I hate outdoor Halloween displays more every year. They haven’t always been a thing – back in the 18th century when I was a kid, there was a carved pumpkin and that was it. You didn’t have every yard full of rotting corpses and that stupid cobweb shit draped all over everything.

But some displays are disgusting in a whole other way. The story at AlterNet is titled Kentucky Woman Doesn’t Find Display Of Black People Hanging From Her Tree Offensive

so that’s how that one is disgusting.

A Halloween display depicting what appears to be a black family hanging from a tree outside of a Kentucky residence has been taken down after people complained about it. The house is

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If you have a goddy hatred of the whole idea of same-sex marriage and you’re seeing hurdle after hurdle fall in defiance of your goddy hatred, what do you do? You go on goddily hating it, of course, but also you make a big fuss about “religious freedom” for people whose jobs entail some kind of involvement with marriage. Hollis Phelps at RD gives an example:

The strategy has fallen instead to “protecting” those whose religious opposition to same-sex marriage may conflict with the law.

That includes public employees whose regular duties include issuing marriage licenses and officiating marriages, such county registers of deeds, magistrates, and their employees. As The Charlotte Observer reported, the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition,

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Alastair Smart at the Telegraph asks a question that I have wondered about many many times – How did we forget William Hazlitt?

Seriously. The guy was a demon writer, and a genuine thinker. He was also interesting to read. How and why did he get so obscure?

Certainly, even by the non-specialist standards of his day, he had a mighty range: a philosopher, journalist, political commentator, grammar theorist, theatre critic, art critic, travel writer, memoirist – not to mention, biographer of Napoleon. Here was a serious thinker, for whom every pursuit fed into life’s deeper questions. His rise coincided with that of Romanticism. Indeed, though our popular image of the movement is dominated by its poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge,

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Tuesday the North Dakota Supreme Court upheld a state law that limits the use of drugs to perform abortions. Yes that’s right, North Dakota, the state that has one count them ONE abortion clinic for a state that’s 70,762 square miles / 183,272 square kilometers in area.

The state’s high court, in a 103-page ruling, reversed a ruling by a district judge last year that found the 2011 law violates the state constitution.

“Beginning tomorrow morning, there will not be any medication abortions in North Dakota,” said David Brown, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is helping North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic in Fargo with its legal challenges.

No pill-based abortions for you, North Dakota sluts! … Read the rest

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Yesterday the pope took a moment to tell us not to underestimate the devil.

Francis described Christian life as a continuous battle against Satan during his homily at morning Mass at the Vatican on Thursday (Oct. 30).

Oh yeah? That’s what it is? All the more reason to be glad I’m not a Christian then.

“This generation, and many others, have been led to believe that the devil is a myth, a figure, an idea, the idea of evil,” the pope told the faithful during Mass at the St. Martha guesthouse where he lives inside the walls of the Vatican.

Yes, Mr Bergoglio, that’s because it is. It’s a supernatural or magical immortal being with superpowers, dreamed up by … Read the rest

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Scott Kaufman watched Christina Hoff Sommers’s latest video, which is nice, because it means I don’t need to.

Sommers says the GamerGate people are “a voice for moderation in today’s fevered debates over sex and gender.”

According to Sommers, GamerGate is merely a group of gamers who either “believe there is too much corruption and cronyism in gaming journalism” or “are weary of cultural critics who evaluate video games through the prism of social justice.”

Why is that a bad way to evaluate video games or any other cultural artifact? Why are we not supposed to think and talk about the ways cultural artifacts shape our thinking about anything and everything, including about kinds of people who are seen … Read the rest

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Iram Ramzan takes on Yvonne Ridley.

[A]ccording to Muslim convert and Respect party activist Yvonne Ridley, the war in Afghanistan was a total failure. On Twitter, she said: “So Taliban undefeated, no career women emerging from rubble & only success story is the rapid growth of opium in Afghanistan.”

While the situation in Afghanistan is far from ideal, there are some good things to have emerged since the western intervention, one of them being the the education of women, which I pointed out to her.

.@yvonneridley in 2000 there were no girls going to school in Afghanistan. In 2012, 36% of pupils were girls. I’d say that’s an achievement

Ridley denied this, saying that there were girls in school

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In case ya missed it – Anita Sarkeesian on the Colbert Report.

Lots of applause and squeeing.

At the end Colbert kind of dropped the persona.… Read the rest

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Well, ok, just to confuse everyone, I’m going to disagree with one feminist claim about street harassment. The claim is in a piece by Kat George (whose work I’m not familiar with) on the harassment video and what counts as harassment. She starts with the fact that with any harassment story there are always men and some women who will say “oh but that’s not harassment, it’s just being nice.” True enough. But then she goes on.

Here’s the thing: by the inherent nature of being a woman walking in the street, almost ALL uninvited attention from men is threatening. Women are victims of sexual violence EVERY SINGLE DAY, even in “liberal” cities like New York. Whether it’s a

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I had barely finished that post about Stefan Molyneux and his occasional collaboration with Peter Boghossian and my stubborn difficulty taking in just how right-wing some popular atheist men are, when my attention was drawn to a new provocation by Boghossian.

