So since I was reading a piece by Laura Bates I saw another piece by Laura Bates, so I read that too.

A UK tabloid, the Daily Star, is in such a lather about the urgent duty of telling Kate-who-married-William how to body that it published a story about the ghost of Diana – the mother of said William who died I think it was 16 years ago – giving Kate how to body advice. Yes really.

Laura Bates comments:

Under a front-page headline so ridiculous I assumed it was a spoof for a couple of hours, the paper ran the “story”: Di ghost tells the duchess: You’re too thin! They labelled it an exclusive.

That’s right. Not only has the body relentlessly lauded and photographed and peddled to women everywhere as the ultimate pinnacle of ideal, unachievable, feminine thinness attracted the inevitable media backlash – but the paper in question had the gall to take body shaming to a completely new plane. The unrelenting criticism of women’s figures has gone paranormal.

That could become a trend. Joan Crawford tells Hillary Clinton how to body. Queen Victoria tells Angela Merkel how to body. Catherine the Great tells Elena Kagan how to body.

Without even going into the breathtaking insensitivity of evoking a dead woman’s memory to body-shame her son’s new wife, articles such as these pose an even more immediate and insidious threat.

As we sell our daughters birthday cards, dressing-up costumes and childhood books about becoming a beautiful princess (while our boys revel in merchandise promoting the active adventures of astronauts) the media obsession with the duchess’s every bodily inch reinforces the principle that girls should be seen and not heard. Compound that with the contradictory message that she is simultaneously perfectly, joyously slender and selfishly, irresponsibly underweight and we’re also broadcasting to our girls, loud and clear, the message of mandatory female insecurity.

The duchess’s treatment testifies that though they will forever be evaluated on the basis of their looks alone, those looks will always be cruelly attacked by somebody; there is no way they can win.

That is true. It’s something that’s been forcefully shoved on my attention in the past few years – there is no way we can win. We are targets, no matter what.

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

Actual, not figurative, out loud blurt of laughter. An American Legion post in North Carolina wanted to give the local schools a poster yelling “in god we trust” but the school board said no thank you, and a member of the Legion who is also a pastor has hurt feelings.

“We got an email from the school saying thank you but on advice of their legal counsel they could not accept the posters because of separation of church and state,” American Legion member Rick Cornejo told me in a telephone interview.

Cornejo, who is also a local Baptist preacher, said the decision to ban the posters has resulted in a lot of hurt feelings.

“It’s disappointing, it really is,” he said. “Educators are asking us for those posters so they can put them in their classrooms but right now they can’t do it – because the school board won’t let them.”

The 16×20 inch framed posters include the words “In God We Trust,” with an American flag in the background.

It reads: “The national motto of the United States, adopted by Congress, July 30, 1956.”

At the height of the Cold War, and wtf is a “national motto” anyway, and one of these days I really ought to stop everything else and make a concerted effort to get “ingodwetrust” off the god damn currency. But anyway.

 spokesman for the school district told the Watauga Democrat newspaper that “In God We Trust” was banned on the advice of their legal counsel. They feared someone could see the poster and construe the district was promoting religion.

Cornejo said that’s just silly.

“How is that promoting religion?” he asked me. “It doesn’t say anything about Jesus. I could understand if it was a Bible verse – but it’s ‘In God We Trust.’”

There, that’s the part that caused the noisy laughter. It’s hard to tell if they’re bullshitting or stupid when they say that kind of thing. “Ho yus the cross is not a religious symbol at all, it’s purely ceremonial, as any fule kno.” “Oh good heavens no, ‘God’ is not religious; Jesus is religious, absolutely, but God? Don’t be silly.”

How is saying “in god we trust” promoting religion? I’ll tell you, sport. It’s promoting the baseless claim that there’s an always-absent yet supremely important other-worldly but concerned-with-us SuperBoss out there somewhere (and also in here and everywhere) and that we trust it. If you genuinely don’t recognize that that’s a very large and very difference-making claim, then you should think harder about it. After that you should think harder about how anyone knows that, and why they should be shoving it on people when in fact they don’t know it.

The writer of the article, Todd Starnes, goes on to blame it on the liberals. It’s creepy.

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

Ron Lindsay objects to the way the plaintiffs’ attorney in Greece v Galloway briskly threw the atheists under the bus.

Roberts was asking whether the concerns of atheists had to be considered in
determining whether the prayer practice is constitutional. And, incredibly, the plaintiffs’ attorney responded, “We’ve excluded the atheists.” (Transcript, p. 46.) In other words, to all atheists: Your concerns don’t matter. You’re not part of the community. You’re a special case and your constitutional rights are limited. Or, if you prefer blunter language, eat shit.

