Hahahahahaha Justin Vacula explains why what Michael Shermer said about atheism as a guy thing was totally reasonable and ok and fine. He explains it in a comment on Jacques Rousseau’s post accusing me of misrepresenting Shermer, hyperbole, and failure to read charitably.

Unfortunatly, the principle of charity is not something Ophelia (and her commenters) are considering. As you note, the most charitable interpretation of Shermer’s observation — a statement of what he sees — is that men are quite active. Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’ This isn’t to say men are being excluded from the ‘needlepoint community’ or that some inherent gender ‘thing’ makes men not attracted to needlepoint…and it

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Scalia’s a funny guy, as any fule kno. On Monday he was talking at Princeton (which is in Princeton, which is where I grew up, or at least where I spent the years from 0 to 17) and he explained about why same-sex sex is a no-no.

A gay student named Duncan Hosie got up and asked Scalia about his avid support for bans on “sodomy,” i.e. same-sex couples doing it, and Scalia answered with this:

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against

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Michael Shermer is displeased with me. It’s about this thing from last August.

And speaking of videos…I didn’t watch all of that one on The Point the other day, and yesterday a Facebook friend, Mavaddat, pointed out a later segment when they talked about Y no women. Michael Shermer explained:

It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it, you know, it’s more of a guy thing.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam.

 I quoted him in the column I wrote for Free Inquiry the same month. He’s replied to the column today.

I’ll just comment on a few things.

I would like to use

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AJ Milne waxes poetical.

I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they won’t play this new bleep comment

It’s not that it’s buzz or beep beep dangerously insightful

Honestly, it’s more dingingly pointlessly banal ‘n abusive

You can’t say honk on this blog

Or shot or twang or blargh

You can’t even call the proprietress a silly sound effect

Even if you say doing so gives you a huge, stiff boing

So I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they daren’t well scatching mark it approved

I bet you those ch’chinging old losers

Will just shrug and delete the load of horse raspberry… Read the rest

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Renee Hendricks has been commenting here. She’s also been discussing her commenting with her pals on Twitter.

Welcome to the cool kids’ table in junior high school.… Read the rest

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Sunil D’Monte alerted me to this blood-curdlingly horrible article on FGM by a sociologist, Lisa Wade, who wants more “balance” in the discussion of the grand old tradition of carving up the genitalia of very young girls.

While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.”  While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”

Good start. Put ”mutilation” in scare quotes because hey, it’s not … Read the rest

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Guilty!

The verdict, against Nechemya Weberman, was a significant victory for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, whose office has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against sexual abusers in the borough’s large and politically connected Hasidic community. And the case offered a rare window into how the Satmar community enforces its sexual values, particularly for young girls, with so-called modesty committees chastising girls for wearing revealing clothing or using cellphones, and parents pressured to pay high fees to religious counselors to treat those girls.

He was convicted on 59 counts.

There’s been a considerable culture of impunity until now, with the police looking the other way for years.

Prosecution of sexual abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox community

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Manboobz offers a good thing by way of a break from bad things. We all get sick of bad things. The good thing is

comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”

Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.

Here’s how she explains it:

Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of

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Via Veronica (via AtheismTV) – a montage from Eschaton 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEsWN92ubH4

Blog posts on Eschaton are collected at Eschaton.

And a video of the protest outside the Uganda High Commission last Monday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et30EsRyzIM

… Read the rest

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Don’t miss Katha Pollitt on Ross Douthat.

Ross Douthat, TheNew York Times’s Catholic-conservative columnist, is so obsessed with women’s fertility it’s really too bad he can’t get pregnant himself and see firsthand what it’s all about.

Yes but that would take all the fun out of it. The whole point of being a Catholic-conservative columnist dude is so that you can try to browbeat women into getting pregnant moar.

I’m not so sure why we want more people on our crowded, overheated planet, where world population is projected to increase by 2 billion before finally beginning to fall. But if Douthat really thought through what it means to have and raise a child these days, I’m sure

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Andy Borowitz asks.

a consortium of billionaires today warned that if their taxes are raised they will no longer have enough money to buy politicians.

The group, led by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, commissioned a new study showing that the cost of an average politician has soared exponentially over the past decade.

While the American family has seen increases in the cost of food, health care and education, Mr. Adelson says, “those costs don’t compare with the cost of  buying a politician, which has gone through the roof.”

That is very worrying. Food, health care, education and housing are all luxuries, of course, but the ability for billionaires to afford to buy politicians is non-optional.

Plus think of all … Read the rest

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