Author: Ophelia Benson

She’s still on a ventilator but her vital organs are “intact and working properly.” The swelling in her head has subsided.

Her two schoolmates are doing better.

Just a quick one. Because he says

I’ve been confirming that I left of my own accord all over the ether, including my farewell post on Ftb, and my Welcome post here, on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

It was Ophelia who decided to let the cat out of the bag several days before I had planned, and posted a piece that insinuated the exact opposite. This left me with a shitload of work to do changing links, redesigning graphics, etc., on a night I planned to spend with my family.

The quick note is just to say that I didn’t know it was a secret. I didn’t know I was letting a cat out of a bag. Part of the reason for that is that the ragey podcast with Reap Paden was already out there. Given the nature of the podcast it didn’t even occur to me that Al was keeping his departure a secret. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. I didn’t intend to leave Al with a shitload of work on a night he’d planned to spend with his family.

This made me quite angry, but not at FtB as a whole. I still maintain there are a lot of talented writers there, and regardless of anyone’s personal opinion about individual writers, it would be perfectly understandable if they stayed with their favorites.

I’ve commented on this blog, as well as other places, that the only two who’ve been given the boot from FtB have been Thunderf00t and Laden, and that JT, Dan, John, etc., left on their own accord, as well.

There are, however, individuals at FtB who are REALLY starting to piss me off – and the results will be predictable, and not pretty at all.

Got it. We can look forward to another ragey podcast, with extra added fucking bitches and stupid cunts. Noted.

Update: I forgot to say that it’s just not true that I “insinuated” that Al had been pushed out of FTB as opposed to deciding to leave. That’s a falsehood.

In a comment by adriana at Stephanie’s.

One interesting fact about this whole affair of rejection of feminism or the word feminism, is that a bunch of atheists (I don’t know how many, but they sure are vocal) think Western women, and especially atheist women in secular democracies, have nothing to complain about. Equality has been reached, according to those people, and misogyny eradicated. Therefore, any complaints of unequal treatment or misogyny are signs of bitchiness, basically.

I hadn’t thought of that before. That’s illuminating.

It certainly seems to fit well with “Dear Muslima” and all the subseqent bullshit that has amounted to amplification of  ”Dear Muslima” – so much amplification that we all feel a bit deaf.

Yeah, we’re just being bitchy when we object to being called bitches and cunts. We’re being bitchy, because hey, Nancy Pelosi, and SUVs, and Real Housewives of New Jersey, and bikini waxes, and slate countertops, and Sex and the City, and Greek yogurt, and contraception. What more do we want?

Biatches.

As you may know, Greta’s father just died. She has a wonderful post about him – a daughter’s biography, I would call it, rather than an obituary.

A small excerpt.

My father used to read to us — me and my brother — from fun, brainy books for kids: The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice in Wonderland. His copy of Alice, the Annotated Alice with annotations by Martin Gardner, is the version I fell in love with, the version I still think of as the classic. I learned the poem “Jabberwocky” by heart when I was in third grade. I got the Jabberwock tattooed on my arm when Ingrid gave me a tattoo for my wedding present. And I didn’t just get my dad’s love of Alice. I got his love of ideas. Not a refined, high-falutin’ version of the “life of the mind,” but a delighted, silly, deeply joyful life of the mind: a sense of the playfulness in ideas, a sense of ideas as toys or puzzles or games, a sense of the deep pleasure and straight-up goofy fun that could be found in just tossing ideas around and seeing where they landed.

My father was a math teacher. He never taught me, not in school anyway — he was always careful to never have me in one of his classes — but I knew other kids who had him as a teacher. And the word I got was that he was one of the fun teachers. He was one of the teachers that kids were glad they got. His love of math, his love of the puzzle-and-game aspect of it… it was infectious. There are people in the world now who enjoy math, and aren’t scared of it, because they had my dad as a teacher. And my dad had a love, not just of math, but of the act of teaching itself. He understood that unique pleasure of conveying ideas to other people, the unique pleasure of sharing not only the ideas but the love and the fun of them, the unique pleasure of watching other people not only catch your ideas but run with them in their own direction. I’m not a teacher… but that pleasure is a big part of what motivates me as a writer. And it comes from my dad.

Read it all. There’s a part about being a union organizer at his school, and how risky that was. Read it all.

The CBC’s Doc Zone had an interesting show last night about the sexualization of children. At one point a group of high school girls were talking about the way porn affects boys, and they said it teaches them to treat girls with contempt and call them bitches, sluts, whores, cunts – you know the drill.

If they’re right, that seems a rather depressing sign for the future.

The German bishops have told German Catholics that if they don’t give the church money they don’t get the sacraments.

Last month, German bishops warned that if members of the Catholic Church don’t pay the country’s church tax, they’ll be denied the sacraments — including baptisms, weddings and funerals.

In increasingly secular Europe, Germany is one of the few countries where the state collects a special levy from tax-registered believers and hands it over to three organized faiths.

Registered Catholics, Protestants and Jews pay a surcharge of up to 9 percent on their income. The Catholic Church alone received some $6.5 billion in 2011.

$6.5 billion! That’s not a bad chunk of change, especially for putting on fancy dress to pretend there’s a magic sky dude who will make everything come out right. How nice of the state to do the church’s collecting for it.

In issuing the stringent new decree, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the president of the German bishops’ conference, said that not paying taxes for the church is a grave offense, and that sacraments will be banned for those who distance themselves from the church.

“In Germany, the church is a community of faith which coexists alongside the legal system,” Zollitsch said. “The two cannot be separated.”

And if you try, no sacraments for you! Don’t like it, take it up with god.

The bishops issued their decree as church defections are growing. In 2010, when the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in Germany, nearly 200,000 Catholics left the church. In a normal year, it’s 100,000.

Church statistics show that only 13 percent of Germany’s Catholics attend Mass weekly. And, Weisner says, the majority of those who are observant criticize the church leadership.

So the German bishops have come up with the perfect way to fix that! Threaten and bully!

What could possibly go wrong?

A picture Dil Nawaz shared on Facebook.

Well that’s funny. All that martyrdom stuff about stepping down was apparently just performance art. I hear that Justin Vacula hasn’t stepped down as chapter co-chair of the Pennsylvania SCA after all. Certainly he’s still listed as such.

Update October 13: now he’s not listed.