What Laycock said really is rather tooth-grinding.

We can treat the great majority of the people equally with the tradition of prayer to the almighty, the governor of the universe, the creator of the world -

Yes but you can treat all the people equally by skipping the putative tradition of prayer at a government function altogether. Treating just the great majority equally isn’t what you should be doing here.

Back to Ron’s post.

CFI, joined by other secular groups, filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, arguing that the reasoning behind the Marsh decision is fundamentally flawed. The Marsh court assumed invocations would not be divisive. That has proven not to be the case, especially as the country has become more religiously diverse, including a growing segment of nonreligious individuals. There have been a number of protests involving various local bodies when members of minority religions have offered invocations—or when atheists were allowed the opportunity to open business with solemn secular remarks.

You know what they should start doing? Showing a film clip of the earth seen from space, with inspiring music. Let that be the invocation.

I’m serious. They want to start with solemnity and reminding everyone that this matters. Ok then, do it in a way that really is relevant to all of us.

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

Movie theatres in Sweden are introducing a new rating system to highlight the scarcity of women in movies. It’s a Bechdel test rating. That’s not even a joke or a figure of speech: they’re using the Bechdel test.

I love Sweden.

To get an A rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.

“The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all Star Wars movies, The Social Network, Pulp Fiction and all but one of the Harry Potter movies fail this test,” said Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house cinema in Stockholm’s trendy Södermalm district.

Bio Rio is one of four Swedish cinemas that launched the new rating last month to draw attention to how few movies pass the Bechdel test. Most filmgoers have reacted positively to the initiative. “For some people it has been an eye-opener,” said Tejle.

It’s especially pathetic about Harry Potter, isn’t it. J. K. Rowling is after all a woman.

Beliefs about women’s roles in society are influenced by the fact that movie watchers rarely see “a female superhero or a female professor or person who makes it through exciting challenges and masters them”, Tejle said, noting that the rating doesn’t say anything about the quality of the film. “The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens,” he added.

In the hope that maybe, someday, a few centuries from now, people will at last start to realize that women aren’t quasi-human or partly human or almost human, but really actually fully human.

The A rating is the latest Swedish move to promote gender equality by addressing how women are portrayed in the public sphere.

Sweden’s advertising ombudsman watches out for sexism in that industry and reprimands companies seen as reinforcing gender stereotypes, for example by including skimpily clad women in their adverts for no apparent reason.

Since 2010, the Equalisters project has been trying to boost the number of women appearing as expert commentators in Swedish media through a Facebook page with 44,000 followers. The project has recently expanded to Finland, Norway and Italy.

So where are the people shouting about radical feminism? Oh, they’re there.

“If they want different kind of movies they should produce some themselves and not just point fingers at other people,” said Tanja Bergkvist, a physicist who writes a blog about Sweden’s “gender madness”.

Good thinking. If the culture ignores women, just make a new culture yourself and not just point fingers at other people. That’s easy enough isn’t it? Making a new culture single-handed? Producing better movies because you want better movies?

Research in the US supports the notion that women are under-represented on the screen and that little has changed in the past 60 years.

Of the  top 100 US films in 2011, women accounted for 33% of all characters and only 11% of the protagonists, according to a study by the San Diego-based Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

Another study, by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that the ratio of male to female characters in movies has remained at about two to one for at least six decades. That study, which examined 855 top box-office films from 1950-2006, showed female characters were twice as likely to be seen in explicit sexual scenes as males, while male characters were more likely to be seen as violent.

And if you don’t like it, it’s up to you as an individual to create an alternative. Your time starts now.

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

The article I’m reading in Slate is from 2004, and it’s about what the FBI ended up concluding about why Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School. It wasn’t because they were bullied; they weren’t. Klebold was depressed and suicidal, and Harris was a psychopath.

It’s not just that his private journal bristled with hatred. It was more than that.

It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.

He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but “It’s more about demeaning other people,” says Hare.

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

Reading an article in Slate, I see a headline in the right margin:

Ugly Celebrities Without Makeup

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

The AP reports on the SCOTUS discussion of Greece v Galloway yesterday.

The Supreme Court wrestled Wednesday with the appropriate role for religion in government in a case involving mainly Christian prayers at the start of a New York town’s council meetings.

The justices began their day with the marshal’s customary plea that “God save the United States and this honorable court.” They then plunged into a lively give-and-take that highlighted the sensitive nature of offering religious invocations in public proceedings that don’t appeal to everyone and governments’ efforts to police the practice.

Sigh. Why is there such a thing as the marshal’s customary plea that “God save the United States and this honorable court”? Why can’t the government and its institutions be free of this constant “customary” prodding to acknowledge a god that doesn’t exist?

