Gender policing? What gender policing? Garance Franke-Ruta says what gender policing.

Niall Ferguson dismisses economist John Maynard Keynes’s work as the product of an “effete” sensibility more interested in talking ballet than building a family with his wife.

Daily Caller writer Matthew K. Lewis blasts coverage of the gun control debate and declares, “Newsrooms should also hire a few journalists who aren’t effete liberal p*ssies.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas dismisses fellow Republicans who considered voting for a de minimis gun-control bill as “squishes.”

Effete squish liberal pussies; we hates’em. We hates women too, because women are where all that effete squish liberal pussiness comes from.

This isn’t policy talk oriented toward coming up with the greatest good for the greatest number, reducing human suffering, or even securing the nation against foreign threats. This is something else — something far more primal. This is about perceptions of manliness, and about policy as an affirmation of masculine identity.

And what is masculine identity?

Not woman-like.

…today I think we see more and more expressions of cultural identity from white men qua white men, as they seek to claim a place of their own in the multicultural firmament. Sometimes this identity is described as being Southern, or rural; other times, as Lewis puts it, it’s about “redneck” culture. He contrasts this with having “a cosmopolitan background,” a.k.a. hailing from a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse urban community.

“Cosmopolitan” also means Jewish, as does “New York.”

Lewis stuck with his insult against members of the press that they are pussies. By his use of asterisks I think we can all be certain he did not mean that they were kittenish; he meant that they are like women. That they are weak. Inferior. Because women are weak and inferior; they are vulnerable where men are impenetrable.

And they can’t throw. Effete squish liberal pussies throw like girls, and that’s why we hates’em.

Luckily, violence is not the only form of force. There are other ways of creating change.

Public shaming also has a power. Ferguson apologized because he was subjected to a great deal of criticism from people in his own world, people whose opinions mattered to his sense of group belonging. Cruz is getting some blowback from people in his own party who think that he’s acting like an immature jerk (not my words), though I doubt that will slow or stop his rise as a public figure unless it turns into high-level on-the-record shaming from his squishy party colleagues or cuts into his fundraising ability. Majority Leader Harry Reid has sought to help define him during these early days of Cruz’s tenure in the Senate, calling him a “schoolyard bully.”

Well quite. What you get when you have people who hate everthing perceived as female and weak is, inevitably, a bunch of bullies. Not pretend bullies like “FTBullies” but real ones. Public shaming of that mindset is much needed.

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

A guest post by Athyco in a comment on A new way to stir up trouble.

It has been a knotted mass of stupid from the beginning, and each one contributes their little bit to the mess.

I looked over the comments to Karla’s It’s Personal blog post dismissing this WBC contact, then clicked on her banner to look at some other post titles. I wasn’t looking for anything that would relate to a tweet/con problem, but one surprised me.

Did you know that Karla, as one of four organizers, was not at all happy to have a tweet to #NEPABlogCon (single day September 2012 con for Northeast Pennsylvania bloggers) from someone who wasn’t interested in promoting/attending the con?

She writes:

I used TweetChat to livestream hashtagged tweets on the screen behind a presenter who did not bring a visual presentation. As the presenter was half way through his excellent talk on how to monetize a blog, the audience was exposed to the following tweet on the screen behind him:

How many people were raped at #NEPABlogCon? Like, 50/60? I trust fake neck things were banned; they always lead to rape.

Do you know who this horrid FTB/Skepchick/A+/Social Justice Warrior was?  (/sarcasm)  It was ElevatorGATE. The very one who started the Brave Hero stuff that Justin Vacula and Karla Porter use as the title of their radio show. The one who has AmbrosiaX (declared “twitter sister” by Karla Porter) as his co-author on WP. Karla continued:

Can you imagine the confusion and even horror experienced by attendees of a blogger / social media conference seeing this on the screen behind an internationally respected presenter at the conference they were attending? The looks on their faces were quite telling. How would they know the tweet by @ElevatorGATE was a joke?

I knew what was going on, what the reference was to but no one else in the room did except Justin Vacula. I couldn’t allow attendees to feel uncomfortable and so I didn’t hesitate to reply:

Well, if you must know, 0.  Model attendees without a con policy. RT @ElevatorGATE: How many people were raped at the #NEPABlogCon? Like 50/60?

