A friend on Facebook alerted me to an item:

www.shannonthunderbird.com

www.shannonthunderbird.com

Tsimshian Artist, Singer, Motivational Speaker on Native Spiritualism, Culture and Social Issues, Storyteller.

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

Originally a comment by canonicalkoi on The arbiter of what feminists should or shouldn’t get upset about, with added video.

I wish someone could explain something to me. Nugent has 12 kittens and 35 cows over tone and language. He gets extremely prissy about language, about how it’s not right to demonize people over things that they haven’t been convicted of in a court of law. So, here’s where I’m confused:

On Nugent’s website, he has a list, a directory if you will, of atheist/secular songs. All well and good. One of those songs is by the extremely talented and personal favorite of mine, Tim Minchin. The Pope Song. C’mon, you know the one that starts out, “Fuck the motherfuckers…..” It seems a strange choice for Nugent to list since it’s chock full o’ outrage (rightfully so). It’s a good song, but let’s look at this. It deals with:

A. Calling the Pope to account for something he was never charged with in a court of law.
B. Equating him and anyone who supports him with a rapist.
C. Equates anyone who ever covered up for an abuser with a rapist.
D. Deals with assuming the stories of all child-abuse victims whether or proven in court or not, are facts.
E. Uses naughty language that could, in no way, be considered conciliatory.
F. Expresses extreme outrage.

So, apparently, if it’s dealing with the Pope and child-abuse, outrage, “naughty language”, assumptions of guilt, are all just fine. If, on the other hand, you have feminists discussing the sexual misconduct of someone in the atheist/secularist “Holy Trinity”, depending on the stories of far more than one woman, dealing with stories that describe a “hunting pattern” astonishingly alike in each description, or dealing with another of the “Holy Trinity” comparing rape with drunk driving and yet a third member saying that that danged estrogen-vibe is why we can’t wrap our lady-brains around logic, we’re to watch our tone and our language, our outrage is all just a fake and, since nothing’s been proven in a court of law, it shouldn’t be brought up in the first place.

I see. If someone could explain that strange dichotomy to me, I’d appreciate it. And Mr. Nugent? You might want to give another listen to The Pope Song. This verse might get it across, especially if you add the words, “or anyone else” to the end of the last line:

“And if you don’t like this swearing this motherfucker forced from me
And reckon it shows moral or intellectual paucity
Then fuck you motherfucker, this is language one employs
When one is a little bit cross about fuckers fucking boys” – Tim Minchin

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRDfut2Vx0

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

Another one, this time from Dan Arel: one Patheos blogger disagreeing with another Patheos blogger (Adam Lee, who dared to criticize Dawkins (and got called a liar by him as a reward).

Arel doesn’t use punctuation much so what he writes can be hard to follow. With that warning –

Much like Lee, I came to atheism on my own and Dawkins played a major role in my activism, but unlike Lee, I am not ditching Dawkins for simple disagreements.

Lee would most likely argue that these are not simple disagreements however as he seems to have joined the ranks of Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers in doing everything they can to pin hateful labels to Dawkins, instead of dissecting what he has said or simply realize that I cannot agree with everyone on every issue and that sometimes I will disagree with some of my favorite people.

I’m getting tired of this. It’s bullshit. I’m not “doing everything [I] can to pin hateful labels to Dawkins”; I’m taking issue – strongly – with the role Dawkins is playing in making hostility to women, and especially to feminist women, even more entrenched and pervasive among atheists than it already is. We have a right to do that. I’m tired of people treating it as blasphemy against The Heroes. It’s not blasphemy.

…now Dawkins is being criticized for standing up for Sam Harris who found himself in a bit of controversy surrounding a remark he made about atheism and critical thinking being more of a guy thing.

Harris’ remark carried some strong sexist implications, but before he even took to his blog to explain the comment, he was quickly labeled sexist and declared an enemy of women everywhere.

After his full explanation of his remarks, the same who accused him of being sexist continued to do so. Harris explanation did not do a whole lot to change what he said, but they did show, in my opinion that even if those remarks were sexist, and that Harris still needed to be corrected that he was not being sexist, he was just mistaken.

