Author: Ophelia Benson

The Telegraph is outraged because Richard Dawkins had the temerity to say that Mormonism has ridiculous stuff in it. It uses loaded language to convey its outrage.

Richard Dawkins on Sunday accused Mitt Romney of being a “massively gullible fool” as he launched into a furious tirade against the Republican’s Mormon faith.

Britain’s most prominent atheist attacked the core tenets of Mr Romney’s religion, saying that the Church of Latter Day Saints’ founding prophet was “a fraud” and that the presidential contender was “too stupid to see it”.

“No matter how much you agree with Romney’s economic policy, can you really vote for such a massively gullible fool?” asked Prof Dawkins during an outburst on Twitter that lasted several hours. [emphasis added]

Today was Cooper’s last trip to the vet, to get the stitches taken out. His paw is healed! I still can’t take him out to run after the tennis ball at 90 miles an hour or to race over rocks to swim in the waves, but we can go for long walks.

Whew. Glad that’s over.

Another in Amy’s series: another guy saying yeahno, harassment and bullying and threatening aren’t funny or cute. Eran Segev, contributor to the Skeptic Zone podcast and to the Skeptic magazine (in Australia), and former President of Australian Skeptics.

He’s had some of it himself. Way too much of it.

When organising TAM Australia, my fellow organisers and I were the subject of some astonishingly rude and unfriendly tweets and blogs over some decisions we made. Not one of the authors had contacted us to ask for the reasons behind the decisions. All were skeptics; people who wanted to attend the conference, and most eventually did. And over the past year or so, I have had a cruel and nasty campaign of vicious defamation directed at me. Obviously I will not be repeating what was said, but I’ll say that it was directly related to my being a man, and I can assure you it was so nasty that it could easily ruin my life. No exaggeration. Let’s just say, that because of a few cruel individuals I have had a pretty tough year. These people got to me.

We can see that he knows what it’s like.

I have met Rebecca a few times, and exchange emails with her occasionally, but we are not close friends by any stretch, and until fairly recently I had no idea of the composition of her mailbox. However, some mutual friends gave me some of the details of the emails and other messages she has been receiving, for years. I was horrified. I was at the local police station for less than Rebecca receives in an average week.

When I found that out, I started asking around, and discovered that not only is Rebecca not alone, it is practically the norm for women who are active online. And if they dare to be active feminists, then the level of hate becomes immense. And these are not just some gamers or kids. There are good reasons to believe that at least some of the messages come from adult members of the skeptical community; from people you might meet at Skeptics in the Pub or at TAM.

I have no idea how Rebecca and women like her tolerate it. I don’t completely understand how they don’t crack under the pressure. Perhaps they sometimes do.

No, we turn into Feminazis and Femistasi instead. We morph into the Oppressed Sisterhood. We become Infantilizers and Victims.

I also don’t understand, and surely never will, what goes through the minds of the perpetrators. I try to reason: OK, so you think Skepchicks are sometimes unreasonable about sex relations, or you disagree with what Rebecca wrote about TAM. Fine. SO DO I. So what? Why does it mean that she deserves to be insulted, humiliated and threatened with physical violence? If you want to say something, say “I disagree with you and you’re being unreasonable. Here’s why.” And if that gets shot down, argue some more; or leave. But hatred and violence?

Do you threaten a colleague you argue with that you’ll kill them? Do you wish the shop assistant that hasn’t helped you that she’ll be raped on the way home? What gives you, what gives ANYONE, the right to subject another person to such hate? And where does this hate come from? And why women? Do you not have a mother; a sister; a girlfriend? Do you hate them too? Do you insult and threaten them, too?

I was shocked that someone could hate me enough to want to ruin my life; imagine having dozens, maybe even hundreds of people personally wishing you raped. I can’t imagine what it’s like. I hope I never find out.

It’s what we’re supposed to expect because we say things in public. We have to develop a thick skin and then it will all be fine.

Yeah here’s Wooly Bumblebee’s “Anatomy of a Bully” post.

Her name is Kristina Hansen, by the way, she made it public the other day on a blog post about how evil atheism+ is. Hansen is easier to type than Bumblebee, and besides Bumblebee makes her sound cuddly. That doesn’t work for me.

So here’s her “Anatomy of a Bully” post that all the FTB haters were so wowed by.

What is bullying?

