Cuttlefish wrote a poem about self-described allies who flounce off in a huff when people don’t take their brilliant advice.

Don’t you see? I am your ally!
One you dare not risk to lose!
So my clever new idea
Is the one you ought to choose!
Okay, fine, my help’s not wanted!
Suit yourselves—it’s just as well.
If you disrespect your allies
Well, then, fuck you—go to hell!

Oh zing.

Mind you…I think attempts to think about an issue are being conflated with offers of help, so then the flouncing off in a huff is misrepresented, since it wasn’t about rejections of unwanted help in the first place. But poets get license, you know.

From the prose commentary after the poem:

I lost my old aggregator and started reading about other things instead. Stuff outside my areas of expertise, where my urge to help was tempered by the knowledge that I was an ignorant outsider.

I did note, though, that being an ignorant outsider was not stopping everybody.

And I noted (or rather, saw it pointed out over and over again, across many different populations) a subgroup of ignorant outsiders who were offended when their offers of help were not met with thanks, cookies, and glitter. This verse is for them.

Well, again, I haven’t made any offers of help. I don’t have any illusions that I can help. But oh well…poets get license.

Oh, and probably this verse, too.

That verse in its entirety:

I would write it in letters, eleven feet tall—
And how they would shine; they would glisten!—
The advice I once got, the most useful of all:
“Just shut the fuck up… and listen.”

Well…no. Not exclusively. I do listen, and I also write about what I listen to, and think about what I listen to, and write about what I think about what I listen to, and so on. I think that’s part of free inquiry and free thought.

But oh well…poets get license. I don’t, but poets do.

Lady Mondegreen alerted me to this horrific story by Martin McKenzie-Murray –

Nazanin left the Nauru refugee camp one morning on a day pass, happy to be visiting some friends who had been settled on the island – she and her family had been in detention for 26 months. “She used a bus, and I called a friend and he said she was there,” Dabal tells me. “My sister was happy to leave this camp for a day.”

She never returned. At 6 o’clock that evening, Dabal and his mother reported her absence to security guards. Something wasn’t right. In response, the guards floated theories of missed buses or an innocent loss of time, benign explanations for what the family felt was a sinister disappearance. By 7pm, several hours past Nazanin’s curfew, the camp authorities began to wonder, too. “They realise it was bigger than the things they thought,” Dabal says.

Police found her at 9 pm, beaten and disoriented.

Much of the reporting of Nauru focuses on the camps, or regional processing centres. But there is another reality lived outside it, once refugees are settled. For many months now, hostility towards refugees has grown among Nauruans. Local resentment about the 2013 riots has metastasised, mixed with anxieties about employment and culture. Many settled refugees have been assaulted, and there are frequent threats to storm the camps themselves.

In other words refugees are sitting ducks, imprisoned on a small island where the locals hate them. Women are placed in isolated locations, without proper locks on the doors. The private company the Australian government pays to house the refugees says there’s no problem.

It’s unusual that they haven’t encountered any allegations of rape or sexual assault, because there are many. Such as the story of Beth, a young refugee who was released into the Nauruan community in May. Allegedly Beth, whose name I have changed, was sitting on the beach with some other women when local men gave her a drink. Beth began to feel woozy, before being dragged into bushes by two or three men and raped. They then poured fuel on her and set her alight.

She had an abortion, then she tried to kill herself.

There are others.

McKenzie-Murray indicts the refugee camp system:

We have built camps in our name that house damaged children, yet denude privacy and employ guards without background checks. Camps that encourage abuse, intimidation and the hypersexualisation of children. Camps that cannot provide nominal release dates to its subjects, creating purgatories. Camps that repel journalists with exaggerated visa fees, and punish detainees who speak to them distantly.

On Nauru, aid workers have been traumatised, discredited, sacked without explanation and had their exoneration ignored. We have criminalised their disclosure of child abuse. Have, in fact, created a distant exclusion zone for mandatory reporting; a black site whose governing legislation is a repudiation of our own laws. “If I see child abuse in Australia and I don’t report it, I can get into enormous trouble,” David Isaacs, a paediatrician, said last week. “If I see child abuse on Nauru and I do report it, I might go to prison for two years.”

And that’s not the end of it.

