Almost Diamonds

Moving Day

2011-09-01T10:12:00.001-05:00

After four-plus years of blogging independently (and as part of a group blog), I've been thinking for a while that it was time to join a blog network. While I've been invited to join elsewhere, it probably won't surprise you to find my new home is at Freethought Blogs. Even before the rumors of its existence were confirmed, it struck me as the best fit for this eclectic little blog. Luckily, Ed agreed.

I think you'll find it's a nice place to visit. The neighbors are great.

We've got PZ at Pharyngula, of course.

Ed takes one of the clearest stances I've seen on civil liberties at Dispatches From the Culture Wars.

The Digital Cuttlefish is still mixing rhyme and reason at a prodigious rate.

Comradde PhysioProffe is messing with the language (and an awful lot of rice).

Chris Rodda is keeping on the case of the Dominionists at This Week in Christian Nationalism.

Stephen "DarkSyde" Andrew stays on top of science and nonsense at The Zingularity.

And Reasonable Doubts keeps you up to speed on their podcast.

But that's just the original crew. We're bringing in reinforcements.

My boy Jason Thibeault will still be beer- and bacon-deficient at Lousy Canuck.

Greg Laden will be starting a new project at The X Blog that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.

Greta Christina will continue to talk about sex and atheism with unflinching (un)common sense.

Ophelia Benson has moved Butterflies and Wheels to a much more browsing-friendly location.

Assassin Actual is representing the atheists in foxholes.

Hank Fox is bringing us the perspective of a Blue Collar Atheist.

Daniel Fincke is practicing philosophy at Camels With Hammers.

Deacon Duncan is countering religious apologetics at Alethian Worldview.

And soon, Jen will be joining us with Blag Hag.

So please, update your feeds and your links to follow me to the new place, look around, get to meet my new neighbors if you haven't already. I'll introduce you over the next few weeks. They're a pretty cool lot, and the neighborhood is only getting bigger.

Businessmen's Heads

2011-08-31T10:39:00.001-05:00

It's one of those ridiculously busy times at work right now, so you'll get nothing of substance from me today. This, however, is making me feel a little bit better.

And be sure to tune back in tomorrow.

The Love of Problematic Literature

2011-08-30T10:27:00.000-05:00

Periodically, someone pops up to tell us we shouldn't like literature in which Bad Things happen. The most recent iteration of this is a critique of the sexism and misogyny of the world and characters in George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the critique. A writer friend recently had to fix a bad copyedit that consisted, in large part, of making the (non-historical, non-Earth) world of his book more sexist because "that's how high fantasy works." I understand that these things can be done thoughtlessly and pointlessly and in ways that contribute to the idea that "that's how the world works." But that doesn't mean that the presence of these elements mean that the work is thoughtless, pointless, or harmful to its readers.

Nor does it mean that the fans of that work, even if they disagree with you vehemently about the worth of the work, are drinking in the sexist Kool-Aid. We interact with what we read in complicated ways, even when we're deep in fandom. One of my favorite fantasy books sets the plot in motion by placing an almost supernatural value on beauty--which leads to a brutal incestuous rape. When I reread it, I often skip that part. I'm not up for putting myself through it, and while it's a necessary part of the story, I'm interested in what happens afterward.

Alyssa Rosenberg has that kind of complicated relationship with the Song of Fire and Ice, and she explains it, and what it means to read fantasy, beautifully:

And it seems particularly bizarre to assume that people read A Song of Ice and Fire because they want to live in the world depicted in it. The medieval era is a useful setting, because the conflicts are smaller enough than our contemporary ones that it’s possible to imagine that a single character can have an impact on the outcome, but big enough to feel that said impact is meaningful. Sady may find medieval warfare boring, which is her prerogative, but that does not mean that medieval warfare is inherently boring (the constant treatment of preferences as facts is one of the things I find most offputting about this mode of criticism), and the scale of it means that critics like Spencer Ackerman have been able to extract applicable lessons and metaphors about strategic thinking from it that are accessible to everyday readers. I tend to find the banking subplots both interesting and usefully, grimly analogous to our present situation. I read these novels with a profound thankfulness that I don’t live in this time period, but with a feeling of being energized by the characters’ triumphs. If I had an actual office, I’d have a replica of Needle over my desk, not because I want to live through Arya Stark’s privations, but because her strength in them reminds me of the smallness of my own obstacles, the tiny magnitude of risk I face in confronting them, and that spurs me on. People want to be part of the Brotherhood Without Banners not because they are really psyched to be peasants trying to survive in a country where the nobility is actively hostile to their flourishing, but because groups based on affinity for fiction can be really rewarding!

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Male Rape Victims: Let's Talk About the Men

2011-08-29T13:51:00.001-05:00

A few months ago, this video was posted.

Very shortly thereafter, a blogger posted an objection to one line of the video:

I love the organization and I support them in doing great things. However, there is one thing that rubs me the wrong way. Watching this video, I get the message that men don't get raped.

Yes, I am aware that the video portrays a woman, Shoshannah Stern, and shares her perspective on the rape culture. That's fine. The part that bothers me? At the end, she signs, and the message is printed on the screen: "Rape is hate crime against women." Not people. Not humans. Women. Just women.

This is a very measured version of an objection that is raised whenever women talk about the experience of being raped and about the culture and myths that support rape in our society. Men get raped too.

It's true, of course. Fewer men are the victims of rape than women (about 10% of rape victims), but the number is still not small. And we know there's at least one important difference when a rape victim is a man instead of a woman: Men are even less likely to report the crime. Aside from that, though, how well do women's descriptions of rape fit men's experience? Aside from not consistently naming men as victims, do women's discussions of rape do any disservice to male victims?

Luckily, although the phenomenon of rape of men outside of prison populations wasn't acknowledged immediately when rape became a major topic of scholarly study in the 70s and 80s, the literature has had some time to catch up. The following is very U.S.-centric and may not apply uniformly to childhood sexual abuse, but it is a quick review of what we know about the experience of male rape victims. Prison rape is included in this discussion, even though it isn't usually mentioned specifically because rape in prison looks very much like rape in the general population.

Definitions
Counting rapes is made more difficult by legal definitions that relate rape directly to procreative sex and direct violence. In many U.S. jurisdictions, rape is still defined as forced penile-vaginal penetration, although other types of rape are covered under other sexual assault charges. Making the term "rape" more general, to recognize other types of contact and situations in which consent cannot be effectively given, is controversial, but if male rape victims are to be treated seriously, changes need to occur.

The Rapists
Whatever the gender of the victim, rapists are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly heterosexual. This lends extra weight to the statement that rape is not about sex but about power, as does the fact that males are relatively more likely to experience gang rape. The relationship of the rapist to the victim is one of authority rather than sexuality. The exceptions to the heterosexual male rapist are generally found in date and domestic rape, in which people are forced or coerced by their romantic or potential romantic partners. As we see more women in positions of stable power from which they are able to apply coercion, this may change, but that's the picture at the moment.

Hate Crimes
What Shoshanna said in her video is true. Rape is a hate crime against women. It is also a hate crime against non-heterosexuals, those who don't conform to stereotypical gender expectations, those on the receiving end of racial or religious hatred, civilians on the "wrong" side of a military conflict, and those who are otherwise disenfranchised. This goes along with rape being a crime of power.

In men and women, bisexuals are at the greatest risk for sexual assault, then homosexuals, then heterosexuals. Men pay a stricter penalty in terms of increase in risk for non-heterosexuals. Women's rates of victimization are consistently higher, only beginning to approach equality in bisexuals.

In all these cases, the sexual assault itself, as well as the reactions of others afterward, can reinforce the self-hatred of internalized oppression.

Coercion
Coercion is another controversial topic in rape education. There is constant pushback from those who feel that enthusiastic consent is too high a bar, but the fact remains that many people don't feel free to say, "No." Whether they are dependent on a partner for emotional or financial support or housing, whether they are dependent on a colleague for career support, saying, "No," often comes with unacceptable consequences, even if those consequences are never stated directly. Just as we have come to recognize that "Yes," when said at knifepoint or in another physically threatening situation, is not consent, so do we need to realize that consent given under other kinds of duress is not consent at all.

There is a great deal of irony in this being a controversial assertion among the same people who usually complain that those who speak of rape aren't speaking about male victims. There is evidence to show that rates of coercion by sexual partners is higher among lesbians than among gay men, but that statistic is likely skewed by women's higher sensitivity to issues of coercion. By attempting to stop those who speak about rape from identifying coerced sex as rape (the "If they didn't call it rape, how can you?" argument), these people are continuing to deny male victims an equal understanding of their experiences. This is particularly relevant for those men who are coerced into having sex by a woman.

Rape as Sex
Rape defense and denial works very hard to confuse rape with sex, similar to the enormous amount of effort made to blur the very simple distinction between flirting and sexual harassment. To put it simply, sex and flirting are things that both parties want. Rape and harassment are one-sided. It's very simple for all the argument that goes on.

It's also quite an important distinction when we're talking about male victims of rape. The ongoing confusion between rape and sex is particularly bad for male victims, because erectile response and even ejaculation can occur in the presence of fear and other negative emotions. This can lead to men under-recognizing rape when it happens to them--again, particularly with female assailants. It can also lead straight men who are raped by other men to question their sexuality, even as they have to deal with the other aftermath of their rapes.

Rape Trauma
Rape trauma, the post-traumatic stress disorder associated with sexual assault, needs to be understood well for two reasons. The first, of course, is that it is critical for proper treatment. The second is that the presence of rape trauma can be used as corroborating evidence in rape trials in at least some jurisdictions. The research on rape trauma specifically in men is scanty. However, the literature that exists does suggest a similar spectrum of symptoms is present in men and women who are raped, with the individual constellation of symptoms varying from person to person.

Heterosexual men may additionally, as noted above, question their sexuality after a rape in a way that is unique to them as victims. They may also view the assault as a failure on their part to fulfill their masculine gender identity, in a way that women may not.

Attribution of Blame and Social Support
Social support is critical for the recovery of rape victims of all genders. It is perhaps the single most important factor determining recovery outcome, and influences treatment by the criminal justice system. Due to a number of rape myths, however, victims are often judged when they should be supported.

Both women and men face disbelief when they report rape: women are thought to have changed their minds after consensual sex, men are told it is impossible for them to be raped by women, and vast numbers of all genders have to try to be heard and believed over attackers whose social status is much higher, as discussed under Hate Crimes above. Men report rape so rarely that there aren't any good statistics on rates of false report, but automatic disbelief is an issue for men just as much as it is for women.

Similarly, men are also on the receiving end of victim blaming, even if some of it varies slightly in the details. They "should have known" that this part of town was bad. They shouldn't have committed a crime if they didn't want to be raped in prison. They should have known better than to flaunt their sexuality in front of aggressively heterosexual men. And even more than women, who are expected to be the weaker sex, they should have fought back. Male survivors of rape, like any other victims, need us to break down the practice of deciding that anyone who has been attacked must deserve the attack in some way.

The idea that rape is a form of sex instead of a crime that uses the trappings of sex is also a problem when it comes to attributions of blame. If the attacker is of the appropriate gender to be desired by the victim under other circumstances, rape is viewed as less of an assault, denying some degree of social support to the victim. Gay men are considered to be more complicit in their own rapes by men than heterosexual men are.

Institutional Support
This is where we most fail male rape victims. From education to collection of evidence to rape counseling, so few men attempt to use services for rape victims that the services are often not put in place in time to help them. As we continue to work to improve services for women and to make rape a safer topic of public conversation for everyone, we also need to insist that those providing the services--at a minimum--know where services for men are provided by trained, compassionate professionals. And while we are doing that, we need to make sure the same is provided for those whose gender expressions don't fit the standard binary as well.

Happily, I can say that the group that provided the video at the top of this post pointed to this one as well. We need more of these (though perhaps with better treatment options recommended).

Citations
Anderson, I., & Lyons, A. (2005). The Effect of Victims' Social Support on Attributions of Blame in Female and Male Rape Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 35 (7), 1400-1417 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2005.tb02176.x

Balsam, K., Rothblum, E., & Beauchaine, T. (2005). Victimization Over the Life Span: A Comparison of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Siblings. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73 (3), 477-487 DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.73.3.477

Davies, M. (2002). Male sexual assault victims: a selective review of the literature and implications for support services Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7 (3), 203-214 DOI: 10.1016/S1359-1789(00)00043-4

Doherty, K., & Anderson, I. (2004). Making sense of male rape: constructions of gender, sexuality and experience of rape victims Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 14 (2), 85-103 DOI: 10.1002/casp.765

Lipscomb, G., Muram, D., Speck, P., Mercer, B. (1992). Male victims of sexual assault JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 267 (22), 3064-3066 DOI: 10.1001/jama.1992.03480220082032

Waterman, C., Dawson, L., & Bologna, M. (1989). Sexual coercion in gay male and lesbian relationships: Predictors and implications for support services Journal of Sex Research, 26 (1), 118-124 DOI: 10.1080/00224498909551495

Saturday Storytime: The Shadow and the Flash

2011-08-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

There was a time when people who wrote simply wrote science fiction and fantasy along with everything else they made up. Whether that stopped due to our changing relationship with science and rationalism or due to the codification of genres, I think we're the poorer for its lack. Recently, Dr. SkySkull traced how early writers of invisibility stories were likely inspired by the work of Isaac Newton. Though it would be rare to find that kind of direct inspiration outside the genre ghetto today, at the beginning of the 20th century, no one thought it odd when Jack London was inspired to write this tale of scientific rivalry.

"Very true," he went on warmly. "And that is because they are not perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it were, we could not see them - ay, not in the blaze of a thousand suns could we see them! And so I say, with the right pigments, properly compounded, an absolutely black paint could be produced which would render invisible whatever it was applied to."

"It would be a remarkable discovery," I said non-committally, for the whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.

"Remarkable!" Lloyd slapped me on the shoulder. "I should say so. Why, old chap, to coat myself with such a paint would be to put the world at my feet. The secrets of kings and courts would be mine, the machinations of diplomats and politicians, the play of stock-gamblers, the plans of trusts and corporations. I could keep my hand on the inner pulse of things and become the greatest power in the world. And I --" He broke off shortly, then added, "Well, I have begun my experiments, and I don't mind telling you that I'm right in line for it."

A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there, a smile of mockery on his lips.

"You forget, my dear Lloyd," he said.

"Forget what?"

"You forget," Paul went on - "ah, you forget the shadow."

I saw Lloyd's face drop, but he answered sneeringly, "I can carry a sunshade, you know." Then he turned suddenly and fiercely upon him. "Look here, Paul, you'll keep out of this if you know what's good for you."

A rupture seemed imminent, but Paul laughed good-naturedly. "I wouldn't lay fingers on your dirty pigments. Succeed beyond your most sanguine expectations, yet you will always fetch up against the shadow. You can't get away from it. Now I shall go on the very opposite tack. In the very nature of my proposition the shadow will be eliminated --"

"Transparency!" ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. "But it can't be achieved."

"Oh, no; of course not." And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled off down the briar-rose path.

Keep reading.

Insomniac Games Does Social Media Right

2011-08-26T10:25:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Insomniac Games from close to the start. When my brother asked whether we'd played a new game and I said, "Ratchet and Clank? What's that?" I had no idea it was the new game by the people who made Spyro the Dragon, the first game I played on a modern game console.

The answer, by the way, to "Ratchet and Clank? What's that?": Just awesome; that's what. And through a large number of sequels, the games have stayed awesome. Then they added the Resistance franchise, which aside from also being a shooter, was very, very different in tone and style. Still awesome.

Now I'm really looking forward to Overstrike. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first game of its type with an even number of male and female playable characters. When you play a lot of network games with another couple, the lack of this option in most games gets pretty painful. Also, the game looks to be combining the gritty world of Resistance with the sly humor of Ratchet and Clank.

But still, well before that comes out, Resistance 3 launches the day after Labor Day. Like Resistance 2, 3 has robust online play. For the new game, the online play is currently in beta, and this is where Insomniac Games has impressed me in a way no other company has.

Betas are fun. They're also somewhat painful. No matter how much you test a game, no matter how much load you put on your servers, it isn't quite the same as having a bunch of people figure out your interface on their own and using it in any way they see fit. Things go wrong in beta, however well prepared you think you are.

For some companies, this could result in a lot of user frustration. For Insomniac fans who are on Twitter and Facebook, it's been an exercise in being heard and helped in record times. When the public player-matching system went wonky, players arranged "private" games with strangers on Insomniac's Facebook page, and Insomniac used Twitter to send players there. Insomniac broadcast questions on Twitter to collect information about how widespread bugs were. They announced the expected timing of bug fixes and server downtime and passed along workarounds. They took bug reports and customer service complaints and responded incredibly quickly.

In short, Insomniac Games took what could have been the ugliest time for their game launch and turned it into an exercise in making their customers very happy by using social media. I should be surprised, and I'm not really. This is one of the first companies to figure out what a podcast could do for them, and they've always been on top of figuring out what options new gaming hardware can give them.

So, no, I'm not surprised. I just hope that those behind Insomniac's social media presence get the credit they deserve, and that some other companies pay attention to what Insomniac is doing right.

Why Should I Pay for Your Health Insurance?

2011-08-25T10:25:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine from high school asked on Facebook a few days ago, "Why should I pay for your health insurance?" Because we have a certain amount of history together, I'm going to answer that question seriously instead of hiding or unfriending this person, which would be my normal inclination with anyone who has managed to reach our age without figuring this out.

So why should you pay for my health insurance? Lots of reasons.

Maybe because I pay for yours and your family's, and I do it willingly. More than that, I insist on it. Who do you think has been churning the economic engine while you've had your career in the military? Who do you think has raised a stink when your benefits haven't been funded, your institutions have been allowed to rot, your fellow service members' coverages haven't kept up with the dangers of the modern military age? I'll give you a hint: It wasn't anyone leaning "kinda libertarian on this one."

Pat yourself on the back all you want for the planning or whatever that got you into a position where you don't think you need to worry about paying for your own health care. But remember, I was there. I know just how much planning didn't go into those choices. You lucked into this one, and you're going to have to count on luck to keep what you've been promised.

To your fellow "Why should I" libertarians, you're a slogan at best. There's nothing special about you or the military that will keep them from cutting your benefits so they can keep more of "their" taxes. The only thing putting you one major illness away from bankruptcy, just like the vast majority of the rest of us, is that there are people out there who answer, "Why should I," with, "Because to do anything else would be indecent."

If that isn't enough for you, maybe you should pay for my health care because you already do. You pay more taxes because my insurance is untaxed. You pay more for products because my salary and benefits have to be enough to cover my costs. You pay the unemployed because I or others like me work enough hours to pay for everything, which keeps jobs from opening up. (It's cheaper, after all, to pay overtime than to pay health benefits for another employee.) You pay for disability if the incentive structure of my private insurance is set up to prevent short-term problems over the life of my one-year contract instead of over my much longer lifetime.

Only right now, you're paying way too much for my health care. You're paying for the most inefficient health care and insurance industry in the world. Free market health care maximizes profit, not efficiency.

Or maybe you should pay because you want to protect your own health. Can you come up with a better breeding ground for epidemics than crowded emergency rooms full of infants, seniors, people with open wounds, and the immune-compromised? Can you come up with a better way to push people to those emergency rooms with serious illness than to make them unable to afford a trip to their doctor early in their disease? And how long were those people wandering around, ill and contagious but unable to afford care, before they were forced to seek treatment?

Or maybe you should pay because you think the U.S. should be a land of innovation and enterprise again. Because you understand that large companies are mostly buying small companies these days in order to add products and services, not innovating on their own, having slashed their research and development budgets and staffs over the last couple of decades. (If you don't know that, I'm sure you have enough friends in R&D to find out what's happened to their departments.) Small companies are currently driving innovation, if they haven't throughout our history, but small companies pay more for health insurance and have the smallest of margins. People smart enough to change the world are smart enough to know what they risk by starting a company to pursue their ideas.

Or maybe, just maybe, you should understand that caring for one another, creating a better world for all, is what humans do. You should know that the point of this incredibly long adolescence of ours is socialization, becoming fit to take our places among the larger complex group, understanding both the advantages and responsbilities that this gives us. You should understand that claiming only the advantages while sniffing at the responsibilities is claiming the perpetual status of adolescent, which is why the grown-ups around you look so disappointed or angry when you say these things.

In other words, for as far as you've come and as much as you've accomplished, maybe it's time to finish growing up.

Beer Science!

2011-08-24T11:26:00.000-05:00

Just in time for me to go pick hops this weekend, a couple of related posts on the history of drinking and brewing beer.

Does Your Beer Glass Matter?

Typically, my beer comes in a pint glass, which seems the standard treatment for this libation: it leaves enough space for a nice head, and allows beer drinkers to appreciate the color and clarity of their beverage. But is it enough to really enjoy the rich notes that fermented barley can produce?

Our relationship with beer dates back some 9,000 years BC when the fermenting process was discovered independently by several cultures. As this is a history that’s fairly accessible, I won’t delve too deeply here. In line with this particular story, however, is the history of “glassware”—the containers that hold our libations reflect the social context of our times. These products reflect the technologies and the knowledge at our disposal through the ages.

Raise your pints to the Patagonian fungus that helped us to brew lager

Ask someone to think of a domesticated species and they’ll probably think of something like a dog, cat, cow or horse. But domesticated fungi are just as close to our hearts or, at least, our livers. The yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiase, has been used to bake bread and ferment wine or ales for centuries. But it’s only partially involved in lagers.

Lager is fermented at a lower temperature than either ale or wine, and the fungus for the job is a cold-tolerant species called S.pastorianus. It has never been found in the wild, and its genes tell us why. It has four of each chromosome, and appears to be a fusion of two different yeast species. One of these is S.cerevisiae but the identity of the second partner has been a long-running mystery. Until now, the best guess was yet another species of cold-tolerant yeast called S.bayanus. But like S.pastorianus, S.bayanus has never been found in the wild.

Now, Argentinian scientist Diego Libkind thinks he has tracked down the real species that merged with S.cerevisiae to help us brew our lagers. And he has found it in a most unexpected place – Patagonia, the southernmost tip of South America.

Enjoy! (Responsibly, of course.)

We Can Have Better

2011-08-23T10:25:00.001-05:00

I am...not kind to the people who say that all politicians are alike. I don't tolerate those who try to tell me there aren't any good ones. I know better. I'm represented by several at the city, state, and national level. Not everyone who represents me is effective and passionate about making the world better for all, but many of them are outstanding at both.

Nor is Minnesota unique in that respect. Yesterday, Canada lost its opposition party leader, Jack Layton, to his second bout with cancer. Between his battles, and before he first was diagnosed, he had spent his life articulating a vision first of a Toronto, then of a Canada that was strong because it cared for its weak and vulnerable and rich because it properly valued the work of the poor.

He never got to run that Canada, although his message carried his party from fringe to center stage, even as the press failed to take him or the NDP very seriously until just before the 2011 election, when polling numbers required it. But even as he was dying, he continued to lead it. From his last letter:

To young Canadians: All my life I have worked to make things better. Hope and optimism have defined my political career, and I continue to be hopeful and optimistic about Canada. Young people have been a great source of inspiration for me. I have met and talked with so many of you about your dreams, your frustrations, and your ideas for change. More and more, you are engaging in politics because you want to change things for the better. Many of you have placed your trust in our party. As my time in political life draws to a close I want to share with you my belief in your power to change this country and this world. There are great challenges before you, from the overwhelming nature of climate change to the unfairness of an economy that excludes so many from our collective wealth, and the changes necessary to build a more inclusive and generous Canada. I believe in you. Your energy, your vision, your passion for justice are exactly what this country needs today. You need to be at the heart of our economy, our political life, and our plans for the present and the future.

And finally, to all Canadians: Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

Reading the whole letter, I can't help but wonder what Paul Wellstone would have done had he known he was about to die. I also can't help but wonder how many of those passionate people have their influence confined to their city or county or small nonprofit instead of sharing it more broadly with the world because, when they run for a larger election, we can't bring ourselves to believe that they will or even want to make that bright vision a reality. How many of them never even make it past primaries or caucuses.

There are more people like Layton out there. What could we accomplish if we supported them? I think Layton just told us all.

Title IX, Civil Rights, Sexual Violence, and Clueless Whining

2011-08-22T13:23:00.000-05:00

This weekend, Peter Berkowitz published a piece in the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal that probably ought to raise serious questions about his abilities as a scholar. The Stanford fellow was all up in arms over guidance to federally funded schools and programs on dealing with sexual violence as a civil rights issue under Title IX. In his letter, titled "College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt" and subtitled "Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases.", he wrote:

Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.

The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."

At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

Now, of course, it isn't his opinions on how universities ought to be run that suggests his value as a scholar is limited, but his apparent unwillingness or inability to read the letter he was complaining about. For all his vitriol, it is both a needed and a rather unremarkable document. You can read it for yourself. It begins:

Education has long been recognized as the great equalizer in America. The U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) believe that providing all students with an educational environment free from discrimination is extremely important. The sexual harassment of students, including sexual violence, interferes with students’ right to receive an education free from discrimination and, in the case of sexual violence, is a crime.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX), 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681 et seq., and its implementing regulations, 34 C.F.R. Part 106, prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities operated by recipients of Federal financial assistance. Sexual harassment of students, which includes acts of sexual violence, is a form of sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX. In order to assist recipients, which include school districts, colleges, and universities (hereinafter “schools” or “recipients”) in meeting these obligations, this letter explains that the requirements of Title IX pertaining to sexual harassment also cover sexual violence, and lays out the specific Title IX requirements applicable to sexual violence.

The first thing to note about this letter is that it is desperately needed, particularly at the junior high and high school level. Despite what reading Berkowitz could lead you to believe, this letter is not aimed at colleges and universities. It's aimed at all educational establishments, and the timing (given that we can't send it back in a time machine several years) is excellent. When a cheerleader is forced to cheer for an athlete whom the school knows has been accused of raping her, we need this letter. When a child is expelled from school for reporting a rape, and when the response of the school to this child being raped a second time--on school property--by the same assailant is to say that "the girl failed and neglected to use reasonable means to protect her self," we need this letter. It was about damned time.

It is also worth noting that despite Berkowitz's sneer about women being a majority on campus (thus surely not in any need of any consideration in this setting where the authorities are still predominantly men) and use of the male pronoun for anyone adversely affected by enforcing Title IX's requirements on sexual violence, the report itself highlights the fact that males are also protected by these requirements:

The statistics on sexual violence are both deeply troubling and a call to action for the nation. A report prepared for the National Institute of Justice found that about 1 in 5 women are victims of completed or attempted sexual assault while in college. The report also found that approximately 6.1 percent of males were victims of completed or attempted sexual assault during college. According to data collected under the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act), 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f), in 2009, college campuses reported nearly 3,300 forcible sex offenses as defined by the Clery Act. This problem is not limited to college. During the 2007-2008 school year, there were 800 reported incidents of rape and attempted rape and 3,800 reported incidents of other sexual batteries at public high schools. Additionally, the likelihood that a woman with intellectual disabilities will be sexually assaulted is estimated to be significantly higher than the general population. The Department is deeply concerned about this problem and is committed to ensuring that all students feel safe in their school, so that they have the opportunity to benefit fully from the school’s programs and activities.

Title IX protects the civil rights of all students, not just females, from discrimination based on sex. That means that male students are also protected from those like Berkowitz who gloss over the rape of men and boys in order to make their points.

But what is Berkowitz's point? What is his main complaint? Right, that the Obama administration is weakening due process on campus.

OCR's new interpretation of Title IX "strongly discourages" universities from permitting the accused "to question or cross-examine the accuser" during the hearing. In addition, if universities provide an appeals process, it must be available to both parties—which subjects the accused to double jeopardy.

Most egregiously, OCR requires universities to render judgment using "a preponderance of the evidence" standard. This means that in a rape case, a campus disciplinary board of faculty, administrators and perhaps students serves as both judge and jury. Few if any of these judges are likely to have professional competence in fact-gathering, evidence analysis or judicial procedure. Yet to deliver a verdict of guilty, they need only believe that the accused is more likely than not to have committed the crime.

This is the lowest standard. It is much less demanding than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is used in the criminal justice system, and the intermediate standard of "clear and convincing proof." Yale, Stanford and many other universities have rushed to comply with OCR's directives.

On campus, where casual sex is celebrated and is frequently fueled by alcohol, the ambiguity that often attends sexual encounters is heightened and the risk of error in rape cases is increased. The consequences for a wrongly convicted student are devastating: Not only is he likely to be expelled, but he may well be barred from graduate or professional school and certain government agencies, suffer irreparable damage to his reputation, and still be exposed to criminal prosecution.

This is where I really start to question Berkowitz's basic fitness to comment on this issue. Despite the OCR letter itself being quite clear on the topic:

In some cases, the conduct may constitute both sexual harassment under Title IX and criminal activity. Police investigations may be useful for fact-gathering; but because the standards for criminal investigations are different, police investigations or reports are not determinative of whether sexual harassment or violence violates Title IX. Conduct may constitute unlawful sexual harassment under Title IX even if the police do not have sufficient evidence of a criminal violation. In addition, a criminal investigation into allegations of sexual violence does not relieve the school of its duty under Title IX to resolve complaints promptly and equitably.

