Yes, an invitation. Get your party clothes ready, because here it is.

I’m inviting some lucky guy to do a dialogue with me, which I will publish as an article here at B&W in the articles section. The dialogue will be on sexist epithets. Are they a bad thing, or are they a good thing? How bad are they, are some worse than others, if they are bad then in what way are they bad, does it really matter, is it reasonable to think they are a bad thing, if so why?

We’ve been told lately that “we’ve been getting totally unnuanced discussions of insults like ‘twat'” and that “not everything is the same, and it’s possible to tease … Read the rest

PZ is in Oslo for a Humanist thingy. (Do you know, the Norwegian Humanists get state money. For reals. The churches get it and so they get it too. The Swedish humanists told me this when I was in Stockholm a year ago. The Swedish Humanists do not get state money. They are envious of their Norwegian colleagues.) He has won an international humanist award.

Ya! You go PZ.

PZ is one of the non-sexist male atheists. Such people are not the overwhelming majority I had thought.… Read the rest

Phil Molé did a Facebook note about this video clip in which Tim Gunn complains about the clothes Hillary Clinton wears and says she’s “confused about her gender.” The clip is a stupid annoying piece of sexist crap.

A woman commented on Phil’s note (Phil’s FB notes are actually articles; I’ve published some of them here; people tell him he should collect them in a book, and they’re right) and said “It has nothing to do with her being a woman.” Seriously. HC is confused about her gender, but it has nothing to do with her being a woman.

She also said “Sheesh. Pick your battles or you’ll be pissed at the whole world. This is an absolutely pathetic reach … Read the rest

Apparently tens of thousands of UK teenagers go to Christian youth camps every year. Really?! I thought people had better sense there.

They sound perfectly disgusting. Horrible yoof jargon is spoken, and horrible christian bullshit is pushed on the gullible young people whose brains have not fully developed yet.

…the evangelical tactics used at such camps are on occasions manipulative. Sermons at such camps often take the form of wild orations that aim to wear down the resistance of the audience to the message. Videos designed to whip up the emotional temperature of the audience are shown, and fervid calls for youngsters to accept Christ are made. This culminates in the centre point of such meetings: the altar call. After

As you doubtless know, the Montreal police have finally begun an investigation of Dennis Markuze’s ceaseless flow of death threats against atheists and scientists. The petition we signed a few days ago did what it was intended to do.

QMI Agency tracked down the mother of “David Mabus,” Eva Markuze, who
confirmed that her son, Dennis Markuze, 36, is the man police are looking
for. She said her son lives with her, and is currently in Ottawa and can’t be
reached for comment.

Eva said she doesn’t believe the accusations. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “(My son) would not even kill a fly. Maybe they don’t understand his message or something.”

No that’s not it. His messages have been quite unambiguous. … Read the rest

A little light reading.

From Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness (Picador, 1999):

But perhaps the deepest and stubbornest wounds to civility are those inflicted using race and gender as weapons…

In 1996, Karen Grigsby Bates and Karen Elyse Hudson published Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times, an etiquette manual aimed at the emerging black middle class…Yet they also concede that painful throwback situations may still arise where racism survives, either in full-blown or vestigial form – and offer advice about what to do, for instance, if someone tells racist jokes, suggests a colleague would haver have been hired but for affirmative action, or behaves in any other way that suggests a continuing belief in some false

Michelle Goldberg points out that Anders Breivik’s hatred of women hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as his hatred of Islam (and Muslims in general) has.

Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it.

…

A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation…

Castrating bitches driving men into tragic lonely corners, when they could have been so happy if only there were enough … Read the rest