I’m reading an article in the NY Times about the malleability or not of gender identification, and my attention snagged on something tangential.

Is it really so surprising that gender identity might, like sexual orientation, be on a spectrum? After all, one can be exclusively straight or exclusively gay — or anything in between. But variability in a behavior shouldn’t be confused with its malleability. There is little evidence, for example, that you really can change your sexual orientation. Sure, you can change your sexual behavior, but your inner sexual fantasies endure.

What snagged my attention was the contrast between behavior and inner fantasies.

I think maybe calling it “inner sexual fantasies” is what did the snagging – that’s not the usual counterpart to behavior. More usual would be inner self, or internal identity, or self-image, or sense of self. Boiling that down to sexual fantasies seems pretty reductive, because there’s usually more to being gay or straight than which genitalia appear in your sexual fantasies –

– but that “more” is really what snagged my attention, not the reductiveness of the comparison. It’s the moreness of the inner life, and how important that is or isn’t compared to behavior, and whether or not I’m some kind of accidental dualist, because I do think the inner life is important, and also more “real” than behavior, at least when that behavior is constrained and shaped by social pressure.

Is that dualism? Or is it just being a nerd?

Do very gregarious people feel that their behavior is more “real” – a more authentic part of them – than nerds do? That’s what I’m wondering.

I just found out about a thing, via Pieter Breitner – Fallacy Ref.

The one I saw is very familiar:

There was a loaded question on the play

Inquiry unfairly restricted answers to force an unjustified conclusion

Uh huh. Been there; had that.

This creeps me out.

[Description: it’s a drawing or cartoon at the top of the Twitter account Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse, with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens striding in line, based on the familiar image of the Beatles striding across Abbey Road.]

Why is it so creepy?

The worship, the fandom, the adulation, the drastic limitation of horizons.

There’s a lot to be disgusted at in Richard Carrier’s inaccurate, patronizing, mental-illness-attributing post about me, but I’ll spare us all and just address one ridiculous assertion.

No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.

That’s grotesque. This was not just “disagreement” and it was not just “criticism” – it was vehement moral condemnation and shunning, aided by much misrepresentation.

That is not something that routinely happened on the network. As far as I know it never happened on the network before it happened to me. I’ve been trying to remember, I’ve done some searching – I can neither recall nor find anything like it in the network’s history.

The closest comparison would be to Phil Mason aka Thunderf00t. (Yes, that’s right, they treated me as if I were another Thunderf00t.) But that didn’t happen on the blogs – he was expelled before it could happen on the blogs. There were other behind the scenes tensions at various times, but they didn’t make it onto the blogs…presumably because of that unconscious assumption I’ve mentioned, that we didn’t do that on the blogs. That’s the assumption I didn’t realize I had until people started doing it to me on the blogs, and I was surprised, because I had always assumed we didn’t do that, for obvious reasons.

So, no – Carrier is full of shit about that. (He’s also full of shit about almost everything else in that post.) He’s completely full of shit to imply that the shunning of me was just another disagreement, totally normal, entirely routine. It wasn’t. I can’t think of a single precedent for it.

But hey, if you can, by all means point it out in comments. I’d be interested to know about it.

(There was one incident that, if other bloggers had participated, could have developed into the same kind of thing, but we didn’t. Greta Christina disagreed with Taslima on sex trafficking in what I thought was an excessively heated way. But it ended there, as far as I remember. That’s the difference.)

You might think this was just my personal reaction which is naturally biased in my favor…but I’ve heard privately from a lot of respected people who are horrified by what happened, so no, it’s not just my reaction.

Another piece of good news, to go with Malala’s spectacular exam results – India has renewed Taslima’s visa again. She was very worried about it.

They should make it long-term or permanent though.

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s visa was extended by a year on Friday, a home ministry official said.

“Taslima Nasreen’s visa has been extended for one more year from the very date it was due to expire,” a ministry official said.

Exiled from Bangladesh in 1994 for “hurting religious sentiments” with her novel ‘Lajja’, Nasreen took refuge in Kolkata in 2004. Since then, she has been getting Indian visa on a continuous basis.

No, not continuous – she never knows it’s going to be renewed. It’s a cruel and ungenerous arrangement. But at least it has been renewed again.

On many occasions in the past, the controversial Bangladeshi writer had expressed her desire to live in India permanently, especially in Kolkata.

