The Problem With This Situation Is It Needs A Grindstone For My Axe
Irradiated by LabRat
So we threw a really advanced lawn dart at a comet (which we have already discovered interesting space things about, though the coolest bit is apparently the thing growls like an alien space monster), nailed it, and the guy primarily responsible for this marvel of human techhnological achievement wore a shirt with some cheesecakey pinups with chicks holding rayguns on it.
Naturally someone zeroed in on the most important detail of this story: dat SHIRT. Disclosure: I’m linking this particular article because I have intense regret at not having written this summation of the situation*:
Mr. Taylor then made the bad situation worse. Instead of telling these progressive puritans to go pound silicon dioxide, he issued a sobbing public confession straight out of a Maoist show trial. This guy just dropped a dishwasher on an ice cube 300 million miles from home and he’s groveling to a coven of D-list bloggers?
I would have a quibble with the man if I showed up for a job interview and he was wearing that. Would feel a little squicky if that was the message sent right then, though I’d probably just shrug and see how the interview went. I really kinda dig the shirt and I’d be asking if he was a fan of Coop too. Looks great with the tats and his overall look.
More importantly, this is probably the highlight of his professional career, and if he’d shown up in nothing but whipped cream with cherries on his nipples and a complete banana split sundae on his crotch (HE HAS THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THIS WORK) I’d have cheered him on. You go, nerdboy, you ROCK THAT. That was his moment and anyone who would piss on his parade, let alone over something so fucking petty, should go live in a cactus patch so they can achieve self-actualization and become one with the sensation of being constantly needled by the world.
Even if I were to put on my feminist goggles and view this strictly through the lens of women in STEM fields I wouldn’t see a fucking problem, because the first thing I’d see was how many women were on that project, and not in a “getting coffee” role either. Monica Grady’s brief account from inside Mission Control was all part of the excitement. Hell, one of the comet’s discoverers is a woman. Go, women in STEM! Can anyone tell them where they may go pick up their rayguns?
Meanwhile, predictably the reaction to the reaction is somehow every inch as fucking stupid. So far I’ve heard the exactly two women that reacted that way described as a “FEMINIST LYNCH MOB”, and a “GIANT STEP BACKWARD FOR WOMANKIND”, and “FEMINISM IS OVER”, inevitably with a whole bunch of misogynist stereotypes packed in because, y’know, those two ladies said something retarded so free pass!** Anyone who thinks this constitutes a lynch mob of any description or in fact any sort at all of unified Feminist Rage needs to go roll around in the same fucking cactus patch for at least a few hours until they gain some sense of motherfucking perspective.
Actually I think this needs to be a thing. The Cactus Patch of Perspective. We can stock it with teddy bear cholla and some of these.
*Of course I have a gripe with the writer too, which is that he can’t resist throwing a barb of his own over the guy’s tats and overall style because he doesn’t fit in with conservative aesthetic preferences either. Seriously, dude?
**Instapundit has a reaction roundup if you want to go see some of this stuff. I don’t think that’s the purpose he made the roundup for, but hey, it works well.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:08 pm
I think you’ve dismissed the “criticism” as trivial without realizing how important it was, or why it was delivered the way it was.
The message is “even as you accomplish the most amazing thing you’ll ever do, the people who matter can still shove you in your locker and make you cry, nerd. Know your place.”
The shirt doesn’t matter. Even the people who say they care about the shirt don’t care about the shirt. They care about having the power to hurt and humiliate the person wearing it in front of millions of people.
Because even if you can’t land a rocket on a comet, displaying your dominance over someone who can makes you even more special, right?
So how do you respond to that? Because you’ve been laughing at them for years, and it doesn’t seem to have helped any.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:26 pm
“the exactly two women that reacted that way”. I guess you’re thinking of Rose Eveleth and Katie Mack?
Please see the responses to their tweets:
https://twitter.com/roseveleth/status/532538957490561024
https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/532509765989965824
It’s not only two women. The worst I’ve seen is the Verge article from Chris Plante and Arielle Duhaime-Ross, I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing
Also noticeable, there isn’t any preponderance of women that jumps out at me in those Twitter links; approximately as many men vaporing about the shirt.
