I don’t know who writes the Dark Buzz physics blog, but it’s someone named Roger—someone whose latest post, “Krauss is being silenced“, made me chuckle. After noting that both Sam Harris and I have expressed our beliefs that Lawrence Krauss is in all likelihood guilty of sexual malfeasance, Roger speculates why. His conclusion? I have nothing to lose. Get a load of this logic:
Coyne has a popular blog, and probably most of his readers think that he is gay. He denies it, but he blogs a lot about his personal life, and it is obvious that he has no wife, no girlfriend, and no kids. Furthermore, he has stereotypical gay interests in music, arts, clothing, and pets. And his political views are mostly what you would expect from a gay atheist professor.
I am not saying this to criticize, but to give background for his opinions. He does not appear to have any worries that any woman is going to metoo him.
I have no way of knowing how he has flirted with women in the past, and I don’t see how it is anyone’s business.
No Roger, it’s not anyone’s business, NOR YOURS EITHER!
Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. I’m just not—I’m one of those old, white, cis-het males who rank lowest on the oppression scale. I’m not worried about being #MeToo’d because I don’t have a history of abusing or harassing women. There are some of us, you know!
The rest, about the connection between one’s interests, one’s atheism, and one’s sexuality, you can judge for yourself.
If I could have imagined all the ways people would go after me for my stand, I would never have dreamed up this one. Thanks, Roger, for a long moment of amusement. You’re an idiot.
NOTE: This is not the place to debate Krauss’s guilt or innocence; if you want to do that, you can discuss it on the Dark Buzz post. Comments that violate this policy will be removed from the thread.
That is ridiculous & stereotyping!
“interests in music, arts, clothing, and pets” – wow! Then most of the world is gay… what a stupid idiot.
Oh – Roger works in ‘consulting’! That explains a lot!
More like ‘insulting’. Must be problematic in his chosen business.
Everything you said.
You’re all wrong. As a woman with interests in music, art, clothing and pets, this shows that Jerry is obviously a woman! (especially the clothing part…the only thing that injects some doubt is that shoes are missing).
He has cowboy boots instead.
OMG! Jerry wears cowboy boots! Ted Cruz wears cowboy boots! Ted Cruz must be gay!
Don’t try to criticize my conclusion. It has all the intellectual rigor that “Roger” used.
😝
Sorry! #Youtoo 🙁
Jerry is obviously a lesbian — everyone knows lesbians are crazy for cats.
This is beautiful: “Furthermore, he has stereotypical gay interests in music, arts, clothing, and pets.”
Of those four interests, I don’t know which one to single out as being the MOST gay!
Only naturists are not interested in clothing!
He just needs to be slim and neat, and he’ll get mistaken for being gay just like Jerry Seinfeld.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
No of course not! People’s personal sexual preferences are their own business.
I’d say based on the frequency of heart symbols Dr.Coyne places next to certain female’s names in his Hili dialogues, he is a good scientist and a fine popularizer of science.
And there’s the foodie thing too! 😛
This is so silly and ludicrous, and carries stereotyping to new heights.
My heterosexual, unmarried, childless brother has many of the interests that Jerry has, plus other hobbies like wilderness camping, making Chinese silk painting on his own hand-sewn fine silk scarves, other crafts like building his own canoe and guitar, Eskimo cloak, mukluks, gloves,white-water rafting, black belt in the martial arts, loves literature, is a nature-lover and environmentalist, marine biologist and former computer geek. Not sure which ones qualify as gay traits and which ones not.
He is also interested in baseball, not exactly known as a gay sport.
OMG, I too have “interests in music, arts, clothing, and pets.” Does that mean, oh, no!!!! I better go tell my wife, I just didn’t know. I hope she will forgive me.
But wait, he left out all of the food reports from India! And hey … clothes? Jerry? Oh, I don’t think so.
I think that guy was full of gross fecal matter, if you ask me. Glad I didn’t go confess to the wife.
Well, you forgot Jerry’s cowboy boots obsession. 🙂
I guess they go under “clothing” :-).
Cowboy boots are gay? OMCC I live in Montana! Who knew I was surrounded by gay men?
