J.B. Handley, Misogynist

J.B. Handley has decided that his organization aimed at peddling dangerous pseudoscience about vaccines didn't make him enough of an asshole, so he decided that go for the tried and true way of proving douchebaggery: misogyny.

In case you missed the multiple smack-downs posted by some awesome science bloggers, here's some background: Amy Wallace writes an article on how anti-vaccination loons (henceforth called antivaccaloons) are creating panic out of thin air and ignorance. J.B. Handley does his usual job of throwing shit at anyone criticizing him and takes it one step further by emailing Wallace some pretty fucked-up shit. Here have it straight from the horse's (or rather horse fucker's*) mouth:

Warning: discussion of rape and date-rape drugs

I often write and then re-write pieces. When I first wrote the piece about Ms. Wallace's Wired article, which I wrote right after reading that horrible piece of shit, here is how it began:

Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine

By J.B. Handley

"The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit’s house must be damn good, I really don’t know how else to explain the intellectual rape that lead to the writing and printing of Wired magazine’s cover story on vaccines and autism that you can now read HERE..."

I was so amazed with the article. As a student of Paul Offit's talking points for years, it was as if he had put his brain inside Ms. Wallace head and written the piece for her. As is often the case, I forwarded my essay, via email in advance, to Ms. Wallace the night before it ran.

In his defense he didn't end up running the article, but then again in his defense this was his defense:

With some reflection, I decided that although "intellectual rape", a relatively commonly used term, and "sexual rape" were very different things, the use of the word "rape" was ultimately in poor taste, would distract from the article, and would most certainly offend some readers, and could appear demeaning of women, which wasn't remotely the intention of the piece or my words. So, I changed the article to the one you all have read, and then AoA ran it the next day. And, I sent Ms. Wallace, via email, the new piece.

Because you know using rape as a metaphor for what you perceive to be shoddy scholarship has absolutely nothing to do with "sexual rape". It's just that that word that's the problem, not that fact that you're trivializing a very real and horrific experience so you can insult someone -- yeah fucking right.

And that thing about "demeaning of women", Handley's title and one paragraph didn't just appear to demean women, it fucking damn well did demean women. Using rape and date-rape drugs to illustrate how much he dislikes Wallace is all about demeaning her as a woman. Using that language to describe her writing reduces her to a sexual object. It also illustrates how much of a fucking misogynist he is because he jumps at using rape to make his point against a woman when the kool-aid metaphor he later used would have been more fitting and he just doesn't actually see what's wrong with that.

Bonus stupid:

"Ms. Wallace appears to have gone exclusively to Google University to research her feeble attempt at describing a very complex topic" - J.B. Handley

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* J.B. Handley does not in fact fuck horses, but he is is about as morally bankrupt as as a horse-fucker.

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ID, it's fucking everywhere

Yes, even in a 4th year class on developmental biology.

I decided to take a seminar class on dev-bio for the following reasons: the topic is pretty damn interesting, I really liked my dev-bio and evo-devo classes last year, and the profs teaching the course are the most engaging instructors I have had at university. What I had failed to take into account was that class content would be highly determined by the students enrolled and that some student would have managed to get through three years of a biology degree believing in Intelligent Design. Apparently, this was a huge oversight.

It didn't help that the person presenting decided to spring this on us as a wild change of topic. He started off doing a pretty good overview of some aspects of sex determination in mammals and how one model of this was creating. After about an hour of this he finished and put up a slide about how the stuff we learn in class and in the labs should effect the way we view the world. My immediate thought was: "Awesome, we're going to talk about sex/gender/intersex people/etc!" Oh, how wrong I was. The segue wasn't for that; it was for a slide with the words intelligent design plastered all over.

*Sigh* What followed that was an entirely uncomfortable 45 minutes.

He started off with an exercise involving us pretending we knew nothing about several objects and trying to intuitively place them in either designed, natural, probably designed. I, of course, decided to object because if I don't know anything about these object I can make no judgement about their origins. It's also pretty damn hard to pretend you know nothing about a lion or a pyramid. As you can guess, this was all about making us go "complexity = design" because obviously our "cognitive biases = reality".

