Rose Eveleth at the Atlantic reports on Twitter’s new moves to improve its practices on harassment. (Rose Eveleth herself got considerable harassment from people enraged at the objections to Matt Taylor’s shirt.)

It’s no secret that Twitter is currently playing host to an uptick in targeted harassment. The site has long provided an easy way for people to lob hostile and threatening messages into someone’s timeline, but things seem to be getting worse, not better. Gamergate targets like Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Breanna Wu have all been inundated with death and rape threats that have forced them to cancel talks and flee their homes. After her father’s death, Zelda Williams—Robin Williams’s daughter—quit the social network after sustained harassment.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

James Croft writes – in a guest post at Friendly Atheist – about atheism and humanism and

1. their failure to do enough about racism
2. what some humanists have been doing about racism

He thinks they should be doing more, and that what the humanists are doing is important.

I stress our engagement because it is representative of a long tradition of Humanist passion for social justice — a tradition that is frequently overlooked even by Humanists themselves. While many of us can reel off the names of a few prominent individual activists who have been Humanists, few know that there is a history of organized social justice work that is explicitly Humanist, motivated by Humanist values and supported by Humanist

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The New Republic has abruptly disintegrated, NPR reports.

We have more news today on The New Republic, which on Thursday announced that it was cutting its publication schedule, moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to New York and rebranding as a digital media company – decisions that prompted the departure of editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

The majority of the magazine’s masthead resigned today, including senior editors Julia Ioffe, Noam Scheiber, executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis, and contributing editors Anne Applebaum and Jonathan Chait. (You can find the full list over at Politico.)

It has emerged that Foer resigned after discovering that TNR’s owner, Chris Hughes, had already hired Gabriel Snyder,

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The Washington Post has done a big investigation into the Rolling Stone account of a gang-rape at the University of Virginia and has found a lot of discrepancies and holes in the story.

A lawyer for the University of Virginia fraternity whose members were accused of a brutal gang rape said Friday that the organization will release a statement rebutting the claims printed in a Rolling Stone article about the incident. Several of the woman’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates expressed doubt about the published account, and the magazine’s editors also apologized to readers for discrepancies in the story.

Naturally Sommers is rejoicing.

The Post continues.

Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, also released a

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Orion took off and went 3,600 miles up and orbited twice and came back, dropping into the Pacific 600 miles off the coast of California. It sent some snaps.

The view from up there:

Here’s Earth as seen from #Orion during its flight out to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles away from the planet.

There’s also a very cool (very meta) snap of the ISS crew watching the launch.

A snap on the way back down:

… Read the rest

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The BBC reports that some UN boffins have expressed worries about this pattern we seem to be developing in the US of failing to indict cops who kill unarmed people.

“I am concerned by the grand juries’ decisions and the apparent conflicting evidence that exists relating to both incidents,” UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsak, said in a statement.

A trial process would ensure the evidence is considered in detail, she said.

“The decisions leave many with legitimate concerns relating to a pattern of impunity when the victims of excessive use of force come from African-American or other minority communities.”

They do, yes. The Eric Garner case, especially, is horrifying. He wasn’t rushing at anyone, he was … Read the rest

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From A Mighty Girl:

At age 23, British secret agent Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy in May 1944 to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France’s liberation in August. For seventy years, her contributions to the war effort have been largely unheralded but, last week, the 93-year-old was finally given her due when she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Doyle first joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at age 20 in 1941 to work as a flight mechanic but SOE recruiters spotted her potential and

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My November column for The Freethinker is out.

It asks a question.

What do we do with the thought that some things are more important than others? Specifically, how do we deal with the awareness that some human problems are more urgent and pressing than others? How do we sort them, how do we rank them, how do we decide which ones we should pay most attention to?

I talk about the variety of things I discuss on my blog (hey that’s right here) and say that I don’t really know how to rank them, and don’t particularly want to.

I understand the thinking behind good-faith efforts to rank degrees of misery. There is such a thing as being spoiled,

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A long long list of Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry are urging the news media to stop referring to climate deniers as “skeptics.” Pass it on.

Public discussion of scientific topics such as global warming is confused by misuse of the term “skeptic.” The Nov 10, 2014, New York Times article “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” referred to Sen. James Inhofe as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” Two days later Scott Horsley of NPR’s Morning Edition called him “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” These are not equivalent statements.

As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we are concerned that the words “skeptic” and “denier”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So a kid age 7 reads a book about insects with much enjoyment, then when she gets to the back cover she sees that it says the book is for boys.

Publishers? Don’t do that.

You don’t say “books for white people” do you? Don’t say “books for boys” either.

Parker Dains, seven, from Milpitas in California, wrote to Abdo Publishing after she discovered that the Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs that she was reading was part of a series called the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys. She told her local paperthe Milpitas Post: “It made me very unhappy. I was like, ‘What the?’ I said, ‘Dad we have to do something quickly.’”

So she wrote to

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So so so so so so funny.

