[CONTENT WARNING: liberal spoilers for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker]
Reprobate Spreadsheet
/dev/random, unless I make a hash of it
[CONTENT WARNING: liberal spoilers for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker]
The two strongest arguments for allowing transgender athletes to compete as the gender they identify are the argument from biological diversity and the argument from human rights. When I was outlining the latter case, I settled for merely establishing the right to self-identify existed and just assumed everyone would agree to indivisibility.
Human rights are indivisible. Whether they relate to civil, cultural, economic, political or social issues, human rights are inherent to the dignity of every human person. Consequently, all human rights have equal status, and cannot be positioned in a hierarchical order. Denial of one right invariably impedes enjoyment of other rights. Thus, the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living cannot be compromised at the expense of other rights, such as the right to health or the right to education.
Now that I’m some distance from the argument, I can better picture someone rejecting indivisibility. I mean yes, as I pointed out back then, rejecting indivisibility also rejects decades of legal precedent, but leaning entirely on the letter of the law makes for an iffy argument. I should have propped up the argument by pointing out how devaluing one right harms the ability to enjoy every other right.
Trans people routinely face challenges to their basic humanity every day. Their very existence is being contested. How much rights they should be allowed to have is considered a topic for debate. When some group of people are seen as equal in dignity and rights, the rest of the society doesn’t argue about whether they should have the same rights that everybody else takes for granted. […]
Trans people are routinely discriminated by landlords and potential employers. For example, one of Freethoughblogs bloggers is a trans woman who is forced to dress as male at work, because nobody will hire her as a woman. Cis people aren’t forced to present themselves as a gender they are uncomfortable with in order to find a job. […]
I personally have been refused access to healthcare, because several transpobic doctors felt like kicking me out of their offices. Here you can read the full story about that. I am a European Union citizen, The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that trans people have a right to obtain various medical procedures that would change their gender. Nonetheless, transphobic doctors and bureaucrats still figured out a loophole how to de facto deny me the surgery I requested.
Fortunately, Andreas Avester has my back. As one of his debut blog posts, he’s done an excellent job of pointing out all the consequences of rejecting indivisibility. It’s well worth a read, all on its own.
I was planning on signal-boosting the YouTube boycott, thanks to a message by Great American Satan, until everyone else beat me to it. For an awareness campaign like this, it’s more useful to space out your messages than doing one big blast, so I deliberately held back. But what is there to do once the boycott’s done, you ask?
Well, some of you might be tempted back to YouTube. There are alternatives out there, though. For instance, Intransitive posted an animated short about the Le Mans crash of 1955. Problem: it was host on YouTube. Solution: it was also on Vimeo! Rather than blindly follow that YouTube link, do a bit of digging to see if any other site is hosting it. I’d also like to plug the Internet Archive, which hosts everything from Democracy Now! to classic cartoons.
You could also contact Google/YouTube directly. Yeah, Google’s support ranges from byzantine to bad, but did you know they post a mailing address for YouTube? Track down that pen that’s migrated to the back of your desk, fish out a blank sheet of paper from the printer tray, and send them a polite but firm message about their new terms of service.
If that all sounds like too much work, why not hit them in the pocketbook? There are multiple YouTube ad blockers available, all of which can be installed with a single click, and these tools are popular enough to keep up with Google’s countermeasures. Just be sure to uninstall it if or when Google relents! It’s what I’ll be doing, now that I can watch PyData videos again.
[HJH 2019-12-14] With the benefit of hindsight, I can see an objection to my last bit of advice. Yes, blocking ads will hurt Google’s bottom line, but it also might hurt the bottom line of YouTube creators. Aren’t I taking money out of their pockets?
For the most part, people aren’t making money off YouTube ads. Some big channels rely on Patreon to keep afloat, while others use paid sponsorships, and neither is significantly effected by a YouTube ad blocker. In both cases it’s easy to make up for any lost revenue due to your ad block.
The entities who do make genuine money off YouTube ads either have a second revenue stream you can drop money into, were already famous and don’t need the cash, or are gaming the system in some way. This last category is the one most hurt by removing ad revenue, and while that would prevent a Baby Shark it also prevents Elsagate. Ironically, this gamification is also the cause of YouTube’s draconian new Terms of Service, because the old one could not satisfy video creators, advertisers, and viewers at the same time. The new one solves the issue by allowing YouTube to crack down on creators however they see fit, should bad press float their way.
Blocking ads does not prevent quality content creators from surviving on YouTube, but it does harm those hoping to game the system and pocket a quick buck. So long as that remains true, blocking YouTube ads is perfectly moral.
Consider this scenario.