I would love to hear Roger’s explanation of how Jerry’s political views are stereotypically gay.
Don’t inform your Montana neighbors that they are gay, let this be our little secret!
From what I understand of ignorant stereotyping, I’d venture that an interest in cowboy boots from someone who is not a cowboy would be considered a gay stereotype by the sort of people inclined to such thinking. I’m not endorsing this view, just reporting it.
Haha OMG; this just made my morning, hilarious!
“Roger” is the son of Phyllis McAlpin Schlafly. He fancies himself a physicist, but has done nothing other than write a vanity press book claiming Einstein was a plagiarist. This was low, even for him.
Oooooh, I don’t know. The Schlafly bar is set really, really low. While Roger doesn’t have the total w00t! w00t! crazy of Andy, he did say this:
“I say that raping a virgin is a worse crime than raping a slut…”
Afraid I’d have to put his “outing” of Jerry in the “just another day at work” category for him.
On some topics he seems sane, although highly opinionated. On others, he seems bat-shit crazy.
Speaking of Schlaflys, Andy thinks relativity is wrong because Jesus sent a message instantaneously to his disciples.
w00t!
I have never sexually harassed any women and I like music and arts and I a progressive liberal. I should tell my wife and kids that I must be gay, apparently.
+1
Cats make you gay.
That’s just their orientation.
Glen Davidson
Apparently, if you are a civilized human being, you are gay. If gay people make up about 10% of the population and only they are interested in the arts, music, clothing and pets, the world is even worse off than we thought. Roger clearly has a very limited worldview — and he doesn’t know you at all.
I forget the name of the movie, but it starred Kevin Kline as a schoolteacher. In one scene, a student patiently explains to him why everyone in the class knew he was gay before he knew himself, a long list of good qualities, the clincher being that he was a thoroughly decent human being.
The movie was “In and Out”
A conservative, Trump-supporting rabble-rousing mathematician, according to:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Roger_Schlafly
Argh, Phyllis Schlafly’s spawn.
Ya, I had the same reaction.
I couldn’t care less one way or the other. But, as someone who spent all of my college summers working in Provincetown, MA, and who has had two gay roommates after that, let me say that my gaydar has never squeaked.
I agree,Dudebro is an idiot.
I think Roger has a problem. Because you or I would have a comment on another person or an accusations about that person does not mean there is some secret hidden agenda. I for one have had several things to say about sexual harassment on this site over the past several weeks. Often I have been discounted, most often by the younger males. Now, I may conclude that they are immature or even juvenile but gay never crossed my mine. I do not see any connection at all.
The fact is that people who do not treat women like sex objects or something for their personal amusement but instead think of them first as human beings are very unlikely to be accused of harassment or assault. To think it can hit all of us equally is to say there is probably something wrong with you.
Good on you for noticing that Randall – Jerry treats women with respect so therefore this guy thinks he must be gay. And actually that’s a correct conclusion about his views. He even wrote a post about it on another one of his blogs (Singular Values) called:‘MeTooism is Destroying Marriages’. That post concludes:
“I believe that prostitution will soon be considered the only morally acceptable form of heterosexual activity. Only explicitly-paid prostitution is fully consensual, according to newer definitions of consent.”
On the latest post on that blog he criticizes a guy for saying that Jews are the problem of ALL the world’s ills because:
“They are only maybe 50-80% of the driving force behind the mass immigration agenda and those other items. Maybe 90% in the cases of porn, school prayer, and feminism.”
Perhaps being a secular Jew is part of the reason Roger is going after him.
These two blogs have been going sixteen years. Dark Buzz (the Jerry is Gay blog) has eight followers. The others don’t say how many followers.
His third blog began in 2016, obviously as a pro-Trump site.
A lot of his posts are just re-posting of his parents’ posts. He calls himself a “consultant”. I guess I could do that too – people have been known to ask me what to do!
+1
Interesting to speculate why this bozo cares? Let’s all just admit we’re gay and let it go.
Yep, gay people don’t have to worry about Me Too. Just ask Kevin Spacey.
And James Levine!
That gay folk can’t be #MeToo’d would come as a surprise to Kevin Spacey.