He was just mistaken, in a sexist way. Sure, he was just mistaken, and nothing terrible happened to him for being mistaken. I have a decent readership, but it’s bound to be a fraction of his; why is it so terrible that a blogger disputed his fatuous explanations for the sparseness of women at his talks?

Simply, simply yelling at someone claiming they are sexist is not the best way to influence someone’s way of thinking. Does anyone expect that Harris would just immediately say that he is wrong and everyone else must be right? Of course not. Yet this hostile name calling and finger pointing seemingly upset Dawkins who came to his friends defense, after all Harris and Dawkins are good friends I would assume that Dawkins does not find Harris to be sexist, and Dawkins took to Twitter to ask if bloggers could be faking outrage for clicks in which they get paid…

Yes he did, and that was a cheap and unworthy thing to ask. Blogging is not a way to get rich. I could make more money working at a Burger King a few hours a week; nobody blogs for the money. I write about what interests me, period. I did it for nine years without making any money at all, because I wanted to do it.

Dawkins is right, some bloggers do, does that mean that those like Benson or Myers did? No, and I do think Dawkins was wrong to insinuate they did without proper evidence.
After all, I am a blogger who is paid per click as well, so of course we pick stories people want to read, but it doesn’t mean we are faking our outrage over the topics.

No, we don’t. We really don’t. I don’t pick stories people want to read; I pick what interests me. By this time I know from experience that it will interest other people too, but that doesn’t change the fact that I do not choose stories based on trying to suss what other people will want to read.

Yet this is not sexism, Dawkins may be wrong about clickbating, but is that enough to justify disowning him? I wouldn’t think Lee would either, except other than the Dear Muslima letter Lee spends all his time focused on clickbaiting, except for a one line mention of Dawkins comment about drinking and rape, but Lee never expands on this, he just tells the reader Dawkins is wrong for mentioning clickbating and oh he said this about rape, but by taking no time to explain the context of the tweet, Lee only paints Dawkins in the negative light he is going for and continues to ask his friends why Dawkins is wrong about clickbaiting.

Okay…

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

Got any spare cash burning a hole in your pocket? You could do worse than helping Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering keep her house. The appeal is here. A friend of hers writes:

I know I have a deep gratitude for the support she’s given freely to dozens of former QFers who’ve come to No Longer Quivering for help in escaping and recovering from spiritual abuse. She’s poured her life into the website and support group, as well as helping other Quiverfull walkaways to establish their own websites in order to increase awareness of the problem of spiritual abuse: The Spiritual Abuse Survivor Blogs Network at NLO. In honor of Vyckie’s hard work helping others I have started a crowdfunding campaign as a project of NLQ to raise the money necessary to save Vyckie’s house. Vyckie has agreed to allow me to share this part of our FB chat conversation in order to let others know about her desperate situation.

…

I’m proud to say this courageous woman is my friend. She’s struggled to support herself and her family after leaving the Quiverfull movement. While Vyckie has been instrumental in helping others she now needs help to stay in her home with her children.  It’s why I’m asking you to help her, particularly if you’ve been helped by Vyckie and NLQ.

Please spread the word.

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

Father. Daughter. Superhero board game. Open the box. No female characters.

“What girl can I be?” Cassie asked, digging through the game pieces.

“I don’t think there are any girls, sweetie,” I said, anger building in me. Cause really, DC & Wonder Forge? WTF? You know it’s 2014, right?

Cassie put down the game pieces. “I don’t want to play this, then.” She turned and moved to leave the room, and it broke my heart. In part for her, and in part because I love superheroes, and this should be something we can share.

He thought of a solution: make their own female characters. They did; problem solved.

Cassie loves it and wants play every chance she gets. And this is why I am so pissed about the whole “no girls” thing. In addition to illustrating how they remain creatively stuck in the 60′s, DC is leaving money on the table by continuing to make their merchandise exclusive to boys.

And they are exclusive. I know many would argue that a kid should be able to handle playing a character that’s not their own gender sometimes. I agree! But why should that mean only the girls have to suffer that?

It’s like this: boys are future men, and men (in the aggregate! I said in the aggregate, stop yelling at me!) just are more into heroics, while girls are future women, and women (siiiiiiiigh in the aggregate siiiiiiiiiigh) just are more into that estrogen vibe.

