Science, sexism and heresy

[fretslider]

Shame on CERN for suspending a professor for criticising feminist ideas.


If you thought the particle-physics boffins at CERN, mothership of the Large Hadron Collider, would be clear-eyed, cool-headed masters of reason, think again. The European nuclear-research agency has suspended one of its senior scientific staff over comments he made in a presentation given at its headquarters in Geneva.

It says the address by professor Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University to the workshop on gender and high-energy physics was ‘highly offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’ to the audience, which was comprised mainly of young female physicists.

According to one leaked report, Strumia said he wanted to ‘get to the bottom of the “mainstream” and “conservative” positions about gender equality in physics and science more generally’. His slides showed data on the percentage of women in different fields and on sexism in citations, at conferences and in recruitment.

The BBC says Strumia concluded that his data showed that there is discrimination in physics right now — against men. Yet ‘physics was invented and built by men’, he is claimed to have said.

In response, CERN has turned its back on the traditional scientific practice of widely sharing the facts and letting the individual judge for him or herself the truth of the matter. Instead it has decided that the professor’s words are so beyond the pale that they must be completely removed from its online depository. They have been put down the memory hole; no one can now see what Strumia did, or didn’t, say.

CERN took action against Strumia after research physicist and feminist activist Jess Wade, who also spoke at the workshop, started to tweet about his speech.

She drew parallels with James Damore, who was sacked from Google last year for sending around a memo about discrimination and feminism at the company, and who subsequently became a bogeyman for woke liberals and a poster-boy for the alt-right.

But actually, Strumia’s story shares more in common with the case of Nobel prize-winner Sir Tim Hunt, who was hounded from his job at University College London in 2015 for comments he made in an address about women in science.

Wade went on to write about what Strumia said in a New Scientist blog post. She claimed that he had argued that women aren’t as good as men at physics. She questioned why we allow people to make and discuss such points: ‘We shouldn’t be putting up with this. His remarks were offensive, but also damaging. When people in positions of power spread such ideas, they teach the next generation of scientists that such behaviour is okay. Obviously, it isn’t.’

This looks like the latest salvo in the culture wars, another instance of people saying ‘You can’t say that’ and punishing someone simply for dissenting from new orthodoxies. All physicists at CERN, male and female, should take a stand against the potential sacking of an esteemed colleague, who by all accounts has had a long career at the research body.

Strumia may hold a few backward ideas about women in physics – but we can’t know for sure, since CERN has broken with 500 years of scientific thinking and taken upon itself the role of censor-in-chief and blocked everyone from reading his speech.

But even if he is putting forward a sexist argument, he should be allowed to do so. And in the spirit of scientific discourse, others should then be free to assert facts and arguments of their own, and challenge what he has to say.

Wade’s censorious intervention has made the situation worse. She believes girls and women in physics will actually be damaged by the kind of ideas (allegedly) pushed by Strumia. Like a medieval cardinal, she has shouted ‘blasphemy!’ and denounced a heretic, and she wants all discussion of the subject to cease.

One media outlet to publish a cravenly uncritical account of this affair from Wade’s perspective was Vice, on its Motherboard website. The headline was ‘Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics’.

This is significant because Vice was founded, in Canada in 1996, as the home of post-punk gonzo journalism. It was unashamedly aimed at readers who felt they were on the outside of mainstream culture. With plenty of in-your-face attitude, it set out to tackle ‘the things we’re meant to be ashamed of’, in the words of Andy Capper, the first editor of its British edition.

However, recently Vice has been hit by a series of sexual-harassment claims. There is a boys-club culture at the magazine, former employees claim. Around 20 women have come forward to testify to being either victims of sexual harassment or witnesses to it. Four claims have been settled out of court. In response, Vice has been at pains to change its image, with high-profile firings of particular staff and public admissions of guilt.

According to Variety, Vice has also ‘established an advisory board made up of feminist activist Gloria Steinem and other high-profile female executives and lawyers’.

Who knows to what extent this nannying panel has power over Vice’s editorial content. But when a gonzo mag for outsiders believes that arguing ‘physics isn’t sexist’ is so shocking it is worthy of a triple-deck headline, you have to wonder what being outside means today. Censorship, it seems, is the new counterculture. Trying to destroying people’s careers because of what they believe is now the radical, good thing to do. That CERN itself has fed this media hysteria about Strumia by censoring and censuring him is shameful. Some sense is much needed.

www.spiked-online.com/2018/10/04/science-sexism-and-heresy/


My favourite loony feminist science?

Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research

Abstract:
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368


more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions

feminist political ecology

a feminist glaciology framework


Feminist lunacy.

[men an tol]

Oct 4, 2018 7:43:35 GMT -5 fretslider said:

Shame on CERN for suspending a professor for criticising feminist ideas.


