Category: Science

Ooh! Another Atheist Sex Scandal?

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Karen Stoltznow and Ben Radford at a December 2012 conference.

You may recall that in 2011 Rebecca Watson — the total smokin’ hotness of atheist chickdom — celebrated her victimhood after some guy tried to hit on her at an atheist conference. The silliness of it all prompted Vox Day to comment on the misery of atheist guys:

No wonder they’re so furious at God. He created all those lovely women with those beautiful breasts and they aren’t even allowed to even talk to them.

Basically, atheism seems to attract a lot of game-deficient Gamma dudes who figure atheist chicks are easy (correct), but then presume this might mean some hot action for Gammas (incorrect).

OK, so fast-forward, and the New Total Smokin’ Hotness of Atheist Chickdom, Karen Stoltznow steps forward to tell her tale:

Sexual harassment is an uncomfortable topic to discuss with colleagues, especially when you’re the victim. . . .

(As if it is easy for the guy she accuses to discuss it.)

According to gossip about me, I gave him mixed-signals, I led him on, I’m flirtatious, and I’m a dirty little slut. . . .

(Is this true? I mean, was it only “gossip”?)

Five months after I lodged my complaint I received a letter that was riddled with legalese but acknowledged the guilt of this individual. They had found evidence of “inappropriate communications” and “inappropriate” conduct at conferences. . . . They assured me they were disciplining the harasser but this turned out to be a mere slap on the wrist. . . .

(He wasn’t burned at the stake.)

Those who didn’t know the extent of the harassment reacted as though we simply don’t play well together in the sandbox. “Why don’t you two just get over it and move on!” The matter was misconstrued as a lover’s tiff, or that we were a couple in an on again, off again relationship. . . .

(Were you ever a “couple” at all?)

To some people the news didn’t come as much of a surprise. They “knew” there was something wrong, especially with the benefit of hindsight. “I thought something was up when you two stopped working together.” Others felt they could finally admit to me what they think about him. “I never liked him.” “I’ve always thought he was a creepy guy!”, “He’s a weirdo!” and, “I unfriended him on Facebook because of the sexist shit he says and the perverted stuff he posts.” One woman confessed, “No wonder my female friends roll their eyes at me when I tell them he’s single!” . . .

(OK, I’ll stipulate this guy is creepy. But you have not yet told us whether you were ever in a “couple” with him, or explained why people may have thought you were.)

This man is a predator who collects girls of a certain “type”. His targets are chubby, shy, lonely, and insecure, just like I used to be.

(Oh. You used to be his “type,” but now you’re the Total Smokin’ Hotness of Atheist Chickdom, and so — under the bus!)

In the early days I looked up to him and was flattered that he seemed to respect my work. I quickly spotted some red flags but I disregarded them. These became too big to ignore, so I called it all off. The rejection was ego shattering to him at first, and then met with disbelief.

(Hell hath no fury like a Gamma dumped.)

This was followed by incessant communication of a sexual nature, including gifts, calls, emails, letters, postcards, and invites to vacation with him in exotic places so we could “get to know each other again”. He wouldn’t leave me alone. This wasn’t love. It was obsession. His desperation only increased when I met another man. He continued his harassment as though my boyfriend (who is now my husband) didn’t even exist.

(Excuse me for interrupting again — now we’re getting to the good part — but why not have your boyfriend tell the creep to buzz off?)

From late 2009 onwards I made repeated requests for his personal communication to cease but these were ignored. He began manipulating the boundaries by contacting me on the pretext of it being work-related. Then came the quid pro quo harassment. He would find opportunities for me within the company and recommend me to television producers, but only if I was nicer to him. One day the company offered me an honorary position that I’d worked hard for, but he warned me that he had the power to thwart that offer. I threatened to complain to his employer, but he bragged that another woman had accused him of sexual harassment previously and her complaints were ignored. According to him, she had been declared “batshit crazy”. Then, he saw me at conferences and took every opportunity to place me in a vulnerable position. This is where the psychological abuse turned physical and he sexually assaulted me on several occasions.

“Officer, arrest that man!”

Well, isn’t that what you think Karen Stoltznow would have done? If somebody “sexually assaulted” you, wouldn’t you call the cops?

For some reason, she didn’t, but instead complained to her employer, who gave her sort of a runaround, and she published her account without ever naming her harasser. But it seems everybody in Atheist World knows this creep, and his modus operandi is not exactly a secret, so arch-Darwinist P.Z. Myers outs him:

Something strange happened after I posted this. People started emailing me. They all said the same thing: they knew exactly who the harasser was, and they named him, and eerily, they all named exactly the same name, and they were all 100% on the money. I’m starting to believe in psychic powers.
The accused harasser was Ben Radford.
Wait. Maybe it’s not psychic powers, it’s privileged ignorance. Almost all of the people writing to me are women, and some of them also tell tales of their husbands or boyfriends not believing them at first.

