UH OH – some people think it would be a good idea to have better gender representation in video games, on account of how the human species isn’t actually 90% male, and we all know what a crazy and destructive thought that is to think. Here’s a bit of news from that battlefront:

Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it reportedly received a number of complaints from self-identified gamers upset that the site was championing fair gender representation in video games. The decision by the world’s largest chipmaker to remove its advertising from the site comes as a result of a coordinated campaign called Operation Disrespectful Nod, apparently orchestrated by supporters of the #GamerGate hashtag, who rail against so-called “social justice warrior” writers, journalists, and developers.

Right, because what could be more gut-wrenchingly horrible than social justice? Thank god there are people who organize campaigns against it, and corporations that bow to pressure from such campaigns. Down with social justice! Up with keeping things as they are, or maybe making them even worse!

Organizers of the campaign exhorted people to contact companies that advertise on video game-focused websites such as Gamasutra and Kotaku in order to complain about five specific articles that suggested the concept of the “gamer” as an identity was fading away. In this case, their efforts were successful. “Intel has pulled its advertising from website Gamasutra,” an Intel spokesperson said to Recode. “We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements.”

So they need to get more feedback, this time from people who don’t hate social justice with the heat of a thousand suns.

Operation Disrespectful Nod was born from the #GamerGate hashtag. Sincere users of the hashtag, as Vox explains, are ostensibly concerned with two main topics — the treatment of women in gaming, and the ethics of games journalism — but its supporters have been linked to campaigns of harassment against prominent women in the industry.

The hashtag was reportedly first used by actor Adam Baldwin when he made reference on Twitter to independent game developer Zoe Quinn. Quinn, the subject of a lengthy diatribe written by an ex-boyfriend, was the target of a harassment campaign after being accused of using sexual relationships with the press to secure coverage for her video games. #GamerGate supporters also attacked feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series attempts to call out and question sexist stereotypes in games. Sarkeesian and her family became the targets of a volley of personal attacks that resulted in her being driven from her home after receiving threats of sexual violence from a Twitter user who knew her actual address.

While many #GamerGate supporters have attempted to distance themselves from such harassment, the movement’s methods, leaders, and ethics are still questionable. Weeks after she was pilloried for her private relationships, Quinn revealed she had been idling in IRC chatrooms run by the orchestrators of the campaign against her. In a series of Twitter posts, she showed how a small group of 4chan users boasted about engineered the #GamerGate hashtag in order to target and attack those it saw as “social justice warriors.”

Such a noble cause, pissing on the very idea of social justice. #proud

The movement has maintained in part because it’s grown wider than gaming. Adam Baldwin continues to tweet on the topic not because he’s a gamer, but because he’s an outspoken conservative figure, vociferously opposed to the left-wing ideals the imagined cadre of “social justice warriors” uphold. Even Washington think tanks have weighed in on the side of #GamerGate supporters. The American Enterprise Institute, a high-profile right-wing group, issued a video in which host “the Factual Feminist” questioned whether games were sexist at all. Such interjections have extended the lifespan of the discussion, and the #GamerGate movement, even further.

And who is “the Factual Feminist”? Christina Hoff Sommers, of course, Richard Dawkins’s new best friend.

Intel says it was flooded with complaints about its Gamasutra ads, but it’s difficult to work out how pervasive support for #GamerGate is in the wider gamesplaying community — its supporters are amplified in the Twitter echo chamber and uncountable thanks to a prevalence of fake “sockpuppet” accounts that retweet messages of support.

Just like those other organized haters of social justice, the ones that target us “rage-bloggers” and “FTBullies.” Maybe they’re all the same three people, typing at the speed of sound.

The #GamerGate hashtag is inextricably linked to campaigns of harassment and its proponents have been demonstrably manipulated by a small number of people who want to hurt others for fun. Until now it has had no major successes, but by giving in to its demands and pulling its advertising from Gamasutra, Intel has legitimized a movement that has shown itself to be anti-feminist, violently protectionist, and totally unwilling to share what it sees as its divine right to video games.

It’s appalling.

Ernest Adams (who writes a column for Gamasutra) has a public Facebook post with his protest to Intel and the address where we can send ours.

I am gravely disappointed to learn that Intel has stopped advertising on the game developer Web site Gamasutra in response to pressure from gamers with an anti-diversity agenda. You should be aware that many game developers have been made the target of an orchestrated campaign of criminal harassment for their belief that video games should be for everyone, and Gamasutra also supports this view. Some developers have even been driven from their homes in fear for their safety.