ME: “Hey, thanks for coming over! If you’re thirsty, I’ve got your choice of Pepsi, A&W Root Beer, and Mountain Dew.”
YOU: “I’d prefer Mountain Dew, but I’ll take anything.”
ME: “Gotcha, I’ll be right back!”
ME: [leaves, then returns with a Pepsi]
YOU: “Thanks. Too bad you ran out of Mountain Dew.”
ME: “Oh no, I’ve got tonnes.”
YOU: “… but it was too tough to reach, right?”
ME: “No, the Dew was right next to the Pepsi.”
Have I done anything wrong here? No, at least technically. You said you were fine with any soft drink, and I gave you a soft drink. At the same time, though, you expressed a preference for Mountain Dew over the other choices. I could be forgiven for ignoring your preference if I wasn’t able to fulfill it, or doing so would have been inconvenient for me, but in this fictional scenario both of those were off the table. My choice to hand you a Pepsi instead of a Mountain Dew reveals something about me, most likely that I think other people should prefer Pepsi over other soft drinks. You could point to the ordering of my list as further evidence: I’d be more likely to list my preferred option first, as it would be more prominent in my mind than the other choices, and then rattle off others as they came to me. This isn’t strong evidence, but you’d be justified in suspecting my motives as you enjoyed your Pepsi.
robbe de Boer: Hey EOT, I had a question not related to this video, what pronouns do you prefer? I couldn’t find anything real quick.
EssenceOfThought: They. But I’m fine with both she and he as well. It’s all on the channel description/Facebook page ‘About’ section. 😛
By merely existing, EssenceOfThought has set up a very similar situation. They have a pronoun preference, and when listing their pronoun choices put “he” last, but also say they aren’t offended if you pick another reasonable one. The difficulty in typing two extra letters is practically zero, and “they” as a singular pronoun has been in the English language for six centuries, so there isn’t any obstacle to its use beyond your hang-ups. Hell, even the guy who became famous for refusing to use transgender people’s pronouns is perfectly capable of using singular “they.”
Jordan Peterson: I don’t recognize another person’s right to decide what words I’m going to use, especially when the words they want me to use, first of all, are non-standard elements of the English language and they are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people. They might have a point but I’m not going to say their words for them.
So if we encounter someone calling EssenceOfThought “he,” we’re justified in raising an eyebrow. While they’re not technically in the wrong, the use of “he” is suggestive that they’d overrule someone’s pronoun preference if they thought they could get away with it.
Steve McRae: Essence of thought bullies Rachel Oates and demonstrates himself to probably one of the worse humans ever to be on Twitter or YouTube.
[12:00] Noel Plum: The truth of the matter is, is that effectively in saying what he’s saying, Essence of Thought has said, to the majority of people who have sided with him, you are transphobes. Your position is, transphobic unless you adopt this position that anyone who identifies as a woman gets to compete in this category, then you are holding a transphobic position. And his masterstroke is that it seems to have done the trick, and nobody’s arguing – none of his supporters are arguing with him.
Rachel Oates: In regards to Essence of Thought calling the police and claiming to be the ‘only one’ actually helping me. It didn’t. He called the police. Who apparently turned up at my old flat, broke the door down and then they wasted hours and many resources trying to find me. Meanwhile, I was at home with my friends around me, having all my Youtube friends send me love and support and check in on me. My family phoned me. People were there for me, helping.
The analogy isn’t a perfect fit. In there, I asked for your choice and received it. EssenceOfThought will mention their preferred pronoun if asked, but does not put it on blast nor do they bother to correct people who don’t pick their preference. Ignorance is more of an option than the analogy presents.
Provided, of course, these people were ignorant. Some of them claim to care about transgender people, though. They should know not to screw up someone’s pronouns, and thus be willing to do a little extra legwork to get things right. Even if they only use “he” because their friends and peers do so, that means their social circle is overwhelmingly dominated by transphobic people or people with a high tolerance to transphobia.
Rachel Oates: Also, I’m really sorry if I got EoT’s pronouns wrong in this thread – I’ve heard different things about which pronouns they prefer & may have slipped up here.
A good way to rule out ignorance is to correct them on EoT’s preferred pronouns. If that person responds with something like this…
Noel Plum: If he drops the “he” then I will drop it too. As it stands he accepts he, she or they. I couldn’t give a toss which he “prefers” as i don’t like him.
… then you’re pretty justified in believing the “cloaked transphobia” hypothesis.
“He” is also a strange choice given how EssenceOfThought presents. You see someone with no facial hair and long flowing locks in front of a transgender flag, and you immediately jump to “he?” C’mon, even Rationality Rules splits the baby and uses “she.” These people didn’t settle on “he” by accident, their choice reveals something about their internal opinion of transgender people, their peer group, or their ignorance.
