Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

Try staying quiet for a while and actually listening

May 27th, 2014 3:35 pm | By

Phil Plait has a great article at Slate on #YesAllWomen, with a shout-out to Amy at the end for giving him a helpful idea – that’s how good it is.

The murderer was active on men’s rights fora, where women are highly objectified, to say the very least. They are seen as nonhuman by many such groups, and at the very least lesser than men—sometimes nothing more than targets or things to acquire. What these men write puts them, to me, in the same category as White Power movements, or any other horribly bigoted group that “others” anyone else. While it may not be possible to blame the men’s rights groups for what happened, from the reports we’ve seen

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The worried worried

May 27th, 2014 3:10 pm | By

Oh no, feminist writers stirring up moral panics – someone call – VaculaMan!

Justin Vacula The Daily Mail is over-the-top with its headline, too, calling him the “Hunger Games Assassin.” I guess we can be outraged by tabloid publications. I’d rather not.

Anyway, to recap and follow up on recent comments, I think that focusing on misogyny and people like Valenti/Macrotte/SPLC representatives talking about this as being part of a “war on women” or “proof that misogyny kills” is as silly as people saying women who kill their male sons by microwaving them being “proof that misandry kills” or a “war on men.” It’s just much more complex and it’s really no surprise, unfortunately, that the SPLC and feminist writers

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Guest post by Antonia Bookbinder on the normalization of misogynist ideology

May 27th, 2014 1:52 pm | By

I recall being a twenty-something woman and being tremendously attracted to one or another sexy, smart man. These men almost always friend-zoned me for being butch and sarcastic, saying how great it was to be friends with me because I wasn’t “really a girl” and whining about their far more conventionally feminine girlfriends. It hurt, a lot, and I eventually learned to avoid that particular sort of male “friend”. Somehow, though, I never ranted about how all men were evil or depraved or contemplated purchasing firearms to massacre popular students. This is mostly because I was never told that I had an inalienable right to male bodies. I was told instead that I should focus on enjoying life without a … Read the rest

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Their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses

May 27th, 2014 12:02 pm | By

Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on PUA ideology and Elliot Rodger.

This theory—that ordinary and worthy men are oppressed by women who refuse to have sex with them—was articulated in Rodger’s 141-page manifesto he sent to newspapers.

Women are incapable of having morals or thinking rationally. They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses. Because of this, the men who do get to experience the pleasures of sex and the privilege of breeding are the men who women are sexually attracted to… the stupid, degenerate, obnoxious men. I have observed this all my life. The most beautiful of women choose to mate with the most brutal of men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like myself.

This

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Rodger told the world exactly why he went on this killing spree

May 27th, 2014 11:09 am | By

Lindsay Beyerstein has a brilliant public post on Facebook that has 392 shares as of this moment.

I am so tired of ostensibly smart, liberal men pretending that there’s some deep mystery about why Elliot Rodger did what he did, or worse, that there’s something unseemly or self-serving about feminists pointing out that he was an explicitly misogynist terrorist. I read Rodger’s manifesto twice. I wish all English comp students could formulate a thesis and support it as clearly as he did.

Rodger told the world exactly why he went on this killing spree. He spelled it out in excruciating detail and sent his narrative of the killings to the media. In case that wasn’t enough, he made a series

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Same? Or different?

May 27th, 2014 9:55 am | By

So…this too is “spin” for “political purposes,” yes? Or not.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

“What’s so wrong about hating? Its just evolution, and how their chemicals react to such things.” Are you really that stupid, or pretending?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

Sorry, it seems my sarcasm needs spelling out. It’s usually aimed at Western liberals who patronisingly excuse atrocities as “their culture”

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 23

What is especially depressing is that the demand comes from STUDENTS. Pathetic, brainwashed little twerps.

Demand for Iranian actress to be flogged, because formally kissed on cheek by President of Cannes festival

It’s all so frightfully political! How cruel that is!