I think businesses tend to make decisions based on more monetary concerns. Maybe statistically it’s more likely to be four boys playing, and they want to cater to that. But if so, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you market only to boys, don’t be surprised boys are your only market. And don’t be surprised if the boys with sisters and female friends end up playing something else entirely.

When comics and game designers exclude or otherwise diminish the role of female characters, they are really telling girls they are not welcome. That sure, they canplay, but they can’t have full immersion. Full immersion is for boys only.

And fuck that.

I fixed this shitty game, but I shouldn’t have had to. We have a right to expect (and demand) that comics companies and the game designers they license to do better. Sure, it’s a free country and they have a right to make boys-only games if they want, but we don’t need to support it, or stay quiet about it.

Oh please, you’re just looking for ways to be offended.

Peter W Brett wrote the piece and the Mary Sue reposted it.

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

Amanda Marcotte is amusing about Sam Harris and his tantrum about horrid people saying he said something sexist and wrong and silly.

Nah, he can’t be wrong. He’s Sam Harris! And so he’s going to drown us in words to show how mean we are to criticize him about his suggestion that being female makes us less critical and ugh, getting a headache now. Let’s just get into it. His response is titled, “I’m Not the Sexist Pig You’re Looking For“. Indeed, as his comments showed, we don’t have to go looking for sexist pigs, as they happen to fall right in our laps. I would like, in fact, for sexist pigs to quit falling in my lap, honestly.

Exactly. He accused me of going looking for it, but not at all – I happened to see it (on Facebook, because someone posted the link – that’s a thing that can happen), and when I saw it, I saw that it was bad, and I responded to it. That’s all. No need to go sniffing for truffles.

He starts with saying the “estrogen vibe” thing was a joke. Okay, but that doesn’t change the fact that he suggested being good at the “critical posture” is inherently male, something you’d think that he would have learned is completely false in the days after this quote. Then this:

And when I shifted to speaking about atheists as a group, I was referring to active atheists—that is, the sort of people who go to atheist conferences, read atheist books, watch atheists debate pastors on YouTube, or otherwise rally around atheism as a political identity. I was not talking about everyone on Earth who doesn’t believe in God.

Yep, a lot more male than female atheists are active about it. This should be considered evidence not that women are less critical—they are just as likely to come to the conclusion that there is no god as men—but that there’s….something….unappealing about organized atheism. Perhaps the swiftness [with] which women are treated like biologically inferior helpmeets might have something to do with it?

Or even a lot to do with it? I know I’m feeling very wary of organized atheism and organized atheists right now.

…the acerbic tone that offends him so greatly that he goes into italics-bonanza mode should suggest perhaps that he is not as masculine and tough and women are not as soft and receding as he thinks. On average, even. Also, the reason a lot of women hated Hitchens is Hitchens thought we were inferior by dint of biology. I find that offensive whether you say it gently or say it acerbically. It’s the content, not the tone. Or, as the calm, rational manly man Harris would write, it’s the content, not the tone.

Or sometimes it’s both.

I gotta go. The manly atheists have worn me out today.

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

Let’s take a moment to be grateful for something. I’ll choose not being a blogger in Iran. I’m so glad I’m not a blogger in Iran. One guy who is a blogger in Iran has been sentenced to death for insulting the prophet. You’d think somebody who has been dead for 1400 years could put up with being insulted – I mean who gets upset if someone insults Alfred the Great or Boethius or Eirik the Red? But Iran is different that way.

According to an ‘informed source’,speaking to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Soheil Arabi, 30, had kept eight Facebook pages under different names and admitted to posting material insulting to the Prophet on these pages.

Mr Arabi, who was arrested along with his wife in November last year by agents from the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), is said to have written the “material without thinking and in poor psychological condition”.

Branch 75 of Tehran’s Criminal Court, under Judge Khorasani, found Mr Arabi guilty of insulting the Prophet, or “sabb al-nabi”, on 30 August.

Maybe the NFL should try that. Maybe it should try to make it a crime to insult a dead football coach.

But no – even the NFL wouldn’t think that would fly.