Bullying is persistent unwelcome behavior, mostly using unwarranted or invalid criticism, nit-picking, fault-finding, also exclusion, shunning, being singled out and treated differently, being shouted at, humiliated, excessive monitoring, having verbal and written warnings imposed, and much more.

Excessive monitoring! Funny she should mention it. Hansen and her friends monitor a few selected people they hate very excessively indeed – daily and hourly, via tweets and blog posts. They seem to do nothing else while online. And then there’s “humiliated”…Not to mention  unwarranted or invalid criticism, nit-picking, fault-finding, exclusion, shunning, being singled out and treated differently. Check check check check check check check.

Bullying is present behind all forms of harassment, discrimination, prejudice, abuse, persecution, conflict and violence. When the bullying has a focus (e.g. race or gender) it is expressed as racial prejudice or harassment, or sexual discrimination and harassment, and so on.

No comment necessary.

Gang bullying is a serial bully with multiple partners. Gangs can occur anywhere, but flourish mostly in corporate, educational, and on-line arenas. If the bully is an extrovert, they are likely to be leading from the front; they may also be a shouter and screamer, and thus easily identifiable. If the bully is an introvert, that person will be in the background initiating the mayhem but probably not taking an active part, and may thus be harder to identify.

Half the people in the gang are happy for the opportunity to behave badly; they gain gratification from the feeling of power and control, and enjoy the patronage, protection and reward from the serial bully. The other half of the gang is coerced into joining in, usually through fear of being the next target if they don’t. If anything backfires, one of them will be the scapegoat on whom enraged targets will be encouraged to vent their anger. (Sound familiar, FTB?)

No, Kristina, not in the way you intended. It sounds like you and the other obsessives.

Cyber bullying is the misuse of email systems or Internet forums, Social media, blogs, etc for sending/writing aggressive, abusive, or belittling messages, statements, e-mails, or articles.

There is quite a good example of this happening recently on Greta Christina’s Blog, and on the Lousy Canuck where they thought it would be funny to take over the Twitter hashtag #FTBullies and use it to mock Paula Kirby who had written an open letter titled Sisterhood of the Oppressed, as well as any, and all those on Twitter who are speaking out against FTB and exposing their bullying for what it is.

No, it had nothing to do with Paula Kirby, or any other individual; it was mockery of the hashtag itself. It wasn’t personal and vicious the way Hansen’s disgusting post about Mike McCreight is.

The expert on bullies is a mind-searingly vicious bully herself.

Fucking hell. I keep thinking they can’t go any lower, but they always do.

Remember when all the FTB-haters were retweeting that post on bullying by “Wooly Bumblebee” at Is God a Squirrel? She’s an expert on bullying, she said. The haters were way impressed.

Today she has a post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post saying boo talking shit on the internet and yay Jen.

Yes you read that correctly. Wooly Bumblebee/Is God a Squirrel wrote a longish blog post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post defending his daughter.

You could light a small city with me right now.

Here’s some of Wooly’s shitting:

But, some parents are abject failures, such as Jen McCreight’s father. He has written a short blog post for and about Jen. He has come to her rescue, like a parent does for their small child, only Jen is not a child… She is an adult. Well, an adult in the sense that she is over 18 and looks older than 12. But apparently she still needs daddy to come to her rescue when she gets emotional. She still needs daddy to kiss her boo-boos and frighten the monsters away. She needs this because her daddy failed as a parent and never equipped his daughter with the tools she needs to get through life. It’s quite sad, and a great example of bad parenting.

When you coddle your kids constantly, refuse to see them as their own person, and feel the need to constantly prop up their ego, you get people like Jen. Jen should be completely embarrassed by the fact that her father wrote what he did. If she had any self-esteem she’d be furious that her daddy felt he had to come out and publicly chide everyone as if we are all 5 year olds because she got a boo-boo. She doesn’t because she is just like a child, and doesn’t see her daddy saying what he did as him actually infantilizing her.

This has to be the most pathetic thing I have yet to see. A grown woman being rescued by her daddy. It’s a fucking joke, and speaks volumes as to why she can’t handle the slightest little bump in the road. She is completely incapable of functioning as an adult. I rather pity her, and that is not a good thing.

Congratulations daddy dearest, and thank you for proving once and for all how completely incapable your little Jen really is.

Unfuckingbelievable.

I’ve turned on comments registration for awhile. The trolls have stepped up their merry pranks, so it can’t be helped. Sorry for the inconvenience.