By withdrawing your support for Gamasutra, you are sending a message to the game community that Intel, too, opposes diversity in games and is prepared to side with bigots and bullies.

sincerely,
Ernest W. Adams, Ph.D.
Game Designer and Founder, International Game Developers’ Association

If you would like to send a similar message, please do so here:
https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate-responsibility-contact-us.html

I borrowed some of his wording and combined it with some of mine and sent this:

I’m shocked to learn that Intel  has stopped advertising on the game developer Web site Gamasutra in response to pressure from gamers who don’t approve of efforts to make gaming more welcoming to women and minorities. Many game developers have been made the target of an orchestrated campaign of criminal harassment for their belief that video games should be for everyone. Some developers have even been driven from their homes in fear for their safety. Gamasutra shares the belief that video games should be for everyone. By withdrawing your support for Gamasutra, you are sending a message to the game community that Intel is prepared to side with bigots and bullies.

I urge you to drop Intel a line. Here’s that link again:

https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate-responsibility-contact-us.html

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

Josh Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, wonders whether the funeral procession really needs to be treated as something untouchably sacred like football or pumpkin pie or monster-large cars.

Bill Mayeroff is a blogger at ChicagoNow.com who wrote a post questioning the practice of funeral processions. It was picked up by the funeral-industry news aggregator site, ConnectingDirectors.com. All comments [sic].

“Let me guess, Bill Mayeroff is: 1. A baby boomer 2. A narcissist 3. An idiot.”

“I think this blogger should have this discussion face to face with the thousands of people who mourned and processed with any number of our fallen soldiers.”

“Although the article is so sophmoric that it doesnt earn the time of a reply, I feel I have to. It is all about respect of the dead. Something that the author probably knows very little about. He is an NPR listening, liberal, candy ass moron.”

“In today’s society, death rituals, etc. are often viewed as “inconvenient” to those involved. But, death should NOT be convenient – if it is, that person’s life didn’t mean much.”

So, commenters have established that Bill Mayeroff is a narcissistic, soldier-hating, un-patriotic baby boomer with a candy ass he keeps glued to National Public Radio in between ruining everyone’s Grief Work(TM). Except no, they haven’t. I too question the place of funeral processions. Many undertakers would say that’s because I’m an anti-funeral director outside agitator who hates sentiment and religion and wants to force families to bake-and-shake their loved ones. Or something.

Read the whole thing.

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

El Salvador is not a safe country for women. The secretary general of Amnesty International reports:

Beneath the surface of apparent peace in El Salvador, a hidden war is being waged. It is a war that does not involve guns or troops but one that has resulted in the imprisonment and unnecessary deaths and disability of thousands.

It is a war against women and girls that is documented in Amnesty International’s newreport, On the Brink of Death: Violence against Women and the Abortion Ban in El Salvador.

The report illustrates how a change in the law 16 years ago criminalized abortion in all circumstances, making it one of the strictest abortion laws in the world. Women and girls in El Salvador cannot have an abortion, even if continuing their pregnancy might kill them, or if the fetus is not viable and will not live. 
Even a nine-year-old girl pregnant after from rape cannot get an abortion.

Just to make sure no opportunity is missed, miscarriages are treated as suspected abortions.

Consider the story of Cristina. She was 18 years old when she miscarried. She passed out and was rushed to hospital where, instead of care and kindness, she was accused of actively terminating her pregnancy. In August 2005, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Men also are fighting this injustice. Dennis Muñoz, a lawyer who heard Cristina’s story, was so shocked he tracked her down to the prison where she was being held.

Together they fought a two-year legal battle to get her sentence reduced. They won her release, but not before she had spent four years in prison. Muñoz describes the country’s abortion ban as a “witch hunt against poor women.”

(Unlike Dawkins and Shermer and Blackford, Muñoz is talking about something that really can be legitimately called a witch hunt.)

Amnesty International believes that El Salvador’s total ban on abortion is a form of torture. It pushes women and girls to the brink of death. The ban violates women’s and girls’ right to life by forcing them to seek unsafe abortions, putting their health and lives at risk. It also denies them their right to health, privacy and to non-discrimination.

It is a shame to see El Salvador so far behind the rest of the world in its legislation on abortion. It is one of seven Latin American countries with a ban on abortion in all cases.

The Vatican is happy though.

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

Richard Bartholomew debunks a photo of a purported “witch” used to fuel hysteria about witches.

Nigerian sceptic Leo Igwe has drawn attention to a Facebook post by a certain Pastor I.C. Ezeugwu, in which Ezeugwu describes an event he held in “a remote village in Edo State”:

I titled the crusade “Operation Kill the Witches”. This title was necessitated as a result of the activities of witches in that village which included destroying the destinies of young people.

I took a look at that Facebook post – it dates from August 2013, well over a year ago, yet people are commenting every few seconds to say…”Amen.” It’s rather frightening.