It’s interesting to me how people like Roger think they aren’t telegraphing some pretty dismal ethical predispositions when they say things like what Jerry quoted of him here.
I get that they don’t think their ethics are low. But they do know that other’s that they are talking to do think poorly of some of their ethical standards as evidenced by the addition of qualifiers to try and suggest that they don’t actually hold the low ethical standards they just demonstrated to support a claim.
These sorts of people are the worst. I dealt with a man like this at work recently who would say the most sexist things in casual conversation, completely oblivious how sexist they are. Basically, he was sexist but had no knowledge that he was.
I did a little online investigating which makes it plain that “Rodger” is a total nut case. Among other things he wrote a book (you can actually buy it at Amazon!!) that purports to prove that Einstein was a “fraud”.
Misspelled his name. Sorry. It is Roger.
I have much the same interests in music, arts and of course, cats.
If I’m going to be gay too, can I be a lesbian? I’m still in love with my wife and she’s probably going to want to remain a woman.
That doesn’t even make sense. How does expressing that you think someone may be guilty of something make it more likely that you’ll be accused of that thing yourself?
This is strange on a number of levels:
1) Gay men can also engage in sexual misconduct (Kevin Spacey)
2) Having non-stereotypical interests provides little evidence for someone’s sexuality
3) An individual’s political beliefs are not determined by their sexuality.
I’ve never considered the question of Jerry’s sexuality because I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to anything he discusses, unless he wanted to draw on examples from his personal experience. This is another example of trying to attack the speaker rather than the argument.
And how did Sam get off so easily? Why did Sam say similar about Krauss’s accusations? It must be because he’s a cheese maker. He probably makes cheese, and we all know that people who make cheese will never be accused by the #MeToo movement.
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Unless you are lactose intolerant.
Depends on the type of cheese. Most aged cheeses have little or no lactose. Now if Sam is one of those cottage/mozzarella/mascarpone cheese guys…
It’ll be pretty funny if a rumour starts that Sam Harris makes cheese.
I see from his site that Sam’s selling special mugs and T-shirts now. I’d like to buy some cheese if he were allowed to sell that.
Wait- the fact that you’re a college professor didn’t tip him off? I thought post secondary education made everyone gay?
“…he blogs a lot about his personal life, and it is obvious that he has no wife, no girlfriend, and no kids.”
By this logic, isn’t it equally as “obvious” that “he has no boyfriend?”
And any long-time reader of this website would have noticed Jerry’s occasional hints about his amorous youth. He’s apparently had (or at least sought) girlfriends, anyway. 😛
Not just his youth.
🙂
Ooh!
Woot!
Indeed.
Perhaps in some higher order logic it is not-obvious rather than obvious. NOB and OB gates?
If Jerry were gay, I’m pretty goddamn sure he wouldn’t be in the closet about it — and that nobody around here would give a damn, one way or the other.
Well according to Roger’s erroneous and grossly ignorant criteria that makes or determines if an individual is gay or not, I am surprised to learn the I am apparently gay as well.
I have always enjoyed reading this comments on this website. I truly enjoy reading the points of view and opinions of others who, for the most part, identify as atheist or agnostic.
I am always challenged when confronted with ideas and points of view that are different from my own. I have a very dear friend who identifies as a lesbian. We can sit for hours and have wonderful thought-provoking conversations of a wide range of topics.
In my early youth, being raised in a christian fundamentalist home I was very judgemental of homosexuals. Once I was able to grow up and develop my own thoughts on this issue among many others, I could never understand why g*d was so disagreeable towards homosexual behavior in humans but was okay with this behavior in other species of animals.
I do rather enjoy when a homophobe throws out the It’s Not Natural argument.
I’ve been arguing about this on a conservative Catholic website for the last few days. When I said that homosexuality had been observed in over 200 animals, they now want to know how I define homosexual. It’s like the previous days of discussion never happened.
They’re all saying being gay is a mental disorder. When I say that all the AMAs have said it’s not, they start posting stuff about how all psychiatry is rubbish and stuff about the history where women were put away for wandering wombs.
They say the Church is the Church, and has never changed, so I point out all the occasions where doctrine has changed. That’s gay propaganda. Every statistic etc that supports gays in some way is a lie or gay propaganda. You can’t argue with them. Well I can’t anyway. I’ve stopped responding.