Berkowitz can't seem to tell the difference between an administrative procedure designed to make sure all students' civil rights are being protected and a criminal trial. In case he needs the clarification, only in a trial is one convicted, and it is only in a trial that the Fifth Amendment protection from double jeopardy applies.

Nor does a Title IX complaint procedure constitute double jeopardy. It serves a different purpose than a criminal complaint--to ensure that the civil rights of all the school's students are served in an equitable way. This becomes quite obvious if one reads the entirety of the section of the letter from which Berkowitz snipped his quotes:

As noted above, the Title IX regulation requires schools to provide equitable grievance procedures. As part of these procedures, schools generally conduct investigations and hearings to determine whether sexual harassment or violence occurred. In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school’s procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaints. The Supreme Court has applied a preponderance of the evidence standard in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e et seq. Like Title IX, Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. OCR also uses a preponderance of the evidence standard when it resolves complaints against recipients. For instance, OCR’s Case Processing Manual requires that a noncompliance determination be supported by the preponderance of the evidence when resolving allegations of discrimination under all the statutes enforced by OCR, including Title IX. OCR also uses a preponderance of the evidence standard in its fund termination administrative hearings. Thus, in order for a school’s grievance procedures to be consistent with Title IX standards, the school must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred). The “clear and convincing” standard (i.e., it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred), currently used by some schools, is a higher standard of proof. Grievance procedures that use this higher standard are inconsistent with the standard of proof established for violations of the civil rights laws, and are thus not equitable under Title IX. Therefore, preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard for investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence.

Throughout a school’s Title IX investigation, including at any hearing, the parties must have an equal opportunity to present relevant witnesses and other evidence. The complainant and the alleged perpetrator must be afforded similar and timely access to any information that will be used at the hearing. For example, a school should not conduct a pre-hearing meeting during which only the alleged perpetrator is present and given an opportunity to present his or her side of the story, unless a similar meeting takes place with the complainant; a hearing officer or disciplinary board should not allow only the alleged perpetrator to present character witnesses at a hearing; and a school should not allow the alleged perpetrator to review the complainant’s statement without also allowing the complainant to review the alleged perpetrator’s statement.

While OCR does not require schools to permit parties to have lawyers at any stage of the proceedings, if a school chooses to allow the parties to have their lawyers participate in the proceedings, it must do so equally for both parties. Additionally, any school-imposed restrictions on the ability of lawyers to speak or otherwise participate in the proceedings should apply equally. OCR strongly discourages schools from allowing the parties personally to question or cross-examine each other during the hearing. Allowing an alleged perpetrator to question an alleged victim directly may be traumatic or intimidating, thereby possibly escalating or perpetuating a hostile environment. OCR also recommends that schools provide an appeals process. If a school provides for appeal of the findings or remedy, it must do so for both parties. Schools must maintain documentation of all proceedings, which may include written findings of facts, transcripts, or audio recordings.

Note that the "to question or cross-examine the accuser" quote that Berkowitz presents isn't actually in the OCR letter. There is a power shift being required by this letter, but it isn't nearly the shift away from a presumption of innocence that he represents it to be. It is simply an acknowledgement that if schools fail to protect the rights of the accused and the accuser, that they will be reinforcing a fundamental inequality.

The letter from the OCR is a rather remarkable document in that respect. I suggest reading the whole thing. It addresses, in a more practical way than Berkowitz's poetical hand-wringing, the problems of alcohol and sexual assault. It also has guidelines for drafting educational materials, which might be entertaining to compare to Berkowitz's paranoid fantasy of the same.

Or if you're short on time, you might just want to read the end of Berkowitz's piece, with its overblown invocations of the major fields of human knowledge to lament that no one (no one!) in power seems to agree with him on this topic. Unlike the rest of his letter, it's both entertaining and reassuring.

Be the Village

2011-08-21T09:56:00.000-05:00

I miss DuWayne. He used to have more time to come play online, even after he started school. It was limited time, of course, because he missed his kids and had to travel several states away to spend time with them. But with parents, you always settle for the time you can get.

DuWayne's time online is even more limited these days, almost nonexistent, because he now has full custody. That's a good thing. The boys' mother lacked the personal and social resources for parenting. Being with DuWayne and near other family is good for the boys.

It's not so good in that the boys still only have one parent fully involved in their lives. The boys each have their own challenges, and after being raised mostly by the parent who wasn't up to dealing with her own trials, the boys' challenges are worse. On top of that, they now have to deal with an absent parent.

David (three year old) is also starting to finally express his frustration at momma being gone – this started around nine months after he last saw her. He is wanting mommy when he is upset and he is also constructing very complex and idealized narratives that involve his mommy. Sometimes they are specifically about her, while others she is involved in more peripheral ways. One of his most recent involved his alligator friend who apparently bit him in the leg while they were playing (thus explaining some rather nasty bug bites). He then explained that his alligator friend and said friend’s mommy are homeless, so have been staying with his mommy (where he has decided he also lives). Mind you, last I knew and have no reason to assume this has changed, the boy’s mom is homeless and Daver is aware of this – though he often talks about his mommy living in a very fancy house.

On top of this, Caleb is extremely angry, as well as experiencing a wide array of other emotions – many of which are escapist in nature. He has really been pressing hard lately, to fight with me, the way he was fighting with his mom before I got them. He is even using much of the same language his momma used – though often refers to himself, not me. He calls himself a stupid fucking brat, a dumb bitch and in other similar ways. And he has admitted to his therapist and to my mother, that he might well be trying to replicate his relationship with momma – or that maybe he wants me to send him away to be homeless with momma – or that he doesn’t deserve to have a safe, warm home when his momma doesn’t have those things.

I am spending the vast majority of my time on the verge of a complete breakdown. It takes a great deal of effort not to just let go and flip out. But I can’t do that. I can’t afford it and more importantly, my kids can’t afford me losing it.

This is where we come in. DuWayne could use some assistance, and he's figured out how his friends on the internet can help. All he's looking for from us are books, some to help the boys directly, some to help him help them. Most of them are inexpensive. Several of them are science-related. All of them would be useful.

It blows me away to have this opportunity. DuWayne's children are in a situation all too similar to those my brothers faced when I was younger. I couldn't do anything about that, but I can, and have, about this. Join me?

Saturday Storytime: The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window

2011-08-20T09:51:00.003-05:00

I was thinking to myself that I needed to post a story about changes today, since there are (good) changes in the works for this blog and for me. Then I got distracted by a story by Rachel Swirsky linked by The Future Fire for tomorrow's #FeministSF discussion on Twitter. You'll never guess what it happened to be about. All stories, of course, are about change somehow, but this one more than most.

Terror cut into my rage for a single, clear instant. “I’m dead?”

“Let me handle this.” Another voice, familiar this time. Calm, authoritative, quiet: the voice of someone who had never needed to shout in order to be heard. I swung my head back and forth trying to glimpse Queen Rayneh.

“Hear me, Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath My Window. It is I, your Queen.”

The formality of that voice! She spoke to me with titles instead of names? I blazed with fury.

Her voice dropped a register, tender and cajoling. “Listen to me, Naeva. I asked the death whisperers to chant your spirit up from the dead. You’re inhabiting the body of an elder member of their order. Look down. See for yourself.”

I looked down and saw embroidered rabbits leaping across the hem of a turquoise robe. Long, bony feet jutted out from beneath the silk. They were swaddled in the coarse wrappings that doctors prescribed for the elderly when it hurt them to stand.

They were not my feet. I had not lived long enough to have feet like that.

“I was shot by an enchanted arrow…” I recalled. “The midget said you might need me again…”

“And he was right, wasn’t he? You’ve only been dead three years. Already, we need you.”

Keep reading.

Lady Gaga Versus The Secret

2011-08-17T16:12:00.001-05:00

If you don't know what The Secret is, consider yourself lucky to have escaped one more instance of the sort of pseudo-mystical self-help craze that mostly helps the author. If you don't know who Lady Gaga is, you don't actually live on this planet, so please leave a comment in the interest of furthering human knowledge. If you've been tormented by the desire to know which of these media darlings would win in a head-to-head battle, your life is about to get so much better.

The battleground:

Just like Lady Gaga herself, her motivational advice is controversial. Essentially, she suggests that images of success (e.g., trophies) can take the place of actual successes (i.e., more victories). So instead of going out and making it happen, we reflect on past or imagined glory and do nothing. The symbol replaces the reality. On the other hand we have Rhonda Byrne, the Australian TV ad executive who wrote The Secret. A perpetual bestseller, The Secret advocates creative visualization, which involves creating vivid and compelling pictures of your heart's desire, with the aim of drawing this vision toward you. If you believe and even act as if your accomplishments have already happened, Byrne argues, then happen they will.

The test:

The first clear voice on this issue of fantasy was that of Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the "irrational libido," the part of our psyche that lives for immediate pleasure. To accomplish this, the libido uses what Freud termed a "primary process," where it "produces a memory image of an object needed for gratification in order to reduce the frustration of not having been gratified yet." So we imagine everything from revenge to accomplishment and then, without doing anything more, receive pleasure from the image alone. When we mature, we put primary processes in check and graduate to "secondary processes," which deal with reason and reality. So as adults, we are able to delay gratification and endure the pain necessary to bring our plans to fruition. In short, Freud is definitely a Lady Gaga fan. Images and symbols, such as trophies, may be pleasurable to gaze upon but they can prevent us pursuing the real thing.

Alright, psychoanalysis is more than a century old and not exactly cutting edge science. But we can do better. Over the last decade, Gabrielle Oettingen of New York University has done a string of studies that test the power of fantasy on everything from romantic success to getting your dream job. Her basic design is to have three groups of subjects: a fantasy group, a control group, and a mental contrasting group. Fantasy groups are just that: essentially, proponents of The Secret who imagine they already have their desired outcome. The control group is the baseline, people left alone to their own devices. Then there is the mental contrasting group, basically following a form of Lady Gaga's recommendation. They mentally contrast by fantasizing about what they want but then immediately afterwards compare where they are now with where they want to be. So if they want a better relationship, they fantasize about being with that gorgeous guy or gal but then deeply reflect afterwards on how they don't have him or her. The mental contrasting group always ends by contrasting fantasy with reality.

Who wins? Lady Gaga or The Secret?

The answer. I only wish the stakes were higher.

The best things come across Twitter. Thanks to Sigrid Ellis for this one.

Embracing the Euphemism

2011-08-16T11:37:00.000-05:00

I've long had a complicated relationship with euphemisms. On their own, I don't like them much. I'm annoyed by people's inability to talk about the things they clearly want or need to talk about. Many of them reflect the negative attitudes that keep us from speaking plainly in the first place. And some of them are just gallingly twee.

However, put a bunch of them together in one place, and they go from an act of denial to a demonstration of our creativity in the face of repression and a testament to the fact that we will talk about these things, no matter how much we're told we shouldn't. One lovely example is this song, brought to my attention by Sex, Etc., a sex education site aimed at teenagers. I don't need to tell you this isn't work-safe, do I?

Then there's this classic song about penis euphemisms.

Doing a song about euphemisms for breasts would be almost pointless. There'd be no challenge in it. As a friend's father once pointed out (in a totally non-creepy way, for the record), any plural noun can be a euphemism for breasts. "Look at the refrigerators on that one," being the illustration.

I also love the practice of using euphemisms to riff because you're talking about a subject in depth and are going to get bored using the same word over and over, as when Scicurious wrote about constipation--and bras:

More to the point, previous work with girdles (heh, I love that, "previous work with girdles", I shall have to quote me) has shown that you get smaller and slower #2 when you are "under the influence of a girdle". And well, if a girdle, could maybe the pressure exerted by a bra change your log dropping abilities?

So they took 7 female subjects, ages 11-41 years (yes, really). All of them suffered from no constipation and were under no medication at the time. The women went braless for a week, then wore the bra for a week, and spent the last week uninhibited and nippin' out. For those three weeks, EVERY TIME they pinched a loaf, they had to record it...and WEIGH IT THEMSELVES. One wonders what scales they had to do this, and how they got the women to do it. I really hope they were paid.

Or as when Bug Girl wrote about the relationship between pubic hair removal and the prevalence of pubic lice:

Honestly? I think the only reason this paper made it past the journal editors was because it was about pubic lice, and crotch crickets are inherently interesting because of the pastures they graze in. (Which, of course, is exactly why -I- am writing about them!)

I did some investigating (in the library, pervs!) and found that there is actually data available on happy trail hair removal for women in the US and Australia. The percentage of Australian college women who shaved their pudenda was around 48% during the same time period; but that means that the majority of women still had some or all of their original carpeting, whether or not it still matched the drapes.

We also know from a very detailed study of American women in 2010 that there is no dominant pattern to hair removal in the US. Women aged 18-24 were most likely of all age groups to have naked crotches, but even then only 38% of them were hair free down there. Having a hairless muffin was actually the least common pattern of body hair in the over 2,450 women studied. Additionally, removal of one’s No-No Fro was NOT related to having experienced an STD infection in that study–which strongly suggests that the sample used for the “Brazilian hypothesis” was not representative.

Any one of these euphemisms alone would bug me. ("No-No Fro"? Really? Could we send a more sex-negative message?) All of them together, however, make me laugh more than wince, no matter how appalling they are individually.

Mock the Movie: Atom Age Vampire

2011-08-15T20:38:00.000-05:00

Things are a bit quiet around the blog at the moment. Somehow, running myself into exhaustion every other day working on the house (updating a 70s-era bathroom with some water damage takes a bit of work) doesn't leave me a lot of energy left for writing anything insightful, much less entertaining.

That's going to have to change by Thursday, though. The Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding has started a new Twitter game: Mock the Movie. Think of it as a crowd-sourced Mystery Science Theater 3000. This Thursday, we have Atom Age Vampire.

The instructions are simple:

Start following @MockTM on twitter.
Start watching Atom Age Vampire this Thursday, August 18th, at 9PM EST. You can find it on Hulu, Achive Classic Movies or Google Videos.
Once you’ve got Atom Age Vampire going, tweet your snarky comments to @MockTM. Directing our tweets to @MockTM will keep our followers from being overwhelmed with our snark!

Won't you come mock with us? I'll try to be on my game by then.

Saturday Storytime: The Fish of Lijiang

2011-08-13T09:55:00.000-05:00

Having recently had a much-needed vacation and time to think, this story by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu, had maybe a little too much resonance for me.

Twenty-four hours ago, I had a multiplicity of identities: an office drone with a strict routine, the master of a gray Ford, the prospective owner of a moldy apartment tucked into a hidden fold of the city, a debt-ridden parasite, etc.

Now, I'm just a patient, a patient in need of rehabilitation.

It's the fault of that damned mandatory physical exam. On the last page of the report were the words: PNFD II (Psychogenic Neural-Functional Disorder II). Translated into words normal people can understand, they say that I'm messed up and I must take two weeks off to rehabilitate.

My face flushed, I asked my boss whether I could be exempted. I felt the stares of everyone in the office burning into the back of my neck. Schadenfreude. They were delighted that the "boss's pet" was shown to be human after all, weak in the head, collapsing under the stress.

I shuddered. That's office politics for you.

The boss spoke slowly, methodically: "You think I want this? I have to pay for your mandatory vacation! People working at other companies can't even get rehab even if they need it. But the new labor law requires it of us. Our company is a proper, globalized business; we have to set an example ... Anyway, if you get worse, your disease will turn into neurosyphilis and infect the rest of us. Better that you leave now, yes?"

Ashamed, I left the boss's office and cleaned out my desk. I ignored the stares. Keep on looking, you neurosyphilitic assholes. I'll be back in two weeks and we'll see who gets to be assistant manager at the end of the year.

Keep reading.

I'm Just a Law

2011-08-10T21:05:00.002-05:00

If you haven't seen this clip from The Daily Show, you must. It is nostalgia, biting satire, political education, and John Oliver at his most entertaining, all in one.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Dodd-Frank Update

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

If you can't view this because you're not in the U.S., you're looking for the Dodd-Frank Update on your local Daily Show source.

God's Design for Discrimination

2011-08-09T19:56:00.001-05:00

In case you've forgotten over the summer, Minnesota will have a "reserve civil marriage for straight people only" amendment on the ballot in 2012. The campaign has now started, since the Minnesota Patriarchy Council has put out a call for volunteers. There's a bunch of rigamarole in their letter about "unaccountable judges" (in a state with judicial elections) and outside money (because none of the money they're raising will come from out of state) that you can read for yourself, but much of it is about religion.

Their letter, however, demonstrates once again that the only argument (aside from an uneasy excitement over the details of gay sex) for denying all consenting, adult couples the right to marry is religious.

In November 2012 a measure will appear on Minnesota’s ballot to place the traditional and biblical definition of marriage – one man and one woman – into our state constitution.

Well, that's one way the bible defines marriage, but it's hardly the only.

As you no doubt know, Minnesota Family Council has been working for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity since 2004 – and your prayers and financial support helped make it happen.

Mostly the financial support--and the polls that have shown that more Minnesotans are coming to support marriage equality all the time. Better get this done right quick before more people have gay friends.

Now we have to get the amendment passed. To help make this happen we have become part of a broad coalition of leaders who are assembling the campaign to ensure this amendment passes, and I am writing to ask you to join our coalition as a volunteer. The coalition is called Minnesota for Marriage and includes Minnesota Family Council, Minnesota Catholic Conference, and National Organization for Marriage to name a few.

This is a coalition, yes. Broad, it is not. It's a bunch of religious organizations. Where is any secular group claiming marriage equality would create any ills in this lifetime?

Even though this campaign promises to be a great struggle, we are very confident of victory – if we receive your help and that of thousands of other Minnesotans who believe in God’s design for marriage. With your support, we will help the voters of our state see the timeless institution of one man-one woman marriage as the foundation on which our society is built and the best environment for producing and raising children.

Timeless, huh? Like those polygynous marriages in Exodus?

While death and divorce too often prevent it, children do best when raised by their mother and father in a low-conflict marriage.

We know how well they pay attention to these studies.

We want to give every child in Minnesota the best opportunity for success.

Except the children of gay couples. They're perfectly happy to deny those children the advantages of having parents who are married.

Whatever one may think of so-called same-sex “marriage,” every gay “marriage” intentionally deprives a child of either a mother or a father.

Setting aside the gender essentialism involved in skipping over the fact that another mother or father is added--"intentionally deprives"? Uh-huh. Where do these kids come from? If it's divorce, they've got another (hopefully) involved parent. If it's adoption, they didn't have any to start with. If it's an egg or sperm donor, that donor is also sometimes involved in raising the child and sometimes simply not interested in raising that child--or they wouldn't have donated. In any situation, marriage equality adds a parent the child didn't have before. What child loses by that?

For our campaign to be successful, however, we need people of faith to rise up, speak, and participate in the campaign.

Prayers won't cut it here, either.

We know that when people of faith who support marriage stand together and participate in the kind of grassroots activities we have outlined, our campaign for traditional marriage will succeed.

Because the only people agitating against marriage equality are the ones who think their god has called upon them to discriminate.

God is the author of marriage, and our campaign will fight to preserve His vision of marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the benefit of families, children and all of society, and for His glory. Please join me in becoming a supporter of the marriage amendment today!

Yeah, no. I'm still pissed about the wedding I didn't get to go to because it had to be held in Iowa. I'm cheering for the best man at my wedding, who is in the process of adopting one of those kids without any supportive parents. And I don't think the appropriate place for constitutional amendments or religion is in denying people equal rights. Even if religion is really good at it.

Saturday Storytime: Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots

2011-08-06T09:48:00.000-05:00

After last week's story, it's time for something less sparkly and less grim. Luckily, my friend Michael recommended this story by Sandra McDonald yesterday.

When I was a much younger woman, as part of the divorce settlement from my then-millionaire inventor husband, I asked for our house in Connecticut, a modest amount of alimony, and six sexy cowboy robots. Sentient sex toys, if you will.

The robots were my revenge for all the time and money Herbert had lavished on tawdry mistresses across the world. His company, New Human More Human, specialized in mechanical soldiers for the U.S. Department of Defense with a lucrative side business in sensual satisfaction. The factory delivered my boys in a big white truck. They jumped off the back ramp wearing shit-eating grins and oozing Wild West charisma. No other firm in the world could produce as fine a product. My husband was the Preston Tucker of his time: a brilliant innovator and visionary done in by vicious boardroom skullduggery.

If you believe that one strong man can succeed in the face of titanic conspiracy and unrelenting backstabbing, you probably believed global icing would be solved. Then the snow reached five feet high against your living room windows and your belief in science was shattered, as was mine.

In any case, Herbert fulfilled his divorce obligations. But he also incorporated his revenge. He had my guys created as sexy ice-skating cowboy robots with steel blades permanently attached to their feet. By design they were most happy when twirling, spinning, and jumping on ice. The frozen lake behind the house sufficed during the winter but back when summer was still a threat, I had to build an indoor rink to avoid months of pouting. There's nothing more sad than a depressed sexy cowboy.

Keep reading.

Women in Secularism Conference

2011-08-04T15:41:00.003-05:00

W00t! The Center for Inquiry is hosting a conference on the topic of women in the secular movement!

Here at CFI we think it’s high time—it’s past time—for these and related issues to receive serious consideration. This is why we are proud to announce a special (dare I say historic?) conference on Women in Secularism, which will take place in Washington, DC on May 18-20 of 2012. To my knowledge, this is the first major conference sponsored by a national secular or skeptic organization to focus exclusively on the role and importance of women in our movement.

This is a hugely significant event. The contributions of women to our cause will finally receive some recognition. Speakers will include (in alphabetical order) Ophelia Benson, Jamila Bey, Greta Christina, Elisabeth Cornwell, Margaret Downey, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Sikivu Hutchinson, Susan Jacoby, Jennifer McCreight, Wafa Sultan, and Rebecca Watson.

Now I just have to figure out how to manage my time off next year for that and WisCon in the same month. May is apparently for feminism.

Thanks to Ophelia for passing along the news.

It's All Geek to Me

2011-08-03T13:26:00.002-05:00

I was looking for the video from my session at this year's ScienceOnline, and realized I had never shared it here. That was an oversight.

It's All Geek to Me from Smartley-Dunn on Vimeo.

The first part of the session works through the idea that some people are motivated by information, at least on a particular topic. It talks about the trade-offs that can occur in shaping your message to meet the needs of that audience or of a broader audience and brainstorms some ways of reaching both groups.

The last part of the session looks at what the presence of geeks means for an online community, and particularly for a community that is interested in more general outreach. In this section, we discussed the uses and pitfalls of geek culture, such as snark, in-jokes, and relentless pedantry. This is also where you'll find the moderators' dirty secrets.

ETA: See also this related (and well-timed) post on social diversity from Stef McGraw.

Dirty LIttle Geeks

2011-08-02T10:19:00.000-05:00

Scicurious sent this to me yesterday. It must be shared. That is all.

Enough With the Distractions

2011-08-01T13:47:00.000-05:00

Rebecca Watson's talk from the CFI Leadership Conference, on why the secular movement is important for women, even when it makes them less than welcome.

Why are we talking about where anyone mentioned in this talk was sitting when it was given, rather than the topic of the talk itself? No, don't answer that.

Whose Health Is Important?

2011-07-31T22:28:00.000-05:00

Approximately 28 years ago, a single mother raising three children far from their abusive father had a small work accident. She fell from a short height and landed badly on her heel. She ended up with a bone spur, then one on the other foot from compensating for the first. Because her job involved standing all day, she needed a new job.

She became an independent contractor, taking a job that allowed her flexibility for her feet, then for her volunteer job facilitating support groups, then for her volunteer job running the nonprofit that sponsored those support groups, then for her granddaughter when her son wasn't able to effectively parent, then for her town government, then for her county libraries, then for her father in his last days. Working as an independent contractor gave her the opportunity to give and make the world a better place for many people. What it did not give her was affordable health insurance.

That single mother is my mother, and a couple months ago, she surprised me with some news.

So, it's been over two months now since I got health insurance and started setting up appointments. Much has happened since then, and much not. Most has been written about, but one thing not. Yet.

The allergist diagnosed my dermatographism as a symptomatic expression of underlying allergy(-ies), tested, and found a bundle of things to avoid. Some of that is possible. Most, not so much. After some thought, I decided to go for the allergy shots, which actually start tomorrow morning, and go Monday and Thursday mornings for a while. Three shots per visit. Wheee.

They cause their own "little" side effect, and I'm not talking about the possibility of reaction to the shots, or even my decreasing availability for work causing lessening of income. After ordering having them made up, I was discussing with their office how much individual shots would cost if the ever-looming possibility of a government shut-down becomes fact on July 1st. My insurance is, after all, sponsored by the state. (An alternative scenario is I could get kicked off any insurance if the legislature budget goes through as written.) She thought about thirty bucks a piece, which is a strain but doable, especially if any shutdown is brief. Then she threw the zinger at me: it's formulating the shots themselves that costs thousands.

Thousands!?! Oooohhhh. Ummmm, maybe it's time to check how much of my $10,000/yr. insurance budget I have left. I figured this was one of the two things this year that I could take care of. There are already enough dead ends.

Getting the fibroid evaluated cost a visit to the OB-GYN, an ultrasound, having a radiologist read the scans, and an option for shrinkage treatment with surgery to follow in a few years when Medicare kicks in. The main problem with that treatment is that it is standard for it to require an overnight stay in the hospital, a very sensible precaution in case the wrong arteries got blocked somehow, but all by itself busting my budget. So, no go there. Keep carrying that football around, watching it grow. Meanwhile, a nice chunk out of that ten grand.

Oh, hell. Not only was there her health to worry about, but there were decisions to be made about money. At least with my cancer scare, I had the luxury of focusing on my health. For the woman who has put in almost three decades of unpaid (or barely paid) public service, there is a constant calculation of how much attention she can afford to pay to hers.

It's almost funny how everybody else freaks out by the word "cancer". I think folks fear it more than another 9/11. Me? Not so much. It's just not something that's been on my radar. Even a request for a repeat mammogram for better detail doesn't phase me. I don't worry about it. I know people who've had breast cancer, died from it. I know people who've died from liver cancer, and I'm aware that my years in the dry cleaners puts me at elevated risk. But, so? I'm just thinking finances.

Well, I'm also wondering what I'll do with my "hair" for the wedding if I'm bald from chemo or radiation. C'mon, something to think about.

There's grim irony in finally having health insurance but with such a limiting cap, and such narrow qualifications regarding my income level. Suppose I cash in some of my IRAs to help pay the bills. The money then counts as income, puts me over the amount to qualify for my insurance, and off the plan I go. So, pay my bills, and wind up losing the house or the insurance or both. Don't pay, declare bankruptcy... another undesirable end. Can we make it not be cancer or not grow fast enough or metastisise so that it can be ignored for two more years? I can afford it better then.

OK, dream on.

I made two phone calls this morning. The first was to my insurance plan, asking just how close to my annual cap I was. There was good news: the $10 grand limit is for inpatient treatment, and since everything I've done so far has been outpatient, I still have $10 grand left! Plus, I can still keep on with the other things I'm dealing with, like the allergy shots and the diabetes.

Whew! It's not a complete solution, but takes care of a chunk of the bill. It's enough that I feel better, irrational as that is. There'll still be tens of thousands of bill to pay afterwards.

A biopsy was good but insufficient. She can't wait until she can retire from work so it won't matter that she doesn't get disability insurance. She can't wait for the Medicare that her taxes have paid to support even as she supported others. She has to do what she can do now and figure out how to pay for it later.

I was the only one in the waiting area when I arrived. Another woman showed up and was quickly escorted back, and then three people came in together. They were there "for _____", who apparently was the woman just sent back, and were told to wait a few and they could go back and talk to the doctor. When it was my turn, among the long list of questions I was asked was whether I was (actually!) there on my own? It was said in such a concerned tone of voice that I gathered it was usual to bring a cheering squad/support group to these visits. Hadn't occurred to me. Been doing my own doctors' visits since, what? forever? Well, adulthood, anyway. Apparently I was supposed to be overwhelmed, distraught, incapable of digesting information, whatever. This was supposed to be scary.

Oh shucks, sorry to disappoint. Scary is facing the bills, and I've developed a plan, including checking myself back out of the hospital after two days to keep the costs down. There are enough healthcare professionals wandering through my house on a daily basis these days. I'm sure they can change a dressing, note inflamation, reassure me whether symptoms are normal, etc., if needed. Scary was not going to be something the doc said that day about what I was carrying around, since I already knew what it was or could be, and there would be no real news until after the surgery when my "football" was examined by the pathologist. That might or might not be scary then, but it'll be dealt with on an outpatient basis, and the insurance kicks in again.

What's your choice of "-oma"? I heard about five different terms, or at least I think there were five. He rattled them off so fast. It could be a myoma, a jargon-jargonoma, a jargon, a jargon-jargonoma, or carcinoma. I caught the first and last for sure. Actually, it helped that he wrote them down. The myoma is what this started out as: another word for fibroid, the "my" part of the word referring to smooth muscles, what the uterus is. Carcinoma, of course, is the worst possible case, and is exactly what you think it is. There are other levels and varieties in between of what stage it might be. They won't pull any lymph nodes until they get the pathology report requiring it, and that means I'll be "open" on the table while they wait. Hope they pick soothing music. Just not too soothing. I shouldn't have any problems with lymphodema (fluid buildup) if they do pull them, but on the rare occasions that happens (you hear about it with mastectomies) it's usually in combination with radiation therapy.