Bartholomew tracked down the image and found that it has nothing to do with “witches.”

Ezeugwu’s post is illustrated with a photo of what appears to be a dead human figure with wings; presumably, this is supposed “evidence” of the existence of witches:

That’s not an image I have seen before, although apparently it’s been doing the rounds for a while; in May 2013, Pulse234 published it under the heading: “PHOTO: Witch Woman With Wings: Real or Fake?”

It  in fact shows an art piece called Angel. It was created in 2008 by two Chinese artists, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The photo was taken while the model was on display at the Saatchi Gallery in London. It’s a “life size sculpture in fibre-reinforced polymer and silica gel”.

Human beings, making up bogus pretexts to murder other human beings. So helpful.

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

A new version of Tim Minchin’s Pope Song.

It ends with

But if you build your movement on intellectual authority
And believe it is to benefit others in society
Then you, you motherfucker, can expect some talking back
When people get assaulted and you never fucking act!

So fuck these motherfuckers, and fuck you motherfucker
If you call yourself a fucking skeptic
Then you cover for each slimey motherfucker who says something sexist
Fuck you, your apologetics really are pathetic

And if you look into your motherfucking heart and tell me true
If the good name of atheism is that important to you
With its problems with harassment, abuse, and also fucking RAPE
If you’re all sad in your pants then go ahead and write a blogpost

But if you find this song more offensive than the possibility
Of leaders protecting rapists and treating victims with hostility
Then listen to me, motherfucker, I don’t give a tinker’s dam
And fuck you Shermer, Dawkins, Harris, Randi,
And you can keep your fucking TAM!

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

Dana has a post about my report that Dawkins asked me to tell people not to spread the “libellous allegation that Michael Shermer is a rapist or a sexual predator.”

Keep in mind, this was about a year after various unconnected sources came forward and said that Shermer had harassed and/or assaulted them. And he’s still busy covering Shermer’s ass.

Even after so many women have come forward under their own names, he still won’t admit there may be something to this. And the little hyperskeptic lickspittles he’s got crowded round his feet are happy to help out, demanding evidence well beyond what they’d require to denounce a homeopath.

I still puzzle about that. These are real people, not just examples in some article by Christina Hoff Sommers. They’re people he may have met himself on the atheist / skeptic circuit. It’s odd that he’s so willing to trash them for the sake of defending Shermer.

There are good comments on the post – like the one by A Hermit:

Dawkins asked me to dissuade people from spreading the “libellous allegation that Michael Shermer is a rapist or a sexual predator.”

Now that’s a pretty strong allegation you’re making yourself Richard; I mean libel is a serious legal no-no. If Shermer is really being libeled why didn’t he immediately go to the authorities, huh? I mean if he can prove he’s being libeled he should be suing everyone who’s libeling him or it’s not really libel amirite?

I bet he’s just playing the libel victim to get publicity for his new book or something…

And kellym’s:

It almost seems as if trying to protect Shermer is the main reason Dawkins issued the joint statement with Ophelia. Almost immediately after the statement was issued, Dawkins tweeted to imply that date rape wasn’t as bad as being raped by a stranger, and if you disagreed, “go away and learn how to think.” Those aren’t the words of someone trying to heal rifts that were directly exacerbated by his own words. But they are an emotional, poorly-reasoned argument that Michael Shermer isn’t a “real” rapist.

And I’m still confused as to what Dawkins was asking Ophelia to do. PZ posted the rape allegation about a year ago, so that couldn’t be undone. There were several women making accusations of predatory behavior against Shermer. Was Dawkins proposing that Ophelia contact each one to try to gain her silence? Was he hoping for a blog post that attacked their claims? I don’t understand what he was asking.

No, I don’t either, really. Maybe just spread the word, on the libelous allegers’ grapevine? I don’t know. I didn’t parse it very much because there was no chance I was going to do that. With several people telling similar stories…how could I do that?

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

What do you do when your stepmother throws acid in your face while you’re asleep? You go ahead and fulfill your ambition of being a fashion designer, and you get other survivors of acid attacks to join you in modeling the clothes. You show the world what it is to woman up.

Rupa suffered extensive injuries when her stepmother threw acid in her face while she was sleeping in 2008.

She was allegedly left without any medical aid for six hours before her uncle found her and transported her to hospital, where she underwent eleven operations and spent three months being cared for.

Her uncle had to borrow on the house they lived in to pay for her medical treatment, and Rupa said her injuries made it difficult to find work.

She dropped her surname to distance herself from her father for supporting her stepmother after the attack.

Wow. That’s some “father.”

After the attack, Rupa teamed up with the Stop Acid Attacks charity who run Chhaon, a support centre for survivors, and began designing clothes.