Yes, she told me that too. She wants to be in India because that’s where her work is, that’s where she can do some good, that’s where people know who she is and need what she has to say.

Meanwhile Dawkins is still at it, generously calling people stupid on the basis of nothing in particular. I forget if I mentioned that he did that in the onstage interview he did at CFI’s conference in June. He referred to someone or some group as an idiot or idiots. I flinched, I scowled, I wished he would stop doing that. But he hasn’t.

Today it was a girl of 16 – one who did a colossally wrong and bad thing, but stupidity isn’t the only explanation for teenagers who do colossally wrong and bad things.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 14 hours ago
If a girl as manifestly stupid as this gets good grades at school, is it time we examined our grading system?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/schoolgirl-fully-radicalised-by-isis-propaganda-must-be-taken-away-from-deceitful-parents-judge-rules-10466815.html

She’s 16. People of that age have bad judgement. Their brains haven’t fully developed yet, and won’t until they’re 25. That doesn’t mean they’re “stupid” and it doesn’t mean they can’t be academically brilliant. Lots of people on Twitter tried to explain that to Dawkins, but he wasn’t having it.

The judge in the Independent article knows better:

B was one of a number of intelligent young girls within the London borough of Tower Hamlets  who had “seduced by the belief that travelling to Syria to become what are known as jihadi brides is a somewhat romantic and honourable path for them and their families,” Mr Justice Hayden said. The reality on the ground “holds only exploitation, degradation and death”, he said. “In other words, these children with whose future I have been concerned have been at risk of really serious harm, and as such the state is properly obligated to protect them.”

There was no reason to believe B would not achieve her ambition of becoming a doctor after achieving outstanding GCSE results, he said. But only a “safe and neutral environment” free from the “powerful and pernicious influences” of jihadi propaganda could now protect the teenager’s well-being.

It’s not that the grading system is broken, it’s that it doesn’t measure the mental faculties it takes to be unimpressed by IS.

I’m sure Dawkins knows Maajid Nawaz. Does he think Maajid is stupid? Surely not. You do the math.

He said a follow-up thing later that’s just wrong on the facts in addition to lacking insight.

@Egoch You seriously think @Ayaan, at 16, would have run away to become a “Jihadi bride”?

Well she did go through a Muslim Brotherhood phase, so yes, I think that’s entirely possible.

Go away and learn how to

oh never mind.

From the Telegraph:

A charity fun run that invited men to dress up as women is being investigated by police after a transgender charity claimed the dress code constituted a hate crime.

Officers were asked to look into the ‘Dames on the Run’ race – where men run dressed as women to raise funds for a children’s hospice – by a transsexual support group.

Chrysalis Transsexual Support Groups say the five kilometre run, organised by Derian House Children’s Hospice, in Chorley, Lancashire, is “dehumanising”.

I signed this: IHEU Joint open letter to Prime Minister and President of Bangladesh.

To Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and President Abdul Hamid,

We, concerned members of the blogging and activist community of Bangladesh and internationally, along with representatives of human rights organisations and other civil society organisations and supporters, wish to protest in the strongest possible terms the institutional attack on Bangladeshi citizens who profess humanist, atheist or secularist views.

In the last two years, five bloggers (variously identifying as humanist, rationalist, atheist, and variously writing about science, humanist values, against Islamist extremism, or in favour of human rights and justice) have been murdered, hacked to death by assailants acting for fundamentalist militant groups (according to their own claims of responsibility). These victims are: Ahmed Rajib Haider, the science author Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman Babu, Ananta Bijoy Das, and Niladri Chatterjee (pen name Niloy Neel). Four of these murders have occurred since February this year. In other cases, individuals like Jafar Munshi and Anjali Devi have been killed for alleged or perceived acts of ‘defamation of religion’, such as refusing to enforce hijab on students. And since 2013, supporters of the Shahbag movement and the war crimes justice process (the accused being Islamist leaders) have also been brutally murdered by similar Islamist entities. The victims include: Ashraful Alam, Arif Raihan Deep, Nurul Islam Faruki, Jagat Jyoti Talukder, Jakaria Babu.

The murderers and their ideological supporters are of course to be condemned and must be brought to justice.