Fun.

After he examined me, I asked him how much weight he thought he'd be cutting out. Since I'd just lost a bunch, may as well take advantage when I can to lose more. He thought 10 to 15 pounds. See? That's another good thing. Of course, I may have to throw out more pants that'll suddenly become too big to stay up. Or just sew in darts and wear them out. Not like I'll have money to burn for a while. He said I can be out in 2-3 days - I told him 2 - and can drive again in 2-3 weeks. That will also be 2. There'll be weight restrictions for lifting at first, till I'm fully healed. Doable.

Surgery is early tomorrow. How strange it is that anesthesia and surgical complications are the least of our worries. How bizarre is it that we have taken all her service over the years and repaid her with this? How does any society survive by treating its useful members this way?

Saturday Storytime: Ponies

2011-07-30T13:54:00.000-05:00

The nominees for the World Fantasy Awards have been announced. This very short story by Kij Johnson, is not your average award nominee, but it is entirely obvious why it deserved to be nominated.

“Where are you?” Barbara asks.

“I’m outside,” TopGirl says, so Barbara gets a Crystal Light and three frosted raisin-oatmeal cookies and follows her. TheOtherGirls outside are listening to an iPod plugged into speakers and playing Wii tennis and watching the Ponies play HideAndSeek and Who’sPrettiest and ThisIsTheBestGame. They are all there, SecondGirl and SuckUpGirl and EveryoneLikesHerGirl and the rest. Barbara only speaks when she thinks she’ll get it right.

And then it’s time. TheOtherGirls and their silent Ponies collect in a ring around Barbara and Sunny. Barbara feels sick.

TopGirl says to Barbara, “What did she pick?”

Sunny looks scared but answers her directly. “I would rather talk than fly or stab things with my horn.”

TopGirl says to Barbara, “That’s what Ponies always say.” She gives Barbara a curved knife with a blade as long as a woman’s hand.

“Me?” Barbara says. “I thought someone else did it. A grown-up.”

Keep reading.

Talking About Leadership

2011-07-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

Prior to the start of Skepchickcon, the skeptics track at CONvergence, Skepchick hosted a workshop on effective activism, led by Desiree Schell and Maria Walters. If you get a chance to attend this workshop in another venue, do it. It's the most productive couple hours on the topic you're going to find. If you don't have the chance to attend, at least read the manual (pdf) they put together on the topic. Then use it when you're planning some kind of action.

Before the workshop started, I had a chance to talk with Debbie Goddard, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last year's Skepchickcon. Debbie is the campus outreach coordinator for the Center for Inquiry and the director of African Americans for Humanism.

Debbie and I spoke about skeptical leadership, and it was a particularly interesting time to do so. Rebecca's post on naming names in her talk at the CFI leadership conference had just come out. This was a conference that Debbie had organized and run. Also, earlier this year, I had expressed some criticism of CFI Michigan's leadership for their promotion of an evolutionary psychology speaker and their reactions to my post and Bug Girl's dissecting the speaker's research.

Debbie and I had a good talk, and I've been meaning ever since to write up a few thoughts on leadership. Note that these are my thoughts, not Debbie's, although I'm comfortable saying that Debbie and I agree on a few things:

Leadership is largely a set of skills that can be taught.

Due to the nature of skepticism and atheism, leaders in these movements may emerge from the ranks based on skills other than leadership. That's natural and expected.

Skepticism and atheism, as broad movements, need to find a way to reliably instill these skills in their leaders to create stronger movements.

We need to provide support for leaders independent of the groups that they're leading. That is to say both that pooling talent and knowledge is more effective and that it isn't healthy for an activist organization's leader to receive all their social support from within the organization.

We're only in the beginning stages of treating leadership skills as important, but we're already making good strides.

Moving this quickly, as with any kind of change, is going to produce some pain.

Now, speaking only for me, I think there are some lessons on leadership to take home from the events of the past few months. I will also be naming names here, but I should note that my intent is to provide concrete examples and to draw something good out of painful events, not to shame anyone. None of what I'm about to say is or should be transparently obvious to everyone. These are things we need to learn.

Why should you pay attention to me on the topic? Well, maybe you shouldn't. My experience with successful leadership is mostly secondhand. However, I grew up with a mother who ran a nonprofit and eventually served in a number of public offices, including as mayor of her small town. I was constantly privy to these considerations as a teenager, and the topic has continued to be something the two of us discuss. In my professional career, I've worked very closely with management for over a decade, mostly crafting communications but also acting as a sounding board for all sorts of leadership decisions.

Probably just as importantly, I've failed miserably at leadership. It hasn't happened because I don't understand the principles and responsibilities (which is why I've been given the job more than once). Meetings I run accomplish their goals and end early. Discussions I moderate stay productively on topic. But anything more sustained than that? I fail because the requirements of leadership grate very hard on this particular slightly disabled introvert. I know what kinds of jobs I'm not suited to and why. And that brings me to the first lesson of leadership.

Who's in Charge Here?

There's a bit of folk wisdom that gets passed around that the last person you should want elected to political office is someone who wants the job. Being represented by Al Franken and Keith Ellison, I have to dismiss this as unworkably cynical, but there is a small grain of truth to be found in it nonetheless.

The advantages of leadership are generally improved status and a greater ability to push through your own agenda. Neither of these advantages should be indulged indiscriminately. Authority doesn't make one inherently any more likely to be right, so it's important to remain approachable and to encourage challenges to your ideas. Also, among atheists and skeptics in particular, an authoritarian leadership style is less likely to be desired or tolerated.

If you're leading a healthy organization, you will constantly be dealing with people who want to improve it. You won't be in a position to pull your group along in your wake, because your organization will be vigorous enough to push you in the direction its members already want to go. You'll be able to steer and to make sure nothing goes off the rails, but the momentum won't be yours. High status in this scenario simply means that you're the person everyone comes to with their ideas.

This is a great position for an organization to be in, but it means that the perqs of leadership largely disappear. The downsides of leadership do not.

What Have You Done for Me Today?

As a leader, you help to set the goals and priorities of your organization. Unfortunately, you don't really get credit for those. As the incident with CFI Michigan's promotion of the evolutionary psychology event showed, you get the credit and blame for what actually happens at any given time, whatever your intent.

Comments from the leaders of CFI Michigan said that they wanted people to ask questions at events and to challenge speakers. However, neither the email notifying people of the event nor their calendar suggested people be prepared to ask questions or pointed them to the resources they would need to challenge the speaker on the controversial parts of the talk. They also said that they didn't in any way endorse the speaker or the material, but at least one group leader put out a communication supporting the speaker in the days following my criticisms and Bug Girl's.

No matter how much work CFI Michigan put into maintaining impartiality toward the events they promoted, no matter how often they told the members who showed up at their events that they should be challenging speakers in the Q&As, for this particular event, their website and their behavior didn't support those goals. For all the work they do, they were still on the hook for what happened during this one event.

Hands Off

Before you rise to the level of leadership in your organization, you have the luxury of concentrating on the organization's mission. You can, personally, get an awful lot done. In fact, this may be what propels you to leadership, where a cruel surprise awaits you: It's time to say goodbye to that kind of productivity.

Once you become a leader, you have a lot more to pay attention to. Do these members or factions need someone to negotiate their differences? Does this member need some extra attention to contribute fully? Does someone need to produce and file paperwork? Does this meeting need to be kept on track? Do new members need to be recruited to fill various jobs? Does someone need to figure out where you're going to meet while your normal venue is closed for renovations? Does someone need to research your group's legal responsibilities in some new situation?

You may not have to do all of these personally, but as a leader, you're responsible for making sure they happen. This leaves you less time to write or otherwise personally get your group's message out, less time to build relationships for their own sake, less time to sit down and enjoy the purely social aspects of your group's activities.

Instead, you get to make things easier for everyone else who is doing what used to take up all your time and motivate you to keep going. Delegation isn't always fun, because it means giving up the place and activities you originally chose for yourself, but it's critical to the success of your group.

Say Goodbye to Privacy

This isn't entirely true, but it's worth thinking about. When you gain disproportionate influence, everything you say and do becomes a little more important. For example, D. J. Grothe has a large number of friends in the skeptical community. He believes in his friends, and naturally, he wants to offer them his personal support. However, he is also the president of the JREF, which means that when he does something like comment on Lawrence Krauss's defense of a convicted statutory rapist, people sit up and pay attention.

As he discovered in that particular circumstance, he no longer has the luxury of simply saying, "I'm sure my friend is a good guy." When he comments on that or any other contentious issue, he--and by extension, the JREF--is seen to be taking a side, whatever his intention. His position of leadership meant that he had to bring himself up to speed on all the details of the situation and make a more formal, informed comment. To his credit, he did just that.

This is also the trap in which Stef McGraw found herself unenviably caught in her disagreement with Rebecca Watson. From the way she has responded, she expressed what was intended to be a personal opinion about Rebecca's video. However, she did so on her organization's blog. And even had she restricted her opinion to a personal blog, her position as Director of Activities for the University of Northern Iowa Freethinkers and Inquirers means that official notice had to be taken of her position. When the number one reason women give for not continuing to attend atheist and skeptic meet-ups is that they're treated as though they're only there as potential dates, there is no option for the larger community to ignore her opinions on what women in the movement should consider normal and expected.

Expressing a personal opinion in public as an organization's leader is a fraught proposition, no matter how much separation you attempt to maintain. This is one of the reasons we need to find better ways to provide social support for these leaders, venues in which they can air those first, half-formed opinions about current events and get feedback before they wade into the public fray.

You're All Alone Up There, or You Should Be

Another reason we need to encourage leaders to exchange ideas and support each other behind the scenes is that groups of freethinkers shouldn't ever be placed in the position of "My group/leaders, right or wrong." We have some justifiable pride in our organizations and their leaders, but if that pride becomes tribalism, we're undercutting our own mission.

There will be mistakes made by the leader of any group. Even if most of our leaders weren't fairly new to leadership, this would be true. Similarly, there will be differences in groups' priorities and missions that will result in disagreements between individuals at the leadership level. People will not always agree on how to work together.

This is understandable and inevitable. It can, and will, also generate frustration and misunderstandings. The ratio of reward to annoyance will sometimes become ridiculously tiny. A leader in that position needs a safe place to vent all those negative feelings.

That leader's organization is the wrong place for that. Social media is often the wrong place for that. Why? Because as a leader, you've lost the ability to make public personal statements on official business. You are speaking as your group, and people will respond to that.

If someone disagreed with you, they will be seen as having disagreed with your group--and the people in it. If someone insulted you, they will be seen as having insulted your group--and the people in it. And if they didn't do either of these things, because you misinterpreted what happened, they will still be seen as having done so because you have put your authority behind your interpretation. Then you will have, not two people who need to straighten things out, or simply decide whether joint goals are more important than bad feelings, but two groups of people who need to do that. That is a significantly larger proposition.

Leaders need confidants who are not invested in the leader's organization, people who are not in a position to be led, preferably people who also have leadership experience. They also need to exercise discretion in what conflicts they treat as matters that concern their entire group.

Final Thoughts

This isn't as coherent a whole as I'd intended when I decided to write about it, which is part of why it's been a month between the conversation and this blog post. I expect I'll be revisiting the topic as I dig into it further. I also hope to engage Debbie in further, more public discussion on leadership.

In the meantime, however, I'm interested in others' thoughts on the matter. What leadership lessons are particularly important to broad, only loosely organized movements like the skeptics and atheists?

Vacation Over

2011-07-24T18:26:00.002-05:00

But oh, it was lovely while it lasted.

Saturday Storytime: The Water Museum

2011-07-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

Nisi Shawl is cowriter of the highly useful Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. She is also an award-winning author of short stories. An excerpt:

Came a low, unmistakable growl and he jumped back. I went around to his side. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it out for you,” I said. “Girlfriend!” I bent over and grabbed one green canvas corner of my assassin’s duffel bag and pulled. This is Girlfriend’s favorite game. We tussled away for a few minutes. “She’s small, but she’s fierce,” I commented as I took a quick break. “You got any food in there, a sandwich or somethin?”

“No. Why?”

“I just noticed she had the zipper open some.”

The hitchhiker got a little pale and wispy-looking when he heard that. He stayed that way till I retrieved his duffel and gave it to him to rummage through. He took his time finding his jean jacket, and by the time he’d dug it out and put it on he looked more solid and reassured.

So now I knew where his gun was. Should I let him keep it? He’d be a lot easier to handle without a pistol in his fist. Then again, the thing might not even be loaded, depending on how soon he’d been planning on meeting up with me; simpler for him to explain an empty gun to any cops stopped him hitching rides. And I’d be able to get him relaxed faster if he was armed.

He threw the bag over his shoulder and I locked the car. Girlfriend had already started up the trail. Of course he wanted me to walk ahead of him, but Buddy just looked at him with his dark, suspicious eyes and Mr. Man decided it would be okay if this time he was the one to go first.

Keep reading.

The Comments You Didn't See

2011-07-08T17:24:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I posted a letter to Richard Dawkins from some atheist and skeptic survivors of sexual assault. I noted in the introduction to the letter that people other than Dawkins who wanted to argue should go somewhere else, and I gave them somewhere to go with an open and active comment thread.

To the best of my knowledge, Dawkins has not left a comment on that post. Plenty of other people, however, were unable to follow directions. Or perhaps they were unwilling to acquiesce to the wishes of a sexual assault survivor giving a space to other sexual assault survivors. Those comments have been, as people were warned, moderated.

They're still in place, though, so people can see how much was moderated. They're there because it was inevitable that some idiot would think "There, not here" is silencing of dissent. It's a complaint that's been leveled at the Skepchicks as well.

So, for those of you desperately curious to see what the "other side" looks like or how I've quelled discussion, have some comments. First, all of mine, then a couple to show you what the Skepchicks are keeping from you.

Saucy Lark, 7/5

I am a victim of sexual assault, I was raped by one of my mom's many boyfriends, and I'm siding with Richard on this. Sorry ladies.

Anonymous, 7/6

You guys are pretty ridiculous, I hope you know that. Labeling a man a rapist just for asking a girl out. Dawkins was exactly right on this one, thousands of people are being raped this very moment and you criminalize a guy TALKING to a girl? Pathetic.

Anonymous, 7/6 (This one Blogger sent straight to spam.)

Professor Dawkins did not denigrate victims of actual assault, he denigrated the non event that is now the elevator debacle.

The horrible violations of females human rights, have nothing to do with the event that happened in the elevator, as nothing did happen, that deviated from talking to a person.

If you want to perceive all men as potential rapist, you can do that, but this is not worthy of rational thinkers let alone feminists.

You are deliberately misrepresenting what Dawkins was actually saying and what actually transpired in that elevator. How someone perceives a situation is not the same as what actually happens! What actually happened was an unfortunate flirting attempt that ended as soon as Rebecca declined the offer. No threat, no further attempt.

Things like this happen, those are normal human interactions, not near miss rapes. I can understand that rape victims or victims threats by men, are especially sensible, but this does not justify to distort a non event in such a manner and to misrepresent the comment of someone who points it out.

I have been proposed for sex by a homosexual male once, when i was still very uncertain of my body and very shy and sexually totally inexperience. It was the most awful situation i had ever been in, since all my insecurities went straight to my head. After declined, the other guy left. It was a non event, i felt awful, but those where my feelings and my responsibilities.

I really hope you get some perspective and don't confuse the Event , with your horrible experience you had with some man. Most man are not rapist and there is no gender guilt as there is no female responsibility to prevent rape by not being attractive to man.

Gender equality arises from us all being human, and if you look at the Elevator event through the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, you will see that it was not a near miss rape, not even close

Misaki, 7/6

Does having your country raped count?
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
http://wikileaks.org/id/92C2418B-423D-4561-53D7A158D5B5C640/

Misaki, 7/6

I might as well paste this here as well.

"Hi everyone, I found out what the problem is!

This is a conflict between people who think that atheist and skeptic organizations are ways to meet new friends and interesting people, and people who think that the purpose is to improve the world by fixing problems.

The former now dislike Richard Dawkins. The latter think that the former are stupid, and accordingly they should read http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9 on how to address that stupidity in a very roundabout way.

To clarify, the first type of person wants to eliminate poor behavior by males who attend atheist and skeptic conferences. The latter type of person puts priority on problems that affect the entire world, not just the social environment of a particular movement."

Misaki, 7/6

"If you are a survivor and wish to have your name added to this letter, let me know, either in the comments or by email."

Someone I know might have been. But I won't tell you her name.

Anonymous, 7/7

Wow, this is incredible. You´re all over'reacting horribly and this is bullying behaviour! Obviously you don´t realise how offensive, discriminatory and hypocritical you´re all being. You bullies!

Anonymous, 7/7

So did any of you survive politely being offered a cup of coffee and left alone after saying "no"? Pathetic...

Anonymous, 7/7

You delete perfectly reasonable comments. That's pathetic. So Rebecca Watson is a rape survivor now for being offered a cup of coffee... Okay, moonbats, I'm gonna leave you alone now... bye!

Anonymous, 7/7 (Apparently Phyraxus, who complained about being silenced after I identified him because he left the same comment elsewhere.)

Just to let you know, Richard Dawkins is also a victim of sexual assult.

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/118

"Happily I was spared the misfortune of a Roman Catholic upbringing (Anglicanism is a significantly less noxious strain of the virus). Being fondled by the Latin master in the Squash Court was a disagreeable sensation for a nine-year-old, a mixture of embarrassment and skin-crawling revulsion, but it was certainly not in the same league as being led to believe that I, or someone I knew, might go to everlasting fire. As soon as I could wriggle off his knee, I ran to tell my friends and we had a good laugh, our fellowship enhanced by the shared experience of the same sad pedophile. I do not believe that I, or they, suffered lasting, or even temporary damage from this disagreeable physical abuse of power. Given the Latin Master's eventual suicide, maybe the damage was all on his side."

And now for a sample of moderated comments from Skepchick:
zumb, 7/8

Dear Rebecca

Please don’t take this wrong. But you’re sick. Really, no kidding.

Please contact a shrink to find out why instead of been flattered you get offended if a man proposes you. That’s really weird.

Unless, of course, you are a lesbian. But even then, all you have to say is NO, I don’t like man. That’s all!

whitehetreosexualman, 7/8

Oh, wow.

“Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man!”

This is the ultimate proof that no matter how much you educate a woman. She’ll always be irrational, hence the ad hominem. As G.W.F. Hegel once said, “Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production… Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions”.

What’s sickening reading this is that you’re complaining about sexism against women, but it’s okay to hate white heterosexual males. I bet in your world for everything that badly happens towards us it’s our fault. Like how we are being killed in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Also, I’m tired of pseudointellectual feminists who continue to rant about oppression. You’re no longer oppressed in the western world. You can sleep with all the men and be a dirty little slut all you want without being stoned to death. Now most men are accepting that a virgin wife is most likely impossible, unless you want to kidnap a 6 year old girl and marry her in Saudi Arabia. You can go get an education and get a job. You might make a tab bit off as a male would, but other than the last example you’re not oppressed, but you’re indeed stupid.

adammorva, 7/8

Dear Rebecca,

I don’t know how to put this, but.. Are you FUCKING RETARDED?

Somebody invited you to his room for a coffee (or sex or whatever) and you dare call him a male chauvinist, women objectifying dirtbag? AND When Richard Dawkins points out that you are whining about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you dare to say that you are looking forward to see him crash and burn?

I feel sorry for you, kiddo. Something seriously damaging must’ve happened to you to have such a poor mental health.

You are giving women and skeptics a bad name. You are disgusting. Cheers.

rianmacker, 7/7

In other words: If you have a penis shut up because women are always right (and men sometimes when they agree with women).

Obviously, someone doesn’t get it and that would be you.

notsureifserious, 7/6

First off, you’re a terrible writer. Give up your dreams of ever becoming a journalist.

Second, people like you are the reason men never want to approach women.

miscmanismiscing, 7/6

Good job reinforcing the ‘all feminists are ugly’ stereotype girls.

phyraxus, 7/6

Schrodinger’s rapist argument is very unconvincing.

Just because every male MIGHT be a potential rapist doesn’t mean they are. Just like every female MIGHT be a cum-bucket, money-grubbing, bitch doesn’t mean they are.

In other words, don’t accuse your allies of misogyny unless you want to be accused of misandry (hatred of men [LOL it is such an unknown word, spellchecker doesn't recognize it]).

Anybody still feel they're missing anything important from the discussion? Then maybe you want to head to Twitter, where nobody feels they'll be censored:

Or this little "joke":

Or the YouTube comments about how she needs to be anally raped, which I won't post here.

So, yeah. That's what you're missing, folks. A whole "side" to the argument being woefully repressed because they're not getting the same forum from me or from Skepchick that they are elsewhere. What do you think, should we open the discussion up more?

A Letter to Professor Dawkins from Victims of Sexual Assault

2011-07-05T19:34:00.056-05:00

Thank you to Bug Girl for suggesting this. If you are a survivor and wish to have your name added to this letter, let me know, either in the comments or by email (see the sidebar for my address). If you wish, you may reprint this letter in full elsewhere, as long as you link back to this post for the full list of those who have signed.

If you need background on this, try this post. If you want to argue about this, and you are not Richard Dawkins, go there or get your own blog. Comments here will be moderated as I see fit.

Dear Dick:

At your request, we write to you to tell you what it is that you do not understand about elevators, invitations, and sexual assault. Who are we, and why are we in any position to tell you anything? We are atheists and skeptics, but more relevantly, we are victims of sexual assault.

There are two important things to note about Rebecca Watson's experience. The first is that she had spent much of her evening telling the people around her, "Please don't hit on me," and finished by saying she was done talking and wanted sleep. This was ignored by the man now widely referred to as Elevator Guy. (Yes, it's been established that he was in a position to hear her. Yes, it's been established that he followed her out of the space in which she'd been saying this and got on the elevator with her.)

She had said, by unequivocal implication, "No." He ignored this and did what he wanted to. This is important.

The second important thing to know is that her response was to say publicly, one more time, "Please don't do that. It makes me uncomfortable." That's it. That was her entire response to Elevator Guy beyond telling him she wouldn't go to his room.

For that response, Rebecca came under considerable fire. This is also important.

The entire drama-filled discussion came about because Rebecca asserted her right and the right of other women to say, "No," and be heard. It happened because she asserted that men, as well as women, have a role to play in maintaining that right.

Then you spoke. Then you, widely regarded as one of atheism's leaders, one of the Four Horsemen, decided you needed to say something about this.

You didn't have to do that. If you felt, as your comments seem to indicate, that too much attention was being paid to this event, you could have simply declined to add yours.

However, that wasn't what you did. Instead, you said that Rebecca, who was voicing our concerns, was thereby telling other women with other concerns that they were whining. Or perhaps that the rest of us who supported Rebecca when she was criticized for expressing her preferences were accusing these women of whining.

Even if you had stopped there, this would merit an apology. Not only has Rebecca spoken out loudly against female genital mutilation (drawing the ire of those who told her she wasn't paying enough attention to the boys) and other religion-driven wrongs against women and girls, but her demand that women's self-determination be respected is exactly what needs to spread in order to prevent the ills you mention. If this is an issue you care about, instead of a distraction from Rebecca's point, you should be thanking her for her work instead of emphasizing the "chick" in the name of her organization, diminishing her stature.

Then, in response to complaints about that, you told us all that what happened to Rebecca--having her clearly and repeatedly expressed preferences about being hit on ignored--was "zero bad." It should be clear by now why that requires a correction from you. It also calls for another apology, whether or not you knew the facts above when you wrote your comment. If you didn't know, you weren't in any state to lend your position and reputation to any characterization of what happened, much less the mischaracterization you used.

That is where you injured us, the victims. You have made one more space blatantly unsafe to us. We don't mean safe as in free from any kind of sexual interest. We're not asking for that, and we don't want it. We mean that you, a leader in our community, made free with a woman's experience and rewrote it to suit your own ends.

You decided you knew better than she did what had happened, and you were comfortable explaining it to everyone else. That is part of how communities are ruined and ultimately shaped to support sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. That is how offenders operate and how they are excused. That is how the world that hurt us was built. And you have added to that.

That is why you owe us an apology as much as you owe Rebecca. When may we expect it?

Sincerely,

Stephanie Zvan, survivor of teen sexual assault
Bug Girl, survivor of a date rape in 1980
Abigail Marceluk Parker
Chris Tucker
Elyse Anders, rape survivor
Dana Hunter, raped at age 18
Megan Wells, survivor of teen sexual assault
Tracy Walker, raped at 15
Danarra Ban
Paul Mannering
Andrea Gatley, sexually assaulted at age 14. In an elevator in a hotel.
Carol Levesque
Anneliese Bowman
Debbie Hadley, lucky to have fought off two sexual assault attempts by men who didn't believe no means no
Cori Frazer, survivor of childhood sexual abuse
Leilah Thiel, sexually assaulted at age 16
Helen Krummenacker, victim of repeated schoolground gropings
Edie Howe, assaulted at 7, 9, early teens, by both husbands, by strangers three times
BeardofPants, survivor child sexual abuse, age 7
Julia Heathcote, survivor of sexual assault by her PhD advisor
Rebecca Dominguez, survivor of sexual assault and date rape
Monado, survivor of groping (age 13), rape threats for refusing one of those innocent invitations to go for a ride (age 16), partner rape (age 35)
Doubting Thomas, gang raped at 18
Anarchic Teapot
Amanda W. Peet, date-raped at age 25
Zandperl
Alice, raped at 16, assaulted at 19
Melanie Mallon
Susan Silberstein, survivor of husband and stranger rape
Stephanie Zierenberg, victim of acquaintance rape at 24
Janice Clanfield
Kelly Sexton
Lynn Wilhelm, date raped in the 80s
Robin Buckallew, victim of childhood sexual assault, age 7
Catherine Ann, date-raped at age 30
Shoshana Kane, biologist, atheist, skeptic, rape survivor
Solvei Blue, survivor of sexual assault at age 19
Dr Fiona Wallace MB BS(London), MA, assaulted age 14 when babysitting - by the child's father
Nicole P., repeatedly raped by ex-fiance
Dorothy M., victim of kidnapping, assault and rape, daughter of a victim of child molestation, mother of a victim of date-rape
Sandy H., survivor of childhood sexual assault
Anne Marie Newman, victim of acquaintance rape, sexual assault by a "friend," and sexual harassment at work
Alianna B., stalked and sexually harassed for 3 1/2 years
Calebandrew, rape at the age of 15
Catherine Schneider, sexually abused by father from birth to age 14; raped by teen boyfriend age 15-17; gang raped by acquaintances age 22
Skepticalbunny, date rape survivor in 1982
Emily Dale, raped at age 16
Professor Anonymous_Female_Voice_Specialist, BS, MA, first sexually assaulted at age 3 or 4 and several times thereafter, at various ages
Nichole Filbert, sexually assaulted and raped in the process of leaving abuser
Nikoel Stevens
Carolyn, raped on 30th birthday
NameHidden
Maggie Champaigne
Sarah Killcoyne, sexual assault survivor
Emily F, rape survivor
Dianne K, molested at age 9, groped on the bus at 14
Kate W., molested at age 14, groped by multiple strange men, assaulted at age 25
WMDKitty, survivor of domestic assault
Jan Bunten
Bethany Baker, sexually assaulted at age 14
Wilma Janssen, assaulted multiple times, first time at 17
Chris Rhetts
Lee Ruby, survivor of childhood sexual abuse
ChristineCCR, raped, stalked, and sexually harassed
Jennifer Forester, raped by multiple partners
Lynne, raped and multiply assaulted
Cafegirl1995, raped at 13, assaulted at 14
Gwen Olson RN, sexually assaulted by a coworker
Lia C., molested at age 10, groped and ejaculated upon while riding the train at age 19, and date-raped at age 26
Katherine Ann B., survivor of multiple partner sexual assaults, two assaults by strangers, and kidnapping and assault by ex-partner
P. Adams, date raped at age 18
ephymeris, raped and molested repeatedly as a child, raped as a teen
CathyC, survivor of childhood sexual abuse and multiple sexual assaults
Sue Williams, date raped at 20, assaulted multiple times
Jennifer Haden, molested as a child and recently drugged and assaulted
Alexandra B, drug-raped at 18, other various sexual assaults
FranW, raped at age 25 by partner's contrivance
Jafafa, sexual abuse victim ages 11-14
Mrs. Carol King, first sexual assault at age 7 with more following
StarsEnd42, sexually assaulted on very first date ever, sexually asaulted again at a conference
PixelFish, sexually harassed, verbally and physically, by fellow students and coworkers
Cripdyke, incestuous rape at age 10, domestic sexual assault ages 21-22
Rune C. Olwen, survivor of a Catholic abuse family and repeatedly attacked since;
one of the women who invented women self-defence
Whiteman, sexually abused by father from the ages of 12-15
Rebecca G., survivor of childhood molestation from 5-7, date rape at 16 and at 17, and sexual assault by a colleague in grad school
Nepenthe, repeated partner rape at age 20
Claire D, survivor of repeated and regular rape and gang rape between the ages of 12-15 and date rape at ages 16 and 18
Kate A., survived rape at 19 & multiple assaults
Jenny W, raped at age 14
Ellid, assaulted twice by her own husband in her own home
Sarah, survivor of molestation at 3 & 5, rape at 5, and threats of sexual assault from classmates from 8-17
Aimee McDowd, survived rape at 8, 12-13 repeated molestation and rape again at 15, escaped attempted abduction at 16
Can'tSayWho, raped by friend of 10 years
Kristin, survivor of sexual assault, age 4 and 20
Cynthia Wood, groped by a teacher at 12, raped by a boyfriend at 15
Kay, raped by a partner, groped countless times
Brigitte Hentschel, raped twice, once by a casual acquaintance, once by an ex-boyfriend; sexually harassed and groped countless times
Margaret L, sexually assaulted at 13, raped by a coworker at 22
Elizabeth C., molested as a child
Sarah Rean, molested from infancy, raped at age 18, and assaulted
Michelle, sexually abused by grandfather 4-12
Juliet, sexually assaulted at age 17
Rae, stalked by someone everyone insisted was harmless until he stabbed a stranger
Dr. Dory Green, sexually assaulted at 21 by a casual acquaintance in an encolsed space after politely turning down his advances
Jessa, drugged and raped at age 12
Tamsin, sexually harassed in elementary school with the help of a teacher
Alumiere Sg, sexually abused age 13 - 17, raped as an adult
Veronica
Melissa Faulkner, sexually abused by stepfather for almost a year, age 12
mouthyb, BA, MFA, PhD (in progress), molested at age 9, raped multiple times
Allison, molested ages 13-14, raped at age 22
Sarah J., molested at age 7, assaulted in 2009
Rob, raped at ages 11-13 by a school official
Kathi, raped at age 12
Faith L., sexually assaulted at 11 and 12, raped at 16, assaulted at 18
Gayle Peterson
Jane P., sexually abused at age 6, raped at 8 and 13
Marley, raped at age 16
Heidi H., raped age age 16
Anonymouse, sexually assaulted at age 17 and groped by a college professor age 18
Demetria, survivor of sexual assault July 10, 2009
Joey Nichole Thomas, survivor of child sexual abuse between the ages of 5 & 6
Ms. Lilithe, sexually assaulted at age 6
Melissa Gay, drugged and raped at age 18
Erica Nash, sexual assaulted by acquaintances and repeatedly raped by ex-boyfriend
KateSi, raped at 18; harassed, groped frequently even now
Grace Feldmann, survivor of attempted rape at age 17 and acquaintance rape--in hotel--at gunpoint age 18
Kendra, assault and rape survivor
G Davy, assaulted at 13

Rebecca Watson Sucks at Reading Minds

2011-07-04T18:23:00.003-05:00

Oh, dear. Rebecca Watson dared to tell guys who claimed to want a movement more welcoming of women that being hit on after giving a talk about being tired of being hit on isn't very welcoming. She dared to say that a guy asking her back to his room for coffee after she just announced her desire to get some sleep--while she's trapped in an elevator with the guy--is creepy. Then she dared to point out--at a leadership conference--how one student leader's remarks help contribute to an atmosphere that is more welcoming to this behavior than it is to women.

