In a comment at Pharyngula responding to people saying things like

I find it sad that, for want of a better analogy, the terrorists seem to be winning… let’s not kid ourselves, this is a fight for our movement, and we have to be prepared to get your hands dirty if we don’t want this kind of dick head behavior to be associated with it.  Yet all I see is declarations of “oh, I’m not going, because poo-poo heads”… it should be more like “They what!?  Let’s take it to ‘em, troops”

Maureen said:

How dare you come here with so poor a grasp of what has been happening, such a complete blank in your brains?  How dare you suggest that we are failing to change the culture because we are too passive?  Some of us do have enough grasp of what is happening to know that sometimes in this fight the opposite of “passive” is “dead”  –  dead in a ditch like Emmett Till in an earlier struggle because he wasn’t quite passive enough, dead under the King’s horse at Epsom like Emily Davidson, dead like Brandy Martell just last month in Oakland CA but then you probably never heard of her.

Besides, guys, we are not on a martyrdom kick.  We are trying to persuade a bunch of entitled buffoons that the culture is changing, it is going to keep changing and, no, they can’t halt the change.  They can only drag it out a little, make it a little more messy.  To achieve that we have to be focussed and rational.  The delayers and disparagers can afford to be emotional and self-indulgent  –  as they have been of late.

What exactly is it that you want us to do?  All sell our houses and fly to Vegas so that we can wrap James Randi and his beard in Scotch tape?  Yes, that would be assault and you can be sure that by the time we finished the first roll every cop within 20 miles would be on hand to protect him.

People are getting away with behaviour on the ill-mannered to criminal scale because they are getting cover from both the arrogant and the dim.  They are getting encouragement.  They are being cheered on as they heap verbal abuse on those who have already been abused.  They are putting on stunts like the Great Penis Debate in the midst of all this and still claiming that it’s all a big joke.

There are two sets of people here  –  the ones who suggest that with some effort we could improve this, that or the other and the other set who say, “Naw, my grandpappy used to get away with groping all the women in his workplace and I want my share, too.”  Not difficult to see which set you lot jumped into bed with!

Now listen up, children.  I was 70 last week and I have been on to this since I was 12.  In my lifetime and in just one country I have seen changes to the teaching of maths and science, the professions opened to women, the banking system woken up so that it no longer demands a male countersignature, individual taxation for couples, women’s refuges and rape crisis centres, clarification of what rape is and stalking on the books as a criminal offence plus other changes to the law.  And so on and so forth.  And marched and wrote and spoke and supported comrades in the fight.

In the course of that I have met an amazing number of totally impressive people, people I have been so proud to know.  Not a few of them on this very blog where I come for the very clarity of thought, effective communication, depth of commitment and experience which has always proved to be far more effective than any amount of mealy-mouthed wanking.

We are not there yet and sometimes that get a bit frustrating.  Some of us, though, know exactly what we are aiming for and it is still eyes on the prize.

You don’t like that?  Tough!

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

I got email threats about TAM today, so I’m not going.

One less thing to worry about.

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

The popular Pakistani singer Ghazala Javed was shot to death in Peshawar yesterday along with her father.

Police official Imtiaz Khan said the ex-husband was suspected of involvement in the murders.

The singer had fled to Peshawar in 2009 to escape the then Taliban-dominated northwestern district of Swat as the army launched a sweeping offensive.

Ghazala Javed sung in her native Pashto language and released more than two dozen albums that were popular among Pashto speakers in the northwest.

She married businessman Jahangir Khan in 2010, but demanded a divorce after finding out he had another wife and because he tried to ban her from singing, the family said.

Not the Taliban, just a murderous possessive ex-husband.

Same thing.

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

The pope’s consigliere says it’s the devil who’s making things hot for them.

In a rare interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, accused the media of “intentionally ignoring” the good things the Church does while dwelling on scandals.