In addition, instead of helping to confront this outrageous injustice, political and state institutions have begun blaming the victims themselves and making matters worse.

Following the murder of Niladri Chatterjee on 7 August, the Inspector General of Police engaged in victim-blaming, called for self-censorship, and threatened bloggers — the very people who are being murdered — with legal action under the current quasi-blasphemy law. Meanwhile, despite some counter-terrorism operations, the police have comprehensively failed to disrupt the networks that are ordering or carrying out these cowardly attacks. Even with two of the killers caught at the scene (after the murder of Washiqur Rahman) and claims of responsibility made openly on social media and via news outlets, still the attacks go on, and the extremists behind the killings remain at large. Instead of calling for vigilance and evidence against the murderers from the general public, police have instead encouraged the public to report alleged atheistic writings.

Faced with fresh death threats against numerous named Shahbag activists and others branded “enemies of Islam” in the week after the most recent murder, a police spokesperson told those threatened merely to “lodge police complaints” if they thought they were being followed! This is a grossly inadequate, highly negligent response to what is evidently a most serious and potentially fatal threat.

A number of Islamist groups, including Awami Olama League which isclosely associated with your own Awami League party, have made new demands of death penalties for all atheist bloggers and activists, echoing the rhetoric of Islamist extremists in other parties. Obviously, this demand represents a gross violation of the rights of the non-religious to freedom of thought, and against freedom of expression generally and must be firmly and explicitly rejected.

Furthermore, your Cabinet Committee for Law and Order, headed by Minister of Industries Amir Hossain Amu, on their 9 August 2015 meeting decided “to declare Atheist authors as criminals”, thereby making them subject to prosecution, and intelligence agencies have been asked to monitor blogs to find those atheist writers. Even under the current law, such a mass arrest of people who profess non-religious views in their online communications would represent a grave violation of the international human rights obligations to which Bangladesh is committed. The Home Minister in a separate speech was seen repeating the same warning message.

These institutions and officials of the state through their current stances — demonising free expression, while appeasing murderous extremists — are destroying Bangladesh’s claim to be a democratic state that upholds the human rights of all citizens. To criminalize the expression of “anything that may hurt anyone’s religious sentiments or beliefs” (as the Inspector General of Police puts it) means in practice that fundamentalists and extremists can say and do anything they want, while anyone who stands for democracy, free expression, rationalism, justice, and human rights would be reduced to silence.

This is a recipe for a theocratic state in thrall to the most extremist members of society. People must be able to discuss and debate religion and politics, beliefs and practices. If they cannot, then injustice, fear and violence will reign.

To fail to confront and refute these oppressive and illiberal tendencies now, will mark the beginning of the end of Bangladesh as a free and democratic country.

We implore you to:

• ensure the safety and security of those individuals whose lives are threatened by Islamist extremists, including the witnesses and family members
• instruct the police to find the killers, not to harass or blame the victims
• disassociate yourself publicly from those who call for death penalties against non-religious Bangladeshis, and ensure using your executive authority that individuals within your party membership maintain the same standard of respect for freedom of conscience and expression
• work decisively for legal reform to repeal Section 295A of the Penal Code and section 57 of the ICT Act of 2006, in order to bring the legal system of Bangladesh in line with the  spirit and values of freedom of expression and ‘of conscience’ as enshrined in the Constitution of Bangladesh, and as per obligations under the international human rights instruments to which Bangladesh is party.

You can see the signatories under the open letter in English and Bangla. I see Maryam Namazie there, and Michael De Dora, and Roy Brown, and Roy Speckhardt, and Russell Blackford, and Udo Schuklenk; PZ Myers, Peter Tatchell, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, Taslima of course, Tarek Fatah, Veronica Abbass, Andrew Copson, Ani Zonneveld, Austin Dacey, Brian Engler…and many many more.

So, this comment on Thinking as a value has been scratching at me all day, so I’m going to argue with it even though it will probably mean repeating things I’ve said about six times before.

Identifying as something in the gender and sexuality sense of the term is in reference to an innate gender identity and an innate sexuality that is immutable with regards to external force even if the experience of them can be internally fluid (see people who have fluid sexuality or are genderfluid).

I don’t believe in innate gender identity unless as a label for a way some people feel. I don’t believe in it as a universal description of how people relate to their own gender.