The charity is now looking to help Rupa raise enough money to open her own clothing boutique in Delhi, which would employ other acid attack survivors as staff.

Rupa said: “Chhaon has helped me feel confident again and believe in myself. I have always loved fashion and tailoring but I never thought I could start my own label. This is the first time I have presented my clothes and I am glad to see them being appreciated.”

The charity asked Mr Saharan to lead the photoshoot, who said the models define “beauty and courage” on his Facebook page. His gallery from the shoot has been shared over 2,000 times.

The album of the shoot is public.

H/t Sarah Moglia

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

The BBC has had a team living next to the University of Colorado at Boulder campus for a month.

The issue of sexual assaults at US colleges was raised repeatedly by students we met.

It is a national problem, with studies suggesting one in five women will be victims during their time at university.

And it is a serious problem at CU-Boulder too. The college is on the White House’s list of schools suspected of Title IX violations – that’s a law guaranteeing that women in federally-funded universities won’t face discrimination due to their gender.

More than 70 schools including CU-Boulder are accused of having improperly dealt with sexual assault cases, and are now the target of a federal investigation.

Cue Christina Hoff Sommers saying it’s all grossly exaggerated and besides boys like to squirm a lot in school so no fair.

While sexual assault is not a problem specific to fraternities, studies have shown that on college campuses, men who join a fraternity are three times more likely to rape than other men.

The White House launched a campaign last week called “It’s On Us”. The initiative is aimed at encouraging male students to intervene to stop abusive behaviour.

Yes but what about the sororities? What about the drunk women barging into the frat houses? Be fair!

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

Originally a comment by Hj Hornbeck on Salt.

I’m one of the lucky few who’ve heard Shermer talk about his system of morality in person.

He called it “Ask First:” before doing some action, ask the people effected what they think. It has a Rawlsian quality to it, but unlike the Veil it’s much easier to game. Jails and safe injection sites will never be built, because the surrounding populace will never agree to them. Ever heard of Hobo Fights, where assholes pay two homeless people to beat the crap out of one another? Permitted by “Ask First,” banned by the Veil. Thinking of cutting carbon emissions? Don’t ask the experts, do an opinion poll!

Shermer was peppered with similar corner cases during the Q&A, but he had a solution: “no moral system is perfect,” so we’d just switch to another one when problems arose! I think he even mentioned a “greater good” system as a candidate.

You know, the type of system which would give the same answers in the vast majority of cases, and which we could have gone with from the start. But no, he had to saw off the corners to suit his libertarian views, then hastily glue them back on, in an ad hoc manner, when those corners became critical.

I wasn’t impressed.

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

So, there’s this. JREF promoting a talk on science and morality at TAM 2013 by that expert on morality Michael Shermer. Nine hours ago. A good many days after the publication of Mark Oppenheimer’s article, the one that quoted James Randi saying he was well aware of Shermer’s frolicsome ways with the laydeez and that if he got many more reports about them he would ask him to limit his attendance at TAM.

Randi Foundation @jref ·  9 hours ago
Science and Morality: Michael Shermer TAM 2013: http://youtu.be/kjT1lkmKVhs

Hey, isn’t it about time for Roman Polanski to return to Hollywood?

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

Doubting Tom wrote a Dubito Ergo Sum post ten days ago, on Michael Nugent, Vice Principal of Atheism. (Good title. Nugent does carry on as if he’s somehow been appointed to scold some people into obedience while protecting others from unwelcome attention to their more appalling behaviors. Nugent hasn’t been appointed to do that.) This post, I was saying, is worth catching up with.

DT starts by summarizing Nugent’s previous work in this vein, then describes a pattern:

Nugent demonstrated a pattern of behavior that he has since escalated: butt in to an issue that doesn’t involve you, adopt the pretense of mature authority, treat the issue as an academic subject to be studied or hashed out in formal debate, and then move on to some other issue once it gets too real.

It’s odd about the non-involvement. (It’s also very annoying, but never mind that for now.) Nugent spends a lot of words scolding us Americans for the fact that Anglophone media keep talking about “the atheist movement” when really all they’re talking about is some Americans. There’s a global atheist movement, Nugent keeps solemnly telling us. True; so why is he so interested in this issue that’s just an American thing? It’s a puzzle.

There’s that email Nugent sent to PZ back in August – that presumptuous, obnoxious email.