Can you point me at anyone else who would self-identify as a feminist who posted similar thoughts to yours? I would appreciate that. Most of the bloggers I read avoid the term, apparently regarding it as a label indicating thinking like Eveleth in this context. Everything I’ve read so far on the subject except your post here divides up along feminist/antifeminist lines.
My favorite take has been Cedar Sanderson’s: Epic Bullying.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:36 pm
That’s quite a feat for two people, and quite a deductive leap in motivation given the two who said something were, respectively, a technical editor and an astrophysicist. YEAH SUCK IT NERD!
I feel really bad for the guy. Another strain of comment that’s been torquing off is people calling him a “mangina” because he cried during his apology. Y’know, in his shoes, I’d be hurt (and really CONFUSED) too. Dunno if I could keep it together for the camera. It’s one of the reasons the whole thing pisses me off in the first place.
But it’s not “they” or “them”. It’s two people, and most outside the conservative blogosphere (let alone the “manosphere”- yikes) are quite rightly ignoring them and going back to talking about how amazing landing that thing on a comet is.
When you start seeing two people as a “they” and start organizing an aggressive response- and don’t worry, they’re already getting “you should kill yourself”, “you’re ugly”, and “get back in the kitchen”, so there’s your response stouter than mockery- then you’re not actually defending much of anyone so much as you are in one trench of the kulturkampf.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:39 pm
Rose Eveleth has been retweeting the worst of the abuse. Which, way to prove the point that there is no misogyny in science and tech, YOU UGLY STUPID WHORES.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:43 pm
My biggest question though, is why does Philae have a drained battery and a solar panel in shadow instead of a nuclear powerplant? The Voyagers are still talking to us and have most of their instruments running and they were launched in 1977.
November 15th, 2014 at 8:59 pm
Good question. This makes me very sad.
November 15th, 2014 at 9:03 pm
“then you’re not actually defending much of anyone so much as you are in one trench of the kulturkampf”
This is something I’ve been worrying will become necessary; that someday I may have to get in a trench and pretend Stalin’s not so bad in order to defeat Hitler. Because one side, the leftist side, of the kulturkampf seems like much more of a clear and present danger. Shirtstorm, in fact, distracted me from the email debate I was having with a Christian friend who was arguing that we take Jesus’s “Do not judge” too literally; I think he’s wrong but I don’t think that he and everyone who thinks like him are anywhere near the ability to force tearful apologies from any astrophysicists.
November 15th, 2014 at 9:26 pm
Sorry Charles, your first comment got dumped in the moderation queue for some reason. And apparently I stand corrected- that makes me pretty sad. I saw none of it go by, probably because I avoid idiots, including idiots who superficially agree with me- but I saw the nasty responses get linked around because it had enough overlap that I saw it through a number of others, most of them conservative/libertarian themselves.
When I went reading among bigger names, like Skepchick and Amanda Marcotte, what I saw was mostly some fairly lighthearted “yeah, that was not a great choice for the time and place”, but not much in the way of venom. Which… okay. I think he should be allowed to wear whatever the hell he wants, period, but I can buy it’s unprofessional- just not worth peeing on his parade over. And I still disagree, and have a huge problem with it being described as “pornographic” as some have. Cheesecake ain’t porn.
But that’s… still not a lynch mob of any description. And it’s not bullying either. I think the initial tweet(s) was mean-spirited (plus all the other stuff I said in the post), but (civil, please) discussion of what messages are or aren’t being sent and what’s appropriate (with me taking the radical libertarian position of fuck yeah, that’s why) is Normal Life. Unless you can’t take being disagreed with at all, that’s all in-bounds play.
I also have a huge problem with this all being framed as some sort of “geek-shaming”, or cool-kids-on-geeks thing. Nnnnot really. This is geek-on-geek action, because geeks aren’t a monolith, and all of the original participants of the discussion? Geeks. Science geeks at that. We can have a community spat without it being some kind of “geeks are the picked-on outsiders” thing.
November 15th, 2014 at 9:27 pm
Two people? Running smear pieces in the Verge, Atlantic, and Grauniad takes more than “two people”.
And yeah, the tragic part of this is all the innocent victims who get caught in the crossfire. Maybe more people should consider that before they start slinging shit, because “shots fired!” isn’t a cute little slang term when they’re causing suffering for real, live people.