I’ve never understood how someone could be proud of being gay. How can one be proud of something one didn’t work for?

That’s a tweet as well as a Facebook post. His FB posts are all public, so public discussion is possible.

Lindsay Beyerstein pointed out that one way one can be proud of what one worked for in this context has to do with the courage and work it takes to come out. Is it ok with … Read the rest

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Hanna Rosin at Slate takes on the glaring flaw in that street harassment video: the shortage of white guys doing any harassing.

The one dude who turns around and says, “Nice,” is white, but the guys who do the most egregious things—like the one who harangues her, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful! You should say thank you more,” or the one who follows her down the street too closely for five whole minutes—are not.

This doesn’t mean that the video doesn’t still effectively make its point: that a woman can’t walk down the street lost in her own thoughts, that men feel totally free to demand her attention and get annoyed when she doesn’t respond, that a woman

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For your viewing pleasure – David Futrelle created a brief video excerpted from a very long video by libertarian MRA Stefan Molyneux.

I stopped listening a bit after minute 1, but I may go back to it later. I stopped at the line

All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes.

I stopped there because it’s all I needed for the moment. That’s his claim. All the bad men in all the places? They’re all the fault of women, because they came out of vaginas. Never mind all the bad men; BLAME THEIR MOTHERS.

What made me curious about Stefan Molyneux? The fact that atheoskeptic guy Peter Boghossian has done … Read the rest

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the reactions to the Hollaback harassment video.

[T]he woman in the video, actress Shoshana B. Roberts, and the anti-harassment organization that sponsored it, Brooklyn-based Hollaback!, have also received a host of death and rape threats, officials say. Those threats, which have been passed along to New York City police, underscore how casually some people view street harassment, experts say.

“We’ve had so many people reach out saying, ‘Thank God, this is exactly what my day looks like,’ or people who were shocked, saying, ‘I had no idea that this is what women face. I’m so grateful,’” said Emily May, the co-founder and executive director of Hollaback!. “But we’ve also gotten this tremendous backlash

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Nine and a half million people have watched the video that documents street harassment in New York.

The selected comments are depressing. Of course.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by sambarge on Yes yes.

The de-valuation of work by feminization is fully documented in labour history. The reason we talk about pay equity (versus equal pay for the same job) is the valuation or classification of labour or job duties that are viewed a “feminine” or “masculine”. Physical strength, for example, is rated higher than accuracy in data entry and, not surprisingly, physical strength is a stereotypically male trait (unless we’re talking about labour that requires physical strength that is defined as female such as housekeeping or laundry workers, then there are no points or recognition for the physical strength required to do the job).

The easiest examples of the devaluation of work when it … Read the rest

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Simon Davis interviews Katha Pollitt for VICE on the launch of her new book saying why abortion is a good thing.

It’s not surprising that many people who don’t want to see all abortion clinics shut down have bought into a few of the assumptions of the pro-life movement. The result is what we have today: a situation where a majority of people believe abortion should be mostly legal but frowned upon.

Which is why I wrote that piece for Free Inquiry a few months ago.

It is precisely those people that Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation, wants to speak to in her new book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, which came out just as the Supreme Court

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That zany pope. One minute he’s saying friendly things about evolution and gravity and shit, and the next he’s sharing the love with exorcists. Exorcists.

Just in time for Halloween and against an unspecified “steady increase” of demonic possession, Pope Francis thanked exorcists for showing the church’s “love for those possessed” by the devil.

About 300 exorcists from around the world attended a convention in Rome last weekend (Oct. 25-26) and their spokesman later expressed concern about the number of people turning to Satanism and the occult.

In a message sent to the Rev. Francesco Bamonte, who heads the International Association of Exorcists (known as AIE), Francis urged the experts to demonstrate “the church welcomes those suffering from

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A tv show rented a newly constructed house in a suburb and set up appointments with several psychics to check on hidden spirits and forces and fossnagles. They also set up a dozen hidden cameras to capture the skilled professional checking.

[A] duo named Susan and Rev. Joseph said there was negative energy in the house. “It’s negative in the sense that it could cause setbacks, it can cause financial setbacks,” Susan said. To purge it, they burned incense and chanted all over the house, and claimed to have trapped the negative energy in a bottle.

Despite their supposed abilities, the psychics were not aware that Jeff Rossen had been monitoring their activities from a control room upstairs in the

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Huh. Another Dear Muslima, because the last one worked out so well.

He appears to be talking, or to think he’s talking, about timidity in making moral judgments. But how odd, and how deeply unpleasant, that he chooses that example of all possible examples. That it’s the rights of US women he chooses to hold up to ridicule and hostility because they are less threatened than those of women in theocracies. It’s odd and deeply unpleasant the way they keep doing this – letting the mask slip.

Update: This is also a public Facebook post, which makes it easier to reply to.… Read the rest

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