Article 262 of the Islamic Penal Code states insulting the Prophet carries a punishment of death, however, article 264 of the Penal Code says if a suspect claims to have said the insulting words in anger, in quoting someone, or by mistake, his death sentence will be converted to 74 lashes.

The anonymous source claims: “Unfortunately, despite this Article and the explanations provided, the judges issued the death sentence.

“They didn’t even take any notice of Soheil’s statements in court in which he repeated several times that he wrote the posts under poor [psychological] conditions, and that he is remorseful.”

A mere 74 lashes – for “insulting” a guy who’s been dead for centuries. Justice itself.

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

Guest post by J H Hornbeck
(part 1: statistics for the people, and of the people)

I just can’t seem to escape sexual assault. For the last six months I’ve analyzed the Stollznow/Radford case, and more recently finished an examination of Carol Tavris’ talk at TAM2014, so that topic has never wandered far from my mind. I’ve bounced my thoughts off other people, sometimes finding support, other times running into confusion or rejection. It’s the latter case that most fascinates me, so I hope you don’t mind if I write my way through the confusion.

The most persistent objection I’ve received goes something like this: I cannot take population statistics and apply them to a specific person. That’s overgeneralizing, and I cannot possibly get to a firm conclusion by doing it.

It makes sense on some level. Human beings are wildly different and can be extremely unpredictable because of that. The field of psychology is scattered with the remains of attempts to bring order to the chaos. However, I’ve had to struggle greatly to reach even that poor level of intellectual empathy, as the argument runs contrary to our every moment of existence. This may be a classic example of talking to fish about water; our unrelenting leaps from the population to the individual seem rare and strange when consciously considered, because they almost never are conscious.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a familiar example.

P1. That object looks like a chair.

P2. Based on prior experience, objects that look like chairs can support my weight.

C1. Therefore, that object can support my weight.

Yep, the Problem of Induction is a classic example of applying the general to the specific. I may have sat on hundreds of chairs in my lifetime, without incident, but that does not prove the next chair I sit on will remain firm. I can even point to instances where a chair did collapse… and yet, if there’s any hesitation when I sit down, it’s because I’m worried about things stuck to the seat. The worry of the chair collapsing never enters my mind.

Once you’ve had the water pointed out to you, it appears everywhere. Indeed, you cannot do any action without jumping from population to specific.

P1. A brick could spontaneously fly at my head.

P2. Based on prior experience, no brick has ever spontaneously flown at my head.

C1. Therefore, no brick will spontaneously fly at my head.

P1. I’m typing symbols on a page.

P2. Based on prior experience, other people have been able to decode those symbols.

C1. Therefore, other people will decode those symbols.

P1. I want to raise my arm.

P2. Based on prior experience, triggering a specific set of nerve impulses will raise my arm.

C1. Therefore, I trigger those nerve impulses.

“Action” includes the acts of science, too.

P1. I take a measurement with a specific device and a specific calibration.

P2. Based on prior experience, measurements with that device and calibration were reliable.

C1. Therefore, this measurement will be reliable.

Philosophers may view the Problem of Induction as an infinitely-wide canyon, but it’s a millimetre crack in our day-to-day lives. Not all instances are legitimate, though. Here’s a subtle failure.

P1. This vaccine contains mercury.

P2. Based on prior experience, mercury is a toxic substance with strong neurological effects.

C1. Therefore, this vaccine is a toxic substance with strong neurological effects.

Sure, your past experience may have included horror stories of what happens after chronic exposure to high levels of mercury… but unbeknownst to you, it also included chronic exposure to very low levels of mercury compounds, of varying toxicity, which had no effect on you or anyone else. There’s a stealth premise here: the dose makes the poison. It’s not hard to come up with similarly flawed examples that are more subtle (“Therefore, I will not die today”) and less (“Therefore, all black people are dangerous thugs”).

Hmm, maybe this type of argument is unsound when applied to people? Let’s see:

P1. This is a living person.

P2. Based on prior experience, living persons have beating hearts.

C1. Therefore, this living person has a beating heart.

Was that a bit cheap? I’ll try again:

P1. This is a person living in Canada.

P2. Based on prior experience, people living in Canada speak English.