Or you could take the RequiresHate lesson: filthy cishet whites can’t feel real pain, so do what you want to them…
@Charles
After NASA bailed on CRAF in the 90s, the ESA had to develop the project on their own, and AFAIK they have very little experience with radioisotope generators, and would probably have to rely on the French giving them access to Pu-238.
Also, the RIG used in the mars rover is half the mass of Philae itself (it’s 1/8th the mass of the rover and the voyagers, overall). It’s pretty hard to build those things small, and they didn’t have the delta-V to get a school bus into that crazy orbit.
November 15th, 2014 at 9:27 pm
And, I’ll bite. Why are they so much more the danger?
November 15th, 2014 at 9:32 pm
RequiresHate is, thankfully, taking a royal drubbing herself within her own circle: RequiresHate unmasking exhaustive breakdown.
She is indeed a vile human being and I’m glad to see her “real” self thrown to the wolves. But I’ll make you a deal- I’ll avoid picking the low-hanging fruit from A Voice For Men if you’ll avoid her tree.
November 15th, 2014 at 9:42 pm
Went and looked at the Verge piece. Actual content mentions he apologized, discusses shirt as symptom of larger problem, does not slam Taylor beyond being the person wearing the shirt. The Atlantic article does not, apparently, exist, though the Twitterer or whatever you call them (Twits?) is an editor there. The Guardian article is critical, but criticism isn’t a “smear piece” unless it goes out of its way to demonize the individual. Saying what they actually said and did isn’t demonization.
November 15th, 2014 at 10:49 pm
‘what I saw was mostly some fairly lighthearted “yeah, that was not a great choice for the time and place”‘
I tend to agree with that actually; it certainly wouldn’t have been my choice. It’s OK with me if people don’t like his shirt, but if he feels it’s necessary to give a teary public apology for it I think it’s a bad sign.
“And, I’ll bite. Why are they so much more the danger?”
Hmm, that wasn’t intended as dangling bait, that was something I considered so obvious as to not be worth explaining. Which implies I’m missing some perspective.
It seems to me as if almost every credible threat to life and liberty in the West which comes from a political perspective is in modern decades coming from the Left (or from radical Islam). I fight the Right on gay marriage* and drugs, but otherwise if a behavior is going to be banned or taxed it’s coming from the Left. Even the War on Drugs is more the Left’s war historically. Except the aforementioned, all the Right seems to be fighting against is things the Left wants to ban, or being forced to pay for things the Left demands. Smoking, guns, large sodas, board-aged cheese, pesticides, medicine, if new regulations are going to be put on something it seems like the Left is doing it. I see misogynists and misandrists, but the misogynists are in the comments and the misandrists are both in comments and published in the Atlantic and the New York Times. Crazed murderers start out being reported as right-wing, but it turns out that they’re apolitical or more left-crazy (or, of course, radical Islamist).
So, what are some of the things I’m not seeing?
*I don’t think there should be any government marriage at all, only government civil unions, identical for gay and straight and everybody; and the definition of marriage should be left up to the various philosophical and religious perspectives.
November 15th, 2014 at 11:00 pm
To sum up, if the people to my right don’t like what you’re doing, they’ll tell you to go somewhere else for your wedding cake. If the people to my left don’t like it, they’ll have the machinery of government destroy your livelihood or your life.
November 15th, 2014 at 11:35 pm
I guest the most obvious in context is it’s not Rick Santorum’s crowd that managed to get Taylor upset about his shirt. If Taylor had been defiant I can’t imagine the socons successfully affecting his position, e.g. getting him fired or transferred. I definitely can imagine the SJWs pulling it off, like Brendan Eich.
November 16th, 2014 at 8:17 am
The articles were solidly weighted in favour of the attack and “callout culture” in general, with only NPR acknowledging that the whole business was ridiculous (by actually letting the woman who made the shirt have the final say, rather than the author speaking on behalf of every woman who may or may not someday be involved in STEM).
“I’ll avoid picking the low-hanging fruit”
That’s awesome of you. But people in your circle seem to be flinging around overripe pears with gleeful abandon-have you seen the latest Popehat bit on… whatever that post was even about?
If everyone who speaks up is going to be painted as some kind of disgusting misogynist slavery-loving fantasy-novel-reading NERD, I’ll sure as hell use any weapon I can bring to bear in my defense.