The justices tried out several approaches to the issue, including one suggested by the two Greece residents who sued over the prayers to eliminate explicit references to any religion.

Justice Samuel Alito pointed to the country’s religious diversity to voice his skepticism about the call for only nonsectarian prayer. “I just don’t see how it is possible to compose anything that you could call a prayer that is acceptable to all of these groups,” Alito said.

Exactly; so don’t have a fucking prayer. Don’t have any superstitious rituals in a government setting that is not supposed to exclude people on the basis of their metaphysical beliefs. If you need to pray, do it before you get to work.

As Douglas Laycock, the University of Virginia law professor representing the residents, tried to craft an answer, Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts jumped in. “You want to pick the groups we’re going to exclude?” Scalia said. A few seconds later, Roberts chimed in, “We’ve already excluded the atheists, right?”

Right. Stop doing that.

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

Pamela Gay published a wrenching, heartbreaking, infuriating post early today about her struggles as a woman in science and skepticism.

With ever increasing difficulty I’ve been dealing with issues of gender related to my career. Right now, I am struggling with hearing that an event I categorized as “A drunk ass  tried to grab my boobs,” is now being discussed by witnesses as, “He tried to sexually assault her in a bar while intoxicated.” I had created a euphemism for myself, and having that euphemism striped away is making me realize that I have been hiding from myself the true degree to which I have been harmed.

I have previously tried to confront and to give voice to the harm that sexual harassment and gender discrimination can do. I don’t think I’ve ever allowed myself to be totally vulnerable in my words, but during my July 2012 talk at The Amazing Meeting (script I vaguely followed and video here) I came close. My goal was to focus on inspiring people to do good, but I briefly addressed many of the issues that hold women like me back: Issues of being inappropriately touched, issues of hearing workplace banter about our boobs, and the effects all this and more has on our self-esteem. I made the following point as clearly as I could: “I know as I say this that it sounds unbelievable – and how can we report the unbelievable and expect to be believed?”

Well we know from bitter experience that we can’t expect to be believed, whether we report the believable or the unbelievable, at least not by a very large and entrenched segment of the relevant population. But more and more of us are reporting it now, and the ground seems to be shifting.

I did not give this talk lightly. I suspected I’d experience backlash for daring to admit that I too am one of those women who has been touched, who has been held back, who has suffered self-doubt related to my gender. What shocked me was the form and degree of backlash. As a result of this talk I faced threat of professional reprimand. Let me state this more clearly, because I admitted that gender related comments hurt my self esteem, there were authority figures who demanded I be punished. While my direct supervisor and the dean we report to have always made me feel respected and have supported me, there were others within my profession who demanded I publicly apologize; that I be formally punished for what I said.

I was horrified when I read that this morning. I’m not the only one. My friend (and Pamela’s friend) Brian Engler is another. So is Leonard Tramiel, whom I met and liked enormously at the CFI Summit. The news is getting around.

And then last week, the fading scars of what happened were cut open with a rusty blade.

I learned that a witnesses to an event that occurred in 2008 is discussing that event and naming names. During the event in question, a man in power who I’d previously never met made a lunge at my breasts. This is one of the events that weighed on me when I wrote my TAM talk. It weighed on me when I said, “As an astronomer, at conferences, I’ve randomly had my tits and ass grabbed and slapped by men in positions of power and by creeps who drank too much. This is part of what it means to be a woman in science and skepticism.”

I’ve been warned this may all hit the internet. I’ve been warned the social media maybe about to explode. I’ve been warned this could be devastating to my career. Let me put this more clearly: Because someone witnessed a man in power attempt to grab my boobs, I have been warned that I need to worry about my career being actively destroyed by others.

And that is fucked up. I run a program that works to spread science education, to generate science results – we are doing good – and I have to be worried that my ability to do good is going to be limited because I have boobs someone thought would be fun to grab at.

And then that man with power – the one who staggered at my breasts at the moment of our introduction – emailed me out of the blue on Halloween, denying anything happened between us because he’s never done anything like that, and if he has never… then he never did with me. He went on to ask why I never confronted him later, why I never did many things, and I found myself explaining, “There is absolutely no way for a woman to walk up to any man, let alone a prominent man they don’t really know, and say, ‘Pardon me, while you seemed to be drunk, you did this inappropriate thing.’ Inappropriate physical contact is so common at these events as to be just part of being a woman in science and skepticism. People drink. Inappropriate things happen, remembered or not, and for the most part we just move on as though it had never happened because otherwise we could never work.”  I told him he should get help, and I dug out my own prescription for dealing with the PTSD that had me shaking. He promised he would share with no one our communications and I told him I didn’t want to communicate with him at all.

This exchange left me broken – it broke me on my favorite holiday of the year.

