Renee Hendricks has her facts wrong. She has a post on The Women Behind AtheismPlus, and she says there are three, and I’m one.

I’m going to try very hard to make this the last spiel I have on “Atheism Plus”. It’s hard simply because I hate seeing the community I’ve come to love be so divided and actually hampered by the creation of a group intent on co-opting not only the term “atheism” but also a logo (apparently the A+ logo on http://atheismplus.com is from a tee-shirt that has been available on Richard Dawkins site for over 4 years). What is more distressing and pertinent to women is that there are 3 women behind the “movement”: Jen McCreight,

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Another petition you can sign, this one recommended to me by Bruce Everett. It’s to put some heat on Alan “destroying the joint” Jones. Formally it’s to urge advertisers to get him to apologize, but really I think it’s to get him to take some heat. (I mean who cares if he apologizes, really? What good is that? But some heat might décourager les autres.… Read the rest

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Via Lauryn Oates, a terrific article on the myth that the hijab protects women against sexual assault.

I was only 6 years old when my family was forced to flee the civil war in Afghanistan for Pakistan in the late 1980s. My sister, Neelo, who is five years older than me, was enrolled in a Saudi-funded Muslim Brotherhood-inspired public school for Afghan refugees. She, like many Muslim women, wore a simple headscarf.

I remember Neelo picking up her tiny bag, wrapping her scarf around her hair, and going to her first day of school. I also sadly remember her coming back from school that day and telling our parents: “The guards told me, ‘Either you are going to wear

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The good news is, Rimsha has been granted bail. The bad news is, it’s about $10,500 or £6,200. The worse news is, would anyone keep her safe if she did make bail?

The BBC’s M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says Rimsha is the first person accused of blasphemy to have been granted bail by a trial court.

Blasphemy is not a bailable offence but her lawyers pleaded that she was a juvenile.

Blasphemy is not a bailable offence. Blasphemy is not a bailable offence. Would you believe it? It shouldn’t even be a crime, yet it’s such a crime that it’s not even bailable.

Honestly, you would think that Allah really existed and lived in an actual palace … Read the rest

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There was huge (two people) demand for a picture of the book so I took a video still. What Kurdish readers will see:

… Read the rest

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Neil Denny of Little Atoms pointed out to me this piece on comedians using their fans to gang up on critics yesterday.

Being a public figure on the internet means having to deal with a barrage of abuse, which has been covered on this blog before, in my podcast interviews with Jonnie Marbles and Charlie Brooker.  It’s unpleasant and unnecessary, but people quickly become emboldened by the deindividuation that occurs when their identities are withheld, given that there’s no chance of getting a punch in the hooter.  Stewart Lee’s current show, Carpet Remnant World, involves a whittled down list of the most frothingly insane online critiques he could find on internet messageboards and social networking sites.  The “40,000 words

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Just a small one, and utterly routine, but then that’s just it – it’s routine.

An ad I saw on tv last night, or half saw, because I was doing something else besides – probably playing “toss the squeaky hedgehog” with Cooper. Something about a thing for guys, a thing guys like, a guy type thing. A cable channel, or service, or something like that. Anyway the “don’t you wish you could join all this fun” part was guys watching a game on tv and doing the usual sporty chatter and laughter.

Line of dialogue:

He throws like my sister!

Jolly guyish laughter.

So. Young girls exposed to that get more twigs added to the stereotype that Girls Can’t Throw … Read the rest

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There’s been a fair bit of discussion of Edwin Kagin’s post on atheism+ yesterday. I haven’t read most of it though, just seen it in passing. I want to comment on a couple of things.

We are now experiencing a most divisive phenomenon where some atheists are viciously excoriating other atheists for not embracing loudly enough certain of a list of worthy causes to which they are joined.

That seems a very back-to-front way of putting it. The vicious excoriation has been coming from a coalition of haters of feminism and of feminists and, arguably, of women in general. It’s been coming from them for more than a year. It comes with (at the extremes, and there are lots … Read the rest

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Rebecca says she’s just going to do it more. I say that too, likewise.

Let’s do it more.… Read the rest

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Ew. One of those Creepy Moments in Cyberstalking things, when you realize there’s a whole level of stalking you didn’t know about, and you’re being itted.

I hadn’t bothered to find out what Storify is. Then I saw a piquant tweet of Martin Robbins’s -

Martin Robbins‏@mjrobbins

40+ yesterday. When Mabus did this, skeptics were up in arms. When a deranged ‘skeptic’ targets women, silence. http://bit.ly/OTNg9Z

So I followed the link and found myself at the Storify of [shudder] the stalker behind ElevatorGATE, who took the time to make more than 40 stories out of Twitter conversations in one day. Including one of mine. Or maybe more, I don’t know.

I should start charging a percentage.… Read the rest

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I got two copies today of Does God Hate Women? translated into Kurdish. The alphabet is Arabic.

The cover is beautiful. In pale green, with a faintly William Morris look, a woman’s face with snakes for her hair, a holy book, chains, lizards, a hand with an eye in the palm…very cool.

… Read the rest

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Misogyny? What misogyny?

I don’t know what you’re talking about! There is no misogyny!

Via Coffee Loving Skeptic on Facebook.… Read the rest

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