https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/
Read it, please, by all means. Now, this is a very long and detailed study. It's been criticized for including some hypotheses based on the data it contains; that's a format issue, which may concern the editors of some journals, but in no way invalidates the data. If anybody went over every one of those studies it cites, number by number--which Folta should have taken the time to do, if anyone would, and which I suspect he's not done because I'm sure he'd be squawking like a hen over an egg if he had done--then it would be a phenomenon, maybe even a miracle, if they didn't find a mistake somewhere. If any real math-heads Out There want to look for math mistakes and point them out, the way "Notorious KGB Aggie" did for last week's major new study claiming that "glyphosate increases humans' cancer risk by 41%," I'd be delighted to publicize that on Twitter. Real science is all about finding math mistakes and fixing them so that we can get at whatever empirical truth our human minds can reach via the Scientific Method.
I think there's an obvious problem with any claim that anything "increases humans' cancer risk by 41%." Which cancer? There are lots of different ones--and although it's painfully obvious that glyphosate is one of the cancer-promoting factors, there are also lots of different glyphosate reactions. I don't blame anyone with a name like Gillam, or like Kennedy, for liking anything that helps people decide to support a ban on glyphosate. The fact is that we of Irish descent aren't likely to survive current levels of glyphosate exposure anywhere near long enough to find out exactly how much glyphosate raises anyone's risk of any kind of cancer. We'll have died from more immediate reactions long before that can be known.
Folta could have crunched a few numbers, as (anti-glyphosate!) "Aggie" did, and scored some good points that way. Let's rub his face in that now. He let a random Twit who identifies as a Russian-Canadian veterinarian--a female one, and this matters--score those points, while he was making a jackass of himself.
Instead, jackass chose an ad hominem attack on the authors of the study. Tweeting to a female writer, he chose an ad hominem attack. This matters. Writers are people whose high I.Q. scores are based primarily on verbal logic. Statistically, the difference is not enough to amount to a positive sex characteristic, but females' general advantage on I.Q. scores is based on a more widespread tendency for females to excel in verbal logic, whereas males have a less widely distributed tendency to score higher on math. Male scientists are nearly always math-heads. Female writers are nearly always word-nerds. And word-nerds perceive an ad hominem argument as such a non-starter that unless the personal hostility is extraordinarily new and well based, like a serious claim that "This writer killed my dog and ate it, raw," just using the ad hominem argument is an insult to our intelligence. If you're trying to enlighten, rather than annoy, a female writer, you don't use a contemptuous reference to a person, ever. You use a solid fact, if you have one, or shut up.
Why attack one author rather than the other? One reason might be that, on the screen, the name that comes first in alphabetical order is hard to read. During the Twitter storm, people weren't sure whether the male scientist was Sansei, Samsel, Samsei, Sansel, or maybe Sensei (which is Japanese for "Teacher," so it's a good thing to call him if you're not sure, but it's not his name). Nobody took the time to copy and paste it into a proper-looking font that has serifs and find out. NIH's software makes that very easy to do in Chrome. Here's his name, as it pasted from the NIH page:
Samsel
Here's how it looks in our normal font:
Samsel
So now we know. But Folta showed a more sinister motive for attacking the female scientist when he called her "kooky." His ad hominem attack invoked a well documented stereotype, recently documented as undead, that If A Woman Does Happen To Be Serious, or "Smart," or Even Older than a Male Speaker, There Must Be Something Wrong With Her Brain, because the female brain is supposed to be "smaller" and therefore childlike and permanently incompetent, so female competence is a form of brain damage, q.e.d.
Folta rallied a bunch of young gender traitors--I don't actually know which ones are subsidized by Monsanto-Bayer and which ones know Folta personally, nor do I care, and some of them may even be Democratic Party goons who were waiting for an opportunity to spew hate at me for not toeing their party line--to scold me for using the #MeToo hashtag to call attention to this vile display of sexist bigotry.
The late Mike Royko comes to mind. #MeToo #MeToo #MeToo. I said it and I'm glad.
A lot of people missed the chance to score off me, too, during this Twitter storm. I typed "Seneff" into a tweet. Twitter reacts to any capitalized word inside a sentence by pulling up a list of Twitter names. I didn't remember the scientist's full name so I clicked on the name of some Twit I don't know who uses "rachelseneff." Duh. It's Stephanie Seneff. But Folta's followers had to forego the chance to call me out on carelessness, because Folta was carelessly using R. Seneff's Twitter name, too, until someone complained...
Anyway, I referred anyone who hadn't read it to Tina Fey's memoir, which I read only recently, and which documents the resurgence of the "She's crazy" meme among hater-boys.
It's a flippin' bestseller, so I find it hard to believe that people are honestly unaware...I mean, my natural sister cited this. Anything from a book that finds its way into my natural sister's consciousness has been well and truly popularized. This is not because the kid is stupid but because she's spent her life trying to be Not Me, Not Mother, Not Cousin -- or Cousin -- or Cousin --, etc. ad nauseam, which basically means not talking about it if she reads much of anything. Some women, of course, really are below the 100-point average I.Q. level, but more women merely have some sort of motive for trying to look as if they were. This has not changed during my lifetime.