This was all to prime us for the magic that is -- wait for it -- Kirk fucking Durston. Was it rude to giggle at that point?

My problem right now is that I need to give this guy a mark (wee! for peer marking), but I have nod idea how to go about that. Do I give him a good mark because he did a good job presenting the science-y bits? Do I give him a terrible mark because he used the science-y bits to legitimize wasting my time on inane, drivel? Is it right to give him a zero because, while he can parrot biology he seems to have not learned the core of the subject?

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Tomorrow Is a New Start

Last week, I got to run through the immunocytochemistry protocol I'll be using from dissecting out the tissue to taking pretty fluorescent pictures and, as can be expected of most first attempts, I failed completely (OK, maybe not completely as I did get one cell that looked like it could be usable data, but pretty damn close). It's frustrating because I really wanted for things to go well so I could prove to that part of my brain that has no self-esteem that I'm not just wasting everyone's time and money with my incompetence.

So, that week didn't go as well as I'd hoped, but tomorrow I'm back in the lab and it's a new week. I have some idea over where I could have gone wrong so maybe my failures will be more minor.

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How long until Thanksgiving?

Today was the last day of the second week of school (UofT has decided to create massive confusion with a schedule that makes sense but is still so fucking stupid) and I think I may be settling in with this going to lectures business and 10 hour days. I miss being a lazy good-for-nothing.

General updates on life:

• I spend more than the course recommended amount of time working in the lab on my fourth-year project. I'm currently in the lab honeymoon phase where I'm convinced my supervisor is awesome (even if she intimidates me), the research I'll be doing is pretty cool, and the grad student teaching me is not a controlling asshat who thinks I'm an idiot. Now I just wait until everyone realizes that I'm an incompetent idiot.
• I've had a quick intro to neuroscience in three of my classes which is almost all repeat of stuff I've already learned (in one class I've even gotten the same lecture I had two years ago by the same prof). At this point, I think I may be learning more about the various ways to give this lecture and the different things you can emphasize.
• The only non-physiology course I'm taking this term is with the two awesomest professors I've had at UofT. I took a course run by them last year and it freaking blew my mind. Since I'm sure someone will make a wrong assumption on the subject, it's a science course.
• I've got a lot of events to help setup as club exec and circumstances keep conspiring to give us even more stuff to do. I'll also, hopefully, be volunteering at the Centre for Women and Trans People. Yeah for non-class stuff to keep me busy!
• The last two days have been crappy emotionally. Everything external to how I feel is pretty good, but my reactions to stuff are completely inadequate. Anytime I'm not mentally occupied I start feeling panic-y, like I'm about to screw something up.
• If I could have any superpower, I'd want to be able to stop time while I nap/sleep...

...and on that note I should go to bed.

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New Year Resolutions

Some of you might read the title and think, "What the balls is LostMarbles smoking?" Today is the start of a new year for me. I know the calender still says 2009 and will continue to say that for the next 4 months, but having spent the last 15+ years in in school I've been convinced that the year begins sometime in the first week of September. So in the grand tradition of setting up goals you're unlikely to accomplish because it makes you believe that you are planning ahead, here are mine:

- Stop wasting so much money on meaningless trinkets. Yes they're shiny and I'm a magpie pie, but I should try.
- Get into grad school
- Stop eating skeezy candy from the bulk store during exam periods
- Read more than 2 works of original fiction
- Finish building my RX-0 Unicorn Gundam before the anime is released.
- Learn some awesome things from my fourth-year project course
- Come up with awesome pie ideas that don't end up looking like chocolate soup in a pie crust
- Keep on track with reading for my classes
- Kick ass at life...
- ... so I can buy a pet unicorn. A gal can dream, right?

So for all of you who still think the year starts in September, what do you want to achieve and/or change about your life in the 2009/2010 year?