I’m sure you noticed the only real criticism of RequiresHate is that she didn’t stick to “punching up”-attacking only fair game filthy cishets. That’s why the people who loved her feel betrayed, not because of any kind of silly long-abandoned principles only old-fashioned liberals like us still care about.
Not sure how you feel about Correia these days, but he was undeniably spot-on about this one.
So sure, I’m in one trench of the culture war, because I know how the original kulturkampf went. It sure wasn’t won by people rolling over and playing dead, and it sure wasn’t won by fighting fair.
November 16th, 2014 at 2:23 pm
“This guy just dropped a dishwasher on an ice cube 300 million miles from home…”
That has quite the ring to it.
November 16th, 2014 at 3:07 pm
The RTG from the Voyagers _would_ be too big.
The current Philae power system masses 12.2kg which I think includes batteries and solar panels, and produces a peak 8 watts of solar power after the big 1000ah battery is drained. Out of Philae’s total 97.9 kg.
Three SNAP-3B RTGswould produce 8.1 watts peak, at 6.3kg. One SNAP-9A produces 25 watts peak, at 12.3kg. One SNAP-19 (as used on Pioneer 10&11) produces 40.3 watts peak, at 13.6kg. So mass does not seem insurmountable.
I think the problem is probably heat. Three SNAP-3Bs would produce 157.5 watts heat, one 9A or 19 would produce 525 watts. I’m guessing that’s way too much when you’re sitting on frozen gas in a lander with an effective weight around 1 gram; you boil the gas underneath and gently blow yourself off into space.
November 16th, 2014 at 4:00 pm
Hmm, the other thing I wondered was life expectancy, but apparently those can deliver ~90% after 10 years.
Interestingly, NASA also used solar power for the Juno probe to Jupiter of all places. Sounds like they’re hoarding the last of the Pu-238 we bought from the Russians after we stopped making it at Savannah River in the 90s, and are trying to get the DOE to make them ~2kg of it a year.
David Southwood of ESA was trying to push them to start their own production, but maybe that stalled after he retired. Be interesting to contact his replacement about that. Doubt there’s much political will in Europe for it, especially given how guarded the French are about their atomic program.
Sounds like logistics is the biggest reason. Shame to see something like that cause so much trouble-I’m sure they’ll have tons of follow-up questions that’ll now never get answered without another billion dollar mission.
November 16th, 2014 at 7:40 pm
Today at brunch, my very liberal elementary-school science teacher friend showed up. I told her about Shirtstorm, and she thought the idea that the pin-up shirt scares girls away from STEM was about the stupidest thing she heard of.
I am reminded that the kulturkampf is an artificial phenomenon, created in large measure by the choice of who to give bylines to. Eveleth obviously didn’t get her science reporter gig by enthusiasm for science (or science fiction, she wrote the Atlantic article discussed here). She got it for being a good inflammatory culture warrior, and for believing in the power of authority figures to end this destructive conflict and bring peace (to quote Emperor Palpatine). Kulturkampf is imposed from the top down, it doesn’t grow from the bottom up, and it is intended primarily as a vehicle to power for its creators. For one thing it is of tremendous benefit to a politician, or the corporation who wants him to legislate, if everybody is too busy keeping the other side out of power to really ask why the guy representing our side is so bad. That corporation hired the person who hired the person who hired the CEO of the owned corporation etc, down to the person who hired Eveleth. No conspiracy, just emergent behavior from human corruption.
November 16th, 2014 at 10:34 pm
Instapundit has a column up on this.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/15/shirt-comet-girls-feminism-column/19083607/
November 17th, 2014 at 12:42 am
As I wrote elsewhere:
“If there’s an upside, it’s that stodgy conservatives and pinko hippies seem to have switched positions on such abstract concepts as “decorum” and “dress codes”.”
November 17th, 2014 at 12:46 am
Eggo,
“That’s awesome of you. But people in your circle…”
Oh, now you get to assign people to fucking circles?
http://youtu.be/op7tQGEtP4k
November 17th, 2014 at 3:35 am
It is kind of funny that we are thiiiiiiis close to the pinko hippies becoming the stodgy, anti-fun fuddy-duddy villains from 80’s teen movies.
November 17th, 2014 at 6:04 pm
Tam, “I agree with pretty much everything Ken said” kinda implies that out of all the tribes of angry hominids shaking spears and grunting at each other, Labrat’s in the same one as Ken.