Oh, Rebecca, how could you?

No, really, I'd like your formula, so we can get more people to do the same thing. Or to do what Surly Amy did, or Jen, or Rorschach, or Ophelia, or Barbara, or Kylie, or PZ, or Greg, or PZ again, and again, or Jen again, or Greg again, or Ophelia again, or Greg again, or Matt [ETA: or Amanda, or Phil, or CJ, or more from Rebecca, or Greg again]. We need more of that. Really, truly. That list of links is not enough.

Why? Because we've really only begun in the comments to explore the real problem here, which is that Rebecca just isn't as good at reading minds as everyone else. We know this because it only took three comments on her video for someone to point it out.

Not sure the guy in the elevator thing was an instance of sexualizing you, just an example of a bad way to approach someone.

He explained more in further comments, but just in case she didn't understand how bad at it she was, there were more people willing to point it out.

But we, as non-participant watchers of the tale can never be sure either way unless we want to assume that all men who ask women to their hotel rooms for coffee, whatever the hour, are always predatorially sexalising all women to whom they ask the question. I can’t buy that. Change either Rebeccas gender, or the guy’s gender, and we have a very different set of assumptions.
.
Now of course it is probable that even being tired, and feeling threatened, Rebecca’s observations of body language, eye contact, etc., provided her with evidence to support her claims and assumptions about the guy’s intent. But we don’t know that do we. We weren’t there.

Fortunately for the rest of us, they didn't confine themselves to Skepchick.

I, however, think that she is following the stereotype that every man that talks to a women at early light is A. hitting on her, B. soliciting sex, and C. a sleazebag. There is a double standard at play here that I think is as unfortunate. Next time, It may be prudent not to jump to conclusions based off of absolutist “observations” and decline the offer like a rational thinker. Maybe even suggest a better time to meet, in a better place than someone’s sleeping quarters. All parties were to blame in this little mishap.

Luckily for Rebecca, there are some real mind readers out there to show her how it's done.

What Watson did was extremely dickish, and contained a large dose of spite. She went for public humiliation over what was, by any reasonable assessment, a pretty minor faux pas in a private situation.

The issue is not that Watson brought up a brought up a posting she thought illustrated a damaging attitude. The issue is that Watson, knowing that McGraw was at the conference, decided to attempt to publicly shame her from her privileged position at the podium.

And one more, from Jerry Coyne:

The concentration on the word “bullying” here, and the assertion that it didn’t happen, simply distracts from the real issue: the obvious fact that Ms. Watson used the occasion of a talk that was supposed to be about something else to air a personal animus against a student, and to lump that student together, implicitly, with other people who had abused Ms. Watson and threatened her with rape. That whole digression was irresponsible and unprofessional, a solipsistic interlude that did not belong in the talk.

Clearly, as all these comments show, Rebecca needs to beef up her skills. Maybe if she just listened more to these guys, she'd figure out how it works. Oh, wait...guys. All these people reading her mind are guys. So are the ones telling her she's doing it wrong. Shit.

I'm sorry, Rebecca. Your sex may have doomed you on this one. You might just have to stick to daring instead.

Which, really, I'm totally okay with.

Saturday Storytime: CONvergence Double Feature

2011-07-02T10:49:00.002-05:00

I failed to post a story last weekend for you to enjoy. As penance, or perhaps just because I can, I post two today instead. Both of these authors are guests of honor at CONvergence, which is where I'm spending my weekend. They are also SF Squeecast members.

Seanan McGuire is one of those people who do everything. Really, that's most of what you need to know about her. If you meet her, ask her about cobras. Or Ebola.

"Good Girls Go to Heaven" is part of Seanan's story cycle based on the legend of the vanishing hitchhiker. An excerpt:

There's something not-right about one of the truckers, a barrel-chested man with a neat little goatee and the hands of an artist. Those artist's hands are wrapped around a coffee mug, stealing heat through the porcelain like a small child stealing cookies from the cookie jar. Most of the eyes in the diner skitter right off me, frightened mice catching the scent of a cat, but not him. He doesn't look at me for long, but when he does, he sees me. That, even more than the scent of ash and lilies that lingers in the air around him, tells me that he's the one I've come here for; he's the one that called me, made me give up a perfectly good ride westward to come to this middle-of-nowhere dive with nothing but the coat on my back and the frostbite in my fingers. I know him, or at least, I know his kind. He's in the process of sliding into the space between two Americas, this one, where the air tastes like apples and the jukebox plays Top 50 country hits, and a quieter, colder America, one where the kisses pretty girls sometimes give never taste of anything but empty rooms and broken promises. He's falling into my America, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it--that's not the sort of trip that you recover from.

The record on the jukebox changes as I walk toward the counter. Blue Oyster Cult, "Don't Fear the Reaper."

I hate it when the inanimate pretends to have a sense of humor.

Keep reading.

Catherynne (Cat) Valente can't be described in mere bloggy words. She's a novelist, short story writer, poet, and one of those con panelists who tells you up front you're in for an experience. Unlike many of those, she means it.

"The Days of Flaming Motorcyles" is not your father's zombie story. It is, however, a zombie story about someone's father.

To tell you the truth, my father wasn’t really that much different after he became a zombie.

My mother just wandered off. I think she always wanted to do that, anyway. Just set off walking down the road and never look back. Just like my father always wanted to stop washing his hair and hunker down in the basement and snarling at everyone he met. He chased me and hollered and hit me before. Once, when I stayed out with some boy whose name I can’t even remember, he even bit me. He slapped me and for once I slapped him back, and we did this standing-wrestling thing, trying to hold each other back. Finally, in frustration, he bit me, hard, on the side of my hand. I didn’t know what to do-we just stared at each other, breathing heavily, knowing something really absurd or horrible had just happened, and if we laughed it could be absurd and if we didn’t we’d never get over it. I laughed. But I knew the look in his eye that meant he was coming for me, that glowering, black look, and now it’s the only look he’s got.

It’s been a year now, and that’s about all I can tell you about the apocalypse. There was no flash of gold in the sky, no chasms opened up in the earth, no pale riders with silver scythes. People just started acting the way they’d always wanted to but hadn’t because they were more afraid of the police or their boss or losing out on the prime mating opportunities offered by the greater Augusta area. Everyone stopped being afraid. Of anything. And sometimes that means eating each other.

But sometimes it doesn’t. They don’t always do that, you know. Sometimes they just stand there and watch you, shoulders slumped, blood dripping off their noses, their eyes all unfocused. And then they howl. But not like a wolf. Like something broken and small. Like they’re sad.

Keep reading.

For the Squee

2011-06-30T10:28:00.001-05:00

Oh, I love this idea.

I've commented recently on the tendency in F&SF fandom to focus on the things we don't like as though our preferences reflected some inherent flaw in the material. It's amazing how much effort and energy we sometimes put into building up a big head of hate. In fact, that was the impetus for posting a little ditty about not liking things.

Just in time for holiday weekend travel and potentially obligatory family time comes the antidote. From the press release:

Science Fiction and Fantasy professionals Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, and Catherynne M. Valente will be premiering a new monthly podcast called the SF Squeecast on June 30, 2011.

In every SF Squeecast episode, our contributors (and occasional guests) will each bring SF works that make them happy -- both new discoveries and old favorites -- for group discussion. Other elements in the podcast include an irreverent question and answer segment and the occasional topical discussion over a virtual cup of tea.

The SF Squeecast combines humor, passion, and professional experience in the SF field into a never-ending convention panel discussion of “don’t miss this” science fiction and fantasy works in all formats. Our regular contributors include two-time Hugo Award-winning and Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear (The Jenny Casey Trilogy, The Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy), Hugo-nominated New York Times Bestselling television, comic book, and prose writer Paul Cornell (Doctor Who- “Human Nature,” Action Comics), Campbell Award-winning, Hugo-nominated New York Times Bestselling author and musician Seanan McGuire (October Daye series, Feed as Mira Grant), Hugo-nominated editor and curator Lynne M. Thomas (Chicks Dig Time Lords, Whedonistas), and Hugo-nominated, Tiptree and Andre Norton Award-winning New York Times Bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente (Palimpsest, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making).

They're referring to it as a "podcast of positivity." That doesn't sound as exciting to you as the latest devastatingly bad review of XYZ? Well, it helps if you know the crew. Lynne Thomas (full disclosure: she's a friend of mine) is leading the charge to turn positive fandom into an industry with the books she's edited, and the others are all known for being the sort of writers who are as vivid in person as they are on the page.

But you don't have to take my word for it. The SF Squeecast officially debuts today. Check it out for yourself. Isn't it about time to remember that you like this genre you love?

Where to Find Me This Weekend

2011-06-29T12:10:00.001-05:00

It's going to be a long, busy weekend, thanks to the Skepchicks and CONvergence. In addition to getting to see all sorts of wonderful people who are too far away most of the year, I have a few specific commitments this weekend.

Tomorrow, I will be at the grassroots activism workshop run by Maria Walters (Masala Skeptic) and Desiree Schell. Once the weekend is over and I have a chance to (start to) recover, I hope to write this up for those who are unable to attend.

Are you wondering about ways to get more involved in skeptical activism? Wondering if you can actually make a difference but not sure exactly how?

I’m really proud to announce that Skepchick is offering a Grassroots Skepticism Workshop at SkepchickCon this year. Desiree Schell and I will be hosting the workshop and helping you navigate the best practices and pitfalls of activism.

If you are attending the convention, Saturday night at 10 p.m. is the Science-Based Sex panel. While any of us on the panel could talk about the topic for the full hour, this is an excellent chance to bring your questions about human sexuality to a bunch of people who may argue over the answers but won't just guess. Come make us talk about what you want to know.

Type: Panel; Science & Technology
Venue: Atrium 7
About: What does science have to say about human sexuality? Do our current cultural assumptions about sex hold up to scientific scrutiny?
Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Rachel Maccabee, Bug Girl, Amanda Marcotte, Stephanie Zvan, Craig A. Finseth
Tags: Science & Technology, Skeptic

All too soon after that, on Sunday morning at 9 a.m., I will be on Atheists Talk interviewing Skepchickcon guest Amanda Marcotte.

Amanda Marcotte is a feminist, atheist blogger and columnist whose views are nuanced and thoughtful but rarely careful. She recently noted that for all her work on feminism, her posts on atheism earn her the most negative attention. Tune in on Sunday, July 3, as she and Stephanie Zvan discuss the intersection between the two. Find out how feminism led Amanda to atheism and how it led to a conflict with the Catholic League over her work for John Edwards' presidential campaign. We'll also discuss the role of religion in the GOP's recently ramped-up War on Women. Expect a spirited discussion.

If you want to listen online, you'll need to use a Minnesota zip code, such as 55401. Call in with your questions to 952-946-6205 or email them to radio@mnatheists.com. A podcast version of the show should also be available Sunday afternoon if you can't listen live.

And then? Why, then I collapse.

Empathic Trauma

2011-06-28T09:57:00.002-05:00

There is a post being passed around on Twitter titled. "I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD." If you have rape trauma, I can't say I'd recommend reading it, although it's fascinating and the journalist author was not raped. Mac McClelland's PTSD was triggered by the constant threat of rape and by the trauma of a rape victim she was working with.

The piece is exactly what its title says it is. It is getting mostly two responses that I've seen. The predominant one (and more male, come to think of it) is a silence that says the piece is complete in itself. The less common, and more female, is that something more should be said, although what isn't quite clear. Sometimes just "Thank you."

At first, my reaction was the predominant one. I felt the story should speak for itself, not because McClelland's response to her PTSD would have been the same as mine, but because it is a story that doesn't need to be second-guessed.

Then I got into a brief discussion about whether the trauma and the behavior that followed from it in the field was an indication that McClelland wasn't cut out for crisis reporting. My argument was that good, high-empathy reporting was often high-cost. Given that I discovered later that McClelland is an award-winning human rights journalist with a well-received book, I think I'm on the right track on this one.

There are a couple of ways to tell a story about dehumanizing violence. One is the "just the facts" approach. It's misnamed, because what it generally tells are the facts of the violent incident(s) in a way that obscures the facts of the people involved. The causes of violence and the way violence changes people's lives are facts too. Without them, the facts of the violent incident are presented out of context.

That's where empathy comes in. It makes the violence something that happens to real people, with real consequences. Frequently, it makes it an act committed by real people, many of whom are also victims.

It's a hell of a way to write a story when it's fiction. That anyone can do it well when the story is real is hard to imagine. Doing it well over and over again makes it inevitable that something will come along to bite you and almost inevitable that something will bite you damned hard.

You can't be fearless and do that job. If you can't empathize with someone else's fear, you can't make your reader empathize with it either. Even if you have the unlikely luxury of reporting from somewhere safe, feeling protected will separate you from your subjects. You have to find other ways to work that close to the bone.

The same goes for pain. To some extent, it must be yours, not theirs.

McClelland's story is remarkable not so much because she used an unorthodox means of dealing with her trauma as it is because of the glimpse it gives into the larger unorthodoxy of making those accommodations to living in pain and without safety. Her abandonment of ill-fitting "civilized" mores becomes obvious as it stops providing any benefits. Her controlled assertion of a lack of control, and a lack of need for control, would be ironic if it didn't work so well.

The title of the article promises sex, and the article delivers, but it's worth so much more as a portrait of a life and a vocation that most of us would never be able to adapt to. Go read the whole thing, if you can.

Confidence

2011-06-24T06:05:00.000-05:00

It's Greg Laden's birthday. As has become tradition, Greg, you're getting a story for your birthday. I hope you like it.

Confidence

Claude pasted a smile on his face before driving into the village square and kept it there while he unhitched and watered the horses. It was still there as he opened the back of his wagon and mounted the steps that folded out from the back. It was a calm and serene smile, despite his worries, never wavering as he waited under the awning for the villagers to become curious enough to gather round.

It didn't take long. Quick glances gave way to pulled-aside curtains and whispered conferences. Children tried to pretend they weren't looking at him while pushing their friends to approach him. Smothered giggles surrounded him.

Finally, a large man with his left arm bound up in splints and linen marched up to the wagon with a purposeful stride. Claude wondered, as he always did, whether he was finally about to be caught, but his smile stayed warm and easy. "Can I help you, friend?"

"I figured I'd better find out what you're selling before someone dies of curiosity." The tall man's grin was broad and open.

Claude relaxed slightly. He raised his voice to carry. "Goodness, friend, if they're dying, bring them here immediately! My partner and I trade in cures."

"Ah. You're magickers then?"

Claude bowed. "We are at your service." He preferred to tell only the lies he had to.

The big man winced as he tried to lift his arm. "Do you have something that'll take care of this?"

"We do indeed. Adele!" Claude turned to find her already standing next to him in the back of the wagon.

Adele frowned sympathetically at the big man's arm. "Was it a bad break?"

"Was it bad?!" He twitched his arm and winced again. He went on more quietly. "It's bad enough I haven't been able to work for two weeks."

"Oh, dear." She clucked and shook her head.

The man leaned forward. "I don't mind telling you, miss. I fainted dead away when they tugged it to straighten it out."

"You poor thing." She looked dismayed. "Stay right here. We have just the thing."

Adele retreated into the shadows of the wagon, and the man turned to Claude. "Good to meet you, by the way. I'm Thierry, the carpenter." He held out his good hand. "It's good you came along. Not being able to work sure gets to a man."

Claude shook it. "I'm Claude, and my partner is Miss Adele. It's a pleasure to be able to help, Master Thierry."

Adele returned quickly, holding out a clay bottle stoppered with a plug of wax. "This is what you want." She handed it to him. "Rub some over the break every evening, then wrap it again in a clean cloth. It may itch, but try not to scratch it."

Thierry turned the bottle in his hand. "How long will it take before I can work again?"

Adele sighed. "It'll be another five or six days, I'm afraid, and the arm will be weak for a bit even then."

"Another week beats another month or more, Miss Adele." Thierry set the bottle on the floor of the wagon and pulled out his purse. "How much?"

"It'll be three pence." Real magickers' potions would be worth about twice that price.

Thierry's eyebrows went up. "I don't mean to argue with a bargain, but are you sure?"

Claude's smile got wider. "We can't all be rich men, Master Thierry."

"You'll soon be a richer man than when you started." He handed Adele three pennies and picked up his bottle. "I'll go let the folks know you're okay." He marched off as purposefully as he'd arrived.

Claude winked at Adele. The soft sell had worked again.

The children gathered first, wide eyed at meeting magickers. Claude practiced a little slight of hand for their amusement.

Then came the adults, a couple at first and more as folks saw their neighbors gather. Claude moved down from the steps then, out from under the awning and out of earshot of the wagon. People were willing to tell Adele almost anything, even things they didn't want their neighbors to hear. Claude enjoyed himself, keeping the crowd happy as they waited, telling blatantly modest stories about things he'd never done. He sent Adele another customer whenever she was ready.

As Claude watched Adele work, he was reminded how lucky he was to have found her. She'd started out timid. Customers standing right next to her used to ask her to speak up. She still couldn't work a crowd the way he did, but she'd gotten much better. She had a knack of looking people in the eye and, to all appearances, really listening to what they said. She held hands and patted shoulders. He'd even seen tears in her eyes on occasion. No one could have played her part better.

"Well, that's everyone from the village. I sent some of the kids to run out to the farms, so I hope you're planning on staying for a bit."

Claude turned to see Thierry. He pumped the man's hand as though it had been a year since he'd seen his dear friend last. "We're hoping to stay through the night, if no one minds. We'll stay in the wagon."

"In the wagon? There's no need." Thierry pointed across the square toward a handsome, two-story stone building with a thatched roof. "We've got a perfectly good public house, and you don't need to be a rich man to stay there."

Claude's smile, which had never left his face, deepened. "I'm sure it's lovely, and we'll stop in for dinner, but there are some..." He dropped his voice. "...things that are better not left alone overnight."

"I see." Thierry shot a nervous glance at the wagon, as did several other villagers. Claude hadn't caught anyone snooping in the wagon since he'd started using that line.

Thierry rubbed the palm of his good hand on his thigh and looked around. "So, uh, where are you heading off to tomorrow?"

"We've been mostly heading east. What's the next village in that direction?"

"It's Elder's Ferry, but it's not a village. It's a good-sized town."

Someone else said, "Hope you have enough medicine. Probably be plenty of sick folk for you to cure."

Claude looked around him. "Well, you're a hearty, healthy lot. I don't think you'll clean us out."

Then he sent Adele another customer. He was as fully relaxed now as he ever got. Things couldn't have gone better. He let his eyes twinkle at the crowd as he mentally counted his take.

***

Claude woke himself two hours before dawn. He threw on his clothes in the dark and opened the half door that led from his bunk to the wagon's seat. Adele was sleeping on the floor, lying between the barrels of steeping "medicine" and the bags of dried berries and herbs they used for color and flavor. All they added was water and a little of the local hooch.

It wasn't easy hitching sleepy horses to a wagon in the dark, but Claude had years of practice. Soon he was on the seat and ready to move.

South. He'd had no intention of heading east, but the news that there was a town there had confirmed his plans. They didn't stop in large towns. Towns were big enough to hold garrisons. If and when his misdeeds caught up with him, he wanted a fighting chance to get away.

He shook the reins and clucked softly to the horses. There was barely enough starlight to show where the buildings were. They made a little noise crossing the square, but his experience said honest folk slept soundly this time of night.

Claude was just turning onto the southern road when he saw a tiny blur of motion cross in front of the wagon. The horses started. The rabbit or whatever it was had come from the right, and the wagon turned sharply back into the square. It picked up speed.

Claude braced his feet against the board and leaned back as hard as he could, pulling on the reins, but the horses were having none of it. They wanted to run.

He saw the fence in front of them just as the horses swerved to avoid it. The wagon didn't make the turn as sharply as the animals did. He threw his hands up to shield his face when he heard the fence splinter.

Then he wished he'd been holding onto something. The wagon tipped, one of the front wheels coming up off the ground. As it came back down, Claude heard an ominous crack.

He was riding lower than he should be, even considering he was now sitting on the floor between the footboard and the seat. He heard something dragging, and the horses slowed. They came to rest in the middle of the road leading east.

As soon as the wagon stopped, Claude climbed back on the seat and opened the door behind him. "Adele, are you okay?"

There was no response. Then he heard a tiny annoyed voice. "Wha time's it?"

"Never mind." Mornings weren't Adele's best time. "Go back to sleep."

He thought about climbing down, but it was too dark to see the damage. Instead, he waited for the villagers to arrive and tried to come up with a plausible explanation for leaving town so early. He looked at the road. At least they were pointed the right direction.

***

It was the axle, and that wasn't the worst of Claude's luck. Thierry, with his broken arm, was the only wainwright in the village, as well as its carpenter. The only good news was that the wagon had landed right outside Thierry's shop.

Some of the villagers thought it would be better to send to Elder's Ferry for help and hope that someone had an axle the right size or would be willing to travel to fix it. Others thought that was useless and the magickers ought to wait the few days it would take for Thierry's arm to heal.

Waiting was, of course, out of the question. Those few days would be long enough for everyone to realize the medicine they'd bought was worthless. Claude tried not to show the panic he felt. He held onto his friendly, unconcerned smile, but only just. He couldn't take any useful part in the discussion.

It was Adele who came up with the solution, once she'd had her morning tea. "Harvest hasn't started, right? Otherwise you wouldn't all be standing around like this."

Sheepish grins showed the truth of her statement. She turned to Thierry. "How long do you think it would take you to make us an axle using other people's hands?"

"You mean tell them what needs to be done?" Thierry's eyes brightened at the prospect of work. "Three, maybe four days--assuming you're not all complete oafs." He turned to his fellow villagers.

There were friendly protests, but four of the young men accepted his challenge. They and most of the rest of the village, who'd found the accident a perfect excuse for a holiday, followed Thierry to pick out a properly sized and seasoned log from his stores.

Claude turned to Adele. "Is there anyone who's expecting to be cured before the axle's done?"

She was looking under the wagon at the broken axle. "I don't think so."

He looked around nervously. "Unless you have a way to speed things up, you might want to be sure."

She stood up and faced him. "They like us here." She shrugged. "What's the worst that could happen?"

Claude stared at her, his mouth hanging open, as she casually reclaimed her tea mug from the wagon's seat and wandered across the square toward the public house. It wasn't bad enough he had to worry about them being hung, now Adele was going crazy on him. He hoped he wasn't going to have to find a new partner again.

His other partners in crime had been so...well, dishonest. Claire had been the first. She'd packed up and left with him when he'd passed through her town. She'd left him about a year later, but most of what she'd packed then wasn't hers. He was lucky he'd been in the wagon when she left.

He'd avoided romantic entanglements in choosing his next partner, deciding they affected his judgment. It hadn't helped much. Marc had turned him in to the mayor of a town they'd stopped in, probably hoping to take the wagon while Claude was occupied. Claude had just barely enough warning from the mayor's daughter to escape--leaving Marc to his fate.

He'd been leery of taking on another partner after that, but he couldn't really raise a crowd as effectively from inside the wagon. Adele had seemed so harmless, even if he got the odd impression from time to time that she looked down on him. She was perfect once she'd learned to speak up.

She'd made improvements to how they sold the medicine, too. Gone were the days when he just pulled the nearest bottle from the shelf, telling people it was a cure-all. Adele spent time in the wagon for each customer, and every one of them came away thinking she'd given them exactly what they needed.

She was the one who started telling people that the cures would take several days to work, an improvement Claude appreciated. It gave them a much better start before irate customers could come looking for them. Only now she was acting like she didn't care about angry crowds.

He wanted to chase after Adele to yell at her, but he couldn't do that here. He couldn't wring an answer out of her either. He clenched his fists in frustration and kicked one of the wagon's wheels.

Remembering Marc, Claude made himself a promise. No matter what trick she thought she was keeping in reserve, if Adele betrayed him, he'd make sure she went with him.

***

"Come on, boys, back to work!" Thierry frowned as he gestured with his left arm. He'd taken the splints off and had it resting in a sling, but he kept using it to talk.

Claude nodded at the arm. "Hurt much?"

Thierry looked down and grinned. "No, but it itches like you wouldn't believe. Your partner was right. Mostly I can stand it, but when it rubs against the sling..." He patted it gently with his other hand. "Well, it's all I can do to keep from taking off some skin."

"You don't want to do that, not when it's healing so nicely." Claude turned toward the young men back at work on the axle. He and Thierry were standing in the open doors to Thierry's airy and barnlike shop. "What are they working on now?"

Thierry started in on the details of how they were shaping the log to make Claude's axle, with lots of pauses to yell at the men as they worked. Claude smiled and nodded in the right places, but his attention was all for the arm.

He was awed and amused that Thierry had decided that the pain was itching, just because Adele had told him it would itch. Two days ago he couldn't even move it splinted. Some people were so desperate to believe they were getting better that they'd convince themselves of anything.

At the same time, he was terrified that Thierry would gesture his arm right into something solid. It should be splinted for weeks yet. If Thierry jostled it hard enough, he'd be likely to pass out from the "itch." Then where would Claude and Adele be? Not that he'd seen much of Adele in the last couple of days.

Claude noticed Thierry's voice trail off. He was staring somewhere over Claude's shoulder.

Claude turned around. Coming across the square were a woman and a girl of about seven. The girl, racing to keep up with the hurrying woman, was quite a sight in this tidy village.

Her curly straw-blond hair was pulling out of her braids and stuck out all over her head. The hem of her dress was torn and hanging down on one side. The dress had probably once been blue, but it was now the same light brown as her hands, feet and the big streak across one cheek. She was carrying a rag doll in worse shape than she was. Obviously a child who liked mud.

The woman, who Claude assumed was the girl's mother, was much neater. Her light brown hair was pulled back. Her dress and apron were clean and pressed, if obviously faded. Claude would have described her as pretty if she hadn't looked so worn and worried.

When the two of them reached the shop, the little girl flopped down on the ground. The woman was winded too.

"Oh, good." She sighed and relaxed very slightly. "You are still here. I...I need..." She blushed crimson and looked at the ground.

Thierry stepped forward. Claude thought he might be blushing too. It was going around. "Is there something I can help you with, Bernadette?"

Bernadette dropped a half curtsy to the blacksmith. "Thank you, but no. It's just..."

"Are you looking for medicine, Mistress Bernadette?"