And it isn’t very refreshing.
I’ve already covered some of this material, as has EoT, so you might be wondering why I’m repeating myself months after the events in question.
The old stuff hasn’t been well-organized nor placed in chronological order. My own efforts, for instance, were at the end of the second-half of a long blog post where I was pretty harsh on Rationality Rules. There’s room for a more dispassionate summary of the full context of what happened, especially if allegations about this “will be amplified by social media and echo for weeks, months, maybe years.” I’m pretty firmly on EoT’s side, but by minimizing my commentary in favour of direct quotes I can create a summary that Rachel Oates’ supporters will also find useful. The primary bias of this post will thus be via lies of omission, so I’ll try to be as comprehensive as possible. There’s also material that neither EoT nor I have mentioned, most of it focused on Rachel Oates’ side of the equation, so her point of view is better represented.
With that intro out of the way, let’s begin at the beginning. All dates and times are based on Twitter’s timestamp, which I think uses my timezone of Mountain Daylight Time, though it’ll be helpful to know about India Standard Time. Oh, and CONTENT WARNING for transphobia, plus mention of suicide and self-harm. [Read more…]
[CONTENT WARNING: Aftermath of abuse]
Remember this, from a few posts ago? [Read more…]
We now live in an age where someone can back door your back door.
Analysts believe there are currently on the order of 10 billions Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the wild. Sometimes, these devices find their way up people’s butts: as it turns out, cheap and low-power radio-connected chips aren’t just great for home automation – they’re also changing the way we interact with sex toys. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of teledildonics and see how connected buttplugs’ security holds up against a vaguely motivated attacker, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at every level of the stack, ultimately allowing us to compromise these toys and the devices they connect to.
Writing about this topic is hard, and not just because penises may be involved. IoT devices pose a grave security risk for all of us, but probably not for you personally. For instance, security cameras have been used to launch attacks on websites. When was the last time you updated the firmware on your security camera, or ran a security scan of it? Probably never. Has your security camera been taken over? Maybe, as of 2017 roughly half the internet-connected cameras in the USA were part of a botnet. Has it been hacked and commanded to send your data to a third party? Almost certainly not, these security cam hacks almost all target something else. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk in general, and the combination of catastrophic consequences to some people but minimal consequences to you only amplifies our weaknesses.
There’s a very fine line between “your car can be hacked to cause a crash!” and “some cars can be hacked to cause a crash,” between “your TV is tracking your viewing habits” and “your viewing habits are available to anyone who knows where to look!” Finding the right balance between complacency and alarmism is impossible given how much we don’t know. And as computers become more intertwined with our intimate lives, whole new incentives come into play. Proportionately, more people would be willing to file a police report about someone hacking their toaster than about someone hacking their butt plug. Not many people own a smart sex toy, but those that do form a very attractive hacking target.
There’s not much we can do about this individually. Forcing people to take an extensive course in internet security just to purchase a butt plug is blaming the victim, and asking the market to solve the problem doesn’t work when market incentives caused the problem in the first place. A proper solution requires collective action as a society, via laws and incentives that help protect our privacy.
Then, and only then, can you purchase your sex toys in peace.
Apparently I know the solar system very well?
I attended a lecture on Carl Sagan, hosted by the Atheist Society of Calgary, and part of the event was a trivia challenge. While I wasn’t the only person at my table offering answers, my answers seemed to be the ones most consistently endorsed by the group. Assisted by some technical issues, our team wound up with a massive lead over the second-place finisher. The organizer from ASC surprised us all by saying everyone at our table could pick up a free T-shirt. I wasn’t terribly keen on wearing their logo, but I wandered over to the merch table anyway.
Sitting among the other designs was one that stopped me cold.
Abuse comes in more forms than many people realize. Take financial abuse, where someone uses economic leverage to control you, or reproductive coercion, or this behaviour.
Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse where the abuser intentionally manipulates the physical environment or mental state of the abusee, and then deflects responsibility by provoking the abusee to think that the changes reside in their imagination, thus constituting a weakened perception of reality (Akhtar, 2009; Barton & Whitehead, 1969; Dorpat, 1996; Smith & Sinanan, 1972). By repeatedly and convincingly offering explanations that depict the victim as unstable, the abuser can control the victim’s perception of reality while maintaining a position of truth-holder and authority.
Roberts, Tuesda, and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews. “A Critical Race Analysis of the Gaslighting against African American Teachers.” Contesting the Myth of a” Post Racial Era”: The Continued Significance of Race in US Education, 2013, 69–94.