If you thought the particle-physics boffins at CERN, mothership of the Large Hadron Collider, would be clear-eyed, cool-headed masters of reason, think again. The European nuclear-research agency has suspended one of its senior scientific staff over comments he made in a presentation given at its headquarters in Geneva.

It says the address by professor Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University to the workshop on gender and high-energy physics was ‘highly offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’ to the audience, which was comprised mainly of young female physicists.

According to one leaked report, Strumia said he wanted to ‘get to the bottom of the “mainstream” and “conservative” positions about gender equality in physics and science more generally’. His slides showed data on the percentage of women in different fields and on sexism in citations, at conferences and in recruitment.

The BBC says Strumia concluded that his data showed that there is discrimination in physics right now — against men. Yet ‘physics was invented and built by men’, he is claimed to have said.

In response, CERN has turned its back on the traditional scientific practice of widely sharing the facts and letting the individual judge for him or herself the truth of the matter. Instead it has decided that the professor’s words are so beyond the pale that they must be completely removed from its online depository. They have been put down the memory hole; no one can now see what Strumia did, or didn’t, say.

CERN took action against Strumia after research physicist and feminist activist Jess Wade, who also spoke at the workshop, started to tweet about his speech.

She drew parallels with James Damore, who was sacked from Google last year for sending around a memo about discrimination and feminism at the company, and who subsequently became a bogeyman for woke liberals and a poster-boy for the alt-right.

But actually, Strumia’s story shares more in common with the case of Nobel prize-winner Sir Tim Hunt, who was hounded from his job at University College London in 2015 for comments he made in an address about women in science.

Wade went on to write about what Strumia said in a New Scientist blog post. She claimed that he had argued that women aren’t as good as men at physics. She questioned why we allow people to make and discuss such points: ‘We shouldn’t be putting up with this. His remarks were offensive, but also damaging. When people in positions of power spread such ideas, they teach the next generation of scientists that such behaviour is okay. Obviously, it isn’t.’

This looks like the latest salvo in the culture wars, another instance of people saying ‘You can’t say that’ and punishing someone simply for dissenting from new orthodoxies. All physicists at CERN, male and female, should take a stand against the potential sacking of an esteemed colleague, who by all accounts has had a long career at the research body.

Strumia may hold a few backward ideas about women in physics – but we can’t know for sure, since CERN has broken with 500 years of scientific thinking and taken upon itself the role of censor-in-chief and blocked everyone from reading his speech.

But even if he is putting forward a sexist argument, he should be allowed to do so. And in the spirit of scientific discourse, others should then be free to assert facts and arguments of their own, and challenge what he has to say.

Wade’s censorious intervention has made the situation worse. She believes girls and women in physics will actually be damaged by the kind of ideas (allegedly) pushed by Strumia. Like a medieval cardinal, she has shouted ‘blasphemy!’ and denounced a heretic, and she wants all discussion of the subject to cease.

One media outlet to publish a cravenly uncritical account of this affair from Wade’s perspective was Vice, on its Motherboard website. The headline was ‘Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics’.

This is significant because Vice was founded, in Canada in 1996, as the home of post-punk gonzo journalism. It was unashamedly aimed at readers who felt they were on the outside of mainstream culture. With plenty of in-your-face attitude, it set out to tackle ‘the things we’re meant to be ashamed of’, in the words of Andy Capper, the first editor of its British edition.

However, recently Vice has been hit by a series of sexual-harassment claims. There is a boys-club culture at the magazine, former employees claim. Around 20 women have come forward to testify to being either victims of sexual harassment or witnesses to it. Four claims have been settled out of court. In response, Vice has been at pains to change its image, with high-profile firings of particular staff and public admissions of guilt.

According to Variety, Vice has also ‘established an advisory board made up of feminist activist Gloria Steinem and other high-profile female executives and lawyers’.

Who knows to what extent this nannying panel has power over Vice’s editorial content. But when a gonzo mag for outsiders believes that arguing ‘physics isn’t sexist’ is so shocking it is worthy of a triple-deck headline, you have to wonder what being outside means today. Censorship, it seems, is the new counterculture. Trying to destroying people’s careers because of what they believe is now the radical, good thing to do. That CERN itself has fed this media hysteria about Strumia by censoring and censuring him is shameful. Some sense is much needed.

www.spiked-online.com/2018/10/04/science-sexism-and-heresy/


My favourite loony feminist science?

Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research

Abstract:
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368


more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions

feminist political ecology

a feminist glaciology framework


Feminist lunacy.

That science now is becoming the battle front between males and females. Woe is me as I believed that science was clashing of ideas and new concepts. Now this is another area to stay away from. More evidence as our culture begins the slide down into obscurity.