Or is it? I haven’t seen … Read the rest

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How dare you treat Rodger’s murders as political?

May 27th, 2014 9:07 am | By

You may think The New Misogyny (as, I’m told, David Futrelle calls it) and the harassment and threats and sometimes plain old violence that go with it are a problem, but there are those who think the problem is instead noticing the link between misogyny and harassment—>violence.

Steve Zara @sjzara

That video seems thoughtful and describes real problems for women, but I think the leap from masculinity problems to murder is too much.

Miranda Celeste Hale @mirandachale

What angers me re: that video & the hashtag &Valenti’s op-ed etc. is the cruelty of the women who think this tragedy is about *them*

Steve Zara @sjzara

I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about

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Oh gawd no not Leonard Shlain

May 26th, 2014 6:10 pm | By

Apparently the anti-feminist crowd have only just discovered Leonard Shlain’s ridiculous book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. That’s odd because it was published in 1998; I remember finding it in a bookstore and skimming through it and laughing a disdainful laugh. That was before I had a blog to do my laughing on!

There’s an article about it on this Amazon-linked site.

Shlain frames the premise:

Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . .

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That he had personally witnessed

May 26th, 2014 5:13 pm | By

Update: oh and there’s also PZ’s account. So that’s two non-anonymous sources.

Slime pitters are all agitated, asking me in unapproved comments if I have a source for the non-anonymous allegations of Shermer’s sexual harassment. I’m pretty sure I’ve already posted this, and I’m not here to do homework for the slime pitters, but all the same – here it is again.

Jason. Last November. Carrie Poppy and the Nay-sayers.

Carrie Poppy has been extraordinarily well-placed in some of the bigger scandals regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault recently, in having been employed as communications director for JREF and having resigned after six months due to, let’s say, philosophical differences with DJ Grothe, president of the organization.

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Attitudes that are all around us

May 26th, 2014 4:54 pm | By

Sasha Weiss at the New Yorker on #YesAllWomen. She first reads Rodger’s “manifesto”:

The first half of the manifesto is lucid and reflective—we see glimmers of a happy boyhood and an affectionate, curious personality—which makes his spewings of misogyny and hatred in the second half even more chilling. He wanted to abolish sex, thereby equalizing men and ridding society of women’s manipulative and bestial natures, and to lock women in concentration camps so they would die out. (“I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” he wrote. “If I can’t have them, no one will, I imagine thinking to myself as I oversee

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A lit review

May 26th, 2014 3:45 pm | By

In that same post of Futrelle’s he does a quick review of Twitter assholes explaining away any connection between the actions of Elliot Rodger and the popular sport of misogyny.

When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.

But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video

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Known for his fierce criticism of Islamist militias

May 26th, 2014 3:35 pm | By

More shit news, via the BBC.

Prominent Libyan journalist Meftah Buzeid, known for his fierce criticism of Islamist militias, has been shot dead in the city of Benghazi.

He was the editor of the Burniq newspaper and had regularly appeared on television challenging the rise of such groups since the 2011 revolution.

The choke hold gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter.… Read the rest

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Rodger’s utopia

May 26th, 2014 3:24 pm | By

David Futrelle starts a post on Elliot Rodger with a horrible chart he says Rodger posted.

I couldn’t even figure it out at first, but then I did.

But his killing spree had nothing to with misogyny. Never forget that. It was just his own individual quirkiness.… Read the rest

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A major public face of the secular movement

May 26th, 2014 12:15 pm | By

Oh gee, the things you find when you glance at the site stats, which show links from other sites. Like this time a bunch from the JREF forum, which surprised me enough that I went to see why. The why? It’s Damion Reinhardt gloating over the fact that Michael Shermer is still popular in skepto-atheo land.

I know that we mostly talk about the accusations levelled against Radford (so much publicly available data to comb through!) but I’d like to pause to consider a hypothesis about the accusations levelled at Shermer.