Yeah the good things! Like telling people condoms cause Aids! Like trying to stop people using any kind of birth control ever! Like trying to make hospitals promise never to save a woman’s life if it requires an abortion – never ever ever. Like excommunicating anyone who tries to ordain a woman. Like saying no no no no no no women can never be priests because they are women. Good things!

Bertone branded as false the image of the Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles, saying: “The truth is that there is an attempt to sow division that comes from the Devil”.

Nothing to do with any faults in the institution itself or its way of thinking about the world – such as claiming that problems are the work of the devil.

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

A few hours after we did the hangout video yesterday, Russell Blackford did a tweet.

I see that DJ Grothe is still Witch of the Week. #bullies

Followed by another.

Freethought Blogs – the haven of bullies, bully-enablers, and witch hunters. I’m sick to death of this. #bullies

Some hours after that, Jeremy Stangroom did one.

…the bullies at FreeThought Blogs run the risk of precipitating a tragedy. Bullying ruins – and sometimes ends – lives. #bullies

So now you know. We (we of Freethought blogs, we who did that video, we whom DJ Grothe accused of turning women away from TAM by discussing harassment issues, we who have been rejecting that accusation, we who have been getting shouted at by raging men on ugly videos) – we are bullies and witch hunters. We run the risk of driving people to suicide.

We are. We do. Really? How? Who is it who is being bullied by us? DJ? Apparently, according to Blackford. But DJ is the president of a big skeptics’ organization, and he has lots of allies. Is he really the powerless one here? And what exactly is it that we’re doing that constitutes bullying? We’ve been disputing what he said about us, certainly – but is that really bullying? I think it isn’t. In fact I think it was DJ who was bullying us. I certainly think it is some of DJ’s partisans who have been bullying us ever since – Emery Emery and Travis Roy, for instance. The people who call us cunts and fucking bitches on Abbie Smith’s blog, for instance.

Blackford knows all about that. He’s never said a word about it that I know of (and believe me, I’ve looked) apart from once saying the Abbie Smith gang should stop it because it’s not helpful to Stef McGraw. I’ve never seen him call it bullying. Not once. It’s been going on for a year, singling out Rebecca Watson, me, and PZ Myers for their most devoted attention.

Stangroom knows all about it too. He has friendly exchanges with some of the Abbie Smith gang. I’ve never seen him say a word about it, either. I’ve seen him say nasty things about “Freethought Blogs” many many many times, but never once anything about Abbie Smith’s blog, where the vilification goes on day in and day out.

So how does this work? What’s the thought process that sees us as bullies and witch hunters (and Talibanesque) while it ignores or even encourages the vicious bile at Abbie Smith’s blog and The Great Penis Debate?

I don’t know. It’s a poser. I don’t get it.

I’ll tell you what though. It makes me feel a little sick to see a couple of men calling a few women witch hunters and bullies when the women have been and are being regularly targeted by genuine misogynist bullies. It’s like a couple of white people calling a few black people who are being targeted by racist bullies “KKK” and “racist.” It’s fucked up. It’s backward. It’s appropriating words that are meaningful to a particular liberation struggle and using them to beat up on the very people doing the struggling.

Greg tried to get some light shed on this matter, but he was told to fuck off.

#bullies indeed. What a joke.

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

A pony, a pony, a pony!

The whole set is at Jason’s – Greta, Natalie, Sikivu, Rebecca, Taslima, Jen, Stephanie – The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse. Yesssss!

The artist is embertine.

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

I mentioned yesterday that a Karachi police station was being attacked by a mob who wanted to kill a guy who’d been arrested for blasphemy. It was eyewitness news on Twitter, not published news. Now there is published news.

A police station in central part of the city was attacked by an angry mob on Sunday that tried to break into the lockups to kill a blasphemy accused.

The Taimuria Police Station in North Nazimabad became a warzone when it arrested and booked a man under section 295(b) on accusation of desecrating a copy of Holy Quran.

…

“Then slowly people started gathering outside and it turned into a crowd. The screaming mob was demanding of us to hand over the accused to them.”

Police claim to have recovered some drugs from his possession as well. As police resisted, the mob turned violent and barged into the police station, breaking furniture and beating at least one policeman.