She looked up at Claude and opened her mouth. Nothing came out. Claude hadn't thought it possible, but her blush deepened.

"My brother's sick." The little girl stood back up and patted her mother's arm. Words came out through her gasps. "Coughing real hard...Aunt Mae says his color's bad...says there'll be one less mouth soon."

Bernadette bit her lip and turned half away. "I can't pay." Her words were almost inaudible.

"The baby's sick? Bernadette, I can--"

She shook her head. "No, Thierry, I can't let you do that."

Claude hadn't heard her approach, but Adele was standing at his elbow. She held out a bottle. "You'll be wanting this."

Bernadette's hands were clenched in fists at her side. She was still turned away from them. "I can't pay."

Claude stared at the woman. What was she doing? "Mistress Bernadette, if your son's sick--"

"I can't pay."

"Here." The little girl held out her doll. "Mama says we don't take...anything we can't pay for."

"Sophie." Bernadette held one hand out toward her daughter.

"It's all right. You can have the medicine." Part of Claude wanted to confess the stuff was worthless, just to make them go away. The combination of need and rigid honesty was making him edgy.

The little girl shook her head, still holding out the doll.

"But I don't need your--"

"Claude, take the doll."

Claude looked at Adele. She looked serious.

"They won't take the medicine otherwise." When he didn't move, she turned to the girl and knelt down. "I've been looking for a good doll. What's her name?"

"Elise."

Adele shook the doll's hand. "Nice to meet you, Elise." She looked back at the girl. "Do you think we can trade?"

The girl nodded. She hugged Elise fiercely, rubbing her face against the doll's. It was hard to say who ended up the dirtier for it. Claude was pretty sure the doll was wetter than it had been.

Then the exchange was made and Adele stood up. "Mistress Bernadette, rub some of that on your son's chest when you get home, do it again morning and night. When he's breathing easier, give him small sips instead for a week."

Bernadette nodded, her eyes wet. "Thank you."

The three of them watched mother and daughter out of sight. Thierry cleared his throat. "Well, I should see how that axle's coming." He wandered away without waiting for a response.

Claude shook his head. "There's a story there."

"There are stories everywhere, if you stop to hear them." Adele was still looking after Bernadette and her daughter. She looked silly, hugging the ragged doll.

"What's yours?"

Adele tilted her head and looked at him through narrowed eyes. "What do you mean?"

Claude decided there were too many ears too close by. He jerked his head to indicate that she should follow him to the other side of the wagon. Once there, he put his head close to hers. "Do you think that was wise?"

"What?"

"Taking the doll. Don't you think they'll have enough to hate us for when the baby dies?"

"But they wouldn't have taken the medicine if I didn't take the doll." She looked confused.

"It's not medicine." Claude spit the words out. "It won't help them."

Adele looked at him for a long moment, opened her mouth and closed it again. Then she shrugged. "It won't hurt."

"Adele!" Claude was shocked at her callousness. She was so good it was easy to forget she was a fraud.

She snorted. "Don't try to convince me that you're growing a conscience. You were doing this long before I came around." She stalked away.

Claude considered going after her, but she was right. What call did he have to talk to her like that? He turned opposite the direction she'd gone and started to walk. He didn't really want to be alone with his thoughts, but he didn't want to share them with anyone else either.

***

That night they held a dance in the square. Visitors seemed rare here, for all they were near a good-sized town. Or maybe it was just that they wanted to do something nice for the people who had helped them. Claude gritted his teeth at the thought. The morning was still bothering him.

Thierry was there. Claude talked to him for a while between dances. He saw him dancing with Adele once, a clumsy proceeding with his arm in a sling. Thierry kept watching over Adele's shoulder as they moved. Bernadette wasn't there.

All the young men and boys wanted to dance with Adele. She laughed and tried to refuse, but they wouldn't let her. She seemed to be avoiding Claude.

When he danced, Claude confined himself to old women and girls under ten. No sense in making more trouble here than they were already in. Mostly he sat to one side and smiled. It was harder than usual. He was worried about how much time they had. The axle was coming along well, but any delay could still mean disaster.

It was odd. The longer Claude thought about it, the less disaster meant arrest or a public thrashing. Truth be told, he'd be sorry to disappoint these people. He didn't want to see their faces when they discovered he was a fake.

Maybe he shouldn't find it strange. After all, he'd gotten into this business because he wasn't any good at anything but talking to people. He enjoyed his job, meeting people and being friendly. He enjoyed telling stories and watching kids' eyes get big when he talked to them. He enjoyed having people look up to him, even if he wasn't who they thought he was.

This was the first time he'd really had to face the fact that there was another part of his job. He knew he was a fraud, but he didn't spend much time thinking about what that meant to anyone else. He'd never stuck around long enough to have to connect what he did with people being hurt. But now he knew these people, and he'd likely to have to watch what happened when they found out about him.

Claude wasn't wearing his habitual smile when Thierry thumped him on the back and sat down next to him. "Not much of a dancer either, eh, magicker?"

Claude waved a hand vaguely. "It's not that."

"Oh, I understand." Thierry smiled conspiratorially. "These small town entertainments, well, it's nice to be neighborly, but you must be used to something more grand."

"No, it's not...." Claude didn't want Thierry to keep guessing about what was bothering him. He changed the subject to the first thing he could think of. "How's Mistress Bernadette's baby?"

He wanted to take back the words the moment they left his mouth. The last thing he needed to do was to draw attention to his failings.

To his surprise, Thierry smiled. If he blushed too, well, Claude was getting used to that. "He's doing real well. Sophie--that's the little girl--she said he's almost stopped coughing. Even Aunt Mae, old pessimist that she is, thinks he'll make it. I can't thank you enough."

"Don't think anything of it." Claude was trying to absorb the good news. He'd been expecting tragedy. He almost missed Thierry's next remark. "What did you say?"

"I said it was right nice of Miss Adele to clean up the doll and 'sell' it to me. Sophie loves that thing, and I'll find some way to get it back to her without bruising anyone's pride."

Claude murmured something noncommittal, but he was too perplexed to make conversation. Was Adele having an attack of conscience? It didn't seem possible after her behavior that morning. Maybe she was trying to ingratiate herself with the villagers, plotting to shift the blame onto him. Or maybe....

Claude hardly noticed when Thierry left him to his own thoughts.

***

If Claude was confused the night of the dance, he was flummoxed by the afternoon they left.

The blow he'd been waiting for had never come. On the contrary, people had been coming up to him for the last day and a half to thank him for his help. A few more folks came to buy medicine. When the time finally came for them to leave, most of the village crowded around him and Adele, shaking hands and pounding backs. There were tears on some faces.

This time, they left in full daylight, and Adele sat beside him on the seat. It took all he had not to ask her immediately what was happening. Then, finally, they were out of earshot of the villagers. He tried to sound calm. "This is hardly the sendoff I was expecting."

Adele hung off the edge of her seat, turned around to keep waving at the villagers. She chuckled. "Thought it would be something less ceremonious?"

"Less comfortable at least." Claude realized Adele couldn't avoid him anymore. "So what happened back there?"

Adele didn't answer, just kept waving until they were around the first bend in the road. Then she turned around and settled in with a sigh.

"I asked you what happened back there."

Adele tried to look blank. "What do you mean?"

"We were there plenty long enough for someone to realize that what we were selling wasn't medicine. But everyone seems to think it worked." He frowned. "We're heroes. That was a grand goodbye. I haven't paid for anything for two days, but we've got enough extra food in the wagon to last us more than a week. What happened?"

"They liked us?" Adele sounded hopeful.

"Adele, stop it!"

"I, uh, I need to get something from the wagon." She reached for the door.

Claude leaned back against it. "You weren't worried, so you know something about what was going on in the village. If you go into the wagon without telling me what that is, it'll be to get your stuff. Then I'll stop and let you off."

Adele's mouth squirmed as though it were trying to flee her face. She turned forward.

"Adele?"

She held up her hand. "Please. A minute. I'm not used to talking about this."

He waited for almost a mile. Finally, she sighed. "It was magic."

"Magic?" Claude was stunned.

She nodded. "I used magic to turn the potion you mix up into medicine. Everybody thought the cures worked because they did."

"But I...but you...." Claude told himself to shut up. He took a deep breath. "How long?"

"Have I been doing this? Since the start."

"Why?"

She frowned at him. "Why what? Help people?"

"No." He thought about what he wanted most to know. "Why is a magicker like you staying with a fraud like me? Don't you have a council somewhere you should be sitting on?" He had a sudden suspicion. "What do the magickers want with me?"

"Nothing as far as I know." Adele grinned. "Why? What have you done to them?"

"Nothing as far as I know." Claude hoped it was true. "Then why stay?"

Adele turned away. "Because the magickers don't want anything to do with me either."

Claude had traveled with Adele for three years. He couldn't imagine her committing any crime bad enough that the council of magickers wouldn't want her. Not with their reputation. "Why not?"

"I'm not very good." There were tears in her voice.

Claude couldn’t believe what he was hearing. "For goodness sake, you just cured a whole village of what ailed them. How good do you have to be?"

Adele wiped her eyes before turning around. "I didn't do all of it. You helped."

"Me?" Claude stared at her. Then he closed his mouth and looked at his hands, holding the reins. They looked the same as they always had. He couldn't see any magic. "What did I do?"

Adele smiled the tiniest of smiles. "Magic requires two things. I have the skills. I know what needs to be done."

"Okay, I'll agree with that. What's the other part?"

"Belief." Adele sighed and looked like she was going to cry again. "That's the part I don't have."

"What do you mean?"

Adele looked at him. "People see you and hear you, and they believe in you. They want to. I...well, I'm not exactly inspiring." She gestured at herself. "I'm not much to look at. I can't carry on an interesting conversation. People just don't look at me and believe I can help them."

"But..." Claude stopped. He realized he was on the brink of saying something that could lose him the best partner he'd had. He wanted to think about what he was doing first.

Then he looked at Adele, twisting her skirt in her hands. She'd spent the last three years curing people. She'd stayed with a fraud so she could keep curing them. What had he done in that time?

There wasn't anything to think about. "People believe in you."

Adele stared at her hands. "You don't have to be nice. I'm used to it." Her expression said she lied.

He whooped with laughter. "Since when do you think I'm nice?"

She looked up with wide eyes. "You're serious."

"I'm serious." He sighed. "I've been admiring your tricks, your way with people, for years. You have a skill I've never had."

She frowned her question.

"Sincerity." He shook his head. "You look at people, listen to them, and they can tell you care. They know--and I should have known, if I was paying any attention--that you're there to help them. When you tell them what they need to take to get cured and how they need to take it, they believe in you. They believe in it."

Adele looked stunned. Claude gave her some time to think.

He thought about the last three years. Nothing he'd done in that time had been what he thought it was. There were places he could go back to, people he could talk to again. They wouldn't be looking to arrest him. They'd think he'd helped.

For that matter, he had helped them--with Adele's assistance. From what she'd said, he'd supplied half of what they'd needed to make them better. Even if he hadn't meant to at the time, it was nice to know the one thing he was good at had turned out to be good for something after all.

The sun had almost reached the horizon when Adele stirred next to him and spoke.

"There's one more thing I should tell you."

Claude braced himself. "What?"

He hoped Adele would stay. If she decided she didn't need him anymore--and he wouldn't blame her--he'd have to go back to being a fraud. Now that there was another option, he desperately wanted to be able to grab it.

"I wasn't completely honest with you." She rubbed her eyes and looked uncomfortable. "I was afraid that if I told you everything, you wouldn't need me anymore."

Claude didn't understand. "What do you mean?"

"The magickers thought I was a novelty. It's pretty rare for someone to have only half the talents needed to create magic. That's how I got so much training before they made me leave. They were sure I'd develop the rest."

When it sunk in, Claude stopped the horses and turned to face Adele. "You mean..." He couldn't say it.

She nodded, a little bit of humor peeking out from behind her nervousness. "If you can raise that much belief, you can probably learn to shape it."

"I, uh...oh." He blinked.

Adele grinned, definitely not the timid person he'd met three years before. "I could try to teach you, if you like."

Claude tried to think about it, but he couldn't give the idea the attention it deserved. On top of everything else, it was just too much. "Could you do me a favor?"

Adele scrunched her eyebrows together. "What?"

"I'm having enough trouble getting used to being legitimate." He shook the reins to start the horses going again. "Ask me again in about a month."

She looked at the wagon and horses then, finally, at him. "I will."

He believed her.

I Do This Why?

2011-06-21T09:18:00.000-05:00

I'll let you in on a little secret: No one reads this blog.

Well, that's not quite true. The people who read this blog aren't anything like "no one." There just aren't very many of them.

To put this in perspective, last Thursday night I wrote a blog post regarding a ridiculous letter published in Times Higher Education in support of Satoshi Kanazawa, the "researcher" who claimed that his analysis showed that black women were "objectively" less attractive than women of other ethnic backgrounds. The letter was causing an angry buzz in my Twitter feed, and I put that anger into words.

The numbers looked good to start with. A dozen people or so have shared it on Twitter, a couple of them quite influential. It's being passed around on Facebook a little. It was Tumbled and reblogged a few times. Go, me.

I know better than that, though. I passed the post on to the JAYFK as well, to give it its best chance of finding an audience. After all, the defense of Kanazawa isn't just ridiculous; it's damaging and outrageously hypocritical. So I also pushed the post more than usual, playing up the controversy aspect by retweeting John Rennie's "Possible to draw & quarter people while hoisting on own petards? @szvan does it to Kanazawa's defenders. http://t.co/oxWIjoQ" and Chris Clarke's "Note to self: stay on @szvan's good side. http://t.co/EEECI3q #kanazawa"

Jason at Lousy Canuck, very much not a "no one," also thinks the topic is important. He wrote a post yesterday reporting on my post and promoting it. Half a dozen people retweeted his post, mostly the same people who had promoted mine, including me.

Now, this is how my blog traffic works: In two hours, Jason's post--meant to get people to read mine--passed it in total traffic, at least on this blog. For the record, that's less time than it took to put my post together. Half a dozen people clicked through from his post to mine. One person retweeted my post again.

So much for timely and topical. So much for content is king. So much for networking and self-promotion. So...yeah.

Why do I do this again?

By Thy Authority

2011-06-20T12:08:00.000-05:00

Oh, look. Another preacher person is in trouble for using the authority of his position to get him some.

The woman told police that her spiritual adviser recommended she find a regular confessor in the Catholic Church so she chose Wenthe, whom she had met while attending a Catholic initiation class. She said Wenthe heard her confession at least four times, while he told police he heard her confession only one time and it was before their sexual relationship began.

According to the criminal complaint, the woman said she had been sexually abused as a child and suffered from an eating disorder. The first sexual encounter took place at Wenthe's rectory apartment after the woman had met with her counselor.

"I remember pleading with him that we should stop," the woman wrote in a 2006 letter to an archdiocese official. "He made me feel like I had done this to him and that I was obligated to finish the job."

The woman told police the sexual encounters happened about every two weeks, sometimes after mass in Wenthe's apartment or in the sacristy where priests change into their ceremonial garments. She eventually left the state to enter treatment for her eating disorder and the sexual encounters ended in February 2005.

This time, however, the priest is saying he shouldn't be in trouble for what he did.

Paul Engh, Wenthe's attorney, filed a motion arguing that the state law prohibiting a clergy member from having sex with a person who is seeking or receiving "religious or spiritual advice, aid, or comfort in private" is unconstitutional. In court records, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office said the law is constitutional and has been upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

District Judge Margaret Marrinan will hear arguments from both sides Monday.

"Any minister who has sex with anybody may be in trouble under this statute," Engh said last week. "It's an overly broad attempt to regulate sexual behavior."

Right. Because priests and ministers can't possibly, say, sign up for OKCupid and take their chances like anyone else. Their situation is so very, very special that they can only have sex with the vulnerable people who come to them for help and believe they have an inside line on what God wants. They are such special snowflakes that they can't abide by the same laws every other kind of counselor or other authority is bound by. Not them.

And the answer to the problem apparently isn't to give up any of that authority either. The church is engaging in similar nail biting.

Andrew Eisenzimmer, chancellor for civil affairs with the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said the archdiocese has not taken a position on the constitutionality of the law. He said these types of cases are complex because of the restrictions on testimony about a particular religion's practices or beliefs.

"You're asking the jury to decide when a Catholic priest is actually counseling a follower," Eisenzimmer said.

Not really. Though the law specifies that sex is prohibited when someone seeks "religious or spiritual advice, aid, or comfort in private," what the state is asking the jury to do is to determine when there is a degree of authority in a relationship that prevents a reasonable certainty of free consent.

It's a high standard, yes. However, it's the same standard that anyone else who offers care in situations that create an imbalance of power agrees to abide by. Do they always stick to this agreement? No, but they don't then challenge the legality of the agreement based on the idea that maybe they didn't have that much power. Power and authority are broadly construed for other "helping" professions. None of them seems to have this same problem with thinking this will keep them from ever having sex. They simply keep their sex and professional lives separate. Who would think it would be harder for those who claim to be experts in the problem of temptation?

It's also amusing to see Wenthe's attorney's concern for "an overly broad attempt to regulate sexual behavior." His client has nominally submitted to a much-tighter regulation of his own behavior and participates in the church's attempt to regulate everyone else's.

That Wenthe is fighting the state and not the church suggests that his problem isn't with regulating sexual behavior in general, but only with anyone who tries to regulate his. After all, the church only made him undergo treatment when they were informed of the problem in 2006. They left him all the authority that allowed him to do this in the first place.

Saturday Storytime: Obedience

2011-06-18T08:50:00.000-05:00

Breanna Yovanoff writes grim and creepy young adult fantasy with elements of uncertain hope. In "Obedience" she has written a notably grim and creepy zombie story with elements of uncertain hope. There are much worse patterns to find in someone's writing.

Grace crouched lower, sinking into her nanovest, bracing her shoulder against the radiator. She checked the cuffs of her jacket, tucked them deep into the tops of her gloves. Outside, pale hands seemed to float, palms flat against the windows. They were laughing, a storm of high-pitched giggles.

They smiled. No training in the world prepared you for that. They smiled as they slashed and bit, tearing flesh off their victims in chunks. They smiled as they ran, a merciless full-out sprint, headlong, ravenous. They smiled right before you leveled the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Sometimes, if the shot was high enough, the caliber small enough, even when they fell back—smoke rising from a neat round hole in the forehead—they were still smiling.

Jacobs said it was neurological, an involuntary tic. He talked about them a lot, his language precise, his hands sketching neural pathways. It had been his idea to come up here, strike for the research complex near Rosewood. They were close now, a couple miles off, but the slopes were crawling with smirkers and everything had started to seem wildly impossible.

A window broke somewhere and the house was suddenly awash with a new influx. They poured into the little common room. One was wearing a Christmas sweater, red, sprinkled intermittently with green trees, white reindeer.

Keep reading.

With Friends Like These

2011-06-17T02:02:00.000-05:00

Times Higher Education has just posted a rather amusing defense of evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. If you managed to miss the poorly analyzed Psychology Today blog post he wrote that put him in a defensive position, I recommend you catch up here before reading the letter.

All set now? Good.

We believe the recent criticisms of Satoshi Kanazawa's work cannot be justified ("Damage limitation: evolutionary psychologists turn on controversial peer", 2 June). Contrary to the assertion that Kanazawa does poor work, he has published 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, biology and medicine. These are listed on his London School of Economics web page and many of them have been published in top high-impact journals.

I'll let someone from Retraction Watch weigh in on how well peer review guarantees that poor work is never published.

Kanazawa's publications are listed here. I note that whatever "top high-impact journals" Kanazawa has published in, he's also published in Intelligence, which still (unironically) prints papers treating IQ testing as a valid measure for cross-cultural intelligence comparisons. Someone for whom impact factor is a big deal will have to do the research on whether the letter writers are correct, but I would love to see the results.

Why? Because there are a number of fairly staid topics and treatments among Kanazawa's publications. It wouldn't be the first time I'd seen that kind of work used to put someone's name in the "right" places while the iffy political pieces went elsewhere. In fact, Pharyngula had a post up yesterday documenting that kind of behavior in a geologist. If anyone matches articles to impact factor, please let me know.

The critics assert that many of these papers are "bad science" and have been published only as a result of a faulty peer-review process. This cannot be accepted. The editors of journals send the papers submitted to them to reviewers with expertise in the fields in question and publish only those that are deemed to be sound. Thus, all of Kanazawa's papers have been judged as sound by competent reviewers. Others may disagree, and in the case of innovative papers of the kind Kanazawa writes, frequently do. Time eventually tells whether the authors or their detractors are right.

This is just silly. Bad science gets through peer review, even when one's peers don't have the same political bent you do. On the day this letter appeared, Times Higher Education also ran an article about a mathematics journal withdrawing a paper written by a proponent of intelligent design that claimed to disprove the second law of thermodynamics. The editor apologized for even considering it, but the article had passed peer review.

The critics complain that when Kanazawa has a paper rejected by one journal, he sends it to another and publishes it there. Who among the academy's members has not done that? Reviewers frequently misjudge a paper and editors accept their recommendations. The author then sends it elsewhere and it is accepted. If there were anything wrong with this practice, then, as the first online comment under "Damage limitation" puts it: "A few Nobel prizes will have to be returned."

The detractors assert that Kanazawa rarely responds to brickbats. On the contrary, we believe that while he sometimes does not respond immediately, he frequently deals with criticisms in his subsequent work.

Actually, the objection was not that Kanazawa submitted papers after they were rejected. The section in question:

The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa's poor quality work. Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals, despite the detailed critiques of the papers given to Kanazawa by the reviewers and editors of the journals that rejected his papers.

Thus, not only is Kanazawa's work an example of poor science on theoretical and methodological grounds in our view, but we also believe it violates the central purpose of scientific discourse, because he rarely engages with his scientific critics. He rarely considers the criticisms of his work that have been published as well as those given to him during the peer review process: to our knowledge he has published counter-responses on only two occasions to critiques of his work (separate responses to two critiques of a paper published in 2001; and a response to one critique of a paper published in 2002). Since then, he has not published a full length response in the academic literature to any of the numerous critiques which have been published against his work, nor has he published corrections to the papers for which doubt has been cast on the conclusions.

There are legitimate discussions to be had on the role of peer-review feedback in shaping the final published product. However, having that discussion and recasting a complaint about Kanazawa's resistance to incorporating feedback are two very different things. Also, given what the criticism of Kanazawa actually was (that he doesn't interact with feedback prior to publication) it seems a little odd to note that he incorporates feedback into later work. If the criticism is important enough to be dealt with, wouldn't he produce stronger papers by dealing with it up front?

But back to the letter. There are a few short paragraphs providing information about two times Kanazawa later responded to criticism, followed by this closing:

Finally, we believe that the proper place to make criticisms of academic papers is in the journals in which they were published, not in letters to the press where they cannot be adequately answered.

This--this!--is what makes this letter so entertaining. Even forgetting that Kanazawa brought himself and his work into the general public eye by writing a blog post about his "findings," this is the richest vein of irony I've mined in some time. You see, while the idea that scientific ideas and their validity should be hashed out in journals is relatively common among scientists, it's pretty rare among the signatories to this letter.

Christopher Brand has spoken publicly in favor of selective human breeding.

Bruce Charlton has advocated for the stricter rationing of education.

Eric Crampton has blogged to defend sweatshops.

Paul Gottfried has used his history background to advocate for a one true version of conservatism.

Richard Lynn has advocated for eugenics.

Kevin MacDonald has written an article positing a choice between immigration and peace.

Gerhard Meisenberg wrote a book outlining the consequences of not using eugenic technology.

Helmuth Nyborg has advocated for eugenics.

Byron Roth wrote an anti-immigration book on the "perils of diversity."

J. Philippe Rushton spoke at a white nationalist convention to state that the problem of Islam is genetic.

Donald Templer spoke at a different white nationalist convention suggesting whites should be in charge because they're just smarter.

Tatu Vanhanen coauthored a book blaming inherent differences in intelligence for global wealth inequalities

Erich Weede has written an article advocating for peace and prosperity through global capitalism.

With the exception of Lynn, who cowrote the book with Vanhanen, that's just one example per signatory for those who were easy to find in a very quick Google search. If there is one thing this group is not, that would be in favor of keeping science discussions contained in journals. The fact that they want everything contained and compartmentalized in this case makes a far stronger argument than anything in Kanazawa's CV that, at least in this field or subfield, there may be some serious problems with peer review.

But it was terribly sweet of them to write a letter and make it obvious.

The Coupling Rant

2011-06-16T15:53:00.002-05:00

I love my fandom, and my fandom drives me insane.

By "my fandom," I mean the people who interact with science fiction and fantasy in a critical capacity with an eye to getting things right. They want the science to not be silly (or at least not any sillier than it has to be for the purposes of the story). They want magic systems to make sense, granted the fact of magic in the first place. They want events to unfold in ways that flow from the world and the characters.

More importantly, what sets apart "my fandom" is that they want the people to be right. They want populations to reflect the diversity of a realistic world. They want characters to reflect the personalities and experiences of the people who read science fiction and fantasy--and those who would read if they could find themselves in the stories.

All that is an excellent thing. It does, however, come with its own set of problems and biases. The biggest problem I tend to find in a group that values getting things right is a tendency to confuse things they don't like with things that are wrong, and by wrong I don't just mean factually inaccurate.

(Note: One of these days I'll stick my hand in the blender that is the tendency of my fandom to apply the simplistic label of "fail" to large-scale, multiple-issue, multiple-party disagreements. Today isn't that day, mostly because the topic deserves careful, nuanced analysis and I'm grumpy.)

The most recent thing driving me insane has to do with Doctor Who. More specifically, it has to do with people's reactions to Steven Moffat taking over showrunning from Russell T. Davies. Even more specifically, it has to do with the fact that the relationship between Amy and Rory doesn't appeal to a lot of people.

Frankly, it doesn't entirely appeal to me either. As pretty as Rory is, I really like being in a grown-up relationship. I don't want to be that young and unsure of what I want and what I'm being offered. I don't want to treat anyone the way Amy does or the way Rory does or even the way the Doctor does. Not. for. me.

On the other hand, you're never going to hear me say, "Have you ever seen Coupling? The problem is that Steven Moffat can't write a strong woman who isn't a bitch." I don't remember who said it in that version, but the sentiment is fairly common.

Here's the thing about Coupling. It was developed when Friends became a big international hit. The biggest difference, aside from the size of the apartments involved and the presence of a pub instead of a coffee shop, is that the characters in Friends were dealing with their various lives at the same time they were hooking up and breaking up with each other: jobs, families, old school friends, etc. and on. Any gender and sexual politics happened in the course of one grand soap opera. Mostly, they didn't happen.

Coupling, as the name signifies, was about sex. It was also about gender roles in relationships. As in Friends, there were three men and three women, but here they came in paired types. Sally and Patrick were the shallow, looks-obsessed traditionalists who ran their relationships by the rules. When they dated each other, some of those rules meshed and some clashed. Jane and Jeff were bound by no rules. They were impulsive, and you never knew what would come out of their mouths.

Then there were Susan and Steve, the proxies for the audience. Each was horrified by how Sally and Patrick treated their partners. Each was a little envious of Jane and Jeff in their freedoms, but neither wanted to deal with the consequences Jane and Jeff faced. They were pretty well perfect for each other, but they still had to figure out how to make things work. They started with nudity, ended with birth, and ran a lot of odd places in the middle.

Coupling was hilarious because of this awkwardness, this tension between the old rules that mostly tell people they can't do what they want with respect to sex and the new rules that require us to negotiate everything without any training in how it's done. Every new freedom came with the embarrassing need to, ahem, you know, talk about it. Every new opportunity came with a need to have an opinion, even if everyone, all your life, has been telling you what the one right opinion is...and it isn't yours.

Susan got cranky about this sometimes. Exasperated. Yep. So did Steve. One of the funniest speeches in the show involves him getting fed up enough to not care about the consequences of explaining the appeal of lesbian porn. It is every bit as bitchy as anything any of the women in the show say to each other in the entire run.

But Susan is the bitch and Moffat can't write any better. Because someone doesn't like what being strong without being perfect in the middle of these pressures looks like. Because her journey and Steve's are uncomfortable to see, particularly if we've managed our own with just a little bit more grace. Or maybe because we haven't. I don't know.

I do know that wanting things to be right is a very good thing, but I'm never going to understand the kind of thinking that takes my opinions and preferences and decides that anything that doesn't match them is wrong.

Something Hard and Something Easy

2011-06-15T18:06:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already seen half a dozen links from your friends to Gerty-Z's "I gay wrote this post," first, ask your friends why they're letting you down. Then read it.

What I wanted to write about today is what it is like to be out as a new TT academic in the bio-sciences. EcoPhysioMichelle over at C6-H12-O6 has a post up about feeling invisible as a non-heterosexual academic. As she points out, it can be relatively easy to not mention the fact that you are LGBT. I have made it a point in my life to NOT be invisible. In other words, I am fully out. Everyone in my department knows that I am gay: colleagues, administrators, the janitor. All of the students know. My wife comes with me to departmental events and we have the lab peeps over for the occasional BBQ. If you are straight, you may be thinking "well, everyone knows that I am straight". No big deal, right. Wrong.

Why is it hard to be out? Not for the reasons you probably think. However, I think we've had enough straight people speaking for lesbians for a while. Find out from Gerty herself.