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Twitter

You know, if you'd have told me that twitter is a great way to observe mass hysteria I would have joined without second thoughts. I loves me some mass hysteria (Why do you think I still have an LJ account? They do mass hysteria better than anyone else).

P.S. ERV has an interesting post on ketotifen fumerate, an allergy med that works both as an anti-histamine and a mast cell stabalizer. I might have to bother my doctor about it, preferably before I claw my eyes out. Dying of allergies. Please rescue.

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Morgan's Flies

[HT: Toronto LJ Community]

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I wasn't planning on writing about the sexist comments made toward Sheril Kirshenbaum on the Bad Astronomy Blog since other people have written some very good commentary on this shit. But after reading and commenting in the post on CPP's blog (which is filled with awesome commenters, trolls, and clueless fools), I decided that I had some things to say that are probably a bit teal deer for a comment. I'll probably be repeating some things mention in the posts linked above.


Point #1: This whole issue to me isn't simply about people commenting on/judging Sheril based on her appearance. Because while that is admittedly a shitty thing to do, I think there is a deeper issue with the with the comments. The problem I see is that too often the metric for judging women is attractiveness ( defined: How much men should want to stick their penis in a particular woman).

This kind of judgement is often made based on what a woman looks like (it was in this case), but it's not exclusive to appearances. Commenting on how sexy a woman is based one her intelligence, interests, hobbies, or a particular personality trait is not as widespread, but it happens and it's still unacceptable.

I've mention before some of my interests. Most of the people who share these interests tend to be male and this means that if I want to talk about them the community I'll be joining will be made up of 90% men. And such was the case on one forum where I post. Of course, I post under a pseudonym and it happens to be a masculine sounding pseudonym. This made a lot of people assume that I a man and I was treated as decently as anyone there can expect to be treated.

After a month or so of posting for whatever reason, I can't remember, it came out that I was a woman. The response that followed was interesting. There was the expected reaction; some people insisted that I must fit their stereotype of a woman and therefore I would infect their precious community with feminine shit. There was also a response I did not expect. I did not expect to receive come-ons that ranged from the almost innocent to the obscene. These were from people who had no clue what I looked like and only knew that I have an interest in certain shows.

This doesn't happen as often in real life, as it's much easier to sexualize based on appearance, but it indicates that the problem with how many men treat women as sexual objects extends passed just finding them physically attractive. And this is what I find offensive about the comments. It's that a women was treated as if her first, if not only, role is to sexually please a man. This kind of treatment denies us the ability to be fully human. This is even more troubling in the context of the history of women's oppression. For thousands of years women have been treated as if their only possible role was to breed and be mothers.

Point #2: Some comments were made indicating that we where just overreacting to an innocent complement. I hope the above convinced you that the comments, while possibly made innocently, are not at all innocent. But lets assume that those comments are harmless. Lets assume that we are living in a historical vacuum. Even in that case I think that the people defending them should apologize and shut the fuck up.

Why? Well, that involves trying to understand what a goddamn compliment is. A compliment isn't simply saying the X is a good trait of Y person. When I compliment one of my aims is to make the person being complimented feel good. I think that's the more important part of compliments and that's why I try not to offend people with inappropriate praise.

Now, if you read all the follow-up to the comments, you'd have realized that quiet a lot of women found the comments offensive, including Sheril. So your compliment failed. All you did was offend the person you wanted to compliment and therefore you should apologize and STFU.

Point#3: "When is it appropriate to comment on a woman's attractiveness?" you ask.

I would say the best guidline is to think, "Would she want to know or care whether I want to bone her or not?" It's really as simple as that. Well, unless you think that every woman is here as as your personal cockwarmer. But then you're an irredeemable misogynistic waste of air.

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The post where you all get to laugh at me

I've been shit with posting the last week or so because I've been busy writing lab reports, assignments, and memorizing the fucking nuclei in the brainstem. So as penance, I'll post this gel from two weeks ago:



I my defense:

• I wasn't the only one responsible for this mess (four pairs of hands are rarely better than one)
• It was my first time pouring a gel
• I hadn't slept the night before.

