Arthur Chu has a brilliant piece at Salon about why the Internet is so susceptible to throngs of obsessive bullies who won’t ever ever ever go away.

The “vote” doesn’t end up being among everyone but among the tiny subset of people who really care about that question, which isn’t necessarily correlated with being right about that question–often, in fact, it’s the opposite.

The people who pay the most attention to these questions are the people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it. That can happen on any end of the political spectrum, but in practice? It

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The Armenian genocide. A century ago. At least humans have outgrown genocide since then.

Oh wait…

Widely accepted historical accounts say that between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives at the hands of Ottoman forces in what was then eastern Turkey.

Between 1915 and 1922 the Teskilat e-Mahsus (special organisation) carried out a campaign of mass murder, deportation, pillage and rape against the minority Christian Armenians.

What does that sound like? Oh…Yazidi, Ahmadiyya, Uyghur, Jews, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, foreigners, natives, aboriginals…

The Guardian received more than 500 responses to a callout for first-hand experiences of persecution. Some are based on transcripts and audio recordings, others are stories recited through the generations.

While it is impossible to

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David Futrelle pays attention to Vox Day so that the rest of us don’t have to. That’s a service. He finds him admitting something about GamerGate.

[T]he interview also featured a few striking moments of candor. One of these came when Day — a sometime gave developer as well as the biggest asshole in Sci Fi — offered his answer to the question: “What is Gamergate really about?”

Suggesting that the issue of “corruption in game journalism” was little more than “the spark that set the whole thing off,” Day declared that

what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being

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Rosie DiManno at the Star is repulsed by the rejoicing over the “clarification” by Justice Edward. She is rude enough to point out that it’s a good outcome for JJ but not for her predecessor.

It is nothing less than a tragedy that a second family lost their own similarly afflicted 11-year-old daughter, Makayla Sault, after chemotherapy was spurned.

The two cases are linked because, in both instances, Brant Children and Family Services refused to intervene and compel chemo by taking the girls into agency care.

In the J.J. matter, Justice Gethin Edward ruled last November that the child was not in need of removal from the bosom of her loving family and, further — shockingly — that the

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Remember? The ruling by Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice that it was ok for parents to take their child off chemotherapy for leukemia because they’re First Nations people  and

Maybe First Nations culture doesn’t require every child to be treated with chemotherapy and to survive for that culture to have value.

Well now he’s “clarified” that ruling.

The clarification of a controversial court ruling that allowed the mother of an 11-year-old First Nations girl to pull her out of chemotherapy says the best interests of the child are “paramount,” but traditional medicine must be respected.

It is a “significant qualification” of Ontario court Judge Gethin Edward’s November 2014 ruling, according to one legal expert, which

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Guest post by Leo Igwe.

The photos of UK Prime Minister David Cameron shaking hands with the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Rev Enoch Adeboye at the Festival of Life program holding in London must disgust anyone who knows about the teachings and positions of Adeboye and his church, particularly on issues of homosexuality and witchcraft. Rev Adeboye was one of the pastors who openly canvassed support for the anti gay marriage bill stating that homosexuality would wipe out humanity.

He said:

Same-sex marriage is an anathema to the will of God for human beings to be fruitful, replenish and multiply on earth. Anything contrary to that is evil.

How can a man who marries

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An interesting comment at PZ’s by Keith Monaghan.

Irish Atheist here. I used to be a supporter and paying member of Atheist Ireland until all this went down and Nugent went off the rails. He has poisoned the entire organisation with his willingness to defend abusers and provide a forum to known harassers. Not to mention his embarrassing brown nosing of our great “thought leaders” Dawkins, et al. It’s a real shame because many in Atheist Ireland have been doing great work regarding raising awareness about our ridiculous blasphemy law and the overwhelming control of our schools by the Catholic Church among a great many other abuses committed in the name of religion.

But just as the charitable acts of

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Nick Cohen looks at the way Lutfur Rahman exploited leftwing ideas to protect his own personal power.

[H]e rigged the vote by using “undue spiritual influence”, an accusation unheard of in a British court since the 19th century. Rahman persuaded clerics to go far beyond saying they thought he was the best candidate. Islam is under threat, they said in so many words. It was the duty of all Muslims to vote for Rahman. If Bangladeshi voters did not, they would be siding with their Islamophobic enemies, perhaps even defying god’s will.

We are used to thinking of racism as Nigel Farage or the Tory tabloids egging on their readers to see the Aids-afflicted foreigner as the enemy. Indeed, it

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Well so much for Labour.

From the Indy:

Labour leader Ed Miliband has said his party will make Islamophobia an aggravated crime, toughing existing hate crime legislation.

Mr Miliband also said that his party intended to ensure that instances of Islamophobia were marked on peoples’ records, in an interview with The Muslim Times.

Although Islamophobia already falls under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, whereby it is punishable by up to seven years imprisonment, Mr Miliband’s proposal would allow authorities to hand down tougher sentences for similar crimes.

“We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root

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Guest post by Simon Trepel, MD. He has more essays at Simon’s Creative Behavioural Therapy.

Truthfully, I probably would not have cared so much, about the shitty thing that Lubitz did, but I was literally stranded on a desert island, thousands of miles across the ocean from home, when he crashed the plane. Now, stranded is a relative term, the island was Hawaii, and I could only be less stranded while being on a desert island, if I was in Australia. But that is where I received the parcel of hate that he chose to deliver to my meme mailbox, that elephant part of your brain that never forgets, yet we call it the hippocampus. That would be a … Read the rest

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Another “uh oh no you can’t make jokes about erm you know that one guy” episode, this time at the University of Bath.

[“]According to CWIPS” was the title of the performance that had the cramped, upstairs-corner of the Bath Brew House roaring with laughter. The show combined pop culture, Richard Dawkins, and the bestseller of all time – the Bible – to construct an amusingly witty performance. However, prior to the opening night, the society was met with some rather strong requests to edit the show.

…

[D]uring the opening week one of the SU officials quietly attended one of the rehearsals. Just four hours prior to opening night the committee of CWIPS was told that a sketch

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More from Siobhan Heanue, because she’s a journalist (for ABC, the Oz one) and she was looking at temples when the earthquake hit, so she’s tweeting these heartrending photos.

12 hours ago there was this

LIVE on #Periscope: Patan Durbar Square Kathmandu Nepal https://www.periscope.tv/w/Vxxh_zkyNDU5fDcwMDA0MjN-CfrLnC9NHLD72y5BqYsxHoOM8DxADi3oiGWyFeAi9w== …

Then an hour later

Huge earthquake in Kathmandu. I’m terrified.

Locals dragged her into a cafe, she said, but she was still afraid; aftershocks.

Then the first photo

Devastation in patan. Kathmandu earthquake.

Then more photos

Kathmandu patan district. Old royal square devastated.

Looking for survivors:

Kathmandu quake aftermath. Clearing rubble to search for survivors.

She has lots more. Good luck to her.… Read the rest

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Meanwhile in Nepal…

(I must say I was disgusted to go to Google News for earthquake news and find at the top of the page headlines about ten dead on Everest rather than the hundreds dead in Nepal. A little too katiehopkinsesque, that.)

CNN has accounts from people in Kathmandu.

Kashish Das Shrestha in Kathmandu

“Some of the historical sites are completely devastated.

“Most of the people — a lot of the people — are walking through the city. They’re confused and scared. A lot of people are crying.

“They’re out with their pets and their families and a lot of locals are volunteering in rescue operations.

“In several parts of Kathmandu, a lot of people seem trapped under

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I’ve seen the name Eboo Patel often in discussions of “interfaith” activities, but I haven’t (that I recall) read anything of his until now. He has a long piece at Religion Dispatches arguing that we should be more accommodating toward haredi men who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes. That’s where “interfaith” takes you, I guess. It’s where privileging “faith” over more reasonable and careful ways of thinking takes you.

He starts by pointing out that people often do change their seats to be helpful to others – parents traveling with children for instance.

The obvious question: why is exchanging seats on an airplane with a senior citizen, a mother with children or a uniformed veteran considered

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Originally a comment by latsot on Actual dehumanization.

As awful as Hopkins is, the UK media are at least equally to blame (I’d argue they more to blame than Hopkins herself) for all her hateful nonsense. I don’t just mean outlets like The Sun. If anything, the more liberal outlets are even more complicit.

Hopkins has set herself up as a professional troll: professional with a capital P. According to an article I now can’t find, she has a team of people scouring news stories and (it’s presumed) coming up with the objectionable responses they can think of, which are then announced by Hopkins. Media outlets call her office for a rent-a-bigot quote. I wouldn’t be surprised if they … Read the rest

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A Catholic girls’ school in Croydon is telling students a bunch of bullshit about what secks will do to them.

Students at a Catholic girls’ school have been warned that sex outside marriage can “destroy their soul” and “make their bodies sick”.

The “warnings” were handed out to 17 and 18-year-olds during a Sixth Form talk at Coloma Convent Girls’ School, in Shirley, Croydon.

Leaflets handed out during a personal, social and health education session (PSHE) warned that condoms and the morning-after pill put people “at risk” and make them “isolated”.

Well it’s like this. Some very puritanical Catholics hate secks and hate girls who do secks and especially hate girls who do secks with pills or condoms. So girls … Read the rest

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One way to make a point about vaccinations…

That was posted on Facebook by an Australian anti-vax group. The SMH reports
:

It is not the first time the group has made the same comparison. In a tweet in January 2011, the group compared a court ordering a five-year-old girl to be vaccinated to “court orders rape of a child”.

Almost immediately, supporters of the group expressed their disgust, with one commentator, Rachelle Taylor, posting: “This is disgusting. Are you saying you believe your child being immunised is as bad as your child being raped? This could also be very triggering for victims of sexual assault.”

The group responded to one comment on its page, defending its decision to liken

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