As such, “identifying as” is often a shorthand to describe quickly this innate phenomenon in gender and sexuality as these are often invisible states of being from an outside perspective.

Sadly, much like “theory” the popular usage of identity clouds the issue and makes it seem part of a spectrum of personal identities one may have that refer to an individual’s community, work, or social behaviors (“I identify as a nerd”, “I identify as a scientist”, “I identify as a feminist”).

Well that is one valid way to use the word. Amartya Sen uses it that way throughout Identity and Violence, for instance.

And this is an especially easy mistake for many people who are cis-identified to make as they can largely ignore their innate gender identity in the same way someone who is straight can ignore their sexuality or someone who is white can ignore their race.

Ok this is where we part company. You are using it as a universal description of how people relate to their own gender. I say no: it’s not universal. The analogy doesn’t work. Yes, white people can ignore their race, but that’s not because they’re overlooking the “fact” that whiteness is their innate racial identity – it’s because their whiteness is the default, and they’re not penalized for it. That’s a different thing. Privilege isn’t the same as innate identity. I have white skin privilege, absolutely…but that privilege is contingent, not innate.

As such, there is little disconnect or need to focus on the innate nature of gender, and this especially becomes true as gender is also a term that popularly gets universalized to not only mean innate gender identity, but also a basket of gender norms and expectations that not all individuals who are cis may be comfortable with.

Well some scholars – perhaps most or all scholars – say that is what gender means – the basket of gender norms and expectations.

And it can be hard to separate that out and see gender identity separate from that conflation when one’s own experience of gender is being perfectly comfortable with gender identity, but having a lot of uncomfortable interactions with expected gender roles.

And this is the part where I get pissed off. Don’t tell me my “experience of gender is being perfectly comfortable with gender identity.” Just stop telling me that. It’s not. That is not my experience. You can tell me what your experience is all day long, but you can’t tell me what mine is. I’ve never been “perfectly comfortable” with my putative gender identity.

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund –

I am Rita and I am from Adjokatsekope (Ada) in Ghana. My mother is a fishmonger and my father is a fisherman. We have five girls and two boys in my family. Only one other sister of mine has gone to school.

I study at the MGCubed program. Math is my favorite subject because I find it easy to understand through my new teachers on satellite! I also help my grandmother sell soap at her shop after school and on weekends. Because I have a better understanding of math from my lessons, I feel more comfortable when I am helping my grandmother at her shop.

She’s learning computer skills too.

After school I also attend the Wonder Women workshops where we learn about things like personal hygiene, dangers of using dirty water and child rights. This is where I learned about sexual health and preventing pregnancy, which was never discussed in school before.

Learning about sexual health is important because girls in my community are being forced to leave school early because of teenage pregnancy. It’s a real problem in our communities since girls don’t receive the right information or any information at all about these issues.

Yeah. That’s right at the top of the list – don’t get pregnant at an early age.

Educating girls is very important because it gives us direction and focus as young women. It also helps us avoid unnecessary situations that might hold us back in life — like getting pregnant while in school. Girls need education to help them see their importance in the community.

This is why I attend school and the Wonder Women workshops. While some people think girls education is good, others don’t like it. They think that we are being given “too much knowledge.” Now that we are going to school and studying, we know when we are being taken advantage of and we can stand up for ourselves. But some people are not happy about this because they believe that women belong in the kitchen.

When I grow up, I want to be a nurse. I haven’t been to a hospital before, but my grandmother tells me it is a good profession! I am happy with my progress and my elders are happy, too.

Go for it, Rita!

Now for some good news for a change – Malala rocked her GCSEs. 6A*s and 4As.

The 18-year-old, who now attends Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, did particularly well in the sciences, with top A* grades in biology, chemistry and physics – as well as in religious studies.

She also scored As in history, geography, English language and English literature.

English isn’t even her first language, yet she did all that.

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund on Twitter:

“Education doesn’t alienate you, it allows you to become a shining light for your community.”

Angeline Murimirwa

#WomanCrushWednesday

International Business Times reports:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual human rights are not guaranteed, nor will they be upheld in Malaysia.

Prime Minister Najib Razak said at an international Islamic moderation seminar 2015 in Bangi, Selangor that his administration will do its best to uphold human rights but only within the confines of Islam.