He tried talking to PZ “privately” about the matter first, considering PZ a friend, and apparently seeing the need for an intervention about his destructive behavior. I can sympathize, somewhat. After all, I am all for people calling out their friends when their friends are hurting others. For that matter, I think that’s a situation where a private conversation may indeed be warranted before taking the issue public, a tactic often problematically proposed as a cure-all for disagreements. It’s not, and when it’s two people who don’t actually know each other very well, the insistence on private conversation first is mostly just a way of avoiding transparency and sweeping criticism under the carpet. But if it’s someone you’re close to? Sending them a personal note to say “hey, I think [specific thing you do] is hurting the people you care about, and I’m worried about you” would absolutely be a reasonable step in resolving the issue.

That’s not what Nugent did. Instead, he CC’d Richard Dawkins and Ophelia Benson on the e-mail. Again, I think Nugent thought he was trying to organize an intervention, but that’s really not how you go about it.

To put it mildly. To do that he would have had to ask Dawkins and ask me, before cc’ing us on his unsolicited email to someone else. He didn’t do that. He cc’d me without my permission or advance knowledge. I don’t know about Dawkins; I suspect a few of these guys have been planning a lot lately, so for all I know he did discuss it with Dawkins first. But he sure as hell did not discuss it with me, and I was disgusted by it. It looked to me like nothing but an attempt to embarrass PZ, and using me to do it. Not cool.

Then Tom moves on to Nugent’s little list of PZ’s putative naughtinesses. He looks up the ones I didn’t take the trouble to look up and they’re even more ridiculous as examples of naughtiness than I had realized.

I knew how ridiculous the Shermer one was though. That one jumps out at you.

he has publicly accused…Michael Shermer of multiple unreported serious crimes,

Accusations that have been validated by multiple sources. Nugent has said that he was not trying to tell PZ to keep sexual harassment accusations secret, but it’s hard to read this (and the letter, which is worded in nearly identical language) as anything but that. On Twitter, Nugent expanded, essentially saying that he thought this matter would have been better served by the police than hashed out online. We’ll ignore the continued ignorant paternalism in Nugent thinking he knows better how to handle rape than the victim, we’ll even ignore the numerousclearreasonswhy rape survivors don’t go to the police. Nugent’s living in a fantasy world of privilege-enabled ignorance where police officers are never racist or misogynist or themselves rapists, and where every rape kit gets tested and victims are never pressured into recanting or (even with clear evidence that rape occurred) treated like criminals themselves. But look at what we know, especially in light of the Buzzfeed piece: Shermer’s behavior and the accusations were known to atheist and skeptic leaders. DJ Grothe knew about them. James fucking Randi knew about them, tanking the remaining respect I had for that guy. What was their response? To continue inviting him to events, to take out extra insurance to protect themselves from his actions, and to give him a stern warning that if he does it too many more times, he might face some consequences of some sort, while punishing the people who speak out. The same thing played out with Ben Radford. Leaders in the community excuse and coddle accused rapists and harassers, and punish victims. Why should Shermer’s victim have expected anything different to happen if the police were the authorities involved rather than the event organizers?

We’ll never know how Nugent would respond to that, though, because either he’ll have already dropped the whole thing, or he’ll be too busy finding new trivia to scold us for in new 5000 word posts.

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

Fraternities, eh. They’re going to hell in a handbasket, and you know whose fault that is? Drunk women! That’s who! All these drunk women keep forcing their way into the place and they’re ruining everything. Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel has the story.

If you blinked at all, even for a second yesterday, you may have missed a doozy of a story that Forbes ran and very quickly deleted. Which is a shame, since the headline was “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities,” and the only thing more hilariously evil than much of the piece that followed was the Satan-y byline photo that accompanied the piece.

Unfortunately, Bill Frezza isn’t a character made up by stoned Onion writers searching for the next Herbert Kornfeld. He is a very real man who many years ago graduated from MIT with a degree in theology and engineering and spends his time now being creepily involved with his old fraternity.

Theology and engineering…that’s a rather frightening combination.

Before feminist web vigilantes call for my defenestration, I single out female guests for one simple reason. Fraternity alumni boards, working with chapter officers, employ a variety of policies designed to guide and police member behavior. Our own risk management manual exceeds 22 pages. The number of rules and procedures that have to be followed to run a party nowadays would astound anyone over 40. We take the rules very seriously, so much so that brothers who flout these policies can, and will, be asked to move out. But we have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through.

That’s so true! Men never can have any control over those bitchez who smuggle booze into the fraternities in their bellies. It’s all part of the plot.

Here are the things that worry me most. Any of them could result in organizational extinction, even if the fraternity never served the “victim” a single drop of alcohol:

Alcohol poisoning due to overconsumption before, during, or after an event. Death or grievous injury as a result of falling down the stairs or off a balcony. Death or grievous injury as a result of a pedestrian or traffic accident as the young lady weaves her way home. False accusation of rape months after the fact triggered by regrets over a drunken hook-up, or anger over a failed relationship. And false 911 calls accusing our members of gang rape during a party in progress. (Yes, this happened, resulting in seven police cars and thirty officers storming the chapter house.)