Ho: Anonymously accusing someone of serious sex crimes (at a rageblog website) will make it difficult for the accused to continue as a major public face of the

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A bad dude

May 26th, 2014 11:10 am | By

Here’s one I didn’t know about – Todd Kincannon, Tea Party honcho from South Carolina. Crooks and Liars is one source for this tweet (and there are others):

I was so impressed by that that I looked him up, and found a Salon article from January.

All the evidence indicates that Todd Kincannon, a former South Carolina GOP operative, is a bad dude. Not only in the sense that he frequently tweets things that are hostile, bigoted and dehumanizing — whichhedoes — but also in the sense that he’s quite likely a sexual harasser, too. A real winner.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to find that Kincannon, who regards himself as some kind of

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Attitudes that generally put down women

May 26th, 2014 10:41 am | By

The Wall Street Journal reports on #YesAllWomen – not with anything earthshaking to say, but it’s interesting that it reports on it at all.

Hours after a shooting rampage in this coastal college town that the alleged gunman said was “retribution” against women who’d rejected him, a woman launched a conversation on Twitterabout what it’s like to feel vulnerable to violence.

“As soon as I reached my teens, I didn’t feel comfortable being outside in the evening on my own street,” the woman wrote in one of her first posts under a Twitter hashtag called #YesAllWomen. The woman declined to be identified for this article.

The hashtag had garnered more than 500,000 tweets by Sunday afternoon, according to

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He was a gentle, charitable man with no enemies

May 26th, 2014 9:38 am | By

Another horrible news item from Pakistan – Dawn reports that a US-based doctor in Pakistan to do humanitarian work was murdered as he visited an Ahmadi cemetery.

The doctor was in Pakistan on a short visit to do voluntary work at the Tahir Cardiac Hospital, a private institution that he himself helped build a few years back.

And that’s his reward.

The Wall Street Journal has more.

An American doctor of Pakistani origin was shot dead in central Pakistan by unidentified gunmen on Monday, police said, in an attack that appeared to target him because of his membership in the minority Ahmadiyya religious community.

Dr. Mehdi Ali, 50, was walking with family members in the town called Chanab

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Men as people but women as

May 26th, 2014 9:26 am | By

This is a good one…

 · May 25

because the media present men as people but present women as sexual objects

Now of course that could in theory be a misleading because unrepresentative selection of Rolling Stone covers. It could be that a representative selection of Rolling Stone covers would show an equal number of men posing with strategic clothes left off and a seductive facial expression, and an equal number of women head and shoulders face front with shirt on looking thoughtful/sullen. That could be, in principle. But in reality?

You be the judge.… Read the rest

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What elephant in what room?

May 25th, 2014 4:44 pm | By

On the other hand, more cheerfully, I’m seeing a lot of good mini-essays (which is to say, paragraphs) on Facebook by angry male friends expressing their anger at all the anxious misdirection oh no don’t look at the misogyny look over there at the purple rabbit in a fedora.

Like Martin Robbins for example, who gave me permish to quote him.

A man who was part of a community of extremists who hate women, wrote a manifesto about his hate for women, then went to a female sorority house to kill women.

But it definitely wasn’t about his hatred of women. Oh no sir, it was because of his Asperger’s, or some undefined mental illness. It clearly had nothing to

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The ideology behind these attacks

May 25th, 2014 4:30 pm | By

Laurie Penny has an angry piece in the New Staggers about misogyny and the rush to deny that misogyny makes any difference to anything.

This is not the first time that women and unlucky male bystanders have been massacred by men claiming sexual frustration as justification for their violence. In 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lépine shot 28 people at the École Polytechnique in Quebec, Canada, claiming he was “fighting feminism”. Fourteen women died. In 2009, a 48-year-old man called George Sodini walked into a gym in the Pittsburgh area and shot 13 women, three of whom died. His digital manifesto was a lengthier version of Rodger’s, vowing vengeance against the female sex for refusing to provide him with pleasure and

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