thing to do. This is what you do. I watched the #MeToo movement happen!” Napoleon said. “I thought you spoke out against this stuff. I didn’t realize that speaking out would be so hard.”

Yeah, I spoke out. It’s been 5 years since, watching everyone let an accused rapist slide right on by, with no repercussions on his career at all.