Now for something a bit easier. Let me start by noting that I have never in my working life received a raise that was only cost of living. Some of the raises I've received, percentage-wise, have made people's jaws drop.

Awesome, right? Go, me!

Well, that's one way to look at it. It's probably not the best way, though, particularly given that I haven't asked for raises that big. What it really means is that I've been underpaid. When someone gives you a raise to "bring you up to where you should be," that means you started way too low and stayed there until someone noticed. It means I've missed out on significant earning power over my career and only avoided missing out on more by not staying anywhere I didn't have a really good boss.

It doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. And my friend Lynne has a post up about three sentences that will go a long way to keep it from happening to you when you start a job.

These are the three most important sentences that I learned in library school:

"I'm really excited about this opportunity. However, the offer is a little below my range. Can we do any better, say [name a number $5000 more than offer on table?]"

These sentences are a simpler version of the strategy that worked for my husband when he recently changed jobs. They worked for Lynne, and she lays out the math on what they can mean for someone else, either as earning power or in other perqs that can make your job or your life more pleasant and successful. Go read, absorb, and put them into action the next time you've already convinced someone you're the best person for the job.

Dreaming for Women

2011-06-14T16:56:00.001-05:00

On Saturday, my niece graduated from high school. Her school is very young, and it's meant to be small. Her graduating class was 13 people. Twelve of those people were women.

They heard a commencement address on the subject of dreams. The speaker quoted Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke of the failures Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison met on their way to success, and praised the work of Mozart and Michael Jordan in mastering their crafts.

It mentioned not one woman. So I will.

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem

The fact of the matter is, ladies, you deserved better. You deserved a speech that recognized you have your own unique challenges to face in finding and following your dreams, and you deserved a speech that didn't make you feel you were the first of your gender to chart this path. You aren't. Many women have come before you and accomplished great things. You've just learned that, like them, your biggest challenge may be in being recognized for what you manage to do.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. --Virginia Woolf

You were given some advice to put aside distractions and listen to your dreams to find out what they really are. This is excellent advice. However, the toughest distractions aren't the sort of thing that will go away when you turn off the TV. Much harder to set aside are the voices of all those people around you who think they know what you want better than you can. They mean well, some of them, but they don't know you as well as you do. And you are the person your dreams must satisfy.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. --Gail Sheehy

Also, it is hard for many of the people who love you to understand that you must grow up and find your own way. That doesn't mean you have to leave them behind, but it does mean they can't protect you anymore. The world can be a dangerous place in which to be a woman, and there are those who want to make it a more dangerous place for those women who dare to strive and challenge and be independent.

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. --Beverly Sills

The problem with this is that not striving to follow your dreams doesn't make the world a significantly safer place. There are costs to living a small, frustrated life as well. Stress is bad for you in large doses, but the stresses of challenging yourself and your world are often balanced by the joys those challenges bring, both in themselves and in meeting them successfully.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. --Anais Nin

Meet people. You don't have to like them all, and they don't have to like you, but you'll never find the people who fill the odd gaps in your heart if you don't find odd people. You won't find the people who share your "odd" interests. And you won't find the people whom you can help like no one else can.

Visit places that are unlike the places you grew up. They're not as far away as you might think. Go as a visitor instead of as a tourist. Learn how and why things you don't do are done, even if you have to ask stupid questions. You don't have to move in, but every possibility you're exposed to is food for your dreams.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. --Alice Walker

Following your dreams will get you into trouble. One sort or another, you can't avoid it. When this happens, particularly when it happens simply because you are a woman pursuing your own dreams instead of someone else's idea of what you should be doing, you have resources. There are laws and rules on your side. You have rights. You will have to fight to get them, but there are also people on your side who will fight for you and with you. Accept their help. It doesn't mean that you're weak; it means that these people understand that we are stronger together.

Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use. --Ruth Gordon

Following your dreams will wear you down. It will be tiring. Sometimes it will hurt. You will have times you just don't feel you have the strength to keep going. You have more than you know. Never quit while you're tired. Cry, swear, throw things. Rest, because you've already done more than you or most of the people around you are giving you credit for, but don't quit. Once you've got your strength back, then you can decide whether it's time for a new dream, but you'll be amazed how often all you needed was the rest to make you strong again.

Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore. --Lady Gaga

Despite the makeup of your graduating class, I can promise you that men are not rare in the rest of the world, if it's even a man you're looking for. The good ones are worth stopping for and appreciating at least briefly, but there are more of them than you've been led to believe. Similarly, there is more love out there than you can imagine now. Not all of it comes in romantic pairings, either. If you make time in your dreams for people, and set aside the people who exist only to fill your time and get in the way of your dreams, you don't ever have to worry about being alone. Don't listen to the people who tell you you can't have it all.

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. --Harriet Tubman

Now, go. Dream.

The Good Bad Girl

2011-06-13T16:37:00.000-05:00

I've been watching the DC comics reboot commentary without much personal stake. It bothers me that the universe is losing Oracle in a redesign touted as promoting diversity, but at a slight remove. I'm not part of the audience for these comics. Watching a bunch of white guys of a certain age decide that they knew how to increase their appeal to everyone else was painful but predictable.

Then, while following a link from Bug Girl, I saw this.

The wonderful thing about Harley’s original design is that it’s inviting, welcoming even. If you saw her on the street, you wouldn’t expect her to suddenly draw out a gun and steal all your money. The general public would be won over with her megawatt grin until her mallet knocked them unconscious. If you put the new Harley in a city, people would start asking if Marilyn Manson was shooting a new music video, pedestrians would avoid her all together and the police would be called. She’s more intimidating and easily more suspicious than the original.

Uh-uh. You don't mess with my Harley Quinn.

Yes, my Harley Quinn, for two reasons: No comic book character stays static, and Harley's been part of several reimaginings. At least one has had a very different Harley origin story, which includes a female Joker. A few show us an older, grown up Harley. I'm not talking about those.

More importantly, Harley is mine because she's a beloved part of my id. You see, Harley is such a pretty little anti-feminist's nightmare.

No, really. What is Harley before she meets the Joker? We know what kind of practice and injury and self-denial goes into being a gymnast. More work and self-denial puts her in a profession that is all about helping others, thanklessly. And all of it done coming out of a family where the men are allowed to fail but Harley is supposed to remain a "good girl."

Then comes the Joker. Our little Harley falls in love, exactly as she's been told good girls do. And there is hell to pay.

Harley adopts Mr. J's ends as her own--and gets in his way helping him, when she isn't showing him up. After all, she doesn't have to be crazy to do what she does. It all makes sense in her world. She idolizes Mr. J, creating a fictionalized, idealized Joker in her own mind that he can never live up to. She maddeningly maintains her cheer when things are going wrong for him. She is so perfectly devoted to him that he has to kill her to get rid of her--or try, at any rate, since she insists on staying alive.

For all her mayhem, Harley remains the quintessential good girl, and I love that this only makes her all the more terrifying and formidable. Harley is the bit of me that looks out from under her eyelashes and says, "Yes, I can be exactly what you want me to be. I can follow those rules and present the front that you require. You're going to hate it."

That isn't this Harley. I don't know what this Harley is. Maybe she'll give us something else we need in the place of that chaotic, amoral creature we're told we should aspire to be. But if we lose our good girl in the process of remaking the bad, then we've lost too much.

Saturday Storytime: Six Months, Three Days

2011-06-11T09:44:00.000-05:00

I've known Charlie Jane Anders tangentially for years through WisCon. I cheered when she co-edited She's Such a Geek. I've enjoyed her nonfiction writing on io9, particularly the occasional movie review. Somehow, I've missed her fiction until this week. I've got to fix that.

This story is, amid whatever else Charlie Jane intended it to be, a meditation on making our own way in a world of other people's expectations. More than that I will not say. You'll just need to read it.

The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley style dress with an Ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too — or she may have, anyway.

Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lay ahead, consoles her tremendously.

Keep reading.

The Judgment of Rep. Weiner

2011-06-09T18:04:00.001-05:00

My former roommate, who was also my maid of honor and has consumed more of my turkey soup than anyone but my husband, left a comment on my prior post on the reaction to Weiner's "sex scandal" that I think is worth addressing at length (in no small part because she asks me to, and I hate to say no to Shari). So here is the meat of her comment and my reactions.

But there's a few things Not connected (at least, in my own head yet) to prudery that Still make me want him to step down.

One thing worth noting here is the prudery under discussion isn't necessarily the prudery of an individual. One effect of the overall background prudery in effect has been to narrow the options and ideas that even come to mind when we think about these issues.

Poor impulse control.

We don't actually know this. Evidence of a mistake is not always evidence of poor planning. He may have thought this through, decided it made sense for his situation, and still bungled the execution.

Utter lack of concern (or was it freaking AWARENESS of concern) for what his family would go through 'if he was caught'.

Again, we don't know this. People who take on "alternative" sexual and relationship arrangements are well aware that there is risk involved. That's why there's a closet. That's why these things are conducted in private. But that doesn't mean that the risk hasn't been weighed and found to be more than balanced by the ability to be true to one's own desires. Let's face it. If that ability were a trivial thing, human history would be hugely different.

Whether right or wrong - and if prudery is being used as a cultural straightjacket, we can all probably assume Wrong! - he knows that politicians are under intense scrutiny, as they represent other people.

Actually, this is new. I recommend reading Marcotte's piece on Alternet on this for some recent historical perspective. If you need more examples, consider that Norm Coleman's mistress was considered non-news for both his Senate campaigns (as, sadly, was his reputation for sexual assault). FDR, JFK, and LBJ's affairs (to stick to the monogrammed presidents) are matters of history, known but irrelevant during their tenures. You can say times were different then, but that doesn't explain why Bush the Elder's mistress was considered only a matter of gossip. To go back further, Cleveland's possible illegitimate child (actual paternity unknown) was acknowledged in his run for the presidency but not a deciding factor.

Private matters used to be considered private unless they were evidence of hypocrisy and often even then. This is new.

And they are held to high standards. Or, at least, I hold them to high standards - especially of judgement.

Well, except we don't hold our politicians to high standards. If we did, we'd get serious about the Citizens United ruling so that corporations have a tougher time buying them. We'd do something so people weren't always talking about voting for the lesser of two evils. We'd hold them accountable for their campaign promises instead of expecting them to be broken.

Holding politicians to high standards only for private decisions that have no impact on our lives is a clear signal of prudery to me. And while any individual may not fit that description, the fact that a consensual dick pic is news and Justice Thomas's hidden conflicts of interest aren't stinks of that background prudery.

I'm guessing he thought he could manage any fallout if this ever became public. We see how well That turned out.

Given the historical treatment of extramarital sex in politicians, I'm not sure that was a bad assumption going in. It doesn't seem to have taken him very long, though, to figure out that nothing but the full truth was going to suffice in this situation.

That amazing level of arrogance in his initial denials screams of his desire for celebrity, without responsibility.

I'm all for lying my face off if someone decides that my private business is their public business. Well, actually, I'm not, but that's mostly because I'm a skewer-with-detailed-truth kind of gal. Still, I completely support it in others. Serving one's country is not the same thing as giving the American population a free pass into one's bedroom (or wherever else one wants to flirt or fuck). It's a pity it didn't work.

And that kind of judgement in his personal life makes me question his judgement on national issues.

Here Weiner has a record. Twelve years of national record, six years in New York before that. And that record is excellent, particularly on the topics of women's health (sexual and otherwise) and sexual freedoms. I have no reason to doubt his record because he screwed up using Twitter.

The point at which compulsive behaviour threatens your job - and this qualifies, I think, you need to put it in check.

What's compulsive? Why compulsive? The fact that you and most of the people you know would need something as strong as a compulsion to behave that way means that this is behavior you find wrong for you. That's fine, but it's not a universal. Someone who doesn't consider this behavior immoral or otherwise wrong doesn't need to be compulsive to do something natural to them.

Would I be as disgusted if this guy weren't married? Not quite, because the whole point of marriage is to forsake all others (not discussing polygamy here.), and if you want to do gross tweets, don't friggin' get married because your spouse will be understandably pissed. Poor judgement.

Actually, the purpose of marriage is to build a life together and to have that life recognized by your friends, family, and society. Beyond that, it varies. I know a number of people in very strong marriages (some of the strongest I know, but not all, so no use guessing) who never promised monogamy or who decided that monogamy was either not necessary or actively harmful to their marriages.

And really, we don't ever forsake all others. Marriages happen within a community. We have friends who meet some of our emotional needs so our partners don't carry them all. We have people around us who share values and interests that our partners don't. We have flirtations, the vast majority of them without any intent to go beyond flirting. We maintain lots of degrees of intimacy with people other than our partners.

Some people simply find that allowing sexual and romantic relationships with people other than their partners is, for them, a reasonable step in the same direction. They're nothing like pissed. The people who don't aren't necessarily prudes, but deciding that all marriages have to be composed of the same boundaries and arrangements that yours are is a form of prudery.

Also, I've seen the picture that was tweeted. It's not gross. It doesn't make me want to jump the guy or anything, but I can kind of understand why he wanted someone else to see it.

Single people sexting (especially with that last name)are opening themselves up to blackmail - poor judgement if they are in the public eye.

There is only a risk of blackmail if there is secrecy. There is more likely to be secrecy in an atmosphere of prudery. If you're willing to do what Weiner did, to confess when the press decides this is the most pressing political issue of the day, you can't be blackmailed.

So, no. While I'm deeply concerned at the judgment of the press in this situation, Weiner's judgment, particularly as a legislator, bothers me not one bit.

Fright N--Ooh, Yum

2011-06-08T14:09:00.000-05:00

So, there's a new trailer out for the remake of Fright Night. It is being passed around because it stars David Tennant's bare chest.

The passing around prompted Dana to ask, "Does retweeting that David Tennant thing make us sexist pigs?"

Because I live to answer these questions and make these distinctions between sex and sexism, I answered, "As long as we don't feel entitled to it, I think we're okay in appreciating it."

So please, enjoy. Things like this should not be wasted.

Prudes and Prisons

2011-06-07T20:01:00.000-05:00

After a night without internet, I finally got to catch up on the Weiner "scandal" this morning. All the reaction I had time before work was summed up in three Tweets:

Yeah, I'm a bit ticked at Weiner. Mostly for labeling his premarital sexting as "inappropriate."

As for his postmarital sexting? Only his wife can say. And I'm certainly not going to put her on the spot to find out.

In other news, has Ginny issued a public apology to Clarence yet for her inappropriate lobbying?

I meant to write a whole blog post about the subject tonight, but Amanda Marcotte has already written it.

Against prudery

I don't want to keep hammering at this, but here's a link to my Alternet piece on why I'm so concerned about this whole Anthony Weiner scandal. I won't revisit it at length here; please read the article. My biggest problem is that the pretense of public interest was completely abandoned, and this was just a matter of the "ick factor". Now that this door is open, and simply making people uncomfortable is considered reason enough to condemn someone and demand their resignation, I'm really worried. My gut feeling on this is that Weinergate really is confirmation of a suspicion I've had for awhile that America has quietly become more prudish in the past few years, and this is a very bad thing.

[...]

Silly, and unfortunately dangerous, as recent events demonstrate. Because it's one thing not to be sexually adventurous, but quite another to sit in judgment of people whose sexual curiosities ick you out, whether done out of meanness or defensiveness. And lately, I've just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so.

Read the whole thing. Really. All of it. Chances are good Marcotte brings up at least one thing you haven't considered as a mark of prudery, and that she makes a good case for it.

There's also an echo in her post of a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine about a week ago. My friend started it off with this:

The queer movement spent decades trying to convince people that we should be taken seriously because we posed a real threat to the status quo. Now we spend all our time trying to convince everyone that we don't pose any threat to anything, so the right should stop picking on us, already! I am of the whiplash generation of lesbians.

I will fight the marriage amendment with all my might because I believe that everyone has a right to marry, but I feel like, by getting us to spend all our time fighting for marriage and for open inclusion in the military, the right has recruited us to do the work of dismantling radical queerness for them.

I think she's wrong about the recruitment. I think it's more a question of discarding the people and tactics that have taken the gay rights movement as far as it's come now that the gates appear to be in reach. But like my friend, I'll fight with the crowd on individual rights issues. Otherwise? I'm hanging out with the drag queens. I'm talking to the leather girls. I'm having drinks with the sex educators and burlesque dancers and poly people.

Why? Because with the exception of a very few other people, these people are the ones who offer me freedom. These are the people who don't care what is hiding in my email or DMs or with whom I flirt or how many inches of my cleavage or legs or anything else are visible. These are the people who understand the costs of arbitrary rules and who are stirring things up enough that we can figure out what is necessary (compassion and good communication) and what is arbitrary (almost everything else). These are the people capable of having the kinds of conversations that philosophy undergrads only dream of, many of which make it to this blog in one form or another.

So go read about prudery. Then go think about the costs of demanding that rights be granted only if something "isn't a choice" or if the alternative is death or if granting the right won't lead to granting another. Think about how narrow this box we're asking for really is. No matter where you sleep, is that where you want to live?

Living in the Dark

2011-06-05T19:28:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that my childhood was no sunny idyll. If you've managed to miss it, you can catch up some here and here and here. It's not much fun, though.

I've spent much of the last week swapping stories that aren't going to make it onto the blog with a friend. It isn't something I usually want to do, but this is someone whose experience was close enough to mine that it really is a way of telling each other we aren't alone--now. We made it. We may be broken, but at least somebody out there understands why and how and how far we've come.

That makes the timing of this WSJ article bemoaning the darkness of modern young adult literature all the more infuriating.

Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn't turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.

If you think it matters what is inside a young person's mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn't, on a personal level, really signify.

Victorian romantic nonsense. Childhood wasn't a happy, sheltered period then for more than a handful of privileged kiddies, and it still isn't. Despite what a view from the WSJ might want you to believe, kids deal with an amazing amount of crap: unhappy parents, parental substance abuse, poverty, neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, unreasonable and/or unreachable expectations, anxiety, depression, bullying. And that's just counting the kids who aren't somehow "weird." Few of us makes it out unscathed, and none of us make it out completely ignorant.

Jackie Morse Kessler (one of the scary dark authors mentioned in the article) does a good job of translating adolescence into numbers in her response:

According to the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behavior in Adolescents and Young Adults, “12% to 24% of young people have self-injured” and “about 6%-8% of adolescents and young adults report current, chronic self-injury.” According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, “about 1 in 10 young people will self-harm at one point.”

One in 10. So in a classroom of 30 teens, 3 of them either are or will self-injure.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 10 million females and 1 million males suffer from anorexia or bulimia, and another 15 million suffer from binge eating disorder.

I was one of those 10 million females.

CyberMentors indicates that “as many as 70% of all young people have experienced some form of bullying” and “1 million kids are bullied every week.”

Let me repeat that: One million kids, every week, are bullied. This is not okay.

Nor is it okay to deny that these kids and these stories exist in order to maintain your sunshiny, simplistic, privileged view of what their childhood should have been like (particularly when all you really need to do is ask someone to help you find the cheery books of your own adolescence). That just makes you one more abuser, even if you wrap your denial in concern:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

Well, now, you see, this is the sort of thing that actually gets studied. In fact, Dr. Madelyn Gould has made a career of studying the almost purely young adult phenomenon of suicide clusters. And what she has to say is somewhat different:

But the most significant and critical red flag that predicts adolescent suicide risk, according to Gould and other researchers, is the presence of an underlying mental health problem. In teens, that's most commonly depression, anxiety and alcohol or drug abuse.

"Even in the context of someone else's suicide, without that underlying vulnerability, they're not going to go on to attempt suicide or die by suicide," Gould says.

Are there reasons to take care when creating a book like this? Of course there are, but that isn't the argument being made in the WSJ. That argument is that things like this should remain hidden, that they shouldn't intrude on a parent who wants a happy book for their little angel (who is, of course, absolutely not hiding anything scary from said parent).

They were hidden when I was younger. What I had then was "oh-em-gee, growing up is so weird and embarrassing" books by people like Judy Blume (which would have been wonderful had my main problem been embarrassment, and which I'm happy to know exist for those kids) and a handful of read-this-and-be-defined-by-the-issue books. I read adult books to find what I needed--books where broken people did things despite being broken. Luckily for me, my parents had a large and good library of this kind of book. Most kids I knew in situations like mine had to go without.

Now, though, many of those books are classified as young adult. More books like this are being written for young adults and put places where they can find them easily. And, having had the good fortune to talk to a number of young adult authors and editors, I can assure that these people are taking extreme care with their material and their audiences. While it may not be the case in book reviewing, people who make books for young adults don't get very far by not knowing their audience or by treating them with disrespect.

So instead of concern trolling and wishing for a return to a nonexistent better past, maybe the WSJ reviewer (whose name, I admit, I haven't bothered to look up for this post) should read a few more of those books. Maybe, just maybe, it'll help her develop a better understanding of the needs of those kids. And who knows, maybe even a touch of empathy.

Saturday Storytime: The Grammarian's Five Daughters

2011-06-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

And a week after the Tiptree Awards, perhaps my favorite short story by any of the Tiptree winners. Eleanor Arnason has a lovely habit of breaking tradition in the most matter-of-fact way possible. I recommend this story at the slightest opportunity. An excerpt:

Finally, the bag was empty except for nasty words. As slimy reached out a tentacle, the third daughter pulled the drawstring tight. Slimy shrieked in pain. Below it in the bag, the worst adjectives rumbled, "Unjust! Unfair!"

The shaman, a tall, handsome person, was nearby, trying on various adjectives. He/she/it was especially interested in masculine, feminine, and androgynous. "I can't make up my mind," the shaman said. "This is the dark side of our new condition. Before, we had clear choices. Now, the new complexity puts all in doubt."

The sound of complaining adjectives attracted the shaman. He, she, or it came over and looked at the bag, which still had a tentacle protruding and wiggling.

"This is wrong. We asked for an end to starkness, which is not the same as asking for prettiness. In there -- at the bag's bottom -- are words we might need someday: sublime, awesome, terrific, and so on. Open it up and let them out."

"Are you certain?" asked the third daughter.

"Yes," said the shaman.

She opened the bag. Out crawled slimy and other words equally disgusting. The shaman nodded with approval as more and more unpleasant adjectives appeared. Last of all, after grim and gruesome and terrific, came sublime. The word shone like a diamond or a thundercloud in sunlight.

"You see," said the shaman. "Isn't that worth the rest?"

"You are a holy being," said the daughter, "and may know things I don't."

Keep reading.

What We Accept

2011-06-02T15:19:00.000-05:00

Gallup has released the results of their 2011 Values and Beliefs Poll. While they're framing the results in terms of U.S. self-image and controversial topics, I want to take a minute to do a straight ranking. What do we, as a nation find most and least morally acceptable?

Divorce (69% find morally acceptable)
The death penalty (65%)
Gambling (64%)
Medical research using embryonic stem cells (62%)
Sex between an unmarried man and woman (60%)
Buying and wearing clothes made of animal fur (56%)
Gay or lesbian relations (56%)
Medical testing on animals (55%)
Having a baby outside of marriage (54%)
Doctor-assisted suicide (45%)
Abortion (39%)
Cloning animals (32%)
Pornography (30%)
Suicide (15%)
Cloning humans (12%)
Polygamy (11%)
Married men and women having an affair (7%)

It's an...interesting list. Spending extra money to execute prisoners is more than twice as "morally" acceptable as pornography as a whole. Suicide is three times as "right" with a doctor's help. Having multiple partners only becomes half again as acceptable if it's part of a codified arrangement.

It's a simple poll, of course. There are shades of gray, definitional issues, and overlapping demographics reflected in these numbers. But it's still interesting to look at our ranked moral judgments.

Just as interesting is to see the generational differences that are shifting the political landscape on these questions. Here are the same issues, ranked for just the 18-34 year olds polled.

Divorce (72%)
Gambling (71%)
Sex between an unmarried man and woman (71%)
Medical research using embryonic stem cells (66%)
Gay or lesbian relations (66%)
Having a baby outside of marriage (62%)
The death penalty (56%)
Buying and wearing clothes made of animal fur (55%)
Medical testing on animals (47%)
Doctor-assisted suicide (46%)
Abortion (44%)
Pornography (42%)
Cloning animals (36%)
Polygamy (19%)
Cloning humans (18%)
Suicide (14%)
Married men and women having an affair (8%)

Almost everything is seen as more morally acceptable. Sex and non-heteronormative relationships come out much further ahead, except for marital infidelity. The big losers are the death penalty and medical testing on animals. Given the anomalous answers between fur and animal testing, however, I suspect at least one of those numbers isn't stable over the long term.

I don't know that I have anything interesting to add on the topic, except to note that there is very little in the way of underlying principles that could explain results like this. Oh, what an odd, inconsistent nation we are when it comes to moral judgments. Mine too, since there isn't anywhere on either of these rankings that I could personally draw a line between yes and no. In fact, there are only about half a dozen where I could accurately answer anything other than, "Well, it depends."

Fallen Warriors

2011-05-30T18:20:00.002-05:00

I'm just back from WisCon, held right next to Wisconsin's capitol. We drove home through countryside dotted with military memorials made up of helicopters, tanks, and airplanes. Given that context, and the change happening in many parts of the world, it strikes me that there's never been a better time to reprint my Memorial Day post from two years ago.

One of the things that struck me in travels through Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes was the monument in every town. Most of them were tiny, just a handful of names from each war–not because few died, but because the town was that small. The memorial at Edinburgh Castle, on the other hand, is of a scale and a simplistic majesty that imposes awe, a trick more church designers would like to have up their sleeves, I imagine.

Whatever the size, most memorials are central and public and impossible to overlook. That isn’t something we do well here. Monuments are destinations, traveled to on special occasions. Memorial Day is a single day of remembrance, Veterans Day, one more, and the rest of the time, our veterans are treated as disposable.

Some volunteered; others answered a call not of their choosing. They risked their lives and health for us. Many died. Worse yet, many killed. Many lost people who had become, in some ways, closer than kin. And we give them a day for those who lived and a day for those who died and maybe a little space out of the way.

We suck at remembering.

Fallen soldiers at least get a day, though. There are others who have fought and died for our society who don’t get that. Nor did they fight with the resources of our military or approval of our government behind them. I’m talking about the culture warriors.

It’s tempting to pretend that “culture war” is just a colorful turn of phrase. It isn’t. People have died every time our country has been persuaded to recognize the right of another group to be considered full human beings.

Workers died organizing unions. Women died claiming control of their own destinies. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans–all have died insisting that no one people have a monopoly on humanity. Many people died for not keeping their sexuality or gender identity a secret. Others died because keeping that secret pushed them into shadows populated by predators.

They died because they challenged rules that were basely unfair. This made them outlaws in the eyes of many, stripped them of the protections we offer those who do not presume to transgress. This made them fair game, and they were hunted. Those who didn’t die rarely escaped without injury. No one offered them medals.

In the face of this, they persisted. Because of them, fewer of us are outlaws today. We can claim protection, imperfect as it is, that was won for us in the wars. Unlike many wars, these have made the world a better place.

So go out and enjoy that better world this weekend, but as you boat and picnic and enjoy family and friends, take a moment. Remember those soldiers whom we have promised to remember, and remember the others, who are too easily forgotten.

They fought for our freedom too.

Saturday Storytime: Drag Queen Astronaut

2011-05-28T10:17:00.001-05:00

It is the weekend for a new Tiptree Award to be given "for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender." One of the best parts of the award is the Honor List that goes with it, an opportunity to be introduced to new writers who see near and far with clarity and imagination, like Sandra McDonald, from the 2010 list. An excerpt of her recommended story:

Joe tapped his mechanical pencil. The desk blotter was covered with a sea of tiny dots, like a Rorschach test only he could make sense of. “You can’t stay. They’re going to send you back to the Navy, and they’re going to shove you in a desk job somewhere, and congratulations. You just won a nice quiet life with your family.”

“I’m not going.” This was the answer I’d rehearsed on the flight in – military, not civilian, and who knows what fresh hell it would have been to be recognized as the person who the media had now ridiculously and inaccurately dubbed the Drag Queen Astronaut. “It was just for laughs.”

Like the time Alan Shepherd presented a gallon-sized vat filled with ammonia and yellow dye as his urine sample for the Gemini program doctors. Wally Schirra did the same thing to a nurse, except he used apple juice. One Apollo mission radioed in a UFO to Mission Control. John Young once smuggled up a contraband corned beef sandwich, which pissed off the techs who feared tiny bits of meat jamming million-dollar equipment.

Joe’s pencil made another series of dots on the blotter. “No one’s laughing, Jim.”

So that’s how I lost Artemis 6, the mission I was scheduled to command. Lost my astronaut appointment. Gary put up a fight for me, as did some good friends I can’t begin to thank, but astronauts have been fired for less: ask old-timers about Apollo 7, when the ill crew refused to follow piddly orders from Capcom and lost their careers over it.

The first person I saw after getting my termination letter was Scott Stevenson, who’d been ducking me since our return to earth. I knew through other people that he blamed me for forever sullying our mission. We’d always be the Flight of the Transvestite – in books, on the internet, in our obituaries.

“I guess they had no choice,” was all he said.

NASA shoved me right out the door and forgot all about me.

Until the day they desperately needed me. But that came later.

Keep reading.

