This question of credentials, accomplishments, fame, status, titles, and what it has to do with whether or not someone can behave badly. As I discussed yesterday, Tim Farley seems to be claiming that fame and titles in the skeptic/atheist world are incompatible with acting like a shit. I say “seems to be” because it’s not clear exactly what he’s claiming. I’ve asked him to clarify but so far he’s said only that that’s a small part of the post, which doesn’t help and is frankly beside the point.

He says

the list of Level 2 and Level 3 blocks reveals people, many of whom I know personally, who are deeply involved in the atheism, skepticism, secularism and humanism movements

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Our friend Tom at Dubito Ergo Sum has an excellent, thorough post about Tim Farley’s objections to the block bot.

He too quotes the list of credentials and then comments on it.

This would make for a great game of spot the fallacy, wouldn’t it? Farley lists all these qualifications, but none of them are “noted anti-spam crusader” or “longtime anti-bigotry activist,” not that those would be excuses either. See, none of these qualifications are inconsistent with “abusive [...] anti-feminists, MRAs, or all-round assholes” or “annoying and irritating”³. It’s possible to be an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning comedian and also be an annoying asshole who delights in baiting feminists with disingenuous arguments, just as it’s possible

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Yesterday Tim Farley wrote a piece about the block bot and some objections he has to it. One objection he has is that it blocks some people whom he considers…I’m not sure what, exactly – too good to merit blocking, I guess is the clearest way to put it. He considers them people who shouldn’t be blocked, because they don’t deserve to be blocked. But he makes this case in a very odd way.

The community needs of this very specific group (“Atheism+”), combined with the lack of auditing and transparency of control, has resulted in some (in my opinion) very strange choices. I am familiar with many of the people in these communities.  I know many of them in

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Bjarte has a new cartoon.

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Nahla Mahmoud is being threatened, and the police won’t do anything about it.

From the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain:

Following an interview on Channel 4 on Sharia law, Islamists have threatened Sudanese secular campaigner and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Spokesperson Nahla Mahmoud with death, calling her a ‘Kafira’ and ‘Murtada’ who has offended Islam and brought “fitnah”. The threats have been reported to the police who have closed the case and advised that nothing could be done.

We the undersigned are extremely concerned about the safety of Nahla and that of her family in Sudan. We ask the authorities to investigate the threats made particularly by Mr Salah Al Bandar.

Nahla writes: “I am most concerned with

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Tauriq Moosa alerted me to an example of “there is no depth too low.” What is it? Harassing a child who has leukemia? Torturing a kitten in front of the kitten’s weeping human? Firebombing a picnic just for the lolz?

No, it’s harassing Amanda Berry for going outside and having fun – Amanda Berry, who spent ten years not being able to go outside and have fun because she was imprisoned in a house by a filthy human being who kept her locked up there.

On CNN over the weekend, Nelly told Erin Burnett, “What stuck with me most was that she had a smile on her face. That’s one of the most impressive things to me, considering everything she

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Alex Gabriel has a list of 100 Irish and British atheists who don’t fit the stereotyped image of what an atheist is. It’s a great list. I know a few of them, know of many of them, am pleased to learn of the ones I don’t know of.

25. Jane Donnelly is Atheist Ireland’s Education Policy Officer, and has spoken widely on the need for secular education. Recently, at Empowering Women Through Secularism, she also gave a presentation on secularism and human rights. You can find her writing and updates on AI’s dedicated Teach Don’t Preach site. [Email her] [Tweet her]

44. Yemisi Ilesnami - proudly feminist, proudly bisexual, proudly atheist – can be found

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I haven’t been doing this lately, but just this once.

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Josh has a great post at More Than Men about bystanders.

There’s a special place in my imaginary hell for tepid bystanders who turn a blind eye to the suffering and targeting of someone more vulnerable. I hate them, and I hate them more than I hate the tormentors. Because they fly a false flag. They present themselves as friends but turn out to be collaborators at the most dire moments. Because they know better and they choose to do nothing. To do nothing in a way that magnifies the stage, and scope, and power of bullies.

I came out publicly at 12 years old. This was very unusual in the mid-80s. There were no such things as Gay/Straight

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Julian Assange is running for the Senate in Australia, and has said he’ll appoint Leslie Cannold as his “proxy” (I didn’t know there was such a thing) if he’s elected and can’t return to Canberra. (They let you do that? Strange.)

The point is, it’s seen as a good wheeze, because Australia (like all the places) has a misogyny problem. (Never!! No, really, I understand it does.)

This is an election where misogyny, always lurking under the surface like a tetanus spore, has erupted. Both political parties are overwhelmingly choosing men to replace outgoing MPs in safe seats, and former PM Julia Gillard told The Monthly magazine that some of the contempt that she was shown as prime minister was

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The campaign to pretend that the BBC libeled some of the people on oolon’s block bot continues. People are working each other into a frenzy on Twitter and Facebook, pretending that they were named on Newsnight and then called abusers. Not what happened. No one was named.

Gavin Esler and Paul Mason discuss it.

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The BBC reports:

Police are investigating bomb threats made on social networking site Twitter against several female journalists.

Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, Independent columnist Grace Dent and Time magazine’s Catherine Mayer all said they had been threatened.

Anonymous account-holders tweeted that bombs had been placed outside their homes, primed to explode at 22:47 BST.

Not a joke. Not amusing. Not “trash talk.” Not trolling. Not best dealt with by ignoring.

Freeman, who had earlier published a column entitled “how to use the internet without being a total loser”, reported the threats to the Metropolitan Police.

The anonymous author of the tweet had “failed to understand my column”, she wrote.

An investigation into the threats, which make the tweeters

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Via the Global Secular Humanist Movement page on Facebook -

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