This is in line with the Islamic teaching of balance and moderation (wasatiyyah), he said, adding that Muslim Malaysia cannot defend the more “extreme aspect of human rights”, citing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual rights for example.

Of course. That’s the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. You can have human rights but only so far as they comply with sharia. I wrote a whole chapter on that in Does God Hate Women?

If you haven’t read the Cairo Declaration, I recommend doing so.

“Although universal human rights have been defined, we still define human rights in the country in the context of Islam and the Shariah,” he said, according to the Malay Mail.

“Even though it is difficult to defend internationally, we must defend our definition of human rights,” the website Malaysiakini said.

“And even if we cannot defend human rights at an international level, we must defend it in the Islamic context,” he told the seminar.

Islam trumps universal human rights. Sharia trumps universal human rights. The Cairo Declaration trumps universal human rights.

Human Rights Watch’s Asia deputy director Phil Robertson later told a news conference that he was shocked by Najib’s promise to uphold human rights only within the Islamic context saying that Kuala Lumpur should withdraw from the United Nations if the government was not serious about upholding human rights for all.

Is the Cairo Declaration news to Phil Robertson? It can’t be; he must know all about it. But then his surprise seems odd. Malaysia is far from the only country that considers itself bound by the Cairo Declaration.

Aron and Lilandra are leaving Freethought Blogs.

Aron explains that it’s not an acrimonious divorce.

We had considered moving the blog a couple years ago, but I didn’t want to do it then because that’s when FtB was under attack.  I thought it would look like we were bowing, or cowering to criticism of anyone who blogs at FtB.  I also stayed because I could use myself as an example against the absurdly stupid stereotypes people tried to pin on this group back then.  I often pointed out that, if everyone on this network is required to work in lock-step with a hive mind, as so many outsiders have alleged, then why am I still tolerated whenever I publicly disagree with so many of my associates on this network?  That strategy must have worked because I haven’t heard any such criticisms in quite a while now.

I don’t know the answer to his question. I don’t know why he is still tolerated whenever he publicly disagrees with so many of his associates on that network. I don’t know why he is still tolerated and I’m not. I do know, though, that it’s not because bloggers on the network never do push anyone out over a disagreement.

Ironically, Lilandra herself helped them push me out. I don’t know if she did it inadvertently or on purpose or some of both. (You know how you can do things without fully consciously planning out the consequences, right?) She decided it would be a good idea to start a discussion of me on the back channel, with my name in the subject line and everything. Ed very quickly said that would not be a good idea at all and please stop right now, but it was too late. The discussion went ahead anyway, and went as well as might be expected.

So, Aron is only partly right. I think it’s true that most people on the network are not required to work in lock-step with a hive mind. But some are. Or, at least, I was.

Larry Wilmore was on Fresh Air yesterday. He used to be the “senior black correspondent” for the Daily Show and now he does The Nightly Show (and Jon Stewart is gone, tragically).

I recommend listening to it, but there’s also a transcript. In one bit they played a clip of Wilmore on his show talking about the Confederate flag.

GROSS: …This is about the Confederate flag and the controversy about whether it should have been, you know, this was before it was officially taken down in Charleston, S.C. so there was still the controversy about whether it should be taken down.

WILMORE: Right.

GROSS: So here’s your take on that. It’s kind of like an editorial that you were calling For the Record. So here’s Larry Wilmore on “The Nightly Show.”

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE NIGHTLY SHOW”)

WILMORE: OK, for the record, the Confederate flag – it’s not a proud symbol of tradition or heritage. It’s a symbol of oppression and intimidation. That’s not my opinion, that’s an objective fact. On March 21, 1861, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, stated that the Confederate government was based on the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. That speech is now called the “Cornerstone Speech” because that idea is the cornerstone of the Confederacy. You don’t get clearer than that.

(LAUGHTER)

WILMORE: Now, some people say that Southern states should fly the Confederate flag because it’s a symbol of their heritage. But if we flew every flag from our past, why aren’t we flying the Union Jack in front of the White House?

(LAUGHTER)

WILMORE: Right?