If You Don't Stand Up for Us Today

2011-05-27T10:29:00.001-05:00

"At the government teat." Not only do anti-government legislators consider compassion to be a despicable virtue and caretaking a despicable act, but in the fight over health care in Texas, someone has produced flyers depicting them as that particularly female despicable act of breastfeeding. Rep. Senfronia Thompson, fed up with all the attacks on women in this session, isn't going to take it quietly.

Why are people electing the douchebags who pass anti-woman legislation instead of more representatives like this?

Help Keep Atheists Talk Going

2011-05-26T21:46:00.002-05:00

Mike explains at his blog. Normally, I wouldn't just lift a whole post, but I think it's justified in this case.

Atheists Talk is a volunteer effort by a larger group of people than those you hear on the air. I appreciate all of the people who contribute your time to help me make it a show worth listening to. The costs that we incur are not for the labor, but for the fee we pay to the radio station. It is well worth going through AM commercial radio because it extends our listenership in ways that podcasting alone couldn’t do.

We have a fundraising drive going on, so that we can keep renewing our six month contracts. Even though we negotiated the price downward from what we had paid in our first two years, the price at $5320 is still quite a chunk for our general fund. Please read this appeal and send in what you can to help us justify the expense to the members who support us.

This program costs $5,320.00 every six months. We sell some ads, but most of our costs are covered by supporter donations. The program is broadcast live on AM950 KTNF, but most of our listeners follow our podcasts. Of the 114 programs our number one download was the program broadcast from the Minnesota State Fair, “All About Atheism,” that had over 21,000 downloads. Next most downloaded was the very first program we did, with Richard Dawkins, at 13,000, followed by “Dialogue with a Christian” with over 10,000. After that, there are seven programs with over 7,000, ten over 6,000 and 15 over 5,000. Within two to three weeks of production, every program has between 1,000 to 2,000 downloads.

We have a donation link.

Be sure to listen to Sunday’s show. I will be talking to Eric MacDonald about the right to make one’s own Choice in Dying.

Pass the word, and please help if you can.

The Politics of the Null Hypothesis

2011-05-25T08:43:00.000-05:00

In which I talk about the lack of evidence for a genetic explanation for variation in human intelligence. In public.

Nothing about the field of IQ studies is free of political influence. It's naive to believe that any kind of research on a purported measure of individual merit could be politics-free in a self-proclaimed meritocracy with wide inequalities. Binet's original work was meant to determine which children should have access to additional educational resources. IQ scores are used occasionally to sort out "inappropriate" candidates for various jobs, including those whose IQs are too high for a role. IQ as a proxy for merit is used to argue that a group does or does not face discrimination in educational or career opportunities. This is all terribly political.

The question isn't whether there are politics surrounding this issue or where. They're everywhere. The question is where does the politics get in the way of the science? Again, the answers don't favor Pinker's view of a fatwa against genetic explanations of individual differences.

For those of you visiting from the Scientific American Guest Blog, welcome to Almost Diamonds. Kick back. Relax. Drinks are in the fridge. If you're looking for more on politically sensitive science, may I interest you in the following posts?

What Is Race Good For?

The Argument for Race
There were four main arguments made for the biological validity of race:

Genetic testing allows for grouping by country of ancestor origin.

Race may not predict the things it's been used to predict in the past, but it's an important proxy for genetics in medicine.

Yes, assignment of humans to racial categories is an arbitrary procedure, but we use arbitrary names for parts of other continua. Why not race?

You're just being PC, Marxist wankers.

I think we can ignore #4, but the rest were addressed in the discussion.

Sex, Science, and Social Policy

There's just one little problem: The studies themselves. In 2001, Paul, Linz, and Shafer took a look at what kind of evidence was being used by those who wanted to marginalize sex-related businesses. What they found was impressive...but not in the way one would hope.

The researchers started with a list of four requirements that would need to be met for a study on the topic to be considered scientific. In situations like this, where laws and regulations may be challenged in court, scientific evidence isn't just a good idea. It's the legal standard, so meeting these scientific criteria is important.

Rape Myth #1: She's Probably Lying
The Rate of False Report

The standard figure passed around by victim advocates suggests a rate of false reports of 8% based on FBI crime statistics from 1997. This is comparable to rates for other crimes. However, citations can be found for rates as low as 1.5% and as high as 90%. In other words, huh? How do we deal with a range that big?

Luckily for those who want to sort out the truth of the matter, two papers came out in 2010 that shed considerable light by examining how false rape report rates are generated. David Lisak, Lori Gardinier, Sarah C. Nicksa, and Ashley M. Cote collected those prior studies that had the best (and most transparent) processes for sorting between false and merely unproven allegations. They also used a similar process for determining the rate of false reports of rape at a U.S. college.

Skepticism and Rape Adaptations

Now, the problem is not that Dr. Shackelford is an evo psych researcher. There are people doing good work in evo psych. The problem is that Dr. Shackelford isn't doing good work on this topic. In particular, the work he is presenting, relating female infidelity to rape of female partners by male partners, doesn't tell us anything that the already robust scientific literature on rape hasn't already told us.

Enjoy.

Sexism Always Wins, but It Still Loses

2011-05-24T11:32:00.001-05:00

Jen McCreight won't be talking about Boobquake at conferences anymore.

I've already said no to groups who wanted me to talk about it, and suggested another topic. I think we can learn interesting things from what happened, but I'm just sick of how people see it as a green light for sexual harassment. I can only tolerate so much.

In an otherwise decent post about the effects of pervasive sexism, Josh Rosenau asks:

Which raises the question: did sexism win, or was boobquake doomed precisely because it was meant to take advantage of society's sexism?

Now, let me think about this for a--NO!

Or maybe I shouldn't be quite so hasty. At least one commenter disagrees with me, saying, "Nobody could have predicted that! Except, of course, for everyone who did, and got shouted down as killjoys," and, "You can't solve a problem using the same thinking which created it."

So, given that argument would my answer be any diff--NO!

To make a short story longer, let's start with the second part of the statement. Boobquake was meant to take advantage of society's sexism? It used the same thinking which created it? Boobquake was meant to be a joke, a joke that took one cleric's claims that "immodest" dress led inevitably to earthquakes via a chain of men's uncontrollable lust and God's anger over adultery and broke it apart to make the individual pieces easier to examine and ridicule.

Jen never meant or expected the idea to take off, much less "take advantage of society's sexism." Once it did, she did an admirable job of steering the inevitable publicity back toward the original intent of mocking the ideas that women are responsible for inciting men's unholy lust and that such lust leads to earthquakes. She educated at least a few people on the use of statistics to illustrate these claims. She used the opportunity to allow Iranian women's rights activists--the people actually affected by the cleric's claims--to be heard in the West.

That some subsequent events were also shaped in part by the pervasive sexism of our society is unsurprising, but is has nothing to do with Jen's intent, and I shouldn't have to spell that out in response to a post on that very topic. Nor is it Jen's responsibility to deal with the predictability of these events. That particular gem of criticism is just a form of the "she should have known" argument. It might be valid if there actually existed a choice between doing nothing, and thus avoiding sexism, and engaging in activism, during which some women are subjected to sexism. That women aren't offered that particular choice is, again, not something I should have to point out when the occasion is a post about pervasive sexism. Does anyone, for example, really still think Jen would be exempt from unwanted comments and jokes on her appearance if she hadn't thought up Boobquake?

Right.

Now for the question of whether sexism won. Yes, it won. Sexism always wins. It has the advantage of numbers and entrenched power.

However, sexism also lost, and it keeps on losing.

The Iranian cleric in question changed his stance in response to Boobquake. It isn't much better than it was before, but he changed it in response to questions from those within his country and his religion. His authority was undermined enough that he had to react.

A large number of the women who participated explicitly rejected the conflations of sex and sin, sex and shame, their clothing and "uncontrollable" male lust. It may not stick, but they've done it at least once. That makes them less vulnerable to the coercive messages that surround sex in our society. If Boobquake was a failure in this respect, then so are the Slutwalks that have been spreading across the globe in recent months.

Jen's profile was raised significantly by Boobquake. That did two important things. First, it added one more good, flexible female speaker to the list of people event organizers draw from. The groups who invite her to speak about Boobquake aren't turning her down when she wants to talk about something else. Instead, they're hearing a different talk, frequently the one on "God's Lady Problem." Not exactly a win for sexism.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, Jen has been identified as a resource for other women in both the skeptic and atheist movements who experience sexism. She's used her blog to promote the complaints of others. She's modeled behavior for objecting to sexist treatment in a very public way. She's used her tenacity to keep the pressure on until she gets an official response on the topic. She's rallied other prominent atheists and skeptics to amplify her message. She has added substantially to the number of effective voices on the topic. She's done it with the platform that was built, in part, with Boobquake. And now, she's seing results.

Sexism found a way to pull a small victory out of Boobquake. The house took its cut. But it only wins if people insist that we've lost if we don't get everything we want right now.

The Role of Confrontation in the Gay Rights Struggle

2011-05-23T19:27:00.001-05:00

The quest for equal rights for LGBTQ Americans is often cited as an example of constructive confrontation in action. In a recent discussion around accommodationism in the fight to keep creation out of public schools, I was asked to provide some documentation on the topic. I put together a list of almost entirely web-based resources for those interested.

I think is worth sharing here for those who want to address the topic in the future. So, an annotated bibliography on the role of confrontation in the U.S. fight for gay rights:

A commentary on the changing nature of gay rights legal action and the personal story of one high-profile court case, with some food for thought about finding test cases (pdf): http://classes.lls.edu/fall2006/conlaw2sec3-west-faulcon/documents/Handout1.pdf

A history of homophile group experience with 50s assimilation and 60s radicalism (pdf): http://www.salemstate.edu/~cmauriello/Demilio_Sexual%20Politics.pdf

Documentation of the confrontational tactics of the Gay Activists Alliance: http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/gay_activists_alliance.html

Some of the positive political steps achieved by the GAA: http://microformguides.gale.com/Data/Introductions/20240FM.htm

Documentation of the wider practice of "zaps" and other confrontational tactics in the movement (limited access): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sex/summary/v012/12.2beemyn.html

Stonewall, the riot that was the birth of a modern movement (and the occasion for observing Pride in June in the U.S.): http://news.change.org/stories/the-importance-of-stonewall

An analysis of how ACT UP's work to turn shame and grief into "an outward-directed, action-oriented anger" remobilized a community that had become somewhat passive by the early 80s and built the modern queer identity (pdf): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.27&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Some of the successes of ACT UP are documented on their Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power

A reminder that many thought the push for gay marriage in Massachusetts was too confrontational and would lead to a backlash that would put marriage out of reach for years to come, a fear that hasn't panned out: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/02/when-gay-marriage-came-to-massachusetts/71635/

A very modern example of how the practice of reacting to homophobia and discrimination quickly, angrily, and loudly shapes the general course of American politics: http://www.mediaite.com/online/targetbest-buy-gay-rights-boycott-tests-citizens-united-decision/

None of this suggests that there isn't a role, particularly in the recent swell of support for gay marriage rights, for simply understanding one another as human beings. However, we did have to reduce the risks to LBGTQ populations to the extent where that was possible. That wouldn't have happened without the changes wrought by confrontation.

Not in My Constitution

2011-05-22T21:39:00.000-05:00

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A constitution or other governmental charter is a document that exists to specify the operation of a government--and to ensure the rights of the people governed. The largest debate over the U.S. Bill of Rights was over whether the amendments were needed to protect what should be "natural rights" and whether there was any possibility that the enumeration of rights might be considered to limit citizens' rights to those explicitly granted.

We, the people of the state of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to perpetuate its blessings and secure the same to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution

Yesterday, the Minnesota House voted to put a question on the November 2012 ballot. In a state in which marriage of same-sex couples is already disallowed by law, in a state where judges have already agreed ruled on the issue, voters will be asked whether our constitution should be amended to limit legal recognition of marriage to unions between one man and one woman.

There wasn't a great demand for this legislation. Polls in recent years have shown an upswing in support for gay marriage, and an overall lack of support for this kind of amendment. The only poll showing support for an amendment vote is an anti-gay-marriage group that won't release details on the polling.

The House members who voted for an amendment referendum didn't speak in favor of the amendment. The one who spoke in favor of the referendum said only that he wanted voters to be able to decide the issue.

ARTICLE I BILL OF RIGHTS

Section 1. OBJECT OF GOVERNMENT. Government is instituted for the security, benefit and protection of the people, in whom all political power is inherent, together with the right to alter, modify or reform government whenever required by the public good.

Sec. 2. RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. No member of this state shall be disfranchised or deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the state otherwise than as punishment for a crime of which the party has been convicted.

Supporters of the amendment suggest they're trying to "protect" the traditional definition of marriage, something that won't be replaced or altered by extending the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples. They have identified no public good that will be served by the codification of discrimination. They offer reasons to prohibit gays from marrying that are based solely in religious traditions, personal discomfort, and lies about homosexuals. They claim that equality is an equal right to do something that only person wants to do.

No one has offered a reason for this proposed amendment that could outweigh the continued denial of equal rights to citizens who contribute to make our state what it is. Certainly no one has offered a reason to turn our founding documents, the documents that exist to protect our rights, into a barrier to the rights of all our citizens. We cannot let this abuse of our public documents stand.

Saturday Storytime: Rapture

2011-05-21T10:01:00.000-05:00

On the most recent date on which virtuous humans are supposed to be lifted from their Earthly cares, I can't think of any better story to share than this one by Sally Gwylan, in which the battle between religion and humanism is aided by an unusual agent. An exceprt:

The auditorium blazed with the new electric lights and was full to overflowing. There was never a chance I would find Josef in that seething mass by venturing into it, so I went round back & climbed the stairs up to the outside walk. A small crowd pressed up near the open windows to listen, but not all the sashes had been raised. I chose one of these closed windows for my vantage point.

As I searched the mass of people below me for Josef's gipsy curls & defiant red scarf, the Reverend's words deviled my ears despite the barrier of the window-glass. A small man whose gestures & intonation burned with fevered zeal, Owings exhorted his audience to Pray! Pray for the Holy Spirit to lead them into the ways of righteousness!

And as he shouted, the air inside the hall began to sparkle, golden motes drifting down. I doubted my eyes, but others were seeing it too, looking up, gaping, and it was then I spotted Josef's set jaw & bold mustachios pushing through the crowd at the back, with Gretchen drawn but determined just ahead of him, the babe wrapped up tight in her arms. Rather than hurry down to find them I stayed watching the dustfall a moment longer.

Soon all faces were turned up to the glittering motes. Some shouted, a babble of Hallelujahs & Glorys. I believe I saw vents in the sculpted ceiling from which the dust issued, but the stuff spread out quickly, & surely the people below couldn't tell the source.

Flash & humbug, I thought.

Sweet manna! Owings's voice rang out. Rejoice for the Lord is with us tonight! & the people in the hall raised up their arms, their heads tipped back as though the golden fall were a shower of welcome rain. Every face filled with wonder.

Even -- this is what haunts me, this is the impossible thing -- my rebel Josef's. Gretchen too, the both of them stopped in their tracks and gaping with childish awe as I have never seen either do before & certainly not at such a conjurer's trick. Cold went through me like a gale off the lake -- even now my hands shake with it.

Unable for a time to turn away, I watched & listened as fever took the crowd, some losing themselves so far as to fall to the floor in fits of jerking limbs. Josef & Gretchen did not do so, yet their open-mouthed gullibility was near as bad. Owings's words pounded the glittering air, sin & pridefulness & render unto Caesar, on & on, a hammer forging his auditors into the shape he desired, til at last I could take no more and stumbled home.

Where I write and wait, hoping that Nathan will return before the others do.

Keep reading.

Anna Fur Laxis

2011-05-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

This one is burlesque, boys and girls. Don't play it if you don't want to see skin.

It's always impressive to see just how many ways there are to do something as simple as take your clothes off. And how much of that time can be spent doing nothing of the sort.

Rich Man's Frug

2011-05-19T10:20:00.000-05:00

I love this set as a commentary on the entertainments of the upper classes. Ah, Fosse.

As I originally saw it on stage:

In its original movie setting, with additional editorial and a smaller set:

The Hands of Guan Yin

2011-05-18T10:28:00.000-05:00

I know what is going on in this video. The mechanism is simple. But there's nothing simple about the way it ends up looking.

Coin-Operated Boys

2011-05-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of this sort of dance around, and lots of people who do it well. This video is more of a rarity because the dancers in it are working together to create the experience, not just displaying their individual virtuosity.

Libertango

2011-05-16T11:23:00.000-05:00

It's going to be a busy week, with a beta of Kelly McCullough's second Aral Kingslayer book to read and think about and all the usual work stuff to get done. So, instead of me spending time writing anything, y'all will get to see the hangovers of my impossible desire to grow up to be Cyd Charisse. Enjoy a week of choreography that goes beyond.

This, for example, demonstrates that two is merely the lower limit for a tango.

The Accommodationism Debate Explained

2011-05-15T11:46:00.004-05:00

Desiree Schell, of Skeptically Speaking and other general awesomeness, will be on Atheists Talk in a few weeks to talk about strategies for effecting change. Since the announcement about her appearance happened in the middle of yet another discussion about accommodationism, Desiree (being the smart and highly prepared woman she is) asked for a clear description of a topic that doesn't come up in what she does as a skeptic or union organizer. I think the results are worth sharing here.

I mainly stick to scientific skepticism, and I don't follow atheist controversies very closely, so can someone tell me exactly what an accommodationist is? Every time I ask that question I get a different answer. And that's understandable; I claim terms all the time to structure my own thoughts. But can someone (or a few of you) on this thread tell me about your perception of what that word means? It would help me, because it's pretty obvious that it's going to come up on air.

Accommodationism is used to refer to the idea that in order to get the support of religious people on political issues (teaching of evolution, separation of church and state, etc.) one should be careful to not challenge their religious beliefs or should, perhaps, even reinforce them. It's as big a debate as it is because the idea is both very pragmatic and very problematic.

I think the pro-accommodationism argument is pretty clear and simple. The anti-accommodationism argument is a little more complicated:

Try as you might to not disturb religious beliefs, the truth and supremacy of someone's religion is exactly what these arguments often boil down to. At some point, you're stepping on someone's religious toes. The actual question is whose.
Stepping on the toes of one religion generally looks, to the apathetic masses, like stepping on all religion, no matter what you try to do. Playing a middle game is tricky on the mass level.
While accommodationism might work on a single political issue (although we don't have evidence that it has), there are going to continue to be fights, all coming out of this same well of religious privilege. Reinforcing the privilege to win one fight is going to make the next fight harder.
Therefore, the way to go is to take on the larger issue of religious privilege, even if it causes problems in the short-term. At that point, this becomes a fight about equality and civil rights, and the whole plan changes a bit.

So, would working with a number of different stakeholders (one of them being a church group) on a single-issue campaign like lobbing the government to keep fluoridating the city's water system, be considered accommodation? Or is it only accommodation when working on a campaign that involves religion?

There will be a few people who say both. They'll get lots of attention, but they're not the sort of people who actually leave the computer and get anything done. For the most part, only the second would be.

So what if an atheist doesn't much care about the larger idea of religious privilege, and is only personally interested in a single issue like ensuring that evolution is taught in schools. Are they an accommodationist by default?

Probably not by default, but for a single issue, an accommodationist approach really does make a lot of sense if you can find a big enough religious population to whom the issue isn't intrinsically threatening.

I think that's why this is so intractable. It's really a difference of values, and you know how those go.

Do I ever.

Saturday Storytime: The Mad Scientist's Daughter

2011-05-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Theodora Goss specializes in short work. Given that, it's not terribly surprising that the two stories she published last year are both being collected in a Year's Best, or that the following story a finalist for a 2011 Locus Award. An excerpt:

Mary created a trust that holds the deed to the house. We are all listed as beneficiaries:

Miss Justine Frankenstein

Miss Catherine Moreau

Miss Beatrice Rappaccini

Miss Mary Jekyll

Miss Diana Hyde

Mrs. Arthur Meyrinck (née Helen Raymond)

But it is her house, really. Her father left it to her, along with a moderate fortune. She is the only one of us who has inherited any money. Science does not pay well; mad science pays even worse.

Keep reading.

The Value of Defiance

2011-05-13T19:05:00.003-05:00

I'm in the middle of a migraine, and Blogger has royally pissed me off over the last couple of days. Today, I'll just point to a couple of other posts that provide context to each other. Jerry Coyne comments on the idea that a new study showing religion is globally pervasive suggests that uprooting its ideals is "hopeless":

That’s hogwash. As we can see from the tremendous secularization of the world over the past few centuries, especially in Europe, it is not impossible for religion to wither. The pervasiveness of a belief gives no warrant that that belief will be with us forever. Look how pervasive, only a century ago, was the idea that women were second-class citizens. This was true in nearly every society. Ditto for gays and ethnic minorities. And look how attitudes have changed! Granted, women, for instance, still get the short end of the stick, but in many parts of the world they’re much better off. Most of us now realize that people should be treated as equals, regardless of gender, color, and sexual orientation. That would have been inconceivable a few hundred years ago.

Let’s just tinker a bit with Trigg’s statement:

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature as the idea that women are inferior, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said. . “The female-equality hypothesis of the 1960s—I think that is hopeless.”

So how do we go about undermining the authority of a such a pervasive idea? Paul W points out that if we really want to understand that, social science offers us a great deal of research on the topics of conformity and minority influence.

Here are some topics worth looking up on Wikipedia—Mooney should demonstrate his familiarity with this stuff if he wants to be taken at all seriously, and his critics would do well to know about the six decades of relevant research he persistently ignores:

Conformity, Asch Conformity Experiments, Normative Social Influence, Social Proof, Information Cascade, and especially Minority Influence and Spiral of Silence.

Scientists and philosophers especially are in a position to exert minority influence, ending a spiral of silence by providing social proof, and undermining the information cascade that supports religion.

But that is exactly what Mooney is most opposed to—he is against the experts voicing the kind of expert opinion that has the greatest potential for minority influence, and he actively tries to undermine the appearance of expertise and minority solidarity that makes minority influence work best. He is firmly on the side of the normative conformity that keeps the masses ignorant of the kind of minority but expert view that could actually change a substantial number of minds.

The reading and the suggestions to be derived from it aren't terribly straightforward, but this is stuff you'll want to know if you're running against the herd.

The Accommodationism Challenges

2011-05-11T12:20:00.000-05:00

Mike McRae, Tribal Scientist, indulged me in a discussion of his goals surrounding his latest salvo in the accommodation debate.

There are frequent olive branches thrown down in request of a ceasefire. Perhaps the most common is the plea for diversity. This call seems democratic, inclusive and reasonable. After all, if there are many different problems and many different audiences, there must be a need for many different methods. Let’s all live and let live, right? If one approach doesn’t work, another will.

The mediators are somewhat like a ring species for Accommodationis warminfuzziness and Newatheist confrontationist.

Yet there is an element of intellectual laziness in this view. Of course, no one approach in communication will reach all demographics, or solve all problems. Diverse approaches are indeed necessary. Yet this is not the same as saying all approaches are necessary. Some will conflict. Some will be resource hungry and have no hope of success for one reason or another. Identifying solutions to the problem of how best to communicate science in the face of religion will take more than guessing, hoping and shouting into echo chambers. Like anything in science, it demands research, critical thinking and evaluation. No act of communication should be above criticism or beyond the need for evidence, clarity and precision.

I wanted to know why he put up a snarky post. I wanted to know why he generalized his criticisms to the group instead of making them specific to particular behaviors and people. Basically, I wanted to know why someone critiquing communication was engaging in such nonconstructive criticism. His response:

You ask what I hope to accomplish? Culture change. Encouraging atheists to see that if they want to defend their choices, those values they appreciate so much in science don’t suddenly disappear and allow them to have robust opinions based on gut feelings and wishful thinking.

Based on the rest of my conversation with Mike, I'd like to offer a set of challenges to those advocating that "New Atheists" be more accommodating of others in their communications.

Challenge 1: Decide whether this is important to you.

Is confrontation as a tactic among atheists an issue you think needs to be addressed? Will it really change the world if you can get a few people to follow your advice? Or are you annoyed by some people who have stomped on your feelings on the blogosphere?

These aren't frivolous questions. You've got work to do. They've got work to do. And change, as you already know, is hard. You should also know that if you do this wrong, you're going to entrench the bad blood over this issue even further. Every little thing you (and everyone else with any kind of platform) say on the topic goes on record these days. If you don't care enough to do this right, maybe it's time to shut up about it, at least in public.

Challenge 2: Know your audience.

Who are you trying to reach? Are you talking to published "New Atheist" authors? Are you talking to atheist groups that sponsor ad campaigns or social meetups? Are you talking to groups that lobby and pursue legal action? Are you talking to blog commenters? Are you talking to forum campers? Are you talking to unaffiliated atheists who just want religion to leave them alone?

These types of groups have very different goals. They have different tactics. They have different degrees of centrality and authority. They have different religious backgrounds and degrees of education. You have to take the time to understand them--ask them real questions and listen to the answers--if you want to know what language to speak and what problems you're going to offer to help them solve.

You also have to understand that you frequently can't address multiple groups using the same message. They're just too different. Being an atheist only gives you so much in common with other atheists. At the same time, however, any individual atheist may belong to many of these groups. You're never going to have the luxury of addressing just one set of concerns at a time, and you're going to have to go to extraordinary lengths to keep from generalizing between groups based on the cross-group memberships of certain individuals.

Challenge 3: Learn to see privilege.

Being an atheist won't get you killed very often. In many environments, being an atheist is entirely invisible. In some, it's perfectly respectable. That does not put atheists on par with the religious. Unless you understand where the differences are, you will never be able to effectively address the concerns of atheists.

Read a privilege checklist or two. Understand what it means to have an area of your life that you choose to keep hidden because there are consequences of doing otherwise. Understand what it means to be watched for signs that you represent a degenerate type. Understand how much time and energy it takes to answer questions whenever you identify yourself. Understand how much it takes to run constant calculations on whether to go with the flow or upset the social order. Understand what it means to watch people take the time to decide whether they really knew you at all when you come out. Understand what it means to hear political debates on whether you're ruining modern life.

Only once you get all that can you actually understand what you're asking otherwise.

Challenge 4: Recognize the limits of your own expertise.

There is a fair body of cognitive science having to do with communication. It doesn't begin to approach the complexity of real-world (meatspace and electronic) communications. There is a lot of information to be had from these studies, but this is a very new science, given the size of the topic. It can only tell us so much.

One of the things it can and has told us is that the power, privilege and out-group status of the speaker have an effect on how the speaker's message is received. We know that whether we are trusted or even heard as speakers is often largely out of our hands. What we don't know, what cognitive science, or at least those presenting the cognitive science, has yet to tell us despite our very real need for the information, is how to overcome this problem.

Until that happens, asking people to understand the cognitive science is reasonable. Asking people to replace current behavior is not. Confrontational tactics for minority groups may not be supported in the cognitive science literature, but neither are they shown to be worse than any other tactics for minority groups. In the presence of privilege, we simply don't expect any communication tactic to have a high rate of success. (Legal tactics, on the other hand....)

Meanwhile, there are other disciplines that do suggest the confrontational approach has merit. The history of social movements is plastered with groups taking approaches that make people feel uncomfortable and threatened. It is also plastered with groups succeeding with approaches that make people feel uncomfortable and threatened. And frankly, familiarity with this sort of social history shows just how mild "confrontational" atheists of the current sort are by comparison.

Even if you aren't concerned with social change directly, recognize that attacking the privilege problem directly is a communication tactic with the potential to succeed. Privilege gets in the way of effective communication. We can go around this with the appropriate tools when cognitive science gives them to us. Until then, we can do our best to go through.

Challenge 5: Recognize others' work and expertise.

This is the point where I tell you to drop the word "but" from your vocabulary. Atheists, even highly annoying ones (whichever set that may be for you), have made major accomplishments in the past couple of decades. Best-selling books, wide blog readerships, social mobilization for political action, communities that support out atheists and those who have left religious communities, successful events at the regional to international level, cogent social criticism, historical scholarship, increased visibility of abuses of power despite a hobbled press.

Is there crap being produced as well? Of course. Sturgeon's Law. That doesn't make the accomplishments I just mentioned any less real.

It also doesn't exempt anyone from the requirement to deal with the accomplished as, at the very least, people with as much to teach as you believe they have to learn. The lessons they have to teach may well include the fact that what they do is so more difficult than it appears on the surface--requiring extraordinary timing, wordsmithery, and humor--that most people may as well not try. You'll never learn it if your approach is to say, "Yeah, they wrote a best-selling book, but it's only because...."

Challenge 6: Offer something better.

The problem of addressing religious privilege while simultaneously working around the bald fact that the religious hold most of the political power is tough. It's ugly. Nobody who is trying to do both thinks it's simple. Your final challenge is to deal with the real difficulty of that problem.

However, the people who are tackling that work aren't going to be lured by a message that is, in essence, "Ignore the privilege problem in order to solve problems that require political power." Privilege is power. Your audience knows that solving individual political problems while allowing the privilege to persist is fighting a hydra. Offering a sharper sword only makes the heads multiply faster.

However, offer the equivalent of a torch, and you've got something. If you want to shape how atheists communicate, figure out how to offer them something that undermines religious privilege at the same time.