False accusations of rape more concerning than actual rape perpetuated by frat members on incapacitated women? Hey, I think I’ve heard this one before!

Yeah so have I. I wonder why Frezza forgot to say anything about outrage bloggers who do it for the clicks.

Never, ever take a drunk female guest to your bedroom – even if you have a signed contract indicating sexual consent. Based on new standards being promulgated on campus, all consent is null and void the minute a woman becomes intoxicated– even if she is your fiancée. And while a rape charge under these circumstances is unlikely to hold up in a court of law, it doesn’t take much for a campus kangaroo court to get you expelled, ruining your life while saddling your fraternity with a reputation for harboring rapists.

Uh huh. That’s what happens all the time. It’s never that the woman gets raped and then nobody does anything about it. Never never never never.

Except all the times that it does.

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

No. Just no. Not ever. Not under any circumstances. Just don’t even. Dear god what are you thinking. No.

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

A conservative Islamic charity is opening three women-only homeless shelters in the UK.

There are no official figures on how many Muslim women have been forced to leave their homes, but the National Zakat Foundation (NZF) has seen a demand for temporary shelter that meets religious and cultural needs.

The first of three of the hostels will open in London at the end of October and will cater for 14 women.

The other two will open in Birmingham and in Manchester over the next few months.

Muslim females are expected to follow a strict code of conduct, which includes not mixing with males who are not family members and not entering an environment where alcohol is being consumed.

So Muslim women who aren’t fanatically conservative won’t want to go there.

The temporary accommodation offered by the charity will provide an environment which complies with the Islamic way of life.

Nusrat is now in her early 30s but at the age of 19 she was forced to leave home.

She was disowned by her family for wanting to go to university. She initially stayed in the university’s halls of residence but after getting into financial difficulty she ended up on the streets of London.

She said: “I was leading a double life. I’d stay at university for as long as I could during the day and then at night I’d be on the streets pretending to be a tourist. I saw things that I never wanted to see.

“There was prostitution, people tried to pimp girls. The younger and more innocent you looked, the more they were out to get you.”

She said pride stopped her from returning to her family because she wanted to show them that she could be independent.

The hostels which were available to her did not comply with her Muslim faith so living on the streets was the only option.

No, it wasn’t the only option. Another option would have been to live at a hostel that didn’t “comply with her Muslim faith.” That seems to mean there were men and alcohol around…but surely that applies at least as much to living on the streets, along with all sorts of other disadvantages.

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

In the Independent: what a student sex worker in the UK thinks of her job.

“Sophie” is 22 and paying for her five year course at university via sex work.

“You get a lot of weird requests. Before you meet you get that out in the open by messaging, they [the clients] say what they want, and you say yes I’ll do that, or no I won’t do that,” and, Sophie says, “you hope they pay attention, but they don’t.”

There is no safety net. “I think it’s hard to…you can pull out every stop to make sure you are going to be ok, and it just doesn’t always work that way. You think its ok, and it’s not,” she said.

There’s a long pause. Eventually she says: “It has happened but, I don’t know, it’s part of the job really, it’s a risk.”

After an ‘outcall’ when she couldn’t get away from the client, “I decided I wasn’t going to do it again, and it was too much.” Having quit, she found herself struggling financially and faced with dropping out, she went back to working in the sex industry.

But she didn’t like it. She doesn’t like it.

Sophie is resigned and bitter about the perception of sex work – particularly the character of Belle du Jour. “I hate it. Because, say I work for a hundred pounds an hour, that it makes it sound very classy, whereas I tend to be going to real s***holes … Yeah, it is a hundred pounds for an hour, but you can be thinking about that hour for the next month.”

She wonders how her clients afford her, continuing, “I don’t like a lot of them. I wonder why they’re there. I’m wary of them, why they’re not seeing women their age when they’re a lot older than you.”

Maybe because they don’t like women. Maybe they like sex but not women, and sex for money does away with the need to interact for all that time when you’re not having sex.

Sophie’s work is carefully separate from her university life. “I’ve met my best friends here, and they are my best friends, but I certainly believe they wouldn’t look at me in the same way if I told them what I did.” None of her friends or family know.

It’s difficult for her to keep up a relationship, never mind start one. “There’s guys I like now, and I’d like it to be more, but it’s just not possible, not at the moment. Because this is not ok, and a guy would not accept this.”

“I walk down the street and I think if people knew what I was like, they would not…” She tails off.

“You just do it, get the money and then get on with your life.”

When she graduates she will leave escorting and her clients behind her, but while she remains at university she will carry on working: “I need them [her clients] at the end of the day, but I don’t like them. I don’t like them at all. I pretend to like them, and then get out. Once that hour is done, it’s out the door, goodbye.”

Definitely not Belle du Jour.

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

David Koepsell has an interesting piece at the CFI blog titled Ideas, not Idols.

A danger, of course, to making idols of intellectuals or anyone else is that once we learn more about them as persons, their very real and valuable contributions to their fields may become tinged, just like Heidegger’s work now seems iredeemably blighted by his antisemitism. How shall we confront this danger? As Arendt urged, there are incredibly valuable elements of Heidegger’s work that have changed the nature and path of modern continental philosophy. We would be foolish to ignore his contributions, and we should remain compelled by those ideas within his work that seem devoid of hateful ideology. But we would be equally foolish, in my opinion, to view the fact of these contributions apart from his personal failings, and unwise in any case to idolize anyone, be they layman, genius, or god.

It is ultimately the ideas that matter, the principles not the personas. Our heroes will always disappoint us if we dig deeply enough, because like most humans, their lives falls short of even the most modest ideals.

I don’t know. I don’t think disappointment is inevitable, if we don’t expect superhuman perfection. People can be normally human and flawed and imperfect without being Nazis or rape apologists or indeed rapists, after all. Being selfish, greedy, vain, irritable is one thing, and being sadistic, ruthless, predatory, exploitative is another. In other words some people are worse shits than others. They really are.

As students of philosophy, as members of movements, as communities sharing worldviews, we must be wary of elevating ideas by attaching them to specific personalities, no matter how strong, attractive, compelling, or even valuable to the projection of a message. When these people fall, they risk setting back the valuable ideas we explore and they espouse, undermining the progress of our philosophies in the short term.

True, but I’m always a little ambivalent about this, because I think a little bit of hero-having can be motivating and even inspiring. I don’t want to pour cold water on the whole idea. Maybe the solution is to act like the CIA or similar, and do thorough background checks on prospective heroes before giving them the job.

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

Originally a comment by Katydid on Horror of the female.

About 6 years ago, my company brought in a sub-contractor. Before he started, there was a meeting to tell the women that because this man was an Orthodox Jew, he would not shake hands with us. Okay, fine…who shakes hands with a co-worker they see every single day anyway?

Then he started, and our seating arrangements had to be changed because he couldn’t tolerate sitting in an area near any of the women. Then, in meetings, the women had to wait for him to seat himself and arrange ourselves as far away from him as we could because his special, special self couldn’t tolerate being in a meeting with women. Oh, and it would be better if we women (all software engineers) didn’t speak up in meetings, because it made him uncomfortable, you see.

Then our “snack table” came under attack; we had a long-standing tradition in our office of bringing in snacks on Fridays–usually some form of baked goods. Suddenly, the women had to stand back and wait for him to serve himself because he couldn’t touch food if a woman had been near it.

It went on and on–this kind of behavior wouldn’t have been tolerated by any random misogynist, but because this guy could cry RELIGION, suddenly it was perfectly acceptable to (expletive deleted) all over the rights of the women forced to work with this guy.

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

More on what it’s like to be on a flight with Haredi men who refuse to sit next to women.

One passenger described the trip as “an 11-hour long nightmare.”

El Al passengers heading to Israel to celebrate the Jewish new year were delayed leaving New York on the eve of Rosh Hashanah when ultra-Orthodox passengers refused to sit near women.

Oops, left out a word. Not ultra-Orthodox passengers but male ultra-Orthodox passengers. It wasn’t women refusing to sit near women (or near men either, apparently).

The pilot asked the disruptive men to sit down and the plane took off.

But after takeoff, chaos erupted.

“I ended up sitting next to a … man who jumped out of his seat the moment we had finished taking off and proceeded to stand in the aisle,” a woman passenger identified only as Galit told Ynet. The man had asked her to move from the seat beside her husband to accommodate his religious beliefs, but she refused.

“People stood in the aisles and refused to go forward,” said Amit Ben-Natan, a passenger who was on board the plane.

That’s just what you want on an airplane of all places, isn’t it – mobs of men clogging the aisles in order to pitch fits of rage about the proximity of women. It’s got everything: intimidation, claustrophobia, noise, fear – only if they’d all been vomiting could it have been worse.

Haaretz reported that in 2012 El Al noticed an increasing number of Haredi men asking to switch seats to avoid sitting next to women. Large groups of up to 20 would try to reserve seats in blocks to avoid it. They would also approach female passengers asking to trade seats before takeoff. An American woman sued, claiming an El Al flight attendant moved her to the back of the plane to accommodate Haredi men.