C1. Therefore, this person will speak English.

Now I’m skating onto thin ice. According to StatCan, only 85% of Canadians can speak English, so this is only correct most of the time. Let’s revise it a bit:

P1. This is a person living in Canada.

P2. Based on prior experience, about 85% of people living in Canada speak English.

C1. Therefore, there’s an 85% chance this person will speak English.

Much better. In fact, it’s much better than anything I’ve presented so far, as it quantifies and puts solid error bars around what it is arguing. The quantity was gathered by professionals in controlled conditions, an immense improvement over my ad-hoc, poorly-recorded personal experience.

Mind you, it wouldn’t take much effort to track down a remote village in Quebec where few people could talk to me, and the places where I hang out are well above 85% English-speaking. But notice that both are a sub-population of Canada, while the above talks only of Canada as a whole. It’s a solid argument over the domain it covers, but adding more details can change that.

Ready for the next step? It’s a bit scary.

P1. This is a man.

P2. Based on prior experience, between 6 and 62% of men have raped or attempted it.

C1. Therefore, the chance of that man having raped or attempted rape is between 6 and 62%.

Hopefully you can see this is nothing but probability theory at work. The error bars are pretty huge there, but as with the language stat we can add more details.

P1. This is a male student at a mid-sized, urban commuter university in the United States with a diverse student body.

P2. Based on prior experience, about 6% of such students have raped or attempted it.

C1. Therefore, the odds of that male student having raped or attempted rape is about 6%.

We can do much better, though, by continuing to pile on the evidence we have and watching how the probabilities shift around. Interestingly, we don’t even need to be that precise with our numbers; if there’s sufficient evidence, they’ll converge on some sort of answer. One flip of a coin tells you almost nothing about how fair the process is; a thousand flips taken together tells you quite a lot, and it isn’t pretty. Even if the numbers don’t come to a solid conclusion, that might still be OK; you wouldn’t do much if there was a 30% chance your ice cream cone started melting before you could lick it, but you would take immediate action if there was a 30% chance of a meteor hitting your house. Fuzzy answers can still justify action, if the consequences are harsh enough and outweigh the cost of getting it wrong.

So why not see what answers we can draw from a sexual assault case? One problem: discussing sexual assault is a great way to get sued, especially when the accused in question is rumoured to be unusually litigious.

So instead, let’s discuss birds…

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

Via Jen Phillips: University of Oregon researchers urge psychologists to see institutional betrayal.

Oh yes? [ears go up like a dog's] I’m very interested in that right now.

In their paper, UO doctoral student Carly P. Smith and psychology professor Jennifer J. Freyd draw from their own studies and diverse writings and research to provide a framework to help recognize patterns of institutional betrayal. The term, the authors wrote, aims to capture “the individual experiences of violations of trust and dependency perpetrated against any member of an institution in a way that does not necessarily arise from an individual’s less-privileged identity.”

An institution…like…a church? A university? The military? The NFL? Corporations, government, non-profits, political movements?

Sound familiar? Yeah.

While their paper focuses on sexual assaults on college campuses, in the military and in religious institutions, the authors say that such betrayal is a wide-ranging phenomenon. Throughout the paper, they discuss the case of a college freshman in the Midwest whose questionably handled allegations against a major university’s football player eventually contributed to her suicide.

“I think what struck me most in our examination of the literature was that people are starting to turn over this idea in their minds in all these different fields,” Smith said. “They are starting to notice that when we see abuse or other trauma occurring, it might behoove us to broaden our focus beyond the individual level.”

Yup. Yup yup yup.

They note that institutional betrayal is a dimensional phenomenon, with acts of omission and commission as well as instances of betrayal that may vary on how clearly systemic they are at the outset. Institutional characteristics that the authors say often precede such betrayal include:

• Membership qualifications with inflexible requirements where “conformity is valued and deviance quickly corrected as a means of self-policing among members.” Often, a member making an accusation faces reprisal because of the institutional value placed on membership.

• Prestige given to top leaders results in a power differential. In this case, allegations that are made by a member against a leader often are met by gatekeepers whose roles are designed to protect top-level authority.