No, I don't know what that is either. All I know is that if you offer something short of that, you're offering less than what atheists ultimately want and need, and that won't work. That's why you need to decide up front how important this is to you. That's why it's a challenge.

Standing on Aether, Thinking Airy Thoughts

2011-05-08T11:10:00.001-05:00

Or, Theology as Pseudophilosophy

There's been a rash of criticism lately of New Atheists (or Gnu Atheists, popular atheists, internet atheists, outspoken atheists, non-invisible atheists--whatever term makes the writer comfortable that he's not being prejudicial while generalizing for paragraphs on end) that we're being anti-intellectual and displaying our lack of education by not grappling seriously with serious philosophy of religion. Everything used to be so much better and it's all terribly concerning according to Michael Ruse:

Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

Jacques Berlinerblau:

In fact, what is fascinating about the New Atheists is their almost complete lack of interest in the history and philosophical development of atheism. They seem not the least bit curious to venture beyond an understanding that reduces atheist thought to crude hyper-empiricism, hyper-materialism, and an undiscriminating anti-theism.

And R. Joseph Hoffmann:

The old atheism was full of cranks and angry old men, but some of them were clever. Many of them (as my grandmother used to say) knew a thing or two. The big distinction between the old and the new is that the old atheism depended on a narrative, based in philosophy, and linked itself to a long tradition of rational decision-making. Not choosing to believe in God was an act of deliberation, not a foregone conclusion. At its best, it was studious and reflective.

Repeating a message in this way can be a very powerful thing. It can, in fact, make one deal with the message in a serious way. However, not all messages benefit from the serious treatment. This is one message that doesn't.

Jerry Coyne makes some excellent points about the difference between understanding history and getting stuck repeating it endlessly instead of moving forward. If the majority of us can't build on what our forebears knew, while leaving the details of exactly how they figured it out to those who like that sort of thing, we'll get nowhere.

We don't criticize farmers for not being socially conversant in biochemistry, although biochemistry underlies what they do. Nor, more importantly, can we legitimately exclude farmers from criticizing biological or biochemical theorizing--if their criticism is that the theories involved rely on faulty understanding of farming.

One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is that it operates from faulty premises. Some of those faulty premises come from misunderstandings of the scientific process (e.g., not understanding the importance of good controls), but some come from misunderstandings of the subject being studied. Experiments in telepathy depend, in both the design and analysis phases, on the idea that communication is verbal and unambiguous (as well as the idea that humans are honest). Experiments in astrology rely on the idea that humans are internally consistent and externally different. Experiments in alternative treatments for the common cold rely on the idea that the condition is not self-limiting.

Theorizing on the causality of autism spectrum disorders frequently assumes that historical increases in diagnoses reflect a real change in the neurology of a population. Those studying the relative intelligence of the black, white, and oriental races assume that those are valid biological categories and that their measurement instruments are valid proxies for genetic differences. Too many experiments in evolutionary psychology assume "human universals" can be determined by studying undergraduate psychology students or industrialized populations and that social structures aren't self-maintaining in the absence of underlying genetics.

To extrapolate, pseudoscience is often a process of deciding that something needs to be explained without first checking to see whether an explanation already exists. All the rigorous design, careful statistical analysis, and flawless logic in the world can't help you produce good results if your premises are faulty. Biochemists can do all the meticulous work they want on how a particular type of bacteria present in a field breaks down pig manure and liberates nitrogen, but if the field under study only ever sees cow manure, the results are going to be meaningless. At that point, it becomes pseudoscience just as much as if the work itself were shoddy.

Philosophy is different than science, of course. That doesn't mean, though, that pseudophilosophy isn't just as important a concept to understand as pseudoscience is. And as with pseudoscience, the problems of pseudophilosophy don't only happen when someone screws up the process by, say, falling prey to a fallacy. They can just as easily happen in the process of formulating questions.

There may be no stupid questions (except for the one you ask again because you didn't listen to the answer last time), but there are bad questions. "Why is a hummingbird?" is a bad question. It isn't a bad subject, but the question, as posed, won't get you the answers you want except by chance.

"What do hummingbirds all have in common?" "How are hummingbirds different from other birds?" "Why do we call them hummingbirds?" "What is the evolutionary history of hummingbirds?" "Where do hummingbirds live?" "Why do hummingbirds capture our imagination?" "What would happen if hummingbirds disappeared?" "What about my backyard is attracting hummingbirds?" "Why does that piece of expressionist art suggest a hummingbird when it's not remotely realistic?" All those and plenty more are questions that produce answers that increase our knowledge, about us, about our world, and about hummingbirds.

They also reflect our knowledge of the world. "Why is a hummingbird?" is a question that might have been seriously asked at one time. The answer would have been (in the form of a poem or essay) that the rapidly beating wings of a hummingbird demonstrate some lesson about work and life or that the creature is simply too beautiful to not exist. Answers then assumed that "why" was a question of existence or nonexistence.

As our knowledge of evolution and ecology has broadened, "why" has given way to questions of this organism or feature instead of that, this location or function instead of another. As our understanding of perception and cognition has developed, "why" has become a question of identification and classification.

The "why" that is a question of existence is met with "Why not?" Creatures exist in numbers and with a degree of diversity that we cannot count. We can only estimate. That one more exists is not a matter of surprise requiring explanation, although its individual characteristics might be. We question why one would ask the question.

The same goes for religious philosophy. We are being told we should respect the serious work done by philosophers on these fundamental questions. Instead, we look at what we know of the world around us and ask why anyone is asking. Can the questions that made sense when religious philosophy mediated between competing ideas still produce any answers with meaning today, when religious philosophy is being used to defend its own existence in a world that continually reveals its secrets to us?

Michael Ruse thinks we must grapple today with "Does a creator god exist?" because someone else once did. Instead, we look at our universe and ask what "creation" would even mean in this context. When we understand that we don't know whether our universe has always existed, whether time is a meaningful concept outside the bounds of our universe, whether our universe is the only one, it is perfectly valid to look askance at those who assume creation in order to ask about gods. When we know from our scientific pursuits that humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize, it is important to demonstrate not just that the question can be asked, but that it can lead to a meaningful answer.

The same goes for the "special place of humans" and "eternal salvation." The idea that human exceptionalism is any more valid than hummingbird exceptionalism cannot be taken for granted. Claims to the contrary require privileging one's own frame of reference over all others. Until those who apply vast amounts of logic to the "problem" can make a convincing case that their question is more important than the question of the "special place of bacteria," they haven't demonstrated that their work is worth my respect. Neither has anyone who mistakes unsupported dualism for a philosophical question in desperate need of an answer.

Until these questions are phrased in ways that reflect what science has taught us about the world, all the philosophical work done on them may be perfectly logical and rigorous, but it still hasn't established that it isn't pseudophilosophy, grand edifices built atop faulty questions. Until it has, it hasn't demonstrated that it's worthy of our time, our attention, and our respect.

There is nothing remotely ignorant or anti-intellectual about the demand that we be shown that questions formed in more ignorant times remain meaningful given our increasing knowledge of the world. There is nothing at all unserious about our requests for evidence that these questions are demanding answers. And equating those demands to anti-intellectualism, lack of curiosity, and tempter tantrums...well, let's just say it doesn't display any will to engage with current atheist intellectual traditions.

Saturday Storytime: The Things

2011-05-07T14:42:00.003-05:00

You probably know Peter Watts, through his run in with U.S. Customs and Immigration, if nothing else. You probably know this story, through the movie starring Kurt Russell. You probably don't know Peter Watts' version of this story. An excerpt:

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

Keep reading.

Anatomy of a Rape Debacle: Failure from Start to Finish

2011-05-05T17:27:00.001-05:00

By now, you've probably heard this story:

A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.

The United States Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a review of the case brought by the woman, who is known only as HS. Lower courts had ruled that she was speaking for the school, rather than for herself, when serving on a cheerleading squad – meaning that she had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud.

That the victim should have to pay the school's legal costs because she sued for the right to be an active participant in her school and protect herself at the same time is the kind of thing that leaves a person wondering how matters got so incredibly fucked up. It takes a lot of failures to get this far. Here is a (probably incomplete) list.

Failure of Humanity
First, of course, we have the rape itself.

The cheerleader and three football players were at a party at the home on Pinewood early Saturday, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed by the Silsbee Police Department.

The girl told police that three males forced her into a room, held her down and sexually assaulted her, the affidavit states.

I won't be explaining why this is a failure. If you need it explained, go away.

Failure of Justice
This case was heard by a grand jury three times. The first jury declined to prosecute citing a lack of evidence. That lack of evidence, by the way, included a rape kit and witnesses.

When others at the party tried to open the door, two of the males fled through a window of the one-story house, the affidavit states. The third boy remained behind.

One of the boys who fled left behind a pair of shorts, the affidavit states.

One of the males later returned and made threats so he could retrieve his shorts, the affidavit states.

A second grand jury was convened after the prosecutor was accused of failing to prosecute zealously because he thought the outcome was predetermined. found sufficient evidence to indict after insisting upon hearing everything twice--with no changes to the available evidence. At that point, the victim had already had to testify three times.

The victim, unwilling to deal with more of the slow grind(er) of justice, supported a plea deal for the man she would later be asked to cheer. Instead of a charge that exposed him to the possibility of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, he received two years probation, community service, a $2,500 fine, and an anger management class. (The anger management class is something else I won't explain, but only because I can't. Maybe there are no sex offender treatment programs in the area?) He also avoided having to register as a sex offender, so potential future victims won't see him coming.

Charges against the second adult indicted were dropped, possibly because the victim was unwilling to testify there as well. The prosecutor only said that "unless new evidence is found, the case, which has garnered national attention, is over." The status of charges against the juvenile accused rapist are unknown, although he's no longer a juvenile.

This is not particularly atypical, for those few rapes that are reported to the police.

Failure of Priorities
The town of Silsbee, TX is not particularly unusual in being "sports-obsessed." However, that doesn't make the school or the appeal court correct when one argues and the other accepts the idea that "This act constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, HS was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily." Sports may be organized around schools, but that does not make them the work of the school. In this day and age of restricted funding, that really, really ought to be self-apparent. Ditto for cheerleading, and doubly so for the sort of cheerleading that isn't a competitive sport itself.

Failure of Safety
This is technically a failure of priorities as well. Learning is supposed to be the first priority of schools, and in order for learning to occur, students need to be undistracted by concerns for their security. If there are not policies in place to deal with conflicts like these, in which an aggressor wants to take part in activities in such a way as to be a threat to the recovery of the victim, there need to be. Those policies also need to go out of their way to accommodate the victim, not the aggressor. That goes for bullying, and it certainly goes for rape, even if the charges are bargained down.

Do I hear someone saying that sports aren't learning? Well, for one thing, that's not what the school and the appeals court argued. For another, that places the imperative to safety even higher. During academic activities, the need to keep the victim safe has to be somewhat balanced by the educational needs of the aggressor. In extracurricular activities, those educational needs are lessened, or perhaps don't even exist. Then the school becomes primarily responsible for the safety of those in its care.

Even if the only charge the rapist had ever faced was the misdemeanor assault he pled to, even if the accusations were still in court, he, not she, should have borne the brunt of any conflict between their activities. But that wasn't the only charge. Silsbee is a small town, and everyone in town knew about the rape. School officials certainly knew. So did every other cheerleader and all the athletes.

That means that when the superintendent placed her rapist's desire to play sports over the victim's need to establish some control over the situation, he didn't just make the victim less safe. He made all those cheerleaders less safe. Cheerleaders are already subject to high levels of sexual harassment. The superintendent reinforced the importance of school tribalism, sports, and athletes--all of them--over the safety of the school's cheerleaders. He told the cheerleaders, the athletes, and everyone else watching that rah-rahing for the school was so important it was worth siding with a rapist over his victim.

Failure of Counsel
The suit against the school district was filed on First Amendment grounds. Although that wasn't frivolous, since the ability to shun a rapist is a compelling claim, the suit should have been brought on Title IX grounds instead. Yes, Title IX. Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy explains:

Title IX requires schools to take “prompt and effective” steps to redress sexual harassment, sexual assault and any other form of sex discrimination. It also forbids schools from exacerbating a situation by creating or allowing a hostile environment to develop on campus in the aftermath of a reported sexual assault.

...the ruling would have gone the other way if the case had been filed under Title IX. That the victim’s parents did not sue under Title IX is unfortunate but not surprising given how little has been done to educate anyone about the connection between Title IX and sexual assault.

This story has sparked loads of commentary, but so far I have yet to see a single mention of Title IX even though the law has been around since 1972.

Title IX expressly forbids sex discrimination, which includes sexual harassment, the most severe expression of which is sexual assault. Yet 9 out of 10 people asked say they believe Title IX only requires equality in athletics, as in making sure girls can try out for boys’ teams.

Other federal laws that cover discrimination against other “types” of students haven’t morphed and narrowed like this into sports-equity rules.

Schools aptly emphasize that laws forbidding racial or religious discrimination are primarily aimed at preventing targeted violence and harassment–not equal distribution of soccer balls. Presumably this is because being free from violence is far more important than scoring baskets if the goal is to achieve an equal educational opportunity.

That's right. Our federal laws require that our schools provide women and girls that safe, equal space that this young woman was denied, but almost no one knows it. I suggest you read all of Ms. Murphy's article (bonus clueless Larry Summers story).

Failure All Around
So that is how a a teenaged victim of a gang-rape ends up owing legal costs to the school district that failed her so badly. It takes an awful lot of people to screw things up on this scale. It takes rapists, a tepid prosecution, an indecisive grand jury, misplaced school pride, an insufficient attention to the duty of protecting a district's students, and a lack of knowledge of the rights female students are already supposed to be guaranteed.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the only people who did anything right in this situation are the victim and their parents. Remarkably, they also seem to be the only people who have lost by this. Lovely.

It's Okay to Not Like Things

2011-05-03T20:04:00.002-05:00

Via Arvind, posted for my friend Michael. He knows why.

Big News Is Too Big

2011-05-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

The first time I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, my response was, "Yep. That's big." Then I promptly slipped on some ice and wrenched my knee. I spent the rest of that brief visit sitting down, slowly doling out peanuts to the ravens. I remember the ravens in a fair amount of detail and have been fascinated with corvidae ever since. The Grand Canyon is still just big.

It isn't just an animal versus rock thing, either. The Little Colorado River flows through a vertical chasm nearby that gripped me as well. I was impressed by how deep and straight the water has cut through the rock and the narrowness of the channel. It was small, by comparison, but the details captured my imagination.

The Grand Canyon, on the other hand, is simply immense in a way that dwarfs its details. Maybe if I'd had more time and mobility, I could have gotten to know a small piece of it. Maybe then the pressure to have an opinion about the place--and that pressure does exist--could be met with more than a shrug. For now, it simply remains big.

On the morning September 11, 2001, the news changed between the time I got out of the car at work and the time I got to my desk. I listened to the radio long enough to understand that, once again, this was something that was simply big. I could, perhaps, if I listened longer, focus on one small aspect of the whole until it made sense, but the whole was always going to be too large. The details were never going add up to something I would truly understand.

There was a conference room with cable news reception. I didn't go in. The pictures weren't going to help, and watching the anchors and guests try to make sense of something that big was only going to make me hate their superficiality.

People drifted out of the room all morning. I don't know whether they gave up on making it all make sense, or whether they each found their own little details from which to mine meaning. At lunchtime, there were two people left, two I respected for their thoughtfulness. I gently chased them out of there with the suggestion that that much immersion might not be good for them. I suspect they were still trying to find the piece that would make it all make sense.

We haven't found it yet, nearly ten years later. Those of us who lived through it almost certainly never will. Historians who look back from a distance probably won't either. Like us, they'll focus on one detail or another, just as we've done with all of these events that are just too big.

In the meantime, however, we have a new event to deal with. In itself, it isn't very large. A dying man is dead, at the hand of one of the nations he harmed. His influence will not have died with him. But he, himself, is dead, and his death is part of an event that is simply too big for us to handle.

There is, once again, immense pressure to decide how we feel about bin Laden's death, despite the overwhelming size of the events he set in motion. How we react, each of us, will depend on the details we took away with us in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It was a crime, a tragedy, a political lever, a moment of deep political insecurity, a blow to our national pride, and much more. Our personal reactions now are informed by at least one of those, but I doubt that any of us can be informed by all of them at once.

As it was on September 11, it is time to give ourselves and each other a little break. We're all behaving appropriately to our understanding of that immense event and those that followed. We're all behaving inappropriately to someone else's.

We can't ever understand the whole of what has happened to us, but maybe, just for a day or two, we can understand that much and let each other be with our personal, emotional, insufficient reactions. Even those of us who have nothing more intelligent to say than, "This is big."

Punching "New Atheists"

2011-05-01T09:53:00.000-05:00

Last week, David Roberts wrote on Grist about why he had avoided commenting on the climate change report from Matt Nisbet. Those who have followed the accommodationism arguments will recognize that name. I think they'll also recognize the social manipulation Roberts sees in this report and others like it.

Predictably, the attacks aimed at green groups drew outrage from their targets. Just as predictably, the outrage was used as evidence that S&N are brave truth-tellers, renegades, the "bad boys of environmentalism." I don't know if S&N planned it that way, but the strategy turned out to be pure media gold.

If S&N had come forward with nothing but a positive agenda for the future of clean energy, they likely would have been politely ignored by the mainstream media just like dozens of earnest green agenda-bearers before them. (Grist's bookshelves sag under their weight.) But S&N capitalized on an insight that had been ignored by their forebears: nothing, but nothing, draws media interest like liberals bashing liberals. They enjoy conservatives punching hippies. They dig centrists punching hippies. But they looove ex-hippies punching hippies. A pair of greenies bravely exposing the corruption and dumbassery of all the other greenies? Crack rock.

It's important to note that it's not just Beltway reporters who love this stuff, though they love it the mostest. Ever since the perceived successes of Bill Clinton's triangulation and the ascendency of the New Dems, the road to acceptance on the left has been paved with hippie punching. To be legit, one must signal to one's peers that one is not like those liberals, the old-fashioned, soft-headed, bleeding-hearted, slogan-shouting kind. One is a Pragmatist, not a Partisan, a traveler on the Third Way, not on the old, boring Left Way, a hard-headed, practical sort, not some kind of dippy dreamer.

Similarly, there is nothing like a brawl among secularists to get people to sit up and pay attention. Sounds good, right? All press is good press and all that? Well, that depends on your goals.

The difficult thing is, they all face the same perverse incentive structure. The wonky stuff -- and BTI cranks out some genuinely good wonkery -- doesn't get clicks. What gets attention (and thus keeps the appearance of influence alive) are the attacks on hippies doing it wrong. These incentives have led the Breakthrough crowd to meditate endlessly on the failings and failures of others pursuing similar goals by different means. In S&N's increasingly baroque telling, the green groups and their partisan blogger defenders are omni-incompetent: spending money wrong, pursuing the wrong policies, dealing with the wrong people, framing wrong, arguing wrong, responding to their critics wrong, and almost single-handedly insuring that there is no progress on climate change.

Similarly, "New Atheists" have been tarred as omni-vituperative: they don't merely disagree with people in strong terms, they destroy them, leaving them weeping husks with shredded reputations. And they scare away all the religious folk who would otherwise jump up to work with secularists. Or maybe not.

The effect has not been the dawning of a new day of post-partisan support for clean energy. Turns out demonstrating one's moderate bona fides by punching hippies doesn't actually bring any conservatives over. They're as partisan about clean energy as they are about climate. Mostly, the result has been lots and lots of press attention on hippie errors, a subject upon which everyone with a keyboard is apparently an expert.

Exactly. I said it Thursday, but it bears repeating. "A gatekeeper's job is to keep people out, not to let them in." They don't want you on their side. They do, however, like the results of the squabbling.

The ineffable but unmistakable property of a Breakthrough-esque foray into politics is that it makes douchecanoes of everyone it touches, like some sort of inverse King Midas. Its authors, the journalists who cover it, its critics -- no one comes out looking good. I've paddled that douchecanoe myself, many times, and every time ended up feeling vaguely dirty. I can't put my finger on the precise mechanics, but I've learned to recognize it.

So I decided, with a few lapses here and there, to stop responding. Life is too short to spend around things that bring out your inner douchecanoe. I'd rather write about ideas I'm excited about. That's why I was going to let Nisbet's report slide on by.

Isn't it really about time all of us secularists did the same? Pay attention to what we want to pay attention to, pay attention to what we want others to pay attention to, and stop distracting them by punching each other, no matter how entertaining they find it. Expend our energy on them, not on each other.

We're at the bottom of the pile now. What have we got to lose?

Saturday Storytime: When It Changed

2011-04-30T10:04:00.000-05:00

Joanna Russ died yesterday. You might not know who she is, but you should. Annalee has a post at io9 that explains why she was important (and she was), but she was also simply one of the most imaginative of the early science fiction writers. Beyond that, unlike many of the classic writers, she could write.

"When It Changed" is a deceptively simple piece. A simple meeting, but what the characters stand to lose tells us so much about what we've never had. An excerpt:

"Plague?" he said. "That's most unfortunate."

"Yes," I said. "Most unfortunate. We lost half our population in one generation."

He looked properly impressed.

"Whileaway was lucky," I said. "We had a big initial gene pool, we had been chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high technology and a large remaining population in which every adult was two-or-three experts in one. The soil is good. The climate is blessedly easy. There are thirty millions of us now. Things are beginning to snowball in industry do you understand? give us seventy years and we'll have more than one real city, more than a few industrial centers, full-time professions, full-time radio operators, full-time machinists, give us seventy years and not everyone will have to spend three quarters of a lifetime on the farm." And I tried to explain how hard it is when artists can practice full-time only in old age, when there are so few, so very few who can be free, like Katy and myself. I tried also to outline our government, the two houses, the one by professions and the geographic one; I told him the district caucuses handled problems too big for the individual towns. And that population control was not a political issue, not yet, though give us time and it would be. This was a delicate point in our history; give us time. There was no need to sacrifice the quality of life for an insane rush into industrialization. Let us go our own pace. Give us time.

"Where are all the people?" said the monomaniac.

I realized then that he did not mean people, he meant men, and he was giving the word the meaning it had not had on Whileaway for six centuries.

"They died," I said. "Thirty generations ago."

I thought we had poleaxed him. He caught his breath. He made as if to get out of the chair he was sitting in; he put his hand to his chest; he looked around at us with the strangest blend of awe and sentimental tenderness. Then he said, solemnly and earnestly:

"A great tragedy."

I waited, not quite understanding.

Keep reading (including the author's afterword).

True Equivalence

2011-04-29T14:07:00.002-05:00

J. J. Ramsey, in a comment on a recent post, suggests that accommodationists aren't being extra harsh and burdensome to confrontational atheists because the accommodationists treat fundamentalists poorly too. Specifically, he responds to a comment by Jason:

I suspect what Stephanie actually meant was that accomodationists don't take the same pains in treating "New Atheists" with the same kid gloves they treat religious folks.

With:

But "accommodationists" don't even uniformly treat the religious with "kid gloves," as you put it. Toward the creationists, fundamentalists, and other denialists, they are quite willing to be aggressive. The NCSE has, for example, even mocked Expelled.

I'd really just like to put my head down now and say, "We've had that discussion. Get over it." But hey, we've got to do what we've got to do. Once more, with feeling.

This is what we call "false equivalence." The fact that two positions within an argument are the most polarized you, personally, have seen doesn't make them the same thing. Nor does it make the point somewhere between them a moderate position. This is particularly true when one "side" is distinctly in the minority, with the majority in control of most of the channels available for distributing messages. Even more true when the minority is heavily stigmatized.

That false equivalence is the only reason to compare "New Atheist" communications to fundamentalist positions. Confronting religion head on is no more "mean," "distorting," or "prejudicial" toward the religious than mainstream religious messaging is toward atheists. Need examples?

New Atheist: Religion is a delusion.
Mainstream: None so blind as those who will not see.
Fundamentalist: Satan resides in your heart.

New Atheist: Religious experiences and belief are the products of cognitive processes. They do not constitute evidence of god(s). Denying that denies science.
Mainstream: I believe in God because I have had these religious experiences. Denying that denies me.
Fundamentalist: Doubt is a personal failure to be fought against.

New Atheist: Religion requires assumption of facts not in evidence and/or contradicting our knowledge of reality.
Mainstream: Atheism requires assuming that what is tangible is the sum of what there is.
Fundamentalist: Denying your god is evil.

New Atheist: Raising a child to believe in sin and hell is a form of child abuse.
Mainstream: It would be cruel to deny your child the experience of God's love.
Fundamentalist: You risk damning your children to eternal torment by allowing non-religious influences into their lives.

New Atheist: Religion provides a source of authority that is used to hurt others. It is also used to define an outgroup, who are "fair game" for persecution.
Mainstream: Religion provides the source of morality that keeps others from harm. It also provides a sense of brotherhood.
Fundamentalist: Our authority is God's authority. Those who would threaten that authority must be dealt with or excluded in God's name.

New Atheist: We must not allow any religion to use the political sphere to promote itself.
Mainstream: We must not allow other religions or atheists to use the political sphere to promote themselves.
Fundamentalist: We must root out all other influences in the political sphere.

And the one most important to the accommodationist promotion of science.

New Atheist: Science undermines the idea of religious myths as a rational interpretation of the world.
Mainstream: We recognize that science reveals the metaphorical nature of our texts but hold that faith is paramount.
Fundamentalist: Science is wrong because our texts tell us so.

People who buy into and pass on this notion that somehow "New Atheism" is equivalent to fundamentalism are perpetuating a narrative that privileges liberal religious thought as the non-extreme, non-confrontational position. They're placing a burden on atheists to be more conciliatory toward religion than mainstream religion is toward atheism, simply by not recognizing that this is where the equivalence lies.

"New Atheists" are no more judgmental, dismissive, or offensive than the adherents of mainstream religions. They're certainly not louder on a collective basis, and I doubt that they are on an individual basis either. The only reason that isn't obvious is that the mainstream anti-atheism narrative is a constant background to life in our society. But really, it doesn't take much work to stop and look at the evidence. It takes even less to find the true equivalence.

Taking It Downhill

2011-04-28T10:48:00.001-05:00

As biodork (love that handle) pointed out in the comments on my last post, the complaints about "New Atheists" being too...too are hardly any newer than the behavior of confrontational atheists.

In 1969 it was the flamboyant cross-dressers and the in-your-face gays and lesbians who changed the GBLT civil rights movement forever. 40 years later (omg - 40 years???), we're seeing opinion letters from straight-laced gays and lesbians (pun not intended when it flew from my fingers, but now I'm totally keeping it) who complain about these same people being over the top in the Pride parades with their short leather shorts, glittery, colorful costumes and their loud, effervescent personas.

In her talk at the U of MN Greta Christina touched on the mainstreaming of an identity like being gay or being an atheist. At first the leaders are courageous, spectacular, FABULOUS!, and willing to take fire from the haters. As time goes on more and more "regular joes" who just want to live their lives without making their identity the center of everything will rise up.

When this happens, I think there is a feedback loop that starts to encourage the quieting of these original noisy upstarts by the community that they originally fostered. "Shhh...we don't need that anymore. They noticed, now be quiet."

There are many more parallels than this, of course. There are those "radical" feminists who keep insisting on raising a stink because there are plenty of things still broken. They make it so tough for women who have to keep defending themselves from the title in order to go make their comfortable lives a little bit more comfortable. There are those socialists who persist in demanding that poor people be treated like people. It's so annoying that they won't just disappear for a bit so the label won't be applied to those people who want a better tax break on their kids' educational expenses.

All these pesky crusaders, who just won't shut up, who won't just go with the flow for a bit so things can get done, so the people with the keys to the kingdom will give us just a little bit more. Ugh! What is to be done with people so rude, so demanding, so mean?!?

This really shouldn't be any news to anybody, but those people at the top? The ones who are telling you it would all be okay if you could just get the noisy people to be quiet? They're not on your side. That stuff they're telling you? It's today's excuse. If you make it go away, tomorrow's excuse will just be different.

A gatekeeper's job is to keep people out, not to let them in.

No matter how much you suck up to the people with power (money, position, conformity to the rules), no matter how much you shape yourself to look like them, no matter how much you do the gatekeepers' jobs for them, you're never going to receive more than a token award. People in charge didn't get there by deferring to others. Power is shared grudgingly, if at all.

Those noisy, persistent, aggravating people? What they actually are is threatening. They are the people who have what it takes to grab and hold onto a piece of that power. They're the ones who aren't going to wait for it to be shared, not by you and not by the people above you. They don't have a lot of respect for gates, and less for gatekeepers.

Do they have a chance? That's hard to say for any given movement at any given moment, but the last couple of centuries suggest that they win in the long run. When they do have setbacks, they aren't dealt out by the people at the top, either. They come from that complacent, uncomfortable middle. They come from the people who think that getting a couple of inches closer to the gate constitutes a gain worth stepping on others to protect. But in the long run, they're winning.

So when you find yourself on edge around these people, when you find yourself thinking they're making your life harder, stop. Think.

Remember that you have a choice. You can stay a part of the gatekeepers' army, turning around and stomping on those below you. Or you can look at the gatekeepers, step to one side, and say, "These people coming up the hill behind me? I'm with them."