Great: “Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and a Research Fellow with the non-profit educational organization the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry,” and he is also apparently “a predator who collects girls … [who] are chubby, shy, lonely, and insecure.”

Sorry about your reputation, Mr. Creepy Obsessive Stalker.

Perhaps you can tell us why people thought you and Karen Stoltznow were a “couple” and what those “sexual assaults” were about.

Have a nice day. And good luck praying to nothing.

UPDATE: I Tweeted this post to the attention of some atheists, and set of World War III. Also, I find myself accused in the comments of “blaming the victim,” whereas my point generally was that atheist guys are creeps, and no woman is safe around them. Attending an atheist conference is kind of like having a sleepover with Julian Assange, it seems, but let’s not revisit that controversy just now, eh?

UPDATE II: A feminist blog comments:

As other atheist feminists might be unable to forget, Center For Inquiry is a fairly large skeptic notprofit which came under fire after CEO Ron Lindsay made some pretty thoughtless comments during his “welcoming” address at the Women In Secularism 2 conference held in DC this past Spring. CFI still hasn’t apologized or taken action against Lindsay. Here’s to hoping they have something more to say now that we know they’ve been doling out honoraria to an individual accused of spending 4 years making an equally famous female skeptic’s life a living hell.

So, it’s all-misogyny, all-the time with these guys, and you might think this would cause some of these “atheist feminists” to reconsider their worldview, go to church and fix me a sammich.

But no. Once they go atheist feminist, they never go back . . .

Or something. Rebecca Watson denounced the Center For Inquiry this year, because those atheist men are all hateful misogynists.

This means no more sammiches for you atheist guys, either.

And next? I guess there will be Atheist Lesbian Feminists conference, which then will split into Maoist and Stalinist sects, followed by the rise of a genuinely radical Underground Atheist Feminist terrorist group, blowing up shit and issuing jargon-laden manifestos.

The progress of such tendencies always follows a historical pattern.

 

This Could Explain a Lot of Things

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Dr. Samuel T. Wilkinson, a physician in residence at the Yale University department of Psychiatry, writes in the Wall Street Journal: “There is a significant and consistent relationship between marijuana use and the development of schizophrenia and related disorders.”

You can read the whole thing — that is, you could read the whole thing, if you weren’t a raving psycho who’s smoked enough weed to fry your brain. Of course, correlation is not causation, and there is the chicken-and-egg problem: Which came first, the crazy or the weed?

We could hypothesize that mentally unstable people are more likely to do a lot of potentially dangerous things — smoke marijuana, vote Democrat, date tattooed women — without any one of these factors being the cause of their insanity. Advocates of the legalization of marijuana could therefore say, “Yeah, crazy people smoke a lot of weed, but . . . Hey, man, stop being such a buzzkill, OK?”

Speaking from personal experience, I know for several years in the 1970s, I suffered from the psychotic delusion that Robert Plant was singing in key on all those Led Zep albums I listened to. And there are long-term effects, too. Even after I stopped smoking weed, I continued voting Democrat for more than a decade.

Thanks to this latest research, however, there are some hitherto unexplained phenomena that now make perfect sense.

 

Obsessed? Who, Me?

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Honestly, you start talking about this stuff, and readers in the comments call your attention to other related stuff, and it’s really pretty fascinating. But next thing you know you’re down the Rabbit Hole, lost in Wonderland. So I promise that after this post, I’m going to write something about NSA snooping or the IRS scandal, just to show that I am not personally fixated on this issue. Meanwhile . . .

Not to mimic the Marina Adshade, Ph.D.. method — i.e., nothing is valid unless empirically proven by social science research — but Clayton Cramer notes a bit of data that turns up almost coincidentally in a study that asks, “Why are lesbians usually fat?”

Correlation is not causation, and one sometimes finds two overlapping data points which are in fact both effects of the same cause. Which isn’t to say that I’m buying any particular single-factor causation argument. Having studied the phenomenon as a mere amateur — a journalist who spent years on the “culture wars” beat — I believe that much of what we now think we “know” about homosexuality is not actually true. But this is a criticism of the state of psychology in general.

Whereas once psychology told Americans to recline on the couch and talk about our mothers, nowadays it’s all serotonin-adjusting chemicals and theorizing about the adaptive value of different behaviors in primitive hunter-gatherer societies.

During the Freudian heyday of the mid-2oth century, homosexuality was explained in terms of family dynamics and “syndromes,” and now the brain-science/Darwinism psychobiology theorists have the upper hand among experts, and I think they all miss the mark.