• Priorities that result in “damage control” efforts designed to protect the overall reputation of the institution. Examples include the abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University, the movement of clergy to other locations in the face of allegations and hiding incidents of incest within family units.  More recently, Freyd and Smith noted, the NFL demonstrated this quality by denying it had seen video footage of one of its players battering his fiancee and its previously long record of minor penalties for such interpersonal abuse.

• Institutional denial in which members who allege abuse are marginalized by the institution as being bad apples whose personal behaviors should be the issue.

Check, check, check, and check. We’re seeing that all the time, these days. Hour by hour, we’re seeing it. Bridges go up in flames as we see it.

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

Scotland voted No on independence.

The prime minister wants to move fast to show that the three main UK party leaders will live up to their commitments made during the referendum campaign to deliver what the former prime minister Gordon Brown called home rule within the UK.

Ministers believe it is important to move quickly to avoid a repeat of the 1980 referendum in Québec. The triumphalist behaviour of Ontario fuelled the separatist cause that nearly succeeded in a second referendum in 1995.

So don’t rub it in their noses. Lots of affectionate hugs, no faces rubbed in the No vote. And no mean photoshops!

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

Guest post by Mary Ellen Foley. 

A threat to bomb the Game Developers’ Conference if Anita Sarkeesian gets an award there…threats to murder her and make it look like suicide because she’s a worse threat than terrorists to the country…and for what? For pointing out that it’s not good that video games exploit images of women’s bodies and of violence against women as scene dressing in the backgrounds of games? Really? A veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq says she’s worse than terrorists because she suggests that it might not be a good idea for game developers to show an animation of a man slitting the throat of an anonymous woman just to get the pulses of game players racing?

I tried to watch one of Sarkeesian’s pieces about the use of images of women in games, and I had to stop pretty quickly — I don’t have a strong enough stomach — though I must point out, not least because my husband makes a living in the video game industry, that not all games are violent and not all games are misogynistic — but of course Sarkeesian doesn’t say they are.

There’s been quite a backlash from misogynist video-game fans over suggestions as mild as that the industry should, in addition to the violent misogynist games the fanboys love, make games that women like to play, too, or more games that maybe offer the possibility of playing as a female character — not that you have to play as a female character, but that other people can if they want to. They so want the Girls Keep Out on the clubhouse door that they can’t imagine life in which women play games, too; they threaten to punish the industry by not buying games at all if the developers go wild and make some more games in which players can, if they want, interact with the virtual baddies as female characters. Women, it seems, just shouldn’t play games, and female characters should be abused, killed, or rescued but certainly ought not to be heroes. Fortunately, as statistics and estimates my husband has pulled together show, the guys who think the world of video games revolves around them are wrong; the money they spend on games makes up a surprisingly small proportion of the funds that keep the industry rolling—hard to believe, but that’s because the violent action games get the press.

And they should at times get the press, and Anita Sarkeesian is part of that press, but she’s getting death threats serious enough to bring out the police and the bomb-sniffing dogs, and the FBI is now looking into who’s threatening her. I wish it were unbelievable…

Mary Ellen Foley blogs at M E Foley’s Anglo-American Experience Blog.

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

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen (aka Stacy).

It’s happened again. Feminists of the atheoskeptisphere have pointed out that one of our Famous Men said something sexist; the assertion has been met with intense defensiveness and downright rage. The defensiveness is understandable, but the rage baffled me until I realized that it comes, at least in part, from a profound misconception about what sexism is and how it works.

To start with, here’s a statement from a comment by Folie Deuce, on Ophelia’s post #EstrogenVibe

If everyone is sexist than nobody is sexist.

No. Category error.

The wrongness there can be understood by substituting a few other words for the word “sexism”:

If everyone is affected by cognitive biases, then nobody is affected by cognitive biases.

See the problem? Everybody IS affected by cognitive biases. They’re implicit. Same with sexist biases, and racist biases, and other out-group biases. We all share them, to varying degrees–even those of us who belong to the groups in question. We’ve internalized them. If you react with outrage when you or one of your heroes is criticized for a cognitive bias lurking behind your/their thinking on a subject, you’re being defensive, not skeptical. Since none of us is ammune to implicit bias, you should at least consider the possibility that the critic is right. Most skeptics familiar with critical thinking (or its language, at least,) will grant that in the abstract, but many can’t acknowledge it when the subject is sexism.