An anti-corruption cartoonist in India has been arrested for sedition.

Mr Trivedi was arrested on Saturday for a series of cartoons lampooning politicians. He refused to apply for bail at Monday’s hearing, and said if telling the truth made him a traitor then he was happy to be described as one.

Cartoons lampooning politicians – if there’s anything you’re supposed to be able to do without interference from the state, it’s lampooning politicians.

Government officials say that while they are in favour of free speech, there is a thin line between that and insulting national symbols, the BBC’s Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi reports.

No…That’s doing it wrong. Really. You don’t want to make it a crime to “insult national symbols.”

But Indians have condemned Mr Trivedi’s arrest, calling it a “wrongful act”. Protesters on social networking sites said it was shameful that corrupt politicians were being let off while those who highlighted corruption were being jailed.

“From the information I have gathered, the cartoonist did nothing illegal and, in fact, arresting him was an illegal act,” the chairman of the Press Council of India, Markandey Katju, told The Hindu newspaper.

…

The arrest of Mr Trivedi comes after other recent controversy over cartoons in India.

In April, police arrested a professor in the eastern city of Calcutta for allegedly posting cartoons ridiculing West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the internet. He was later released.

A month later, a row over a cartoon showing Dalit icon BR Ambedkar in a school textbook disrupted the Indian parliament.

Cartoonists have been taking a lot of heat lately. India: do better.

The UK neuroscientist who blogs as (and at) Neuroskeptic reviewed Naomi Wolf’s new book for the New Statesman blog. I was surfing Twitter the other day at the moment when there was a deluge of tweets about Wolf and the book because everyone was watching Paxman interview her (and because I follow a great many people who watch things like that). Most were funny, all were scathing, and taken together they made for a hilarious few minutes. The review, however, just makes me cringe.

NS starts with an extract.

Words, when deployed in relation to the vagina, are always more than “just words”. Because of the subtlety of the mind-body connection, words about the vagina are also what philosopher John Austin, in his 1960 book How to Do Things with Words, calls “performative utterances”, often used as a means of social control. A “performative utterance” is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says “Guilty” to a defendant, or a groom says “I do”, the words alter material reality.

Studies have shown that verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina. One suggests that a stressful environment can negatively affect vaginal tissue itself…

Ogod make it stop. When deployed in relation to the vagina? Oh jeezis on toast does she do that throughout? Does she use “in relation to the vagina” for “to/at/around a woman”? Does she drag in seriousy-looking stuff to make it sound more seriousy ‘n’ true? Does she pretend the vagina has some kind of special receptivity to words?

NS comments on the extract.

True of course, but it’s nothing to do with vaginas specifically. Threats, admiration and reassurances all influence our stress levels, and stress can affect the function of the vagina. But the same could be said for any other organ: stress also affects the heart, the stomach, and even the penis.

So apparently she does. Ogod.

There’s a good deal more along the same lines.

Why would anyone do that? Write about neuroscience without being a neuroscientist?

It makes me cringe.

What’s the deal with people talking about sexism and someone asking “So is this only for women who experience sexism?”

The dialogue continues.

Someone: Women, then. I guess sexism doesn’t happen to men.

Replier: Always “What about the menz?”

Someone: No… always what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

Well duh, but why does that mean we can’t talk about sexism without being jostled and chivvied and harried for talking about something that happens to women? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t include a coda saying nobody must ever talk about or resist violations of the rights of particular people.

Shut up about racism, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about xenophobia, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about human rights in Iran, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about rape in DR Congo, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about anything particular, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

There is sexism. We can be against it. That doesn’t mean we want to take away your rights. Singling out one form of oppression doesn’t entail approving of all the others.

Isn’t this just a little obvious?

An ad I keep noticing here and there. The copy says

How Cruise Lines Fill All Those Unsold Cabins

And the image is

It couldn’t get much cruder, could it. (Well it could. It could skip the bikini and aim the camera up between her legs. But other than that…)

Hay! Look! Legs bum sex! Now click on the ad.

(I suppose they fill all those unsold cabins with women’s bums? That must be it?)

Martin Pribble discusses the results of his 3 Questions project, Part One.

The first question was

How does your worldview, (atheism, skepticism or agnosticism, whichever is applicable to you), influence your life?