Well, the RC in front of Catholic stands for Raping Children.
This lot think the Australian Commission that found widespread abuse is mostly lies and gay propaganda. They think Cardinal Pell is being railroaded and the charges against him are ridiculous. They admit it happens sometimes, but extremely rarely.
Everyone is inherently bisexual, or masterbation wouldn’t work.
Like!
Of course officially the RCC maintains that masturbation is a Sin, many other Christian sects as well. Interestingly the RCC doesn’t think that molesting children and young people is a Sin, at least not when it is their own clergy doing it. Go figure.
I always thought the cowboy boots were a dead giveaway! 😉
It was Ol’ Willie who noted that “Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other).” 🙂
Ha! Loved that, thanks. Brokeback Mountain has something to say about that as well.
Don’t feel bad. One of my current burdens is a psychotic Brazilian former bimbo (she’s long in the tooth now) who is convinced I’m gay because the guys in the meat market (a literal meat market, not the other kind) where I enjoy hanging out told her that I was, as a joke. Besides all of her mental issues, she’s dumb enough to have believed them. She sees me as a threat because I’m friends with her boyfriend – the owner of the store – who is afraid for his life of taking greater steps toward throwing her out of the shop.
I see no way out for him other than to pretend that he is gay. Maybe you could help him in this.
This sounds like a Seinfeld episode.
Yep, it would be if it wasn’t also for the underlying tragedy of it all. The root of the entire mess is that my pal the owner could easily be the poster child (at 70+y/o) for why arranged marriages are a bad thing.
Have you considered vegetarianism? 😀
When I read that, I read it as “deranged marriages” so I think you painted a very accurate picture of the situation.
The majority of my working life was in typically male professions (construction, military, police) and that was OK with everyone. Way back when, I was the token male in a couple of female-dominated jobs, and people started to look at me askance. I met a wonderful woman at one of those jobs, and we have been (mostly)happily married for 39 years. People are weird….
Please tell you have also been a cowboy and that you are a Native American.
😉
Sorry, I’ll get my coat.
+1
You were a figure skater, weren’t you? 😀
Man, this is a tough crew!😸
Damn, I’m a gay atheist professor too, and I didn’t even know it!
What you said. I’ve had my adventures, happy and otherwise, and been taken for all kinds of thing. The details are for friends and family. On the whole the unrolling of the cosmos has been kind to me.
Yeah, cuz scribing to marxism and hitting on anything with a pulse are exactly alike.
Roger’s dearth of critical thinking skills makes me think he should be working for the Trump administration.
Maybe he is assembling a portfolio to apply.
He has two other blogs. One was set up in 2016 and is a pro-Trump jobbie.
I have never thought that Prof. Coyne is gay. And I do not care.
Me Neither.
Do you have links to accounts of these events? Lack of outrage would be due to it not being reported.
Hmm, he’s a doctor, likes custom-made boots, and cats. Either gay or a super villain.
Catman
I myself have stereotypical gay interests in music and arts, though not clothing. The stereotypical gay pet is any pet rescued from an animal shelter as opposed to bred on pet farm, but the species is irrelevant. The reasons why gays prefer these should be obvious.
In my family there has been a joke that my father is America’s biggest non-Italian Frank Sinatra fan, and I am the San Francisco Bay Area’s biggest straight Judy Garland fan.
Richard Dawkins has said he is “culturally Christian”.
(See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/7136682.stm )
So I can certainly be “culturally gay”.
“Culturally gay.” Great concept!
Isn’t what “metrosexuals” were trying to do?
(Personally I don’t think one needs to label one’s idiosyncratic views on clothing and such, but …)
Agree with both your comments.
I recently heard of a market trader who was considered by his colleagues to be gay because he is not interested in football and takes fresh herbs home. They were amazed when he told them he was getting married.
The fresh herbs thing is a dead giveaway. He’s just getting married to throw people off.
LOL the fresh herbs is pretty funny. That made me LOL as a marker for being gay.
Maybe he meant fresh Herbs.