I am still broken.

There’s more. As I said, it’s heartbreaking.

It’s a long, long road.

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

The Guardian on the FGM report itself.

Thousands of girls in danger of genital mutilation are being failed by the health and justice systems, a coalition of health professionals has warned in a report that recommends aggressive steps to eradicate the practice in the UK.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) should be treated the same as any other kind of child abuse and evidence of it must be reported to the police, according to the report.

Janet Fyle, a policy adviser of the Royal College of Midwives and one of the report’s authors, said that just as it was inconceivable that a health worker would not report evidence of child abuse to the police, it should be equally important to report evidence of FGM.

Imagine someone just carving up a little girl’s genitalia for the hell of it, then imagine FGM, then try to see what the difference is. There isn’t any.

The report clearly emphasises the importance of an individual’s safety over the respect for religious and racial sensibilities, a point welcomed by Shaista Gohir, the chairwoman of the Muslim Women’s Network.

“We need to be mindful of cultural and religious sensibilities but safeguarding the child from FGM has to be the priority. If a child is at risk it is better to protect them rather than religious and cultural feelings,” she said.

Cultural and religious sensibilities that require mutilating children are not worth having or respecting or treating deferentially.

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

From the Washington Post’s reliably irritating “On Faith” blog, Jeffrey Stanley writes about being the faculty adviser for a student-led paranormal investigation club while being a skeptic, but not happy about being a skeptic.

Friends and fans assume I am a true believer but the truth is that I am not. I am a healthy skeptic. And that’s depressing for me because it means that on some level I feel certain there’s nothing out there. I try contacting the spirit world before live audiences to keep an element of hope simmering on the back burner of my mind.

Nothing? Why does he call it nothing? There’s a lot. The fact that he doesn’t think he can find magical stuff doesn’t mean there’s nothing.

He explains about “spirit boxes”…sort of.

You turn on a video or audio recorder to document your session.  You now ask a question into the air and await a response.  Sometimes the responses are immediate and crystal clear.  Others are difficult to understand beneath all the static and only come to light during amplified playback.  Some responses have to be slowed down and have their volume boosted to improve clarity.  In my experience, a five-minute recording might contain 20 or 30 audible “responses.”  Only about 10 of these will be easily understandable to the average listener.  So while the results are not as instantly gratifying or dramatic as using a Ouija board in front of an audience, the results after post-production can be quite stunning and difficult to explain away.

Skeptics will try, though. I chuckled when I first Googled “EVPs debunked” and read various naysayers’ biased conclusions. They generally start from their subjective presupposition that listening to the dead is impossible, then loop to their own self-gratifying conclusion that spirit boxes are indeed not receiving voices from the dead.

Wait, what? Their subjective presupposition that listening to the dead is impossible? Subjective? Really? Aren’t there very good objective reasons for thinking that listening to the dead is impossible?

This is like agnostic atheism, and science doesn’t have the tools to investigate the supernatural, again. Same old bullshit – it’s all a tossup either way; the two are evenly matched; it could be yes or it could be no and nobody knows anything either way. Yeah no that’s not right. It’s not just some stupid prejudice to think that the dead are dead. And what’s “self-gratifying” about that anyway? It’s the longing for immortality that provides the motive for wishful thinking, not the opposite.

Subjective presupposition nothing.

H/t The Morning Heresy.

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

Feeling festive.

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

They have the same confusion in Greece, New York, the Greece of Greece v Galloway, as Sarah Posner reports in Aljazeera America.

In Greece, supporters of the town’s position insist the religious freedom of Christians is at stake.

Pastor Vince DiPaola of Greece’s Lakeshore Church, who has delivered invocations at the council meetings, said the “majority of people certainly believe in God in our community. The majority of people would believe in Jesus Christ. And so it represents our community, and it would be pathetic if our community could not even express itself in that way.”

No it wouldn’t. They can express it in their churches…and at home, and out in the street, and any number of places. They don’t need to make it part of the town government, and doing so takes away the freedom of the minority. It’s the minority that needs protection from coercion, not the majority. Saying it’s a majority thing therefore it should sweep all before it is the very opposite of protecting religious freedom.

Posner quotes several religious people who do understand that.

Pastor Courtney Krueger of First Baptist Church of Pendleton, S.C., a town of 3,000 people, said his town’s council does not open its sessions with any prayer.

“Sectarian prayers don’t serve any positive purpose in official government settings,” he said. Not having legislative prayers, he said, “is the way it should be.”

“The last thing I’d want to do,” Glaze said, would be to pray in a manner that suggested to any citizens attending the meeting that their “interests are not as fully represented here” or that they were “not welcome.”

That, he added, “would really break my heart.”

There.

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