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*sigh*

Dear D. melanogaster,

I really do like you. You`re a pretty cool model organism. You mutate and you don`t afraid of anything. However, it would be really nice if you were bigger. I`m not talking Godzilla-size bigger. Something along the lines of a small rat or a mouse would be nice. Your distant cousin the Coconut Crab can get pretty large (see below) so it isn`t as though it`s impossible, you just need to try harder.

Love,
That biology undergraduate student whose eyes hurt after two hours attempting to count antenna duplications

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But it's too hard...

Last Wednesday, I attended and event hosted by the Hart House Debate Committee on the friction between science and religion. The format was good, and I might steal it for a future events I plan, but otherwise it was boring. One of the two speakers on the religious side, Yiftach Fehige, was possibly the most vacuous person I have ever heard speak. Seriously, he had about as much content as cotton candy (i.e. sugar and air, lots and lots of very warm air).

From what I understood, the event was not planned as a debate, but even as a discussion there was way to much backing down and nothing remotely provocative was said by the speakers. The audience was a bit more daring in regards to provocative questions. When to topic came to the curriculum and what should be taught in schools, everyone agreed that science should be taught in science classrooms. One audience member, however, suggested that maybe when it comes evolution the topic is to "complicated" to teach in schools and so we should just stick to easier topics in science.

Personally, I call bullshit. School and learning, in general, are not about what's easiest. Yes, evolution is not the simplest topic, but that argument could be used for not teaching anything harder than arithmetics. In fact, I've seen it used to argue that calculus, amongst other topics in math and sciences, shouldn't be taught in high school.

Furthermore, I don't think the problem is that it's too hard to teach the basics. In my experience, the problem is that many teachers are ill equipped to teach evolution. If you don't understand it yourself you're hardly in a position to teach it, right? But then the solution to this type of problem isn't to take the subject away. Not teaching evolution in primary or secondary schools will just mean that the next batch of teachers will know jack shit about it too.

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Learning from other people's mistakes

Lessons learned from mistakes have always stuck around in my memories the longest. A lot have been mistakes I made, but seeing other people screw up is also a great source "what not to do"s. This is especially true when you have to work with the results of the fuck-ups.

I spent most of my summer at Research Organization trying to clean up the ugliest database ever because the person who made it was really, really incompetent (Seriously guys, if you're collecting data electronically you should never, ever let people enter whatever they want. Even [Especially?] if said people have an MD). I managed to clean it up well enough that we've already got 2 abstracts accepted for a meeting and there was talk of writing a manuscript. Along with these easily quantifiable achievement I also learned a lot of shit. I learned how to work with a particular statistical package that isn't SPSS, ethical data cleaning, and how to politely tell people that they're fucking nuts. However, the things I will remember forever and will hopefully never repeat in my own work include "Why yes, enter whatever you wish for the units" and "Hmm...contradictory information, nobody would ever enter that so why should we create measures against it?".

Over the break, I started and almost finished making data entry forms for a different study. They're nice, shiny and they are made to be as idiot proof as possible. But again other people screwing up is fucking with my work. This time it's not the kind of mistake that leaves me with lots of interesting work and amused frustration at incompetent people, it's the kind of fuck up that will most likely render 3 weeks of work a complete waste of time.

The gist of the problem: pretty science isn't always practical science.

The study is a clinical trial looking at a novel use for a very common medication. The scientific justification is so simple and sensible that even a person with just a little background on the disease (me) can understand it easily. The study is also well designed for the most part. However, the problem is that the protocol requires a super strict time frame that allows for very little time between an occurrence of the medical event in question and seeing a specialist. This makes some sense as it would make the science better. However, the time frame is so ridiculously ludicrous that at the rate the PI is enrolling patients we're probably going to have a case study rather than a clinical trial.

God, I hope that if (when?) I ever have to plan studies or even simple projects I'll have the foresight to be able to tell when my plans are fucking impossible.

P.S. If none if this makes sense or follows a logical progression, I blame anger and Jagermeister.

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