As you can see Matt [Dillahunty], attendees did not understand the context of @ElevatorGATE’s remark – because they have no idea whatsoever about the drama of the paranoid, sick and dysfunctional element of the online atheist ‘community’. [Excuse me, but exactly which part of the online atheist 'community' sent this tweet to your con?]

But I did, and I felt rather fortunate that I was in the room at that moment to provide the response I did to calm rather than incite. It’s called damage mitigation. If it would have been one of the other organizers in the room instead of me, I can only imagine they would have felt the event was being hijacked and assaulted for no apparent reason. [But you can't imagine the feelings of WiS2 conference organizers only a few months later. Huh.]

I’m not happy at all that any of the content filtered to this event, completely removed from the freakish sideshow that occurs on a daily basis on the Internet by people proselytising in ways harmful to one another about the viscosity of mud.

All typographical emphasis above is mine. The emphasis of “confusion and even horror,” “hijacked and assaulted,” “paranoid, sick and dysfunctional,” and “freakish sideshow” are all Karla’s.

She wrote this angry stuff to Matt Dillahunty because he commented on the situation, but I can’t find a word of reproach to ElevatorGATE for his hashtag “joke,” and I’m positive that she never reminded Justin Vacula of it when he later camped on a couple of con hashtags. I wonder if she ever explained to the other three women organizers of NEPABlogCon what it was all about.

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

Sigh. Really?

The Huffington Post on Disney’s makeover of Merida, the heroine of Brave.

She wasn’t hot enough for nine-year-old girls? Nine-year-old girls want hotties for their hero-characters?

Sure. Now let’s put a G-string on Mary Lennox. Let’s give Laura Ingalls Wilder silicone injections. How about a pair of stilettos for Harriet the Spy?

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

Wahay – Bill Donohue (who likes to call himself “The Catholic League”) says there’s no sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church! Whew, we can all pack up and go home.

Bill Donohue comments on the 2012 Annual Report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the subject of sexual abuse:

The survey, done by an institute at Georgetown University, shows how utterly absurd it is to maintain that the Catholic Church continues to have a problem with priestly sexual abuse. Of the nearly 40,000 priests in the U.S., there were 34 allegations made by minors last year (32 priests, two deacons): six were deemed credible by law enforcement; 12 were either unfounded or unable to be proven; one was a “boundary violation”; and 15 are still being probed. Moreover, in every case brought to the attention of the bishops or heads of religious orders, the civil authorities were notified.

And we can be totally sure of all that, because Bill Donohue. We can also be totally sure that all children who were abused strode confidently and happily up to the police sergeant’s desk to report it. We have no need whatsoever to worry that there might be any children who have been intimidated by priests into shutting the purgatory up lest god tear them into pieces and eat them.

Anyone who knows of any religious, or secular, organization that has less of a problem with the sexual abuse of minors these days should contact the Catholic League. We’d love to match numbers.

He’s so funny, the way he says “we” when he means himself.

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

I saw The Invisible War on Independent Lens last night, and was duly and thoroughly horrified.

It’s about sexual assault in the US military. There’s a lot of it, and it goes almost completely unpunished. 20% of women are raped during their service, and 1% of men are. Because there are a lot more men than women in the military, the 1% is a big absolute number.

The military is exactly like the Catholic church in this respect – sexual abuse including rape is dealt with in house – with the major difference that in the case of the military that’s legal.

But guess fucking what - that doesn’t work. It’s in house, so the people who should be policing are instead protecting. Rape victims have to go to their superiors to report a rape, and their superiors don’t want to do anything about it.

There was a lawsuit about this…and the court ruled against the victims. Rape is an occupational hazard in the military, the court ruled.

There were 26,000 sexual assaults in the military in 2012, which is a 35% increase over 2011.

In units where sexual harassment is tolerated, the incidence of rape triples.

Let me repeat that.

In units where sexual harassment is tolerated, the incidence of rape triples.

One woman was called a whore and a slut and a walking mattress after she was raped. She was told she should deal with it like a marine officer: ignore it and move on.

Rape is obsessive. People who do it once do it over and over. It’s not about ordinary soldiers run wild, it’s about sexual predators who go into the military.

(That last item seems inconsistent with things like Tailhook.)

One more obstacle – soldiers can’t sue.