Martin summarizes the replies:

It seems to me that atheism/agnosticism/skepticism is either seen as a platform from which to build all of life’s experiences, or that it is just accepted as “the way things are”. In either case, it does inform parts of the respondents’ lives, particularly when it comes to the analysis of doubtful claims.

What it does show is that, of the 326 respondents, there is a level of certainty about how their worldview of atheism/agnosticism/skepticism influences their lives, and that most respondents did see this as an important part of them being themselves.

Many of the replies that Martin quotes are skeptical more than atheist; I chose to answer as an atheist. Atheism is more close to the bone, in a way – it’s about rejecting one tyrant, one Big Boss, one imposed celestial dictator. Theism is the model for all kinds of tyranny, so it shapes our thinking in bad ways. The Boss in question is a big deal, and makes big demands on us. Not believing in it makes a difference specifically because of that. I replied from that point of view.

My atheism frees me from thinking I have to obey a mysterious hidden god that I’ve never met or encountered or had any communication with. It frees me from thinking I have to obey rules I think are vicious and horrible. It frees me to judge moral questions in human, this-world terms.

I never stop being grateful for that.

Don’t miss Bruce Everett’s great piece, “…assuming the mantle”.

I’ll give you a teaser to make sure that you don’t.

I didn’t get it, and I haven’t got it for most of the time. I’m only just getting it – the faux-masculine shibboleths that I’m expected to observe, in order to be ‘one of the guys’.

Especially the degradation of women as rite of passage.

Don’t get me wrong…

I’m nobody’s knight in shining armour (I think this will be the last time I repeat this for some time), and I don’t believe in chivalry towards women – chivalry, as opposed to decency, assumes that women are frail objects to be protected like delicate porcelain in a world they’re not equipped to deal with. Women are no such thing.

I’ve got an interest in this. If pseudo- and actual misogyny are used as defining criteria for what it is to be masculine, then I consider that an imposture. I don’t want that group identity lumbered on me, and moreover, I’m willing, if imposed upon, to fight for my stake in masculine culture to the exclusion of other men.

Gentlemen, if you’re going to make an asshole out of yourself in the first instance, I’m not going to take much notice when you make squeals of indignation, when you get a little comeuppance. That is unless, I find it justifiable, useful, and entertaining, to laugh at you.

Seriously though, some men really shit me. The things that some of you expect me to take on board as normal, or healthy, or unappealing-but-otherwise-not-rebarbative.

Read the whole thing.

Brian Earp is unimpressed by the American Academy of Pediatrics ’s (how do you make a possessive out of that, anyway?) revision of its policy on circumcision.

They now say that the probabilistic health benefits conferred by the procedure just slightly outweigh the known risks and harms. Not enough to come right out and positively recommend circumcision (as some media outlets are erroneously reporting), but just enough to suggest that whenever it is performed—for cultural or religious reasons, or sheer parental preference, as the case may be—it should be covered by government health insurance.

That turns out to be a very fine line to dance on. But fear not: the AAP policy committee comes equipped with tap shoes tightly-laced, and its self-appointed members have shown themselves to be hoofers of the nimblest kind. Their position statement is full of equivocations, hedging, and uncertainty; and the longer report upon which it is based is replete with non-sequiturs, self-contradiction, and blatant cherry-picking of essential evidence. Both documents shine as clear examples of a “lowest common denominator” mélange birthed by a divided committee, some of whose members must be well aware that United States is embarrassingly out of tune with world opinion on this issue.

Child health experts in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada say there is no meaningful benefit and it shouldn’t be recommended. Seems fair. There is no meaningful benefit, so don’t snip off a bit of the penis. Err on the side of not snipping off, because no meaningful benefit.

In view of this empirical uncertainty on the medical question, it is problematic to assert, as the AAP does in its new report, that a person does not retain the right to decide whether he wishes to keep his own healthy foreskin–and preserve his genitals in their natural form–and that the right belongs instead to his parents.

Which is odd, because they have their own genitals. Why don’t they alter their own if they want to alter? Why is it always vicarious?

A more reasonable conclusion than the AAP’s, then, is that the person whose penis it is should be allowed to consider, for himself, the available evidence (in all its chaotic murkiness) when he is mentally competent to do so—and make a personal decision about what is, after all, a functional bit of his own sexual anatomy and one enjoyed without issue by the vast majority of the world’s males.

Ah but liberals. Choice. Secularism. Community. Just ask Giles Fraser.