By David Futrelle
Noted racist, er, “intellectual” Steve Sailer has an interesting proposal that he thinks could speed up research on the coronavirus: we should exempt male researchers in the field from accusations of sexual harassment and assault until the virus is finally defeated.
While he proudly notes that most of the researchers in the field are dudes, he’s worried about all the women who will be working alongside them — each one of them a possible accuser!
“Under 2019 Rules,” he lamented in a blog post on the white supremacist VDare site,
any man running a large organization that employed a lot of women and who happened to Surface in the Media was fair game for any woman who used to work for him deciding that what The Conversation needed now to be about was about that time he put his hand on my shoulder at work and it made me feel funny and I thought about it for weeks and I have now decided it was sexual assault. So Society must validate my feeling by firing this man from his job . . .
Here’s my request: Under 2020 Rules, we postpone all such Conversations involving anybody involved in the effort for the duration.
Because these male researchers are just too darn busy to be disturbed by accusations from all the women they grope.
I mean, who’s got time for that?
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@ buttercup
We’re doing a lot of things by video conference at the moment. And I recently found out that only dressing professionally on your top half is called “Winnie-ing”; after Winnie the Pooh.
@Buttercup
The capitalizing of “Men” and lowercase “women” reminds me of how white supremacists like to write “White” with a capital W but write “jews” and “black” as lowercase. It’s also a way of enforcing hierarchies.
@Alan:
I don’t think that works. In the original Shepard illustrations, Pooh was naked. Disney dressed him in the croppiest of crop tops, not appropriate videoconferencing attire in most companies.
@ moggie
This is doing the rounds on legal internet.
For Cornetto fans:
Dogs can’t look up!
Is this like that ancient Greek law that in wartime nobody was allowed to refuse sex to soldiers? (I don’t know if that was a real law, or just something Plato of somebody proposed, but it sort of gets parodied by Aristophanes)
@Moon Custafer Now I’m trying to think of a scenario where it would be at least semi-logical to have a law where nobody was allowed to refuse sex to tour guides or writers. Tricky.
(Yes. Yes I am getting bored. Why do you ask?)
@Sheila Crosby
If a country’s entire economy depends on erotic novel publication and the writers need to get lots of “experience” to write from?
@Romaine-la-Prophétesse – I second that!
OT, but Justin Trudeau just announced that people crossing the border irregularly between Canada and the US will be sent back to the US. As people were asking questions about this, he first said that it was a “temporary measure” but then seemed to say he’d been trying to reach an agreement with the US for some time and this COVID-19 crisis finally allowed the US to agree.
I don’t think it’s fair, especially right now. If the Canadian border towns aren’t too strapped for resources (a reporter asked him whether they were and he dodged the question), Canada still has more reliable healthcare than the US overall.
Although…if people don’t have a health card, they do have to pay. I suppose there are humanitarian exemptions, but those wouldn’t be available to everyone. So I don’t know whether they would ALWAYS be better off here, but they’re trying to come to Canada for a reason, right? Trudeau said something like, “Most of them have legal status in the US, so Canada is still complying with the refugee protection act.”
Most? How can you tell? Argh. I think we should have scrapped the so-called “Safe Third Country Agreement” so that migrants coming in through the US wouldn’t be sent back when arriving at legal border crossings and their cases could be reviewed as fairly as possible. (Then, yeah, the border might still be closed to them NOW, because of the coronavirus, but more of them would be better off.)
…Also, Trudeau isn’t as bad as the US president, but he never seems to answer direct questions and he seems to avoid “I don’t know” like the plague (or COVID-19 for “these historic times”) 🙂 It’s frustrating to listen to him sometimes.
Maybe a bit cynical of me, but based on my experiences in academia Steve’s suggestion is pretty much how it works already. Sure, occasionally someone is held accountable. But the vast majority of cases are swept under the rug, especially if the perpetrator is well funded or working on something high profile.
@epitome : if Canada have excess hospital capacity, it’s probably way safer and less chaotic to send doctors, nurses, and supplies to the US.
An influx of medicare refugees have at least three problems :
* they will spread the Coronavirus, like any population movement
* the lack of control over the flux will make planning and effective restrictions hard. You could accept 10 refugees right now, and three week later the respirators they use are lacking for native cases
* it basically mean the USA will rely on the Canada for its healthcare capacity planning from now on
The question of fairness boil down to if you think the healthcare providers can absorb that influx without collapsing later on the line. If it collapse, then it’s hubris and not fairness. And honestly, after seeing the northern Italy collapse, I would not bet that Canada is good on that point.
Of course, there’s also the problem that in a very real sense, it mean spending ressources (and it can include human lives, not just money) to deal with the problem a failed state created for itself. One of the lesson I learned looking at humanitarian help by the west in the last fifty year, it’s that trying to dig other countries out of their own hole often is bad idea, and sometime lead to tragedy.