Another step down the spiral.

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

Greg has an interesting followup comment on his claim about how intentional it all is.

I am not suggesting that people sat down in a board meeting and made a plan and DJ Grothe is carrying it out.

I am suggesting that a male dominated society within a society (JREF/TAM within Western Culture) is blind to certain things, and has certain self-serving expectations, and smooth sailing is defined when those expectation are not interfered with by, well, by “Feminist Bitches.”  Are there no conversations happening amongst (there’s that word again) JREF financiers, board members, DJ, others? Are there no emails distributed among any of the various mainly male defenders of DJ Grothe in social networking circles that say anything about anything?  Is there no background discussion going on at all?  Of course there are.  How organized is all that? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that an important part of the culture of the skeptical movement is being threatened and JREF is one of the pillars of that culture.  JREF, TAM and DJ Grothe do not need to defend the status quo, and they shouldn’t. Yet they are.  After a while, that ceases, all due respect to my colleague Crommie, to be attributable to incompetence.

Agreed. I don’t think it was a plan, but yes I do think it emerged from a particular culture (and is getting cheered on by that culture now).

I said this at Greg’s:

I think a lot of it is just dislike and contempt, simmering in those background discussions you mentioned. I think DJ blurted some of that out…maybe thinking that it was an “everybody thinks” kind of thing, because of the background discussions – and lots of people do think, so he wasn’t all wrong. I suppose he expected us all just to go “ouch” and creep away to the corner and stop bugging everyone until maybe late July or so. I don’t think he expected the conversation to go the way it has. But the idea that we’re (we pesky women, we feminist bitches, to use Rebecca’s term) threatening the Normal skeptical movement – yes, I think that.

I’ll say more here.

It’s like other male enclaves, or places that men think are male enclaves.

They think we’re going to make it all boring, and weak, and puritanical (or Talibanesque, however bizarre that might seem for feminists), and unfunny, and sexless, and schoolteacherish. They think it’s bean sprouts and Birkenstocks and puzzled frowns and homemade toothpaste.

They think they have a monopoly on all the good things – jokes, irony, sex, energy, noise, sex, color, hippitude, argument, sex.

The trouble with that is, The Great Penis Debate. Not funny.

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

I heard a bit of news on the radio late Friday evening that froze me to the spot with surprise -

A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has declared Canada’s laws against physician-assisted suicide unconstitutional because they discriminate against the physically disabled.

I thought immediately of Eric. I very nearly got back online to email him (but went to sleep instead).

In a 395-page ruling released Friday, Justice Lynn Smith addressed the situation faced by Gloria Taylor, a B.C. woman who was one of five plaintiffs in the case seeking the legal right to doctor-assisted suicide.

Taylor has ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, and she sought the ruling to allow her doctor to help her end her life before she becomes incapacitated.

Because that’s the terrible fear with diseases like ALS and MS (which Eric’s wife Elisabeth had): the fear of being so incapacitated that you can’t kill yourself when you desperately want to because you’re so incapacitated.

In her ruling, Smith noted suicide itself is not illegal, and therefore the law against assisted suicide contravenes Section 15 of the charter, which guarantees equality, because it denies physically disabled people like Taylor the same rights as able-bodied people who can take their own lives, she ruled.

“The impact of that distinction is felt particularly acutely by persons such as Ms. Taylor, who are grievously and irremediably ill, physically disabled or soon to become so, mentally competent and who wish to have some control over their circumstances at the end of their lives,” Smith writes.

“The distinction is discriminatory … because it perpetuates disadvantage.”

I was staggered by that; it’s such good sense, and I thought I would never hear it.

I want to read the full decision. Legal rulings can be wonderful reading, and I’m told this one is.

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

Here’s what I was doing for the last couple of hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_OsT7frPg

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

It’s Sunday, Boko Haram bombs in Nigeria day, so there have been bombs going off in Nigeria today (because it’s Sunday). Boko Haram keeps its appointments.