There are different types of gay people who are gay for different reasons and, as a libertarian/conservative, I think all determinist theories of the phenomenon are misguided. For example, there is what I call the “Desire Is Destiny” mentality, wherein anything that stands between the individual and the satiation of his impulses is condemned as oppressive. And this mentality often marches alongside the “Political Identity” conception of sexual preference, where being gay isn’t something you do to get your rocks off, but rather a politicized mantle of victimhood that functions as a grievance “empowering” you to be self-righteously angry at people you don’t like.

You know the type: “Hater! Homophobe! Bigot!” Continue reading Obsessed? Who, Me? →

She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science

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“Pretty Baby has been banned outright in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. No less a moral arbiter than Rona Barrett solemnly advised her TV audience that the movie is ‘child pornography.’ Others have attacked its French director . . . as a combination of Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski.”
— Kristin McMurran, People magazine, May 1978

“Some people view children as the next sexual frontier.”
— Stephanie Dallam, April 2002

“A Dutch study published [by Paidika editorial board member Theo Sandfort] in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.”
— Jon Henley, Guardian (U.K.), January 2013

“So it appears that younger youth are just as capable of making healthy sexual decisions as are older youth, and yet they are treated differently under the law.”
— Marina Adshade, Ph.D., Psychology Today, May 2013

If you had to fix a date in history when the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s reached its Jacobins-and-guillotines stage, when even those who had originally welcomed and applauded the revolution began to recoil from the perverse “liberation” they had wrought, the 1978 release of Pretty Baby may well have been the pivot-point. The AIDS scare of the 1980s would accelerate the counter-revolution — in fact, the disease was already beginning to spread in the late 1970s, although it was not until the ’80s that the pandemic was recognized — but it was Pretty Baby and headlines about child pornography that alarmed American mothers about the encroaching danger to their daughters.

Of course, the slow approach toward this red line had been going on for many years, but it had occurred on the bohemian fringes of society and had escaped widespread notice by the respectable bourgeoisie. During the 1960s, there was a lot of talk about “high-school dropouts” and “runaway teenagers,” and plenty of minors — 15 or 16 years old, some even younger — were among the hippies and flower children who drifted toward San Francisco in the 1967 “Summer of Love.”

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

Whether they were seeking enlightenment and world peace, or just “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” there were plenty of young teens who were drawn into the hippie orbit. The anti-Establishment mood of that radical youth culture was such that no hairy freak was going to alert police — “the pigs” — that his dopehead buddy was making it with a teenybopper not yet old enough to get a driver’s license.

“Hang-ups” about sex? That’s for squares, man.

During the classic rock heyday of the ’70s, one learns from memoirs and biographies, plenty of high-school girls were among the “groupies” who flung themselves at guitar gods and heavy metal icons. Legendary tales of hotel-room-wrecking rock-tour decadence occasionally include scenes of 13-year-olds quite eagerly donating themselves as love offerings to the platinum-album superstars of that era.

“Well . . . it was consensual.”

This attitude — expressed in many variations by the “Free Kate” fanatics who celebrate Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for her jailbait romance with a 14-year-old — is really nothing new to those who have paid attention long enough. How strange is it, then, that more than three decades after that zenith (or rather, nadir) of the Sexual Revolution, somebody like Canadian economist Marina Adshade thinks we’re in need of a social-science lecture on this topic?

The basis of the age-of-consent laws, like the ones invoked in this case, is that young adolescents are less capable of making healthy sexual decisions than are older adolescents because do not fully comprehend the risks. . . .
So there must be pretty good evidence that younger teens are less capable of making healthily sexual decisions than are slightly older teens who are free to choose the nature of their own sexual relationships, right?
Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually active when they were 16 to 17 years old.

Damn you, damn your “research” and damn Canada, while we’re at it.

As a general rule, the more you know about social science, the more skeptical you are about its findings, especially when confronted with studies that seem to contradict common sense. The media appetite for “counter-intuitive” research findings (as practiced by the fraudulent Jonah Lerner, for example) and the generally liberal leanings of academic researchers (we are not surprised to find the eminent professor of perversion Theo Sandfort on the Columbia University faculty) tend to generate a lot of studies (and publicity for those studies) that tell us sexual hedonism is essentially harmless, even for “younger teens.”

And if you dare so much as raise an eyebrow of skepticism toward this kind of “science,” you’re obviously a bigoted hater. Continue reading She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science →

Stop, Thief!

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Good Lord, what have we come to, when a guy who gets caught making up quotes by Bob Dylan then scores a book deal based on a proposal chock full of plagiarism? Having written previously about Jonah Lehrer, I was shocked at the very thought that anyone would give this lying bastard a book deal under any circumstance.

But . . . Simon & Schuster?