😀
When I lived in Berkeley in the early 70s I went into a shack with a sign saying Herbs and Xmas Trees under it. I asked what kind of herbs they had and the guy, apparently Herb, said they only had Xmas trees…
Hahahahaha!
ROFL!
Huh! I must be gay then! 🙂
Must tell the wife! 🙂
Well, when people hold the view that harassment and assault are just how you treat women they might see someone who doesn’t fear being accused with suspicion. What deep, dark, hidden reason might Jerry have for not treating women like meat on a rack? Why, it’s a case of the gays! You’ve given yourself away with your interest in normal things! We all should have known from all that food porn and those cat pictures you’ve posted!
Wow that guy’s an idiot. My ex bf was a dancer and effeminate in a lot of ways to the point that men would hit on him. In reality, he was even more girl-crazy than the most macho seeming men. I used to have to pry Playboy out of his hands to get his damn attention. His woman now is a hot blonde thing (model-type) that most men can only dream of. So how can that guy just assume that someone is gay from a BLOG? I also never understood why guys call other guys gay as an insult. Like if a guy is successful and attractive other guys say “He’s really GAY.” So Jerry maybe this Roger dude is just jealous of your success. 😮
It’s the same mechanism that is bad for women, is also bad for men. It’s what the MRA types don’t want to hear about feminism, namely, that the patriarchy oppresses males as well. Males are not allowed to have feelings, dress well, care for humans (especially children)or animals. If they do, they are sissies and female (because a female is a bad, wimpy thing) and the ultimate wussy is a gay man. So, feminism (not 3rd wave feminism but the feminism of my time) identifies this as a problem and seeks for fairness for men and women from this type of oppression.
Yes, good point!
Some people are not worth responding to. I don’t know who “Roger” is, but I suspect he falls into that category.
Would your being gay make your posts more interesting and make me want to read more of them? No.
Would your being not gay make your posts more interesting and make me want to read more of them? No.
Basically, your sexuality has no bearing on your posts and is therefor of no interest to me. Add to that that your sexuality is none of my business and I fail to see what bearing it has on anything.
I second Roger’s speculative idiocy.
Uhuh, so he’s Roger Schlafly — I guess he must be the brother of Andy Schlafly, who had that hilarious fight with Richard Lenski.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair
A family with history.
Is it a fight? It was more of a slaughter. Or as the meme says, omae wa mou shindeiru.
Thanks for sharing this link. This was really interesting. The entire family seems to be a bag of complete losers. Interestingly, perhaps Roger is in a snit because Jerry bannned him from commenting on the WEIT site several years ago. This is apparently not the first example of Roger’s interactions with Jerry.
Conversely, I guess my beer-drinking, sports-loving gay friends (including my husband) aren’t really gay?
This was funny. A+ for humor, Roger.
I can give grades because my preferences apparently out me as a gay atheist professor.
You’ve got to love that he straight up thinks that the men who have been ‘metoo’d’ did something to get ‘metoo’d’. He just doesn’t think there is anything wrong with treating women that way.
Well I think Coyne has simply misread Roger’s post entirely. Roger’s concern is that Krauss is being tried by unsubstantiated claims. He sees Coyne as piling on in that process and passing judgment. He observes that Coyne must be awfully confident he cannot be the target of any accusations, which (Roger implies) can happen to any man who flirts with women. This is the import of the no-one’s business remark: Roger thinks that in Krauss’s case it has been treated as everyone’s business.
I am not saying Roger is right. I am saying Coyne misunderstood the post.
I see now Roger has added a comment.
http://blog.darkbuzz.com/2018/03/krauss-is-being-silenced.html?showComment=1520959154340#c445949444113759668
This entire thread and nearly all the comments are based on a misreading.
I understand Craw’s post perfectly. I know his point was to defend the person at issue; the part about me being gay was simply his hamhanded attempt to understand why I was part of the “pile on”. But I found that part really humorous and a complete miss on the part of the writer.
Seriously, don’t insult me by saying that I didn’t understand what was a straightforward (though incredibly dumb) post. I picked out one part to show the lengths to which people will go to get at me for what I believe.
As Dark Buzz himself says, the point was not just that people were ostracizing the person at issue (unfairly, he thinks, but he’s wrong), but also to try to understand why I was part of the “pile on”.