Multiple blasts have hit at least three churches in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna.

A local Red Cross worker told the Associated Press that at least 12 people had been killed and 80 injured in the attacks.

A decent haul. They could do better, but 12 + 80 is respectable.

Meanwhile, Urooj Zia reports via Twitter that there’s a mob attacking a police station right now in Karachi, trying to kill a man accused of “blasphemy” who is being held there. Taimuria police station.

A couple of days ago another mob in Quetta, trying to kill another man accused of “blasphemy,” killed at least three people.

At least three people were killed and several others injured as protesters went on a rampage over an alleged desecration of the Holy Quran in Kuchlak area of Balochistan on Saturday. A large number of protesters set a police station and five vehicles on fire as news of desecration of the Holy Quran spread in the area. Police have arrested a suspect who was reported to be “mentally retarded”, administration official Qambar Dashti said.

Allah is wise, merciful.

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

A religion allows men to have multiple wives. What could possibly go wrong?

When Dr Zabina Shahian married Pervez Choudhry she thought he would be the man with whom she would settle down for the rest of her life and start a family.

But she did not know the former Conservative party leader on Slough Borough Council was still married.

Choudhry, 54, who claimed he did not realise the marriage in Pakistan was legally valid in the UK, was given a community order after admitting bigamy.

A “devastated” Dr Shahian now wants to help other women who are victims of polygamous marriages – a practice a leading family lawyer says is “rife” within the British Muslim community.

Jeez, what a princess. What’s her problem? Just because he gets two and she gets half? He’s a man. Men need more. More what? More everything. More sex, more rights, more freedom, more power, more ability to tell women to cover up and shut up. The prophet said so.

Dr Shahian, who did not want her picture published, realises she was lucky, as a career woman, to have been able to afford the detective fees and also to have support from her family to go through with the prosecution.

However she said some members of her local South Asian Muslim community were less understanding.

“When I go down to my parents I get all the neighbours looking at me. As a Muslim woman I’m supposed to keep a low profile. I feel like I’ve committed a crime here although I’m the victim. You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut and you’re supposed to just carry on. It is impregnated into our culture.”

Princess. Feminazi. Westernized spoiled demanding princessy biatch.

But combating a cultural pressure on some Muslim women is difficult, says Dr Siddiqui. Polygamy “is so widely spread they don’t blame men having a second wife or a third or fourth wife,” he said. “They accept this is their lot.”

Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain and who is an imam, said in the Koran it stated men were allowed to take more than one wife, but only under strict rules that included obtaining consent from the first wife and treating all wives equally and fairly.

He did not think there were many polygamous marriages in the UK but “condemned” the actions of men who flout the polygamy rules. He also described as “sad” the “cultural pressures” that prevent women standing up for justice. “Whatever cultural norms there may be, what Islam does not allow is the mistreatment of women, full stop.”

Why does the BBC think it has to consult the MCB? Why does it act as a conduit for their bullshit?

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

I forgot to say!

Jen is doing her annual SSA blogathon  – not the wimpy 6 hours I did but the big kahuna: twenty.four.hours.

You know why the SSA is a great thing and needs your support.

Donate to the Secular Student Alliance here.

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

And when I say “tomorrow” of course I mean “a week from tomorrow.” Because I was rushing, and got it wrong.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain are having a 5th anniversary celebration and fundraiser tomorrow Saturday June 23 in London. If you’re in or near London, go along and give them bales of money tied loosely with twine.

Book your tickets today and join 5th anniversary celebrations

Join us to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain on Saturday 23 June 2012 from 13.00-16.00hours in London. Book your tickets today. Speakers and acts include: Renowned Philosopher AC Grayling Writer and Documentary-maker Gita Sahgal Comedian Kate Smurthwaite Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss and Best-selling Author of A Universe From Nothing DV8 Physical Theatre Director Lloyd Newson with a clip from Can we Talk about This? CEMB Founder and Campaigner Maryam Namazie Magician Neil Edwards Singer and Songwriter Shelley Segal

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