Friday 31 May 2013

"Get Into That Kitchen And Make Me A Natural BLT, Woman!"

I'm feeling lazy today (as well as stressed; I've got a meeting coming up with the second-worst PhD student I've ever met because I'm at the shitty end of an extremely long list of people who've passed the buck on him), so how about I just pick on an obvious idiot: Erick Erickson
After a Pew Research report found that mothers were the sole breadwinners in 40% of American households with children, Erick Erickson said on Fox Business that it is “anti-science” to suggest that’s acceptable.
Said Erickson: “I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.”
This is so hilarious a misunderstanding of the words "natural" and "science" it almost qualifies as art.  When Erickson looks around this society we've artificially created to look inside the houses we've artificially constructed, he's horrified to learn that the person gaining the money we've artificially given meaning to isn't being collected by the natural people?  "Natural breadwinner" is no less an oxymoron than "natural shuttle-pilot".

It's the invocation of science that's truly wonderful, however.  Science, we now learn, simply means that the most common occurrences are the right occurrences.  That shit be biology, yo!

In celebration of this brave new face of the scientific method, I propose the following list of Erickson's Laws, each of which details behaviour or concepts that only those dabbling in anti-science would even consider:
  • Women making money
  • Cooked food
  • Objecting to people fucking in public
  • DVDs
  • Antibiotics
  • Giving birth
  • Spines
Once again, science is victorious!

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