Italy called. They have some bad news for MGTOW thinking to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic:
“Dr. Deborah Birx announced that in Italy, they’re finding that mortality for males is twice that of females,”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/t/in-italy-coronavirus-male-mortality-rate-twice-that-of-females-dr-birx/vp-BB11t6yL
Reality is apparently misandrist.
@NOBODY
Right now TERFs are having a field day with that statistic because they’re hoping the coronavirus will kill trans* women and AMAB non-binary people. Leave it to TERFs to find a way to spin coronavirus into transphobia.
@Naglfar
These TERFs aren’t very good at math. Trans people account for a very small percentage of population groups.
TERFs had better hope it will not affect the trans population to that degree. If it does, we’ll be in civilization on edge of apocalypse territory, because that will mean it will have proportionally decimated the general population we’re all depending on to keep things going….
I’m wondering. Is the fatality level correlated to hormone levels to any degree? If so, that may not do what TERFs are hoping, even if what they’re hoping for is a statistically small effect.
I’ve seen it suggested that smoking disparity between genders is the main factor. AFAIK the smoking disparity is big in older folks, not so much in younger folks.
@Kat
Seems like a dry cough would be a good deterrent against handsy co-workers.
Or not, if we’re dealing with the sort of super genius who puts his delicate male ego before life-saving research.
@Naglfar Thank you for making me laugh just when I needed it.
Two of my close friends are middle-aged transwomen, both with heart conditions. The good bit is that they live out in the country so they can isolate better than most people.
The extra male deaths could be smoking or other not-taking-care-of-your-health behaviours due to toxic masculinity. Or hormones. Or the lack of a spare X chromosome which sometimes makes a difference, I believe.
I feel like there’s a slow-motion tsunami looming over me. Only 11 cases so far on this island of 83,000 people, but it was 4 when we went into lockdown. A friend in Germany ignored all the pleas to be careful and went to a party. Now someone else at the party has tested positive and my friend has a fever and cough. She’s mid-chemo, so I don’t think she’ll make it.
Could we have some kittens? Or sloths? I think we could use a baby sloth round about now.
@Sheila Crosby, I’m so sorry! I hope your friend does make it in spite of this :-(((((((((
@Sheila Crosby
I’ve heard various explanations, including smoking, estrogen levels, and extra receptors from an extra X chromosome. I’m somewhat curious then how this then affects people with extra or fewer sex chromosomes (e.g. Klinefelter’s, Turner’s, triple X syndrome, etc).
@Naglfar Yes, I’m curious too. I don’t know if anyone’s even done research yet. I hadn’t heard of triple-X before. And the TERFs still insist that everyone on the planet is XX or XY.
@Sheila Crosby
Triple X syndrome is about 1 out of every 1000 AFAB people, so it does exist. There’s also the much rarer Tetrasomy X (48, XXXX) and exceedingly rare pentasomy X (49,XXXXX) and similar variations like XXXY syndrome or XYY or XXYY or XXXXY. And that’s even without the variations on X and Y like how some people have XY but develop female secondary sex characteristics (AIS, for example) or X chromosomes with SRY genes, causing XX individuals to develop ambiguous or male characteristics. Or all the intersex DSDs with “normal” sex chromosomes. Or mosaicism where some cells have one and others have another (like this person, who had XY in most of her cells but had a functioning uterus and was able to give birth unaided). So it is much more complicated than TERFs make it out to be.
@Sheila Crosby
There are also other variations like XXXY, XXXXY, XXYY, XYY, XXXX, XXXXX, and more. And that’s without even going into chimerism where some cells can be XX and others XY, or conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome or XX male syndrome can make someone’s phenotype appear opposite their sex chromosomes naturally, or intersex DSDs unrelated to sex chromosomes. As any biologist will tell you, it’s a lot more complicated than TERFs and fundies make it out to be.
(I had another post with links that disappeared, if that appears later apologies for the double post).
@Sheila Crosby – That sounds worrying to hear. I hope she’s all right.
The teacup sloth is adorable!
@Ohlmann – I think there’s a difference between sending people to another country unasked-for and accepting refugees to your country. The first seems more like hubris, the colonialist/interventionist “I can fix everything” approach.
Now, maybe I wasn’t clear – and of course you don’t have to agree! – but I think the Canadian govt. should have found a way to scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement before. Way before. It would mean, too, that this decision could have been avoided, since the US/Canada border is closed to all non-essential travel now anyway.
What happened was that the Canadian authorities were quarantining people who arrived at the border irregularly, just as other people coming into the country from outside were asked to isolate themselves for 14 days (it’s not exactly the same, of course, since the others are not forced or incarcerated). Now, perhaps the border places were worried about running out of resources. In that case Trudeau should have said so.
Or else it seems like he’s using crises as an excuse to limit human rights. And maybe he is.