For those interested in studying the hideous history of this stereotype, two classics that should still be easy to find are:
Then, earlier in the week, I heard a local lurker's reaction...I didn't tape-record or write down the exact words, and have left out identifying details, but this is the gist of the story:
"
Just lately I heard that my second cousin Tim was telling people I "had mental spells" and "used to chase my sister around with a butcher knife." Tim was trying to impress someone by claiming that he used to live near or be close to our family. If that were true he would have realized how ridiculous that lie is!
Our parents were very religious, and maintained a very wholesome baby-safe environment where they tried to shelter us from the evil influences of school and other children. They were vegetarians, so we didn't even have a butcher knife in the house. We knew what butcher knives looked like from books, but we thought of them the way we thought of razor strops or buggy whips.
And both of us were the kind of goody-goody girls our parents were trying so hard to raise. Quiet, polite, workful, tidy, always attracted to things that allowed us to sit still and keep our clothes clean until we were directed to work in the garden or the kitchen.
We did have just a small spark of childish humor. We liked to giggle about the idea of adults doing stupid things. This was encouraged as being likely to help us say no to stupid choices when we grew up. We laughed at stories or songs about, for example, somebody drinking beer--how icky!
So on one of the old records in the family collection there used to be a song parody. First a man sang,
"I'd be happier, dear,
If you'd throw it in here.
Go get me some beer.
I've been dry all day,"
...and then he sang,
"There stands my wife
With a long butcher knife.
She's after my life.
Brother, I'm on my way."
Well, we thought that was a scream! Booze and violence! We joked about that. We made up a little story or skit about this family, where the father was so incredibly lazy he would sit around and whine for his wife to bring him beer, and then the mother got so fed up she threw him out of the house at knife-point. We gave them a name--a name we'd found in a book, not used by any real people we knew--and some more adventures, which ended up with this foolish father getting into a fight with a policeman and going to jail, and his children dancing and singing "Oh, hurray, hurray, hurray, Daddy went to prison!"
And our parents were not amused by our acting out stupid behavior, even in pantomime...but it got to be a joke that whenever we'd ticked someone off, usually by being goody-goodies, we'd say that that person was "after my life with a long butcher knife." Of course the person was really "after" us with a nasty remark, a failing grade, or at worst a paddle. That was why it was funny to remember the song about the knife.
But as we grew older, both of us did start to worry about having "mental problems." And what were those "problems," exactly? Well, older Christians had told us that the love of Jesus was supposed to remove all feelings of anger, and probably all feelings of lust, from our hearts--and it hadn't! It wasn't working! We still felt angry, oh, maybe every few months, usually when somebody was poking at us to see whether it was possible to make us angry. Sometimes we raised our voices! Two or three times during my teen years, I even said "hello" without the O! Also, almost every month, I used to have dreams if not waking thoughts about touching boys I didn't even want to marry! And both of us, each in turn, was privately, silently worrying that this meant something was wrong with us. I sneaked out and talked to a therapist when I was nineteen, and my sister even checked into a hospital for "postpartum mood swings" in her twenties--because WE WERE LIVING HUMAN BEINGS.
I actually needed to hear a state-certified psychologist tell me, several times, while we observed my "mood swings" over one entire year, that I was not an unusually angry person. If anything, I was unusually slow to anger.
Like most women, I learned, I'd do better--for myself, for other women, and for our children male or female--to express more of what some people may want to call inappropriate anger, meaning anger or at least assertiveness about their abusive behavior. For instance, when guys try to turn us against another woman by using that lame old "She's crazy" stereotype, we need to start saying "What's wrong with HIM, that stupid jackass. How can he imagine that we'd ever listen to THAT kind of idiocy."
"
I last heard from this person here called Tim, again from a third party, trying to impress people by suggesting that he was the person with a similar name they'd been reading about in the newspapers. (He resembles that person, and is probably a distant cousin.) I think young Tim should reconsider the rules of the church in which he was brought up, with help from a therapist if necessary, and embrace his talent for writing fiction. If he calls it fiction and writes it in the third person, it's neither gossip nor lying.
Meanwhile I think women should make a point of expressing support for any woman whose intelligence has been derided by any mere male. Of course women can be wrong, and should be corrected if they are wrong...with facts, but never with sexist hatespeech.
Some Twits suggested--with a conspicuous lack of exact quotes or links--that Stephanie Seneff has made some statements that their malevolent memories recalled as sounding unscientific. Because these Twits' hate was showing I'm not terribly concerned about what Seneff actually said or wrote. If anyone cared to challenge her on facts, that might be worth mentioning. That her opponents prefer to attack her, personally, if not with ad hominem hatespews then with obvious gross distortions of things she has supposedly said, tells me a lot...even if some of her opponents use female-type names on Twitter.
I judge the final score of last week's Twitter debate to be: Seneff 1, Folta 0...and that's giving Folta a point by calling a foul on myself, because his foul performance was sub-zero.
I think it's now clear, too, why Folta is unlikely to try to enter the #GlyphosateAwareness debate. I wouldn't block people who tried to post pro-glyphosate arguments; in fact I've retweeted those arguments. But Folta is not interested in discussing science with competent adults, probably because he already knows that that's one debate it's never going to be possible for him to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment