From Janet L. Factor

Hello fellow freethinkers! My local group, Springfield Area Freethinkers, is undertaking an action this Sunday that we would like more of the secular community to be aware of. We are going to picket an honest-to-goodness cathedral! Since you are a person in a position to spread the word, I am sending this information to you in hopes that you will blog or otherwise report about this event in advance. Feel free to forward this info if you have contacts who might be interested in writing about this as well.

While our group has existed here for years, this will be our first venture into public protest. It’s important that it be a success. We would like to get as much participation as possible from those who can join us, and as much psychological support as we can from those who cannot. I’m hoping that this will be the little push that gets the secular activism ball rolling here in Illinois’ capital city.

Here’s the bare-bones information (more detail follows):

WHO: Springfield Area Freethinkers are the local hosting group. Also participating are CUFree of Champaign and the Peoria Secular Humanist Society.

WHAT: A picket in support of Church-State separation as an American value. We are calling it “Buttress the Wall of Separation.”

WHEN: 9:15 AM until approximately 11:30 AM on Sunday, October 21st.

WHERE: Sidewalk surrounding the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Springfield, Illinois, at the intersection of S. Sixth St. and E. Lawrence Ave.

WHY: Bishop Thomas Paprocki who heads the Diocese recently issued a statement warning Catholics that if they vote for Democrats they will burn in hell. He has also put the Diocese on several lawsuits challenging church-state separation. He is determined to change the law. We are determined to stop him.

HOW: The city of Springfield has told us that we may legally picket the Cathedral SO LONG AS we do not obstruct pedestrian traffic and remain off the private property. We intend to carry signs emphasizing the American ideals of separation of church and state and of freedom of conscience. The focus must remain sharp on these issues. Many believers will support us on this. It will gain us respect and build bridges.

BACKGROUND/LINKS:

Springfield Area Freethinkers web page: http://www.meetup.com/safreethinkers/

Paprocki Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Paprocki

Paprocki is both a civil and a canon lawyer. He is actively seeking to change the law on church-state separation. He has put the Springfield Diocese on court actions challenging the contraception mandate and on a case trying to force the state to fund Catholic adoption agencies even if they turn away same-sex couples and unmarried couples. He once said that victims of pedophile priests who sue the church are tools of the devil, and he organized a national training of priests in exorcism in order to revive the practice. Oh yes, and he’s on the panel of bishops  trying to repress liberal nuns. This guy is something out of the Dark Ages.

His statement: http://ct.dio.org/bishops-column/59-think-and-pray-about-your-vote-in-upcoming-election/video.html Maddeningly worded, but nonetheless a clear endorsement of the Republican platform, with a threat to back it up.

This obviously violates the tax code, which you can find explained here: http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organizations/The-Restriction-of-Political-Campaign-Intervention-by-Section-501%28c%29%283%29-Tax-Exempt-Organizations

In fact, all the bishops of Illinois are collaborating in offering “guidance” to Catholic voters in this election. They have written a series of pastoral letters being inserted into church bulletins every week. You can find those here: http://www.ilcatholic.org/election-2012/  (I find the second one particularly infuriating.)

The local paper’s story on it:  http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x1784776274/Paprocki-doesnt-back-down-from-political-statements.

Their editorial: http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sj-r.com%2Fopinions%2Fx1784776967%2FBishops-election-message-will-result-in-division&h=eAQFSESS6AQFTEcAj1mQE_xntquclJzIc4bMwv5b00pl3kQ&s=1

And a long series of letters to the editor on the topic: http://www.sj-r.com/search?q=bishop+paprocki&submit=Search Including this one from a Catholic upset with Paprocki: http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x493671083/Letter-Offended-by-the-bishop

AlterNet has listed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as one of the top ten most dangerous religious right organizations: http://www.alternet.org/belief/10-most-dangerous-religious-right-organizations?page=0%2C1

If you want some real fire-breathing rhetoric on the bishops, plus some EYEPOPPING figures on how much TAXPAYER money they get, go here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/06/1089172/-Stop-Government-Funding-of-Catholic-Plutocrats

PRACTICAL INFORMATION: For those hoping to attend: parking is free downtown on Sundays. The Cathedral is slightly less than one mile from the Amtrak station. The weather forecast is very favorable at the moment. Anyone who might come the night before and want something to do, the annual Springfield Zombie Walk for charity takes place Saturday evening: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Springfield-Illinois-Zombie-Walk/128668543841888?ref=ts&fref=ts

Some ideas for signs:

“People aren’t Pawns, Bishop!”

“If you want to play you have to pay!—Tax churches that play politics.”

“it’s a voting booth, not a confessional.”

“It’s supposed to be a SECRET ballot.”

“Don’t tell me how to vote.”

“Keep religion out of politics.”

“Democracy not theocracy”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE:

Phil Ferguson of CUFree has done an initial post on this event: http://www.skepticmoney.com/secular-protest-at-catholic-church/ And Rachel Maddow covered Paprocki’s statement in “This Week in God”: http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/29/14150715-this-week-in-god?lite

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

Yes Malala may be doing better, but gurlz still must not be allowed to go to school in Pakistan. Everyone knows the whorey little sluts only want to go to school so that they can fuck all the boys there. Bitches.

Another school was blown up today, bringing the total for the year to 18.

On September 7th a school was blown up by suspected militants in Swabi, northern Pakistan.

Two improvised devices had been planted in the veranda of the school which went off one after the other during night.

Two classrooms of the school building developed cracks and were rendered useless. The watchman of the institution survived the attack.

On September 9th militants blew up a government primary school for girls in lower Orakzai Agency, northern Pakistan

Explosives were planted at the school, located near Khail Maat Shah village in Storikhel area, that exploded before dawn. The school building was destroyed completely in the blast, they added.

Some people build schools, others destroy them. Some people teach girls, others shoot them in the head.

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

Janet Stemwedel has a sharp and to the point post on sexism among scientists, The point of calling out bad behavior.

There’s a blog discussion of a particular guy and his particular sexism, with lashings of sexism-denial Bingo. Free speech! Whassa big deal?! Give the guy a chance to grow!

It’s almost like people have something invested in denying the existence of gender bias among scientists, the phenomenon of a chilly climate in scientific professions, or even the possibility that Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook post was maybe not the first observable piece of sexism a working scientist put out there for the world to see.

The thing is, that denial is also the denial of the actual lived experience of a hell of a lot of women in science (and in other fields — I’ve been sexually harassed in both of the disciplines to which I’ve belonged).

And the denial itself is part of the lived experience. So is the rage and sexist name-calling that goes with much of the denial.

I can’t pretend to speak for everyone who calls out sexism like Maestripieri’s, so I’ll speak for myself.

I saw a tweet earlier today – by a denialist – saying

Can we please just stop using this expression “calling out”? If you use it, you sound like a self-righteous, ideologically driven loon.

Really? That’s a strange claim. What’s wrong with the expression? Atheists call out theists talking nonsense. Lawyers call out people who talk uninformed nonsense about the law. Lots of kinds of people call out journalists on bad reporting. And so on. I wonder if the denialist was talking about Stemwedel’s article, or something else.

Stemwedel says what she wants.

1. I want to shine a bright light on all the sexist behaviors, big or small, so the folks who have managed not to notice them so far start noticing them, and so that they stop assuming their colleagues who point them out and complain about them are making a big deal out of nothing.
2. I want the exposure of the sexist behaviors to push others in the community to take a stand on whether they’re cool with these behaviors or would rather these behaviors stop.  If you know about it and you don’t think it’s worth talking about, I want to know that about you — it tells me something about you that might be useful for me to know as I choose my interactions.
3. I want the people whose sexist behaviors are being called out to feel deeply uncomfortable — at least as uncomfortable as their colleagues (and students) who are women have felt in the presence of these behaviors.
4. I want people who voice their objections to sexist behaviors to have their exercise of free speech (in calling out the behaviors) be just as vigorously defended as the free speech rights of the people spouting sexist nonsense.
5. I want the sexist behavior to stop so scientists who happen to be women can concentrate on the business of doing science (rather than responding to sexist behavior, swallowing their rage, etc.)

2 is where we are mostly stuck right now. There are a hell of a lot of others in this particular community (to use that word for the sake of argument) who are refusing to take that stand, and in fact supporting people who engage in the behaviors.

And, I’ll level with you: while, in an ideal world, one would want the perpetrator of sexist behavior to Learn and Grow and Repent and make Sincere Apologies, I don’t especially care if someone is still sexist in his heart as long as his behavior changes.  It’s the interactions with other people that make the climate that other people have to deal with.  Once that part is fixed, we can talk strategy for saving souls.

Absolutely. Ditto. Same here. The first order of business is getting people to stop the fucking behavior. The improved attitude can come later, or we can leave that for the next generation. Repression is a good thing.

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

As many of you probably already know, Greta is in a situation where some financial support would relieve her of some extra worry that she doesn’t need. Passing on that message would help her too, including if you can’t help financially. Kind words also help. So do suggestions of stuff to watch or read while recuperating.

If you can’t or don’t want to donate money, but you still want to help, other helpful things would be:

Help spread the word about this fundraiser: on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, your own blog, any other reasonable means that you have access to.

Buy my book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and/or encourage other people to buy it and publicize it.

Give me suggestions for books and DVDs to keep me occupied during my recovery. I’m looking for books, movies, and TV shows that are engaging and entertaining, but not heavy or serious, and that don’t take too much brainpower to follow.

Send kind words. They help, more than I can say.

Buttons to donate, again, here. 

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

I just had a lively few minutes of being spammed by Be Scofield on Twitter. He’s written another article, and wants people to read it. Telling me it was about Atheism+ and interfaith didn’t do the trick, so then he told me he’d mentioned me in it so I might want to read it. Transparent, but effective – ohhhhhhhhhh all right, I’ll go see how you’ve dissed me this time. Fortunately it took only a few seconds to read, and I just said meh (in effect). Disappointing, so he tried telling PZ that he needed to stop doing what he was doing for the good of the whatever. Then he said he wasn’t telling us what to do. Good fun. I looked at his feed; he spammed the article to lots of people – Jessica Ahlquist for one. What’s Jessica done to deserve that?! Nothing.

Back to serious biz. Turkey has put yet another valuable person on trial for “insulting Islam.” How? Climbing to the top of a minaret and shouting “Islam sucks!!” through the loudspeaker? No. Tweeting.

World-famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say has appeared in court in Istanbul charged with inciting hatred and insulting the values of Muslims.

He is being prosecuted over tweets he wrote mocking radical Muslims, in a case which has rekindled concern about religious influence in the country.

But Turkey is supposed to be ”moderate” Islamism. Surely “moderate” Islamism doesn’t want to say that radical Muslims are identical to Islam. Surely it doesn’t want to say that mocking radical Muslims is insulting Islam, just like that – does it? Well apparently it does, but has it thought it through?

Prosecutors brought the charges against Mr Say in June. He faces a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison although correspondents say any sentence is likely to be suspended.

The indictment against him cites some of his tweets from April, including one where he says: “I am not sure if you have also realised it, but if there’s a louse, a non-entity, a lowlife, a thief or a fool, it’s always an Islamist.”

Dozens of the pianist’s supporters gathered outside the courthouse with banners, one of which called on the ruling Islamist-based AK Party to “leave the artists alone”.

Mr Say has played with the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and others, and has served as a cultural ambassador for the EU.

Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s minister in charge of relations with the EU, suggested the case against him should be dismissed, saying the court should regard his tweets as being within “his right to babble”.

However, Mr Bagis also criticised the pianist for “insulting people’s faith and values”.

That’s stupid. Bad values are bad, and should be insulted.

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

How useful, how apropos, how…right. An online article at the New Yorker on the wrongness of the idea that harassment is part of our glorious heritage of free speech.

It starts with Amanda Todd.

Todd’s suicide is easily analogized to Tyler Clementi’s, mostly because the  public has diagnosed both cases as the result of “cyber-bullying.” Yet, as a  descriptive term, “cyber-bullying” feels deliberately vague. Somewhere in the  midst of the “mob” there is usually at least one person whose cruelty exceeds  the tossing off of a stray insult. In Clementi’s case, the magazine’s Ian Parker   chalked the harasser’s motives up to “shiftiness and bad faith,” the kinds  of things that criminal statutes can’t easily be invoked to cover. But with  Todd’s harasser, the malice is unquestionable.

As is the malice of our harassers. That’s why we dislike them so much. It’s because their malice is so wildly out of proportion to any real evil – or malice – of ours. It’s because there’s a difference between an online argument or quarrel that lasts a few hours or days and then ends, with either reconciliation or going separate ways, and a sustained daily campaign of vicious defamatory harassment.

And now Michelle Dean really gets into it. It’s as if she’d been reading over our shoulders.

It is a cultural myth—one particular to the Internet—that the methods of a  harasser are fundamentally “legal,” and that the state is helpless to intervene  in all cases like this. The systematic way the harasser allegedly followed Todd  to new schools, repeatedly posting the images and threatening to do it again,  makes it textbook harassment regardless of the medium. Indeed, in Todd’s native  Canada, cyber-harassment is prosecuted under the general harassment provision of the  Canadian criminal code. And in the United States, most states have added specific laws against  cyber-harassment and bullying to their general legislation of harassment. At the  federal level, there is the Federal Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act,  which covers harassment that crosses state and national lines. While all of  these laws are subject to the limitations of the First Amendment, the First  Amendment generally doesn’t protect threats and harassment. If people are not  being prosecuted for these acts, the fault lies in the social alchemy of law  enforcement, the way the human prejudices of judges, juries, and prosecutors  inflect the black letter. Put otherwise, the power is there—the cultural mores  are what is preventing the laws from being successfully invoked.

There are, after all, consequences to the widespread belief that these acts of  harassment are regrettable but not ultimately punishable. Specifically, it  obscures truths about the practice—first, that this kind of thing is not merely  the province of children who know not what they do. While the police have yet to  confirm the identity of Todd’s harasser, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous has identified an adult man who  lived nearby as the culprit. (He denies the harassment, though he told a  Canadian television news crew that he did indeed know Todd.) It remains to be seen whether  they’ve pointed the finger at the right person. But the theory—that an adult  would have targeted a teen-ager for such abuse, that he would have tricked her  and been indifferent to the price she paid—is not merely plausible. It is a  thing that happens every day on the Internet.

For many people it seems to be what the Internet is for – targeting people, especially women, for endless pauseless abuse.

She goes on to Michael Brutsch.

What you could call the Brutschean world view—which takes anonymity as the  only meaningful form of privacy, and a key element of free speech—is nearly an  article of faith in these lower levels of the Internet. But it has tentacles  that extend to higher, more powerful places. Scholars often approvingly quote  EFF.org founder John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which, among  other utopian visions, holds that “our identities have no bodies, so, unlike  you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” The founding myth of the  Internet was its offer of a way to escape physical reality; the freedom to shape  yourself, to say anything, became a sort of sacred object.

But, as the scholar Mary Anne Franks has observed, women haven’t actually achieved this “bodiless” freedom online. They are embodied in distributed pictures and in  sexual comments, whether they like it or not. The power to get away from  yourself, like everything else, is unevenly distributed. Women have become, as  Franks put it, “unwilling avatars,” unable to control their own images online,  and then told to put up with it for the sake of “freedom,” for the good of the  community. And then they are incorrectly told, even if the public is behind  them, that they have no remedies in the law. They are shouted down by people  with a view of freedom of speech more literal than that held by any judge.

Yes, and yes, and yes.

I did have ”bodiless” freedom for several years, or if I didn’t I was unaware of the fact. But then after a few years I didn’t any more. I got away with it for awhile and then I no longer did. I’m an unwilling avatar. That’s freedom of speech, bitch!

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

Almost as if in reply to the “liberal bullies” article, some US publishers say that words matter.

Despite promises to reform their textbooks, the Saudi education system continues to indoctrinate children with hatred and incitement. Seven current and former heads of major publishing houses address the critical importance of words.

The critical importance of words? But aren’t we always being told that words don’t matter? That we “radfems” are just batshit crazy, making all this fuss about mere “werdz” because it’s only fists and sticks that make any difference.

As current and former heads of major American publishing houses, we know the value of words. They inform actions and shape the world views of all, especially children. We are writing to express our profound disappointment that the Saudi government continues to print textbooks inciting hatred and violence against religious minorities.

Oh but there’s no hatred or violence directed at religious minorities in Saudi Arabia. That never happens!!1

A ninth-grade textbook published by the Ministry of Education states, “The Jews and the Christians are enemies of the believers, and they cannot approve of Muslims.” An eighth-grade textbook says, “The Apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews; and the Swine are the infidels of the communion of Jesus, the Christians.” These are just two examples of a long list of hate-filled passages.

Children who are indoctrinated with such hatred are susceptible to engage in bigotry and even violence. Hate speech is the precursor to genocide. First you get to hate and then you kill. This makes peaceful coexistence difficult, if not impossible.

No no no no no. That can’t be right, because free speech.

H/t Seth.

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

The pro-misogyny (yes, misogyny) crowd is passing around an article on “liberal bullying.” Of course they are. The people who stalk a few bloggers day in and day out for a year and a half are “brave heroes” and freedom fighters; the people they stalk relentlessly are liberal bullies.

Still, there’s something to it, at least if the descriptions are accurate.

Increasingly, I’ve started recognizing this kind of behavior for what it is: privilege-checking as a form of internet sport. It’s a kind of trolling, with all the politics I agree with, but motivations and execution that turns my stomach. It’s well-intended (SO well-intended), but when the motivations seem to be less about opening dialogue about the issues, and more about performance, righteousness, and intolerance for those who don’t agree with you… well, I’m not on-board.

You know what it reminds me of? The Slacktiverse. There are some liberal bullies there, I think – except that they’re not liberal in the sense I use it. Ariel Meadow Stallings uses it in a different sense, though, and the bullies at Slacktiverse fit that sense. And they ooze righteousness.

There’s such a thing as the Social Justice Troll; it’s a meme.

A commenter has some doubts though.

What it sounds like you’re saying with this post is “I am tired if having to think about this stuff, and dealing with it is annoying me.” Now, by labeling people who call someone out as a troll and a bully, we can dismiss those people, and silence their concerns. The problem is, it won’t be the balloon examples– and this is already happening– it will be the examples of calling out overt misogyny (as in the skeptic community) or racism that will see the brunt of this labeling.

And oh gee golly guess what that’s already happening, and has been happening for lo these many months.

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

The philosophical primate recommended John Scalzi’s article on Redditt and Brutsch and “free speech” and creepy woman-hating shit, and sure enough.

If someone bleats to you about any of this being a “free speech” issue, you can safely mark them as either ignorant or pernicious — probably ignorant, as the understanding of what “free speech” means in a constitutional sense here in the US is, shall we say, highly constrained in the general population. Additionally and independently, the sort of person who who says “free speech” when they mean “I like doing creepy things to other people without their consent and you can’t stop me so fuck you ha ha ha ha” is pretty clearly a mouth-breathing asshole who in the larger moral landscape deserves a bat across the bridge of the nose and probably knows it. Which is why — unsurprisingly — so many of them choose to be anonymous and/or use pseudonyms on Reddit while they get their creep on.

We’ve been getting the “you can’t stop them so fuck you ha ha ha ha” line right here all afternoon. It’s less disgusting than you can’t stop me, but it’s still very damn irritating. Yes I know I can’t stop you, but that doesn’t mean it’s an admirable or non-stupid thing to do.

In the case of Adrian Chen, the Gawker writer who revealed Violentacrez’s real-life identity, I think he’s perfectly justified in doing so. Whether certain denizens of Reddit like it or not, Chen was practicing journalism, and writing a story of a figure of note (and of notoriety) on one of the largest and most influential sites on the Internet. They may believe that Mr. Brutsch should have an expectation not to have his real life identity revealed on Gawker, but the question to ask here is “why?” Why should that be the expectation? How does an expectation of pseudonymity on a Web site logically extend to an expectation of pseudonymity in the real world? How does one who beats his chest for the right of free speech on a Web site (where in fact he has no free speech rights) and to have that right to free speech include the posting of pictures of women who did not consent to have their pictures taken or posted then turn around and criticize Gawker for pursuing an actually and legitimately constitutionally protected exercise of the free press, involving a man who has no legal or ethical presumption of anonymity or pseudonymity in the real world? How do you square one with the other?

Yes but women who have legs and tits and bums and genitals are sluts and deserve to have their pictures taken and posted without their consent. That’s how it works.

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

A guest post by the philosophical primate. Originally a comment on Using anonymity to speak more freely.

Reddit’s terms of service do not in any way guarantee users’ privacy, and anyone who thinks their privacy is protected when using the internet is an idiot anyway. The only privacy that actually *matters* here is the invaded privacy of women and girls having their images exploited without their consent, which is morally reprehensible regardless of its legality. John Scalzi wrote something particularly clear and scathing on this topic yesterday: I encourage all to read it.

The key idea that deserves attention here is that protection of privacy — even anonymity — has a purpose: Whether legally or morally speaking, that purpose is NOT to protect people from the consequences of their actions. Rather, the purpose is to protect people from unwarranted, unjust negative consequences from morally blameless actions: We ought to protect the anonymity of whistleblowers who expose corruption because they are doing something good that might cause them to suffer bad consequences. We ought to protect the privacy of medical records because it’s good that people feel free to seek medical care (especially mental health care) without fear of social stigma or job loss or other negative consequences. We ought to to protect a sphere of private life from the intrusive monitoring of government because powerful institutions have both the motivation and means to abuse that information in ways too numerous to contemplate.

In contrast, we have no sound moral reason to protect the privacy of creeps who use anonymity as a shield from the negative consequences for their own antisocial behavior. More generally, it is rank moral idiocy to argue that anonymity ought to shield someone from the consequence of morally blameworthy actions.

Free speech (as Scalzi points out) isn’t relevant to this discussion at all in any legal sense: Reddit is a privately owned website, not a government institution or public forum. However, in the broader sense that silencing unpopular opinions can be a form of tyranny of the majority, it is potentially relevant: But even John Stuart Mill, the most ardent and eloquent defender of free speech in this broader sense, never argued that freedom of speech even slightly implied freedom from the consequences of your speech. If your speech reveals you to be a loathsome creep with no respect for other human beings and you suffer the natural consequences — that others loath you, lose respect for you, and shun you — you have no grounds for complaint.

Of course, the speech of Brutsch is not truly minority opinion at all: It is the speech of the powerful, the message of patriarchy and rape culture, the voice of the abuser and oppressor. It would be downright hilarious to watch Brutsch and his fellow travelers claim the role of victimhood in this situation, if only there weren’t so many loathsome idiots willing to accept their claims of victimhood at face value.

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

Damon Poeter at PC mag takes a more rational view than Redditt. (Probably 99% of human beings take a more rational view than Redditt.)

This isn’t very complicated. Posting pictures of people without their knowledge is both an invasion of their privacy and a form of outing them to the Internet. Doing so may be protected speech, but it doesn’t mean it’s good speech, or speech that shouldn’t be shamed from the hilltops as an exercise of one’s own free speech. What’s more, Adrian Chen himself didn’t “do anything illegal” by exposing Michael Brutsch (and yes, Redditors didn’t do anything illegal by blocking Gawker links, etc., etc. — the Ferris Wheel can go round and round, but at some point we have to get off and take a stand for something, I think).

If you live by the sword of exposing strangers to ridicule, contempt, and objectification on the Internet, it’s pretty rich when you throw a hissy fit when the other side of that blade swings your way.

Preeeeeecisely.

The last refuge of Violentacrez and his supporters is the claim that upsetting people’s sensitivities via trolling is socially valuable in that it breaks down cultural taboos and pierces the grim veil of political correctness. Perhaps, in some instances. Trolls come in many shapes and forms, some much more aware of the subversive nature of their activities than others, as explained quite well by Whitney Phillips over at The Atlantic.

Well, there’s a difference between rick-rolling someone, disrupting the flow of an online conversation, or even pointing them to goatse, and actively invading people’s privacy IRL. There’s a difference between using anonymity to speak more freely than you otherwise could and using it to bully, smear, and slut shame others.

Well actually there isn’t, not literally. That is, using anonymity to bully, smear, and slut shame others really is using anonymity to speak more freely than you otherwise could. The description fits. That means you have to make the distinction in a different way. You have to point out that “more freely” is not all there is to it; you have to note that “more freely” covers a lot of territory, and not all of it is good or valuable or fair.

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

Reddit speaks. Reddit says what it’s going to do about stuff like “creepshots.” Nothing, of course.

But Redditt doesn’t admit the nature of the stuff it’s going to do nothing about. Reddit bullshits. Reddit pretends the subject is “distasteful” stuff. That makes Redditt a lying dog.

Social news site Reddit will not censor “distasteful” sections of its website, its chief executive has said.

The site has recently been criticised over sections in which users shared images of, among other things, women photographed without their knowledge.

Yishan Wong told the site’s moderators legal content should not be removed, even if “we find it odious or if we personally condemn it”.

“We stand for free speech… we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits.”

Oh, fuck you, you piece of shit. Publishing pictures of women taken without their knowledge or consent is not “distasteful.” It’s not free speech (it’s not speech at all, for a start). It’s not some glorious liberal principle you get to “stand for.” It’s rapey invasive violation of other people.

In a posting made to a private area of the site for moderators and administrators, Mr Wong described the situation as “a bit of a pickle”.

“There sure has been a lot of trouble lately for Reddit, and I’d like to talk about about that before I nip off for a spot of tea,” he wrote. He went on to add: “We know that some will not agree with us. We also think that if someday, in the far future, we do become a universal platform for human discourse, it would not do if in our youth, we decided to censor things simply because they were distasteful.”

However, Mr Wong – who used to be an engineer at Facebook – said the website would continue to enforce a policy to not allow “doxxing”, a term given to the process of outing a member by posting personal details online.

“We will ban the posting of personal information, because it incites violence and harassment against specific individuals,” Mr Wong said.

He blamed past instances of misguided “witch-hunts” for this rule.

Has it all. Deep concern for their privacy combined with total indifference to the privacy of outsiders. Self-pitying accusations of  ”witch-hunts” combined with determined protection of the violation of outsiders. We are The Good People who “stand for” free speech; They are The Bad People who do “witch-hunts” and have no right to their own privacy.

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

Hilary Mantel won the Booker for the sequel to Wolf Hall. I just got Wolf Hall out of the library a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been reading it, and…

I don’t like it. I not only don’t like it, I also think it’s not very good. I don’t think it’s terrible; I’ve seen far worse; but I don’t think it’s very good. I think it’s padded, the way so much “literary” fiction is padded. I’m increasingly allergic to padded literary fiction.

Plus she has this weird thing where you’re supposed to get that an oddly non-specific “he” in any particular passage is always Cromwell, except the trouble with that is that there are often other “he”s in the passage and it really isn’t as clear which she means as she apparently intended it to be. Or maybe she didn’t bother about it. At any rate it turns out that that doesn’t work very well. I wonder why she thought it would.

Overall it’s just boring. It should be good material but she makes it boring. The opening scene is far from boring, but then after that…Boredom.

Anyone else bored by it? (Jean Kazez tweeted her dislike of it yesterday, and a couple of us chimed in.) Any defenders?

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

Heh heh heh. Jesus has a hermeneuticon. Well of course he does.

Find out what kind at Jesus and Mo.

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

Thugs with guns killed a volunteer who was handing out polio vaccine to children under 5 in Baluchistan.

Not much more to say really.

Except this.

Pakistan is one of only three countries where the highly infectious crippling disease remains endemic, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria.

There have been 30 confirmed cases of polio in Pakistan this year according to the government, 22 of them in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Another day, another bad thing done.

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

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid writes in Pakistan Today that it’s stupid to blame the Taliban while defending the ideology behind the Taliban.

Let’s stop carving out quasi religions, or defending ideologies that we’ve all grown up blindly following as the truth. Let’s call a spade a spade instead and realize that at the end of the day as much as you might have a cardiac arrest admitting it, the root cause of religious extremism is: religion – especially in its raw crude form, which again is the only ‘authentic’ form.

Every single religion has a violent streak. Every single one of them orders violence and killing in one form or the other for the ‘non-believers’. One can quote verses from every holy scripture depicting loathe and despise for anyone who doesn’t believe in the said scripture and its propagator. Sure, those scriptures would have the occasional fit of peace as well, but that only springs into the open when it is recognized as the only supreme authority. Every religion is a ‘religion of peace’ as long as it formulates the status quo; there is no concept of ideological symbiosis in any religion. When a tyrannical regime or dictator calls for peace with the condition that they would reign supreme we label them as oppressors, but when this is done in the name of religion we tout it as maneuvers of ‘harmony’.

Tacitus. It always makes me think of Tacitus. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant – where they make a wilderness, and call it peace.

The Taliban have defended the attack on Malala Yousafzai through scriptures and historic precedents. You can clamor all you want about how there is a lack of understanding on the part of the Taliban, but how on earth can you refute clear messages of violence and historical evidence – scribed by historians of your faith – depicting brutality on the part of some of the most illustrious people in the history of the religion? It is easy to launch vitriol against the Taliban for attacking a 14-year-old girl, but it is also equally hypocritical and pathetic when you eulogize people from your history who did the same in the past, who massacred masses, destroyed lands, pulverized places of worship, raped women, just because they ostensibly did it in the name of your religion. Don’t blame the Taliban for following their lead, don’t blame the Taliban for using violence as a means to cement religious superiority – something that has been done for centuries – don’t blame the Taliban for the fact that you don’t have the guts to call a spade a spade even though it has been spanking your backside for centuries now.

Yes. Watch your back, Mr Shahid.

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

There’s a dead rat outside my door. Ew. I’m hoping a crow will come along and take it away. Or a cat. Or a dog. Or a swat team. Or the National Guard. Or the mayor. Or a wolf. Or a raccoon. Or a bald eagle. Or that neighbor with the very loud voice.

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