They should.

Like cognitive biases, sexist and other out-group biases are implicit. Their content is dependent on culture and varies to some degree from place to place (I’ve read–I can’t vouch for the truth of this–that in Japan, the notion that women are less intelligent than men isn’t common. There are other stereotypes about women to be found there, but not that particular one,) but if you’ve grown up in a culture steeped in stereotypes and biases against Group X, you’ve internalized those stereotypes and biases. Yes, even you, Mr. Big Stuff. You’re not a brain in a vat. You grew up with the same implicit assumptions as everyone else in your society.

When Sam Harris insists “I’m not the sexist pig you’re looking for,” he’s assuming that “you said something sexist,” translates into/as “you think that men are better than women,” or even “you are a male supremacist.” But that’s not what “you said something sexist” means. That’s not what it means at all.

Does this seem obvious to you, reader? If you’re a regular reader of this blog, it probably does. But there are lots of people, some very smart ones among them, who haven’t thought this through.

Ian Cromwell, aka The Crommunist, has argued against using the word “racist” as a noun. We shouldn’t characterize anyone as “a racist,” he thinks, in part because of confusions like the one I’m discussing here. I wouldn’t go quite that far–I think it’s fair and useful to call a person who holds explicit white supremacist views a racist, and a person who thinks it a shame women ever won the right to vote, a sexist. Sam Harris, on the other hand, is correct that he’s not a “sexist pig.” He is, however, sexist–along with me, and you, and everyone else. How nice if he could acknowledge that fact, and turn his attention from defending himself to examining the content of actual claims made by and about women, even–dare we hope–the implicit ones.

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

Michael wants me to respond to his post without the sarcastic paraphrasing. Fair enough. I can at least try, although it’s a very long and winding post, which does make it difficult. This won’t be complete, therefore, but it will be something.

Item.

I believe that the approach taken by PZ Myers, and by some other people on (for shorthand) the FreeThought Blogs perceived ‘side’ of some disagreements, is counterproductive to these aims. It is also unjust and harmful in itself, because it routinely demonises decent people who support equality but who have a different approach to it.

That’s not a good shorthand. There are a lot of bloggers on this network, and many of them don’t write about disputes within Anglophone atheism and secularism at all. It’s not fair to them to keep using the name of the network as a “shorthand,” especially when so many people use it not as a shorthand but as a code for “what we all hate.” I think Michael was hinting at that himself, frankly.

Item.

Some of these more mainstream media analyses imply that there is a single ‘atheist movement’, and that it is best analysed through some opinions of some mostly American bloggers and activists who, while committed and sincere and doing good work, are not representative of atheist activism worldwide.

There’s a whiff of xenophobia there. The claim isn’t really true, and it’s a little bit creepy.

Item.

In the last year or so, he has publicly accused Richard Dawkins of seeming to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children…

On the basis of things RD wrote, no? I myself think Richard Dawkins has been displaying a callous indifference to the sexual harassment of women lately, because of things he’s said on Twitter. I’ve replied to Richard directly, and I’ve also blogged about what he’s been saying. I think people who have large influence and visibility have a particular responsibility to be fair and reasonable in what they say about such things.

Michael Shermer of multiple unreported serious crimes…

What are people supposed to do then? Keep the secrets forever? Never make any public warnings about guys who get handsy or ply women with alcohol in hopes of scoring? Just shut up, always, no matter what?

Item, the penultimate paragraph.

I believe that we should robustly question the ideas and behaviour of people who are, or who are perceived to be, authority figures in our own spheres of activity. I also believe that everyone, on various sides of these disagreements, should reconsider what I describe as the ethos of “You must be more compassionate, you fuckbrained asshole!”

Probably a good suggestion.

Updating to add, at Michael’s request –

There’s probably much in the post that I agree with. I skimmed much of it, and I probably agree with the skimmed part. I certainly agree that the Atheist Alliance International is a great thing. One of the many rewards of the Empowering Women Through Secularism conference in Dublin last summer was meeting and talking to Carlos Diaz.

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