Add the Feres doctrine to the list of hurdles. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court passed the doctrine in response to three cases of military members injured from causes unrelated to the battlefield — one man in a building fire from a malfunctioning heater, and two from botched surgeries. As such, they weren’t liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which at that time prevented individuals from suing the military for injuries on the battlefield. The military didn’t want to worry about getting sued for the very thing servicemembers had signed up for.

But with Feres, the court expanded the Tort Claims Act to ban servicemembers for suing based on any injuries that “arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service.” The Feres doctrine’s domain has stretched to prevent just about anyone from suing the military, including victims of rape. Servicemembers have been effectively blocked from civil courts, according to The Baltimore Sun.

“As strained and improbable as this analysis may be, its true danger has rested less in its immediate application to tort cases than in the foundation it has laid for a widely-metastasizing theory of intra-military immunity from any civil claim at all,” writes Rachel Natelson, Legal Director at Service Women’s Action Network, in Time magazine. “Over half a century later, Feres is not only a judicial invention, but, more alarmingly, the seed of an ever-increasing body of flawed doctrinal offspring.”

Judges have cited Feres to block the use of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which protects workers from sexual harassment and assault.

Even the Catholic church doesn’t have that on its side.

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

Melvyn Bragg doesn’t like the way A C Grayling and Richard Dawkins talk about religion.

He said: ‘The intellectual slackness and terrorism of these atheists, people who I otherwise respected – Richard Dawkins as an explainer of zoology is peerless, and AC Grayling is a great explainer of philosophy. ‘But when they start discussing religion, it’s disgraceful. Religion is basically a great body of knowledge, and we don’t have many bodies of knowledge.’

No it isn’t. That’s just what it isn’t. It’s anti-knowledge. It’s un-knowledge. It’s a huge body of claims to know things that no one knows. It’s an insult to the very idea of knowledge.

Granted it is certainly possible to know a lot about religion…but it’s possible to know a lot about bears, too; that doesn’t make bears a great body of knowledge.

But he said “basically.” Maybe by “basically” he actually meant “not at all.”

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

I watched quite a good show on the Discovery Channel last night, about grizzly bears. A crew got (we were told) closer than anyone ever before had gotten for an extended period to a bunch of grizzlies at a bay in Alaska where more grizzlies gather than anywhere else. They gather for the salmon.

I confide this bit of gossip to you for a reason. I noticed an interesting thing – not at all surprising, but interesting. It’s a hard life being a bear. You have to pack in the food in order to survive the winter. You can’t decide oh well it’s ok I’ll just keep hunting all winter, because you’ll be hibernating instead.

It’s a hard life, so naturally it’s a competitive life. The males grab food away from the females.

One unfortunate seal got into shallow water and was surrounded by bears so couldn’t get out again, and a female killed it and carried it off. The biggest male followed her, she tried to outrun him for a bit but when that didn’t work she just gave up. The male buried the seal on the beach…at low tide. (The tv crew wryly noted that he had more brawn than brains.) The tide came in, and next morning the seal was gone. The male bear sniffed around the burial spot, and considered killing the tv crew in case they’d done it, and then wandered off and went fishing. Then the seal carcass washed up and a different female, with a cub, found it. A different male came ambling up to take it away from her, and she fought him. The tv crew advised against this, and after he knocked her around a bit she did give up.

That’s life with the bears.

All those big tough males who take all the food off the females – they’re there because their mothers managed to get enough food for both of them to survive. The whole thing depends on the females and their cubs surviving, but the males simply grab the food when they can. It’s a wonder any of them survive to grow up.

(Then again because of the salmon it’s a crowded spot. Bears usually don’t crowd together. The salmon is abundant but the crowding means that females don’t get to keep big carcasses. It would be interesting to know if it all balances out for the females or if they would do better elsewhere.)

It reminded me of Haiti after the earthquake, when men simply pushed and shoved in the food lines and women and children couldn’t get any food.

Pitiless Nature.

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

The Minnesota Senate approved the same-sex marriage bill which the governor has already said he will sign.

12!

Twelve and counting.

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

The Audacity of being public post was mostly about this, but I was being cryptic for the time being. I’ll stop being cryptic now: it was about Justicar doing a video to call Jen a fucking nitwit for not totally concealing her location from creeping stalking peering thugs like Justicar – who takes very good care to keep his particulars secret, so that he can creep and stalk and peer and call names with impunity.