(APPLAUSE)

WILMORE: And for the record, South Carolina, you don’t get to make the heritage argument because the stars and bars hasn’t been flying over the state house since the Civil War. It went up in 1961 to mark the centennial of the Civil War and, coincidentally, right around when the black people started with the wanting of the civil rights. In 1961, it was a reminder to black people that they should know their place. It has always been used as a symbol of intimidation and terror, and that’s what it remains today. In fact, because displaying the swastika is illegal across much of Europe, skinheads and neo-Nazis often adopt the Confederate flag in its place. It’s such a racist symbol that it does double duty as the backup racist symbol for another racist symbol.

(APPLAUSE)

WILMORE: That’s crazy. OK, so for the record, I get it that plenty of honorable people have fuzzy feelings about the Confederate flag, but that’s irrelevant. Their nostalgia will never trump the people who see it as a symbol of hate. And for a state to fly this flag, that hate is the message they send to their people. So for the record, does there really have to be a debate on whether or not you should take it down? Just take it down. You won’t get in trouble.

(LAUGHTER)

WILMORE: Just do it. Do it right now. Go ahead. Seriously, take it down now.

And then they talked about Bill Cosby.

GROSS: So one of your real issues is Bill Cosby. You do not miss an opportunity (laughter)…

WILMORE: Right.

GROSS: …To go after Cosby. And to exemplify that, we’re going to play a piece that you did on the Voting Rights Act…

WILMORE: OK.

GROSS: …And on voting restrictions in which you still manage (laughter) to try to drive to Cosby. So here’s Larry Wilmore.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE NIGHTLY SHOW”)

WILMORE: Let me just remind you of why we have the Voting Rights Act. Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson, who I’ve got to say is definitely one of my top five Lyndons…

(LAUGHTER)

WILMORE: …Passed the VRA which prohibited any and all discriminatory voting policies. So no more literacy tests, no more poll tax, right? So what’s changed? Well, in this case, they’re not so much trying to revise history, as they are trying to revive history.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The new rules reduced early voting to 10 days from 17, eliminated same-day registration, ended a program to preregister high school students and banned out of precinct voting.

WILMORE: They’re making voting [expletive] than Bill Cosby at a sleep clinic.

(LAUGHTER)

WILMORE: That’s right [expletive], I haven’t forgotten about you. I have not forgotten about you.

(APPLAUSE)

WILMORE: By the way, three more women came out against you yesterday, you sick bastard, all right? I got a Google alert on this [expletive], all right? In fact, the only reason I did this whole piece – the only reason I talked about Jeb and Hillary and the Voting Rights Act, the only reason why I woke up this morning, showered, put my deodorant on, tied my tie, spent an hour doing my hair, the only reason – the only reason I’m here tonight was so I could get to that joke and call you out. And let me just say, worth it.

But that’s not the best part. The best part is in the interview.

GROSS: So I – you’re hardly alone in being angry at Cosby.

WILMORE: Yes.

GROSS: But you seem to have, like, a special anger. And it made me wonder, like, do you know him from TV circles ’cause he used to…

WILMORE: No.

GROSS: You know, you’ve written sitcoms. It wouldn’t have surprised me if you worked with Cosby….

WILMORE: No, never did.

GROSS: …Or if you heard stories about Cosby.

WILMORE: Yep, that I have.

It was that bit. The transcript isn’t quite accurate – he actually said “yep yep yep” quickly. No, didn’t know him, no, didn’t work with him, yepyepyep heard stories. Yep. Just like Shermer. Everyone had heard the stories.

GROSS: …Or if you heard stories about Cosby.

WILMORE: Yep, that I have.

GROSS: You have? You’d heard about that in the past?

WILMORE: Yep, yep, yep. I think the thing that makes me the most – well, there’s certain – several things about that that make me angry – the period of time that these things have happened over, the fact that these women have these allegations but people could care less. It was like, who cares about what women have to say, you know? You know, the whole idea of a powerful man being able to shut up all these women is so abhorrent to me. That issue was what really drove me first is the idea that a powerful man can just shut women up, you know? That’s what started this whole thing. It had nothing even to do with the fact of liking Cosby or not liking Cosby. It was that simple issue. But yep – so that’s the part of it that really drove me on it.

Damn right. You know, the whole idea of a powerful man being able to shut up all these women is so abhorrent to me. That.