This isn’t some obscure second-rate publisher. This is arguably the most prestigious publishing house in the entire world. And, as Daniel Engber explains, Lehrer peddles a familiar sort of “pop science”:

Each chapter begins with an anecdote of love, often taken from the life of a cultural icon—Montaigne, Berlioz, Tolstoy, etc.—and then progresses in an onslaught of social-science data, cherry-picked to make a simple point that’s been dressed up to look like counter-intuition. That is to say, it’s Lehrer doing exactly what he’s done before. He loves to start with straw-man science, using published research to establish some flagrant bit of nonsense—”marriage is a waste of time,” let’s say—so he can batter and abuse it with other, better published research. (“And yet,” he explains, “a number of subsequent studies have revealed a surprising upside to marriage.”)

Ick. This discount-rack erzatz Gladwellism — a shabby imitation of the best-selling work of Malcolm Gladwell — is a clever way of either (a) getting people to think what you want them to think, or (b) flattering them by telling them what they already think is scientifically valid.

It isn’t science, it’s “scientism” — the mystic belief that everything can be proven by scientific research, and that anything that isn’t proven by scientific research is therefore invalid. That Lehrer apparently resorts to fraud to accomplish this is merely the evidence that his larger philosophy is fundamentally fraudulent, and it seems Simon & Schuster would rather publish popular fraud than actual science.

 

When the Truth Is Scandalous

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Jonathan Karl of ABC News is evidently a Republican, and liberals think it’s a horrible scandal that a Republican could be employed as a reporter: “Didn’t he see the ‘No Republicans Allowed’ sign?”

Meanwhile, Jason Richwine’s recent resignation from the Heritage Foundation, a subject I haven’t previously discussed, yields a secondary story that is either amusing or frightening, depending on whether you take Harvard students seriously:

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority. students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood.
“Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,’’ the petition said. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.”
The thesis — “IQ and Immigration Policy,’’ by Jason Richwine, a former doctoral candidate at the Kennedy School — compared IQ scores of US residents, including immigrants from a variety of countries, and concluded that the scores of Hispanic immigrants were substantially lower than those of native whites. The paper argued that the United States should allow only immigrants with high IQs.

This controversy essentially re-hashes the controversy over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve back in the 1990s. And the problem is that the facts are the facts. You can explain the facts or interpret the facts however you wish. You can use the facts as arguments for one policy or another, or you can even argue that the facts have no relevance in terms of policy. What you cannot do — at least if you have any regard for intellectual integrity — is to attempt to suppress the facts as politically incorrect.

This is the same basic problem that Harvard feminists had with Larry Summers, who merely referred to available data in suggesting that innate differences between men and women explained the relative paucity of women in elite science positions.

In all of these cases, we are talking about measurements of average group differences. I repeat: average group differences.

Men — as a group, on average — are taller and stronger than women. This does not mean there aren’t tall women who could kick my ass. Also, men — again, as a group, on average — have better mathematical aptitude than do women. (It so happens that I’m crappy at math.) Such average group differences don’t really matter in terms of assessing any individual’s aptitude, but do matter when attempting to explain large-scale socio-economic phenomena.

Liberals have spent the past several decades insisting that all socio-economic differences between groups — male and female, white and black, native and immigrant — can be explained in terms of unfair discrimination which must be remedied by policies (including quotas) to equalize outcomes between these groups.

So when Larry Summers tried to say that maybe the reason there aren’t more women doing advanced scientific research at elite institutions is because women aren’t as good at science or, alternately, aren’t as interested as men in pursuing such careers, the feminist outrage was to be expected. Summers had denied the radical-egalitarian thesis that all differences between groups are the result of systematic unfairness —  “social injustice” — that must be rectified at all costs.

To quote Orwell, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Radical egalitarianism so pervades the thinking of our 21st-century intelligentsia that they can’t seem to think outside of its dogma. The witch-hunt against Jason Richwine is typical: Exactly what did he do wrong? He was not, as the article says, doing “research on racial superiority,” nor did he argue that all Hispanics lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence.” Richwine examined the data and found that — as a group, on average — immigrants score lower on IQ tests than native-born Americans, so that our current policy (or lack thereof) has the effect of lowering the nation’s average intelligence, with consequences that are both unfortunate and predictable.

One can disagree with Richwine’s policy recommendations without shutting down an entire field of academic inquiry, which is what the Harvard petitioners seem to have in mind. But any institution that would make Soledad O’Brien a “distinguished visiting fellow” obviously doesn’t have much intellectual integrity left to lose.

Harvard students are assholes. As a group. On average.

 

My Wife: Scientific Proof

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Just in case I’ve never mentioned it before — but I’m pretty sure I have — Mrs. Other McCain is one smokin’ hot babe:

Ah, back in the day, my friends — of course, I wasn’t too shabby myself back in the day. This isn’t just nostalgia, or a gimmick to make you hit the freaking tip jar — although, please do — but is instead a matter of science, based on a headline I saw today at Memeorandum, which tends to confirm my own extensive research in this area.

Ladies like a man with a big tip jar.