Oh no, feminist writers stirring up moral panics – someone call – VaculaMan!

Justin Vacula The Daily Mail is over-the-top with its headline, too, calling him the “Hunger Games Assassin.” I guess we can be outraged by tabloid publications. I’d rather not.

Anyway, to recap and follow up on recent comments, I think that focusing on misogyny and people like Valenti/Macrotte/SPLC representatives talking about this as being part of a “war on women” or “proof that misogyny kills” is as silly as people saying women who kill their male sons by microwaving them being “proof that misandry kills” or a “war on men.” It’s just much more complex and it’s really no surprise, unfortunately, that the SPLC and feminist writers

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So…this too is “spin” for “political purposes,” yes? Or not.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

“What’s so wrong about hating? Its just evolution, and how their chemicals react to such things.” Are you really that stupid, or pretending?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

Sorry, it seems my sarcasm needs spelling out. It’s usually aimed at Western liberals who patronisingly excuse atrocities as “their culture”

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 23

What is especially depressing is that the demand comes from STUDENTS. http://bit.ly/1jC25ge  Pathetic, brainwashed little twerps.

Demand for Iranian actress to be flogged, because formally kissed on cheek by President of Cannes festival http://bit.ly/1jC25ge 

It’s all so frightfully political! How cruel that is!

Or is it? I haven’t seen … Read the rest

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You may think The New Misogyny (as, I’m told, David Futrelle calls it) and the harassment and threats and sometimes plain old violence that go with it are a problem, but there are those who think the problem is instead noticing the link between misogyny and harassment—>violence.

Steve Zara @sjzara

That video seems thoughtful and describes real problems for women, but I think the leap from masculinity problems to murder is too much.

Miranda Celeste Hale @mirandachale

@sjzara What angers me re: that video & the hashtag &Valenti’s op-ed etc. is the cruelty of the women who think this tragedy is about *them*

Steve Zara @sjzara

I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about

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Apparently the anti-feminist crowd have only just discovered Leonard Shlain’s ridiculous book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. That’s odd because it was published in 1998; I remember finding it in a bookstore and skimming through it and laughing a disdainful laugh. That was before I had a blog to do my laughing on!

There’s an article about it on this Amazon-linked site.

Shlain frames the premise:

Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . .

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Update: oh and there’s also PZ’s account. So that’s two non-anonymous sources.

Slime pitters are all agitated, asking me in unapproved comments if I have a source for the non-anonymous allegations of Shermer’s sexual harassment. I’m pretty sure I’ve already posted this, and I’m not here to do homework for the slime pitters, but all the same – here it is again.

Jason. Last November. Carrie Poppy and the Nay-sayers.

Carrie Poppy has been extraordinarily well-placed in some of the bigger scandals regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault recently, in having been employed as communications director for JREF and having resigned after six months due to, let’s say, philosophical differences with DJ Grothe, president of the organization.

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Sasha Weiss at the New Yorker on #YesAllWomen. She first reads Rodger’s “manifesto”:

The first half of the manifesto is lucid and reflective—we see glimmers of a happy boyhood and an affectionate, curious personality—which makes his spewings of misogyny and hatred in the second half even more chilling. He wanted to abolish sex, thereby equalizing men and ridding society of women’s manipulative and bestial natures, and to lock women in concentration camps so they would die out. (“I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” he wrote. “If I can’t have them, no one will, I imagine thinking to myself as I oversee

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In that same post of Futrelle’s he does a quick review of Twitter assholes explaining away any connection between the actions of Elliot Rodger and the popular sport of misogyny.

When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.

But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video

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More shit news, via the BBC.

Prominent Libyan journalist Meftah Buzeid, known for his fierce criticism of Islamist militias, has been shot dead in the city of Benghazi.

He was the editor of the Burniq newspaper and had regularly appeared on television challenging the rise of such groups since the 2011 revolution.

The choke hold gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter.… Read the rest

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David Futrelle starts a post on Elliot Rodger with a horrible chart he says Rodger posted.

I couldn’t even figure it out at first, but then I did.

But his killing spree had nothing to with misogyny. Never forget that. It was just his own individual quirkiness.… Read the rest

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Here’s one I didn’t know about – Todd Kincannon, Tea Party honcho from South Carolina. Crooks and Liars is one source for this tweet (and there are others):

I was so impressed by that that I looked him up, and found a Salon article from January.

All the evidence indicates that Todd Kincannon, a former South Carolina GOP operative, is a bad dude. Not only in the sense that he frequently tweets things that are hostile, bigoted and dehumanizing — whichhedoes — but also in the sense that he’s quite likely a sexual harasser, too. A real winner.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to find that Kincannon, who regards himself as some kind of

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Another horrible news item from Pakistan – Dawn reports that a US-based doctor in Pakistan to do humanitarian work was murdered as he visited an Ahmadi cemetery.

The doctor was in Pakistan on a short visit to do voluntary work at the Tahir Cardiac Hospital, a private institution that he himself helped build a few years back.

And that’s his reward.

The Wall Street Journal has more.

An American doctor of Pakistani origin was shot dead in central Pakistan by unidentified gunmen on Monday, police said, in an attack that appeared to target him because of his membership in the minority Ahmadiyya religious community.

Dr. Mehdi Ali, 50, was walking with family members in the town called Chanab

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This is a good one…

Sophie Rose @SophieT_UK · May 25

#YesAllWomen because the media present men as people but present women as sexual objects pic.twitter.com/UeQ0CMT9xd

Now of course that could in theory be a misleading because unrepresentative selection of Rolling Stone covers. It could be that a representative selection of Rolling Stone covers would show an equal number of men posing with strategic clothes left off and a seductive facial expression, and an equal number of women head and shoulders face front with shirt on looking thoughtful/sullen. That could be, in principle. But in reality?

You be the judge.… Read the rest

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Laurie Penny has an angry piece in the New Staggers about misogyny and the rush to deny that misogyny makes any difference to anything.

This is not the first time that women and unlucky male bystanders have been massacred by men claiming sexual frustration as justification for their violence. In 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lépine shot 28 people at the École Polytechnique in Quebec, Canada, claiming he was “fighting feminism”. Fourteen women died. In 2009, a 48-year-old man called George Sodini walked into a gym in the Pittsburgh area and shot 13 women, three of whom died. His digital manifesto was a lengthier version of Rodger’s, vowing vengeance against the female sex for refusing to provide him with pleasure and

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There’s a nice article at The Humanist about the Women in Secularism conference.

Lindsay’s opening remarks stressed CFI’s commitment to equality and added that “stirring up trouble…is how we advance as a movement.” A panel of writers and bloggers discussed online activism and the power and pitfalls of a viral hashtag like #bringbackourgirls. While some criticize the passing along of a Twitter hashtag as superficial activism, panelists saw it as using one’s privilege to elevate the voices of the less privileged (in that case raising awareness of the missing Nigerian school girls).

Moderated by Lindsay Beyerstein, the panel included Soraya Chemaly, Amy Davis Roth, Zinnia Jones, and Miri Mogilevsky in one of the best discussions of the conference. A

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