[mouse]

"""e just and equitable science and human-ice interactions"""

oh dear human-ice interations… surely not.. all that interacting with the earth furrows ended centuries ago … it would be a brave couple or human intereacting with ice berrrrrrrrrrrr

these women are so pathetic...god help them if they ever need to survive on equal terms with other women let alone men …..meanwhile I wonder how they are going to convince nature that they are spessshull

[fretslider]

Oct 4, 2018 11:25:00 GMT -5 men an tol said:

Oct 4, 2018 7:43:35 GMT -5 fretslider said:

Shame on CERN for suspending a professor for criticising feminist ideas.


If you thought the particle-physics boffins at CERN, mothership of the Large Hadron Collider, would be clear-eyed, cool-headed masters of reason, think again. The European nuclear-research agency has suspended one of its senior scientific staff over comments he made in a presentation given at its headquarters in Geneva.

It says the address by professor Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University to the workshop on gender and high-energy physics was ‘highly offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’ to the audience, which was comprised mainly of young female physicists.

According to one leaked report, Strumia said he wanted to ‘get to the bottom of the “mainstream” and “conservative” positions about gender equality in physics and science more generally’. His slides showed data on the percentage of women in different fields and on sexism in citations, at conferences and in recruitment.

The BBC says Strumia concluded that his data showed that there is discrimination in physics right now — against men. Yet ‘physics was invented and built by men’, he is claimed to have said.

In response, CERN has turned its back on the traditional scientific practice of widely sharing the facts and letting the individual judge for him or herself the truth of the matter. Instead it has decided that the professor’s words are so beyond the pale that they must be completely removed from its online depository. They have been put down the memory hole; no one can now see what Strumia did, or didn’t, say.

CERN took action against Strumia after research physicist and feminist activist Jess Wade, who also spoke at the workshop, started to tweet about his speech.

She drew parallels with James Damore, who was sacked from Google last year for sending around a memo about discrimination and feminism at the company, and who subsequently became a bogeyman for woke liberals and a poster-boy for the alt-right.

But actually, Strumia’s story shares more in common with the case of Nobel prize-winner Sir Tim Hunt, who was hounded from his job at University College London in 2015 for comments he made in an address about women in science.

Wade went on to write about what Strumia said in a New Scientist blog post. She claimed that he had argued that women aren’t as good as men at physics. She questioned why we allow people to make and discuss such points: ‘We shouldn’t be putting up with this. His remarks were offensive, but also damaging. When people in positions of power spread such ideas, they teach the next generation of scientists that such behaviour is okay. Obviously, it isn’t.’

This looks like the latest salvo in the culture wars, another instance of people saying ‘You can’t say that’ and punishing someone simply for dissenting from new orthodoxies. All physicists at CERN, male and female, should take a stand against the potential sacking of an esteemed colleague, who by all accounts has had a long career at the research body.

Strumia may hold a few backward ideas about women in physics – but we can’t know for sure, since CERN has broken with 500 years of scientific thinking and taken upon itself the role of censor-in-chief and blocked everyone from reading his speech.

But even if he is putting forward a sexist argument, he should be allowed to do so. And in the spirit of scientific discourse, others should then be free to assert facts and arguments of their own, and challenge what he has to say.

Wade’s censorious intervention has made the situation worse. She believes girls and women in physics will actually be damaged by the kind of ideas (allegedly) pushed by Strumia. Like a medieval cardinal, she has shouted ‘blasphemy!’ and denounced a heretic, and she wants all discussion of the subject to cease.

One media outlet to publish a cravenly uncritical account of this affair from Wade’s perspective was Vice, on its Motherboard website. The headline was ‘Top CERN Scientist Suspended for Presentation That Argued There Is No Sexism in Physics’.

This is significant because Vice was founded, in Canada in 1996, as the home of post-punk gonzo journalism. It was unashamedly aimed at readers who felt they were on the outside of mainstream culture. With plenty of in-your-face attitude, it set out to tackle ‘the things we’re meant to be ashamed of’, in the words of Andy Capper, the first editor of its British edition.

However, recently Vice has been hit by a series of sexual-harassment claims. There is a boys-club culture at the magazine, former employees claim. Around 20 women have come forward to testify to being either victims of sexual harassment or witnesses to it. Four claims have been settled out of court. In response, Vice has been at pains to change its image, with high-profile firings of particular staff and public admissions of guilt.

According to Variety, Vice has also ‘established an advisory board made up of feminist activist Gloria Steinem and other high-profile female executives and lawyers’.

Who knows to what extent this nannying panel has power over Vice’s editorial content. But when a gonzo mag for outsiders believes that arguing ‘physics isn’t sexist’ is so shocking it is worthy of a triple-deck headline, you have to wonder what being outside means today. Censorship, it seems, is the new counterculture. Trying to destroying people’s careers because of what they believe is now the radical, good thing to do. That CERN itself has fed this media hysteria about Strumia by censoring and censuring him is shameful. Some sense is much needed.

www.spiked-online.com/2018/10/04/science-sexism-and-heresy/


My favourite loony feminist science?

Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research

Abstract:
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368


more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions

feminist political ecology

a feminist glaciology framework


Feminist lunacy.

That science now is becoming the battle front between males and females. Woe is me as I believed that science was clashing of ideas and new concepts. Now this is another area to stay away from. More evidence as our culture begins the slide down into obscurity.

Science has been hijacked as a new religion and battleground. You go with the consensus or groupthink or you're a heretic, a denier etc. Science has become a matter of belief.

Climate; no proof that man has done anything, but you have to believe it's true - or else.

Sex; XX or XY and there are errors in the code - XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), XXX, XO (Turner’s syndrome), and various other accidents of cell division gone awry, but there are only two biological sexes. Every delivery room hears either: It's a boy or It's a girl, nothing else.


In post-modern science there are supposedly many genders, Gender is broken into three categories, gender identity, gender expression, and biological sex. As we know, biological sex counts for nothing, it's all about breaking gender down into different social and cultural constructions. Pseudo-science, a matter of what you believe.

Starting out as a gay rights charity in the early nineties, Stonewall has diversified into the [mentally unwell] trans issue...

Stonewall, the country’s most prominent gay rights charity, has come under fire from well-known supporters for “demonising” anyone who speaks out about transgender issues.

Leading members of the lesbian, gay, transsexual and intersex community have started a petition urging the charity to rethink its transgender policy, saying that they are fed up with its refusal to recognise other viewpoints.

In a letter published in The Times today, they said that Stonewall’s advocacy of extreme transgender politics was threatening women’s rights, undermining gay and lesbian identity and stifling freedom of speech. They accused Stonewall of refusing to recognise LGBT people who oppose the hostile tactics of transgender activists.

Transgender campaigners say that they represent a vulnerable, marginalised group but critics accuse them of bullying opponents...

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stonewall-backing-transgender-bullies-slvn00vng


For post-modern science read authoritarian cultural-marxism, science has become nothing more than a fig leaf of respectability to wrap around hard left lunatic ideas.

[mouse]

the laugh is that these people so full of angst are nothing more than useful idiots who wouldn't survive 5mins in a really hard left wing society.....
they are nothing more than band waggon opportunists and full of angst attention seekers


th ey have lost one of their brightest stars Caitlin .. who wanted to be a woman.. but resisted having the snip and has now returned back to normality of being the male he was born
we have a case in the UK.. of a girl going through trans to be a boy who is now getting married to a lesbian who used to be a man... and whats more they want to produce a baby ..
poor little sausage ...the biggest laugh is when asked what they would like.. they said a little girl would be perfect …. you couldn't make it up

it was on a tv programme so I have no link

[annaj26]

Oct 5, 2018 6:00:44 GMT -5 mouse said:

the laugh is that these people so full of angst are nothing more than useful idiots who wouldn't survive 5mins in a really hard left wing society.....
they are nothing more than band waggon opportunists and full of angst attention seekers


th ey have lost one of their brightest stars Caitlin .. who wanted to be a woman.. but resisted having the snip and has now returned back to normality of being the male he was born
we have a case in the UK.. of a girl going through trans to be a boy who is now getting married to a lesbian who used to be a man... and whats more they want to produce a baby ..
poor little sausage ...the biggest laugh is when asked what they would like.. they said a little girl would be perfect …. you couldn't make it up

it was on a tv programme so I have no link

This is Caitlyn Jenner's official web site.

caitlynjenner.com/

You should check there or on her Wiki before you spread untrue rumors. She has not gone back to Bruce as far as I can tell.

[mouse]

Oct 5, 2018 14:43:04 GMT -5 annaj26 said:

Oct 5, 2018 6:00:44 GMT -5 mouse said:

the laugh is that these people so full of angst are nothing more than useful idiots who wouldn't survive 5mins in a really hard left wing society.....
they are nothing more than band waggon opportunists and full of angst attention seekers


th ey have lost one of their brightest stars Caitlin .. who wanted to be a woman.. but resisted having the snip and has now returned back to normality of being the male he was born
we have a case in the UK.. of a girl going through trans to be a boy who is now getting married to a lesbian who used to be a man... and whats more they want to produce a baby ..
poor little sausage ...the biggest laugh is when asked what they would like.. they said a little girl would be perfect …. you couldn't make it up

it was on a tv programme so I have no link

This is Caitlyn Jenner's official web site.

caitlynjenner.com/

You should check there or on her Wiki before you spread untrue rumors. She has not gone back to Bruce as far as I can tell.

I forget where I read it.. but it appeared bona fide...
have rechecked and your correct it isn't true...though it appears confused as to whether she is still physically a he and still has his bits