[Description: two photos: one, a bunch of US-football players captioned “how America sees the 49ers”; two, the same bunch of US-football players wearing pink skirts over their uniforms captioned “How Seattle sees the 49ers”]

Contempt for the female just never gets old, does it.… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

I know the New York Post is a Murdoch paper but come on. NY Post columnist Bob McManus says it was Eric Garner’s fault that the cops choked him to death.

Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions.

Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police.

And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law.

The law won, of course, as it almost always does.

What was the law that Garner was supposed to have broken? The law against selling … Read the rest

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Oh look, what a coincidence. Last April, a cop choked a guy while a bystander took pictures…and the cop was immediately fired.

Guess what the choked person isn’t. Besides dead.

Frank Phillips, a Knox County Sheriff’s officer, was fired Sunday night after a series of pictures taken by photographer John Messner were published in the Daily Mail in Britain. They showed an officer identified by the Sheriff’s Office as Phillips grabbing 21-year-old college student Jarod Dotson around the neck and squeezing him until he fell to his knees.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Missouri man drove his van through a crowd of protesters in St Louis last night, and then waved a gun at them.

According to the St. Louis Dispatch, activists were preparing for a “die-in” demonstration, which includes lying in the street, in Maryland Plaza at around 8 p.m. to protest the decision not to charge the officer whose illegal use of a chokehold resulted in the death of Eric Garner.

“As they did, a man driving a Town and Country minivan drove through the intersection and accelerated through the crowd,” the paper reported.

Well maybe he was late for dinner and the pesky protesters were in his way. Look at it from his point of view.

After a

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Surprisingly (to me at least), a high-up in the Southern Baptist Convention has gone off on racism, Sarah Posner reports.

After the failure yesterday of a grand jury to indict the New York police officer who was videotaped choking Eric Garner to death, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, launched into a denunciation of racism in the church on the ERLC’s program “Questions and Ethics.”

Saying he was “shocked and grieved” by the news, Moore added:

Romans 13 says that the sword of justice is to be wielded against evildoers.

Now, what we too often see still is a situation where our African-American brothers and sisters, especially brothers, are more likely to

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The earliest sunset of the year (in the northern hemisphere) is almost on us. I didn’t know, until Leonard Tramiel told me last summer around the time of the solstice, that the earliest and latest sunrise and sunset don’t occur on the solstice. Bruce McClure at EarthSky explains.

The next solstice in 2014 comes on December 21 and marks an unofficial beginning for winter in the Northern Hemisphere. For this hemisphere, this upcoming solstice brings the shortest day and longest night of the year. And yet the earliest sunsets for middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere happen around December 7.

It seems paradoxical. At middle latitudes in the U.S. – and throughout the Northern Hemisphere – the earliest sunsets

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Nice.

America’s favorite Irish-terrorism-supporter-elected-to-Congress took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to thank the Staten Island grand jury for its decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July death of Eric Garner after being placed in a chokehold while under arrest.

“Thanks to SI grand jury for doing justice & not yielding to outside pressure,” King (or a social media intern) pecked out Wednesday afternoon. “Decision must be respected.”

The congressman — who once reaffirmed his support for Irish terrorists after their attack on Royal forces in Ireland, and who thinks journalists should be arrested for practicing free speech — added: “Compassion for the Garner family.”

Ah yes “outside pressure” – otherwise known as citizens objecting to … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So, we’re just going to keep doing this now?

A grand jury in Staten Island has decided not indict New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in relation to the death of Eric Garner.

That’s even though Pantaleo was seen on video putting Eric Garner in an apparent choke hold in July, according to city officials and lawyers for Garner’s family. An apparent choke hold that actually choked him to death. His last words were, “I can’t breathe.”

Fuck.

There is a federal investigation.

An official with the U.S. Department of Justice confirms there is a federal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Eric Garner.

…

Garner family attorney Jonathan Moored told the Associated Press that

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Reading Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club. In chapter 7 she goes to Austin to sit in on Texas Board of Education hearings in March 2010. Many astonishing things were said there.

The conservatives on the board want to make clear that the free enterprise system that makes America great has nothing to do with a universal concern for public policy and the common good – a concern they believe carries the dreaded taint of socialism. On a list of characteristics of good citizenship for grades 1 through 3, the board majority decided to expunge references to “justice” and “responsibility for the common good.”

That one makes me feel something very like nausea of the brain.

Another part of

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Originally a comment by Hj Hornbeck on Guest post: Sexism squanders human resources.

Historically, families have always had at least two “incomes.” Even people who buy into a strict division of labour between the sexes concede that all sexes brought food to the table, from picking berries to doing farm chores. This is quite stable against adversity; if one person cannot provide for the family, they can try to subsist on another person’s contribution. Arbitrary restrictions on what each sex can do artificially limit that capacity, and endanger survival.

On rare occasions, though, a single provider has been enough to feed an entire family. Artificial restrictions aren’t a factor anymore, and don’t face the opposition they would in a … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)