You know…if you’re going to get on a god damn airplane, then you’re buying into the modern world. You’ve accepted the technological benefits it offers. Ok then – you damn well have to put up with the equal rights it offers too. If you can’t do that then you should just go live in a cave and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

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

US military veterans have written to Fox News to tell it that a sexist joke one of its hosts told was not cute. That’s good; let’s have more of that.

During Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Five,” co-hosts Eric Bolling and Greg Gutfeld ridiculed Maj. Mariam Al Mansouri, the first female UAE pilot and F-16 squadron commander leading airstrikes against ISIS.

“Problem is, after she bombed it, she couldn’t park it,” Gutfeld said. “Would that be considered boobs on the ground, or no?” Bolling followed up.

No.

Herewith the letter:

Dear Mr. Bolling and Mr. Gutfeld,

We are veterans of the United States armed forces, and we are writing to inform you that your remarks about United Arab Emirates Air Force Major Mariam Al Mansouri were unwarranted, offensive, and fundamentally opposed to what the military taught us to stand for.

First, foremost, and most obvious to everyone other than yourselves, your remarks were immensely inappropriate. Your co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle was so right to call attention to an inspiring story of a woman shattering glass ceilings in a society where doing so is immeasurably difficult. We never heard an answer to her question: why did you feel so compelled to “ruin her thing?”

As it turns out, women have been flying combat aircraft since before either of you were born. Over 1,000 Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) flew during World War II. Seeing as U.S. Army Air Forces Commander “Hap” Arnold said “Now in 1944, it is on the record that women can fly as well as men,” we can probably guess he thought their parking was adequate. The WASP legacy reaches into the present day; on 9/11, then Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney scrambled her F-16. Completely unarmed, she was ready to lay down her own life to prevent further devastating attacks on American soil.

Thus the skill of women as fighter pilots is well established. And before you jump to the standby excuse that you were “just making a joke” or “having a laugh,” let the men amongst our number preemptively respond: You are not funny. You are not clever. And you are not excused. Perhaps the phrase “boys will be boys”—inevitably uttered wherever misogyny is present—is relevant. Men would never insult and demean a fellow servicemember; boys think saying the word ‘boobs’ is funny.

James Randi please note. The idea that this kind of thing is just “what guys do” is insulting to guys.

The less obvious implication of your remarks, however, is that by offending an ally and cheapening her contribution, you are actively hurting the mission. We need to send a clear message that anyone, male or female, who will stand up to ISIS and get the job done is worthy of our respect and gratitude.

We issue an apology on your behalf to Major Al Mansouri knowing that anything your producers force you to say will be contrived and insincere. Major, we’re sincerely sorry for the rudeness; clearly, these boys don’t take your service seriously, but we and the rest of the American public do.

And then an impressively large bunch of names.

Thank you, veterans.

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

There’s always the “it’s just part of life, get over it” defense. Being groped or plied with drinks or raped is just what happens if you’re female and young.

Rosie Millard makes that [cough] argument in the Independent. She starts off reasonably enough by saying that squeezing a woman’s breasts probably doesn’t merit a prison sentence. But then she veers off into full-on “deal with it” mode.

Yet in many people’s eyes, Dave Lee Travis – another name from the 1970s whose fame surrounded him like a blinding cloud – will have “got away” with it, as if his actions were as repugnant and evil as those of Clifford, Harris and Savile. The unnamed victim of the assault, who said she was paralysed with fear at the time, has spoken of her luck in being able to get on with the rest of her life after the event – the event being having your breasts squeezed for 15 seconds, backstage at The Mrs Merton Show. Hello? If such things really caused deep trauma, half the female population of the UK would be in long-term therapy. Women get their breasts squeezed. They get their bottoms pinched. Without asking for it. It is not particularly exciting, but it is part of life. Get over it.

Um, no?

Those are two different things. A jail sentence for breast-squeezing is one thing and treating unrequested unwanted breast-squeezing as part of life that you have to get over is quite another. Physical molestation, even minor varieties, shouldn’t be taken as normal and just part of the price of being female.

I have worked in television shows similar to Mrs Merton; this sort of thing happened all the time, so much so that it was almost funny. While I was working on one show years ago, one of the executive producers was so used to it that he devised a simple slogan to yell at us humble researchers: “Look, loves, don’t fuck the turns!” Because you know, the turns would turn up and they would, well… hope to have favours granted. Again, I am not referring to or indeed excusing sexual assault. I am pointing out that there was, and probably always will be, a certain amount of irresponsible behaviour in the entertainment world, whether from Radio 1 DJs or anyone else, and women in particular have to negotiate it as they see fit.

But that’s not ok. Dumping an extra burden on “women in particular” is not ok. Treating women as there for the fucking is not ok.

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