I watched it and it made me fucking furious, for the reasons mentioned in The Audacity of being public. I was disgusted by his fake rage at Jen for daring to tweet a picture that included a street sign, and by his starting with announcing that he doesn’t believe claims about threats from me or Rebecca, and by his boasting of his own carefully concealed identity, and by his pretending to be giving Jen advice while vomiting all this out in a VIDEO – I was disgusted by the whole venomous thuggish mess. As I said – I never thought about threats at all until people like him – very much including him – started fixating on me. I’m not some neurotic imbecile who thinks the streetlamp is about to kick her – and neither is Jen, or Rebecca, or Amy.

The only reason we think about such things is because Justicar and people like Justicar have been vomiting bile about us in public for two years.

That’s it. There is no other reason. They’re obsessed, and obsessed people are weird and disturbing and worrying. We do not know why they are so obsessed. It’s an amusement and game for them, it’s a social life, but why it revolves around us remains a mystery. But it is not a mystery that the objects of that kind of obsession should find it threatening. No it’s not. Fucking Justicar is just pretending it is, while he carries right on with the obsession and stalking and production of venomous stalkerish videos.

Hooray for Out Atheists, right?! Speak up! Walk tall! Come out of the closet! Be loud be proud be here. Of course if you do, and you have the bad sense to be a feminist or a mouthy woman at the same time, you will be persecuted. But come on out anyway!

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

This thing about feminism and skepticism, and the idea that they make a natural pair…

I don’t think they do, really. I think they can be compatible, but I don’t think they’re made for each other.

You can be skeptical about any given social arrangement, but since feminism can be a social arrangement, that means you can be skeptical about feminism too. Or to put it another way, you can be skeptical about social arrangements and about proposed alternatives to those social arrangements.

Of course most of the justifications for social arrangements in which men as a group are above women as a group are stupid and don’t stand up to interrogation, and in that sense skepticism and critical thinking perhaps are allied with feminism. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible arguments for such arrangements. Some people like hierarchical arrangements, even if they’re not at the top of them.

Here’s one thing about equality as a social arrangement: it puts all the onus on individuals, and strips them of the excuse of their place in the hierarchy. That can be a burden.

In a way I think atheism is more aligned to feminism than skepticism is. Maybe that’s why I answer to the name ”atheist” but not so much to “skeptic.” Monotheism is the ultimate in hierarchical arrangements, after all, with “god” perched on the point of the pyramid, looking down on everyone. “God” is male, so with him sitting at the top it seems as if men get the next layer and women are underneath god and men. But if you yank god off the top then there’s no particular reason to let men have the next layer, and in fact there’s less reason to think humans are sorted into layers at all.

But skepticism isn’t like that. Plenty of skeptics have been skeptical of equality – you know, equality is for losers, because winners don’t want equality because they are winners. Winning is the opposite of equality, isn’t it.

Michael DeDora has an interesting post about atheism, skepticism and social justice.

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

There’s a weird trope out there – it’s been out there for awhile but it’s getting more and more so (more weird and more out there). One form of it is to complain of “threat narratives” and in the next breath to assert that we are the most vile awful loathsome abominable people ever. In other words, to pour scorn on the idea that there is any whiff of threat at all, while at the same time working hard to create the very threat that is the object of scorn.

Another form of it is to call us fucking morons for not hiding our names and locations, when in fact it never crossed my mind to hide my name and location, until a bunch of people started spending hours of every day calling me a fucking cunt and all the rest of it.*

See what I mean? It’s so circular. Endless ranting and smearing and mocking, accompanied by

• incredulity about “threat narratives”
• rebukes for not hiding our names and other personal information

Having it both ways, in short.

*It hasn’t seriously crossed my mind to hide my name and location now either, and anyway it’s obviously far too late, but the point is that there wasn’t a trace of a reason even to think about it until a couple of years ago. One day I was just some blogger, the next day I was a punching bag.

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

Back, I tell you, back!

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

The greetings committee has certainly wasted no time making our new colleague Yemi welcome. She wrote a post on What are Anti-Atheists+ afraid of? and along came Damion Reinhardt and “pitchguest” and john greg to respond.

john greg is as shy and sweet as ever.

Yemisi, you are indeed a perfect fit with FfTB. Dogmatic; poor English skills; poor reading comprehension; vigourous defensive posture; misrepresentation of commentor’s comments.

Yes, you will do well on this dying network of mad ideologues.

Thank you so much, and do you want the casserole dish back?

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