And they’re definitely the most interesting tribe in all of this. They have more complicated motivations than the rest of us, but most of their arguments seem to rely on an enlightened liberalism that’s very much out of fashion with most of the other tribes.
But hey, let’s just get in the spirit of things and yell “GO FUCK YOURSELF” a lot. Maybe you can doxx me and I can try to get you Zumboed, and we’ll all be winners.
November 17th, 2014 at 7:56 pm
LabRat, I think the Verge piece is so terrible because the point is exactly that Taylor’s shirt is holding back progress.
You could read the title “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing” as “EVEN IF you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing” or “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet BECAUSE your shirt is sexist and ostracizing”. But the subtitle, “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind”, the URL “your-bowling-shirt-is-holding-back-progress” and the article itself make it clear that it’s the latter, the authors think prominently wearing a shirt with pin-ups is a bigger minus than landing on a comet is a plus. My personal pick for worst sentence is this:
“Still, Taylor’s personal apology doesn’t make up for the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population.”
So Plante and Duhaime-Ross want everyone to know Taylor’s heartfelt apology can’t make up for the serious harm to all women on earth done by. his. shirt. That just makes me furious.
November 17th, 2014 at 9:00 pm
So at the risk of veering off into trivial topics that nobody cares about, does anyone have a good explanation of the science and goals of Rosetta?
Most of what I’ve read was on the rocketry side of things, and my astrochemistry never went beyond kindergarten level stellar nucleogenesis.
I guess cometary materials have never gone through subduction or all the other indignities of planet formation, so they’re a good source of info for what things were like before planets?
Are they testing any particular hypotheses about the early solar system, or is it more of a general fact-finding mission?
November 18th, 2014 at 10:33 am
Other things to consider in powerplants.
1) RTG’s have a possibility of causing contamination of the site if something went wrong (like Mars polar lander wrong). As the Voyagers were only slated for flybys and not surface landings, RTGs were appropriate.
2) You fly the equipment you are allowed to by the administration.
As for shirtstorm.
I may have not chosen that particular shirt if I knew I might be on TV, too.
Hardly an excuse to vilify the guy based on an awkward shirt selection.
He said he was sorry. Lets move on.
People make mistakes.
Do we really need Hashtivism for this one error in judgement?
November 18th, 2014 at 3:56 pm
I think it’s important to note that your average human being has the ability to think more than one thing at a time.
For instance, I can think that the Rosetta mission is REALLY REALLY COOL and it’s an awesome thing for humanity AND think that it’s a terrible shirt and the person shouldn’t have worn it.
I can think BOTH those things AT THE SAME TIME.
I can observe that science is awesome. And I can also observe that there are a certain percentage of scientists who’ve never really internalized that clothes are messages, and everything you wear always sends messages to everybody about who you are and what kind of person you are. And that clothing is a language of its own, and refusing to learn the language is simply willful ignorance.
I can observe that the person did awesome science at the same time that he did terrible human communication.
One does not preclude the other.
November 18th, 2014 at 8:49 pm
The shirt was pretty tacky and eyeroll-inducing, but there are actual issues for women in STEM fields that go beyond scientists wearing tacky shirts. If would be nice if those got half as much airtime.
Although, seriously, Eggo? White cishet men are the most oppressed group evar, because sometimes people say mean things about them on Tumblr?
November 19th, 2014 at 3:39 am
Aebhel, sure, if you jam a q-tip far enough into your ear that what you read and understand has nothing to do with the things I actually wrote.
But hey, once you figure out I’m one of them, the only correct thing to do is let your eyes glass over and let the little wordfilter in your head fill out a political bingo card, right?
November 22nd, 2014 at 6:09 pm
Catching up because damn, this week and damn, this thread. Actual substantive reply pending.
November 23rd, 2014 at 6:16 pm
Sorry you’ve had a bad week! I hope this coming week is better.
November 28th, 2014 at 2:06 pm
Labrat: ” … But I’ll make you a deal- I’ll avoid picking the low-hanging fruit from A Voice For Men if you’ll avoid her tree. …”
Fortunately, most of the true crazies in the Men’s Rights movement have gone full MGTOW ( Men Going Their Own Way ), and avoid relationships with women completely.
Which is probably for the best for all parties concerned.