And it’s funny because, you know, I’ve never thought of myself as any advocate for anything. But I remember about 10 or 11 years ago, I joined the – I was on the board of directors for the Writers Guild of America. I just wanted – I thought, you know what? I’ve had a good career as a writer, I should really give back, you know? But I thought, I mean, I’m not particularly passionate about anything. But I realized many times when you show up for something, you find where your passions are, even if you don’t know it. And it was fascinating to me, I realized how passionate I was about so many issues and I didn’t even know it because the issues presented themselves to me and I had to declare where I stood, right? So I ended up fighting a lot for writers in certain situations – under-represented writers, women in certain situations. And I didn’t even know how much of a feminist I was. And I realized oh, my god, I was raised by a single mom who had to raise six kids. I have three sisters. Larry, you’ve been a feminist your whole life, you really didn’t know it until you’ve been presented with these issues. And it was the Cosby issue that made me realize how much I really cared about women’s issues and how much I realize it’s important for me to be an advocate for issues that aren’t necessarily my own – to be an ally for issues.

Now that’s where the word “ally” is useful and meaningful.

One of the most peculiar accusations against me in Stephanie Zvan’s long, clotted, incoherent, pointlessly cryptic list of accusations (pointlessly because she said at the very end that she was talking about me so why all the “they” and “them” in the list of accusations?) was this one –

When you see them repeatedly deride feminine-identified clothing, grooming, and verbal expressions?

The question behind all the “when you” accusations was “what’s a blogger to do” – so apparently she thinks she ought to “do” something about my putative attitude to feminine-identified clothing, grooming, and verbal expressions. Why? Why would she have a duty to “do” something about that? What business is it of hers? Who asked her? Why would she need to take action on that, even assuming her heavily loaded description is accurate?

I could come up with a long list of Irritating Things About Stephanie Zvan if I wanted to, but why would I? It would be boring, just for one thing. It would also look…kind of…how shall I put this…horrible. Publishing a long, clotted, incoherent list of all the things you Don’t Like About Susan is just a dopy, embarrassing, childish, trashy thing to do. But I could if I wanted to, so neener, Mr Salteena said peevishly.

But the accusation about deriding all the things that are “feminine-identified” stuck in my mind and makes me curious. What the fuck is that even supposed to mean. Am I supposed to be “femmephobic” now, is that the idea? So I Googled femmephobia. One of the first items is an article by J. Bryan Lowder in Slate last March about a gay actor named Russell Tovey.

After a stimulating meditation on the actor’s newly fleshed-out physique, reporter Tom Lamont gets Tovey talking about his journey as a gay man, especially as it developed after a homophobic attack (triggered, Tovey reasons, by his wearing a cardigan) 10 years ago, which left him with a scar. Tovey’s story is harrowing, and the trauma he experienced must be taken seriously. That said, his processing of that trauma through damaging femmephobic rhetoric—the kind that values traditionally masculine-performing gay men above their more effeminate brothers—is a problem.

Ah, that – yes I’m aware of that, and it sucks.

If that were the end of the comments, I don’t think we’d be seeing so much outrage from gay writers and fans online. It’s this next bit, focused on Tovey’s early career and schooling, that is really drawing ire:

I was so envious of everyone who went to Sylvia Young Theatre School. I wanted to go but my dad flat-out refused. He thought I’d become some tapdancing freak without qualifications. And he was right in a way. I’m glad I didn’t go. That might have changed … I feel like I could have been really effeminate, if I hadn’t gone to the school I went to. Where I felt like I had to toughen up. If I’d have been able to relax, prance around, sing in the street, I might be a different person now. I thank my dad for that, for not allowing me to go down that path. Because it’s probably given me the unique quality that people think I have.

*clutches head*

What’s wrong with being able to relax, prance around, sing in the street?

The more men who do that the better, that’s what I say.

But then relaxing, prancing around, singing in the street – those are all good things. (Ceteris paribus – singing in the street is not so cool at 4 a.m., but you know what I mean so just behave yourselves.) Some “female-identified” practices are not such good things, in my view, and I think feminists are allowed to be critical of them. Footbinding used to be a “female-identified” practice in China and I don’t think it’s femmephobic to disapprove of footbinding. FGM is a “female-identified” practice in many places now; I frown on it; I don’t consider that femmephobic.

But it’s nice that Stephanie Zvan got all that out of her system, at least.