A small but growing amount of the scientific literature considers gaslighting a form of abuse. It’s also worth knowing about a close cousin of gaslighting known as “DARVO.”
DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation. […]
In a 2017 peer-reviewed open-access research study, Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame, Harsey, Zurbriggen, & Freyd reported that: “(1) DARVO was commonly used by individuals who were confronted; (2) women were more likely to be exposed to DARVO than men during confrontations; (3) the three components of DARVO were positively correlated, supporting the theoretical construction of DARVO; and (4) higher levels of exposure to DARVO during a confrontation were associated with increased perceptions of self-blame among the confronters. These results provide evidence for the existence of DARVO as a perpetrator strategy and establish a relationship between DARVO exposure and feelings of self-blame.
If DARVO seems vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s a popular tactic in the far-Right. Brett Kavanaugh used it during his Congressional hearing, this YouTuber encountered it quite a bit among the Proud Boys, and even RationalWiki’s explanation of it invokes the Christian far-Right. DARVO may be common among sexual abusers, but it’s important to stress that it’s not exclusive to them. It’s best to think of this solely as an abusive tactic to evade scrutiny, without that extra baggage. [Read more…]
I was browsing YouTube videos on PyMC3, as one naturally does, when I happened to stumble on this gem.
Tech has spent millions of dollars in efforts to diversify workplaces. Despite this, it seems after each spell of progress, a series of retrograde events ensue. Anti-diversity manifestos, backlash to assertive hiring, and sexual misconduct scandals crop up every few months, sucking the air from every board room. This will be a digest of research, recent events, and pointers on women in STEM.
Lorena A. Barba really knows her stuff; the entire talk is a rapid-fire accounting of claims and counterclaims, aimed to directly appeal to the male techbros who need to hear it. There was a lot of new material in there, for me at least. I thought the only well-described matriarchies came from the African continent, but it turns out the Algonquin also fit that bill. Some digging turns up a rich mix of gender roles within First Nations peoples, most notably the Iroquois and Hopi. I was also depressed to hear that the R data analysis community is better at dealing with sexual harassment than the skeptic/atheist community.
But what really grabbed my ears was the section on gender quotas. I’ve long been a fan of them on logical grounds: if we truly believe the sexes are equal, then if we see unequal representation we know discrimination is happening. By forcing equality, we greatly reduce network effects where one gender can team up against the other. Worried about an increase in mediocrity? At worst that’s a temporary thing that disappears once the disadvantaged sex gets more experience, and at best the overall quality will actually go up. The research on quotas has advanced quite a bit since that old Skepchick post. Emphasis mine.
In 1993, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party centrally adopted a gender quota and imposed it on all the local branches of that party (…). Although their primary aim was to improve the representation of women, proponents of the quota observed that the reform had an impact on the competence of men. Inger Segelström (the chair of Social Democratic Women in Sweden (S-Kvinnor), 1995–2003) made this point succinctly in a personal communication:
At the time, our party’s quota policy of mandatory alternation of male and female names on all party lists became informally known as the crisis of the mediocre man…
We study the selection of municipal politicians in Sweden with regard to their competence, both theoretically and empirically. Moreover, we exploit the Social Democratic quota as a shock to municipal politics and ask how it altered the competence of that party’s elected politicians, men as well as women, and leaders as well as followers.
Besley, Timothy. “Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden.” THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 107, no. 8 (2017): 39.
We can explain this with the benefit of hindsight: if men can rely on the “old boy’s network” to keep them in power, they can afford to slack off. If other sexes cannot, they have to fight to earn their place. These are all social effects, though; if no sex holds a monopoly on operational competence in reality, the net result is a handful of brilliant women among a sea of iffy men. Gender quotas severely limit the social effects, effectively kicking out the mediocre men to make way for average women, and thus increase the average competence.
As tidy as that picture is, it’s wrong in one crucial detail. Emphasis again mine.
These estimates show that the overall effect mainly reflects an improvement in the selection of men. The coefficient in column 4 means that a 10-percentage-point larger quota bite (just below the cross-sectional average for all municipalities) raised the proportion of competent men by 4.4 percentage points. Given an average of 50 percent competent politicians in the average municipality (by definition, from the normalization), this corresponds to a 9 percent increase in the share of competent men.
For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women.
Increasing the number of women does not also increase the number of incompetent women. When you introduce a quota, apparently, everyone works harder to justify being there. The only people truly hurt by gender quotas are mediocre men who rely on the Peter Principle.
Alas, if that YouTube like ratio is any indication, there’s a lot of them out there.