You’re insulting the intelligence of not just me, but of everyone here. Best to leave this topic alone and stop posting excerpts from that website here. People can go over there to read any response by this befuddled individual.
And the author’s response that the people here are merely virtue signalling is bad reasoning. We are pushing back on the poor logic used to come up with a motivation for this so-called “pile on”. It’s not that we don’t understand, it’s that we understand very well what he is saying.
Um… it seems to me that sexual orientation in any direction whatsoever shouldn’t impose a bias in censuring or not censuring Krauss, but I must say that I’m utterly confused that any incompatibilist could strongly censure someone who after all, “couldn’t have done otherwise”. I am equally confused by my own (compatibilist) feeling of being so very sorry for Krauss even though I feel that he absolutely COULD have done otherwise.
I’m not sure about the sexual orientation comment but I’m arguing that the person’s logic is bad irrespective of the sexual orientation remark.
However, I think you mean determinist more than incombatilist since both combatibilists and incombatilists understand that fatalism is not the same as determinism and both accept determinism which is simply the laws of physics dictate that causes follow affects, at least at the macro, newtonian level. In this way, censoring bad behaviour in an input (cause) that may have an affect that one desires (stopping the behaviour).
As for feeling repulsed or sorry for someone, that’s part of empathy and while subject to the laws of physics, it’s just how we humans role unless we are not functioning properly.
Excuse the horrible spellings.
I’ll tell you Diana, in spite of all the endless debates we’ve had here at WEIT nothing has quite brought home to me free will implications more than the Krauss situation. You say “censoring bad behaviour in an input (cause) that may have an affect that one desires (stopping the behaviour”. To me this reads (in in incompatibilist logic): “In terms of your genes and past causal experiences you have behaved in a creepy predatory way, though you couldn’t behave otherwise. Now I’m going to throw you some bad new experiences, so casually your behaviour in the future will be different. But in effect I will be punishing you for the person you were when you couldn’t do anything different.” Totally incoherent. I thank my lucky stars I’m a compatibilist.
Again you are talking about determinism so you are addressing incompotinkists and compatibilists both. Both believe in cause and effect. Also you need to be careful in suggesting that human behaviour changes because we know something to be true. The fee will sense if agency doesn’t change because I know it doesn’t exist. I still feel like it does but that doesn’t make it real. I also feel like i have a little homonculous riding around behind my eyes making decisions and that isn’t true either but just because I use the word “I” it would be silly to yell “a ha you believe in a little homunculus. You are a contra causal free will believer!”
I’m going to back off from this discussion of the implication of ones free will position and the Krauss situation Diana because talking about philosophy in these circumstances is ignoring the elephant in the room – the level and nature of guilt and the proportionality of punishment for Krauss and for such cases in general – whether censure should apply in his particular case and to what degree. Are we right to not defend Krauss and leave things to be resolved by the University of Arizona Disciplinary processes (although time and time again we have seen other universities judgement process grossly flawed)?
I’m very upset about what is taking place, my instinct is that he is not being treated justly, he has perhaps been deserted in a whirlwind of changing social mores and associated virtue posturing. I am reminded of that old biblical edict “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone”. Does this apply here?
I am uncertain of my stance in all of this. Really uncertain. I do wish I could discuss these fundamental issues with people at WEIT whose opinions and clarity of thinking I so respect. But we cannot.
So you are either gay or at high risk of abusing women…. That is what I gathered from what this dude said. And as far as most of us thinking jerry is gay… I bet most of us never thought about it and wish we could have kept it that way.
Jerry, please post a poll tomorrow, we need to find out once and for all whether we think you are gay.
😀
Ha ha or if we ever thought he was gay.
That was my takeaway from Roger’s post as well…that men are either gay or have performed actions that in this ‘new’ climate constitute sexual harassment.
That is an own goal, Roger.
It hints a lot more about Roger’s past than Jerry’s.
This did make me laugh!
I’m returning very late to this post as I have only just read the Dark Buzz post. I recognize that the Roger who writes this blog is Roger Schlalfy, son of the Phyllis Schlafly and brother of Andy Schlafly – the founder of Conservapedia.