Are you worrying about Lent? Thinking about giving up video games or tequila or marathon running? Considering making a sacrifice of your gardening, or those excursions to WalMart, or spinach and ortolan foam? Last year NPR reported that an archbishop once gave a useful and helpful ruling. It reminds me of those rulings that find it’s halal for men to “marry” women for 15 minutes.

Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but seafood is allowed. Three years ago, when Jim Piculas was trying to settle a debate among his friends about whether gator qualified as seafood, he wrote a letter to the archbishop of New Orleans to ask.

His letter

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This is something I didn’t know about: the women in the refrigerator trope. Anita Sarkeesian offers an illustration in three panels from the 1992 arcade game Dead Connection.

Wikipedia provides some background.

The term “Women in Refrigerators” was coined by writer Gail Simone as a name for the website in early 1999 during online discussions about comic books with friends. It refers to an incident in Green Lantern #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed in a refrigerator.^[2][3]

Simone and her friends then developed

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Rupert Sutton tells us that last week the Student Union at University College London passed a motion calling on the union to support a campaign called Real Student Rights, or rather that that’s ostensibly what it did but in reality it attacked his organization, Student Rights.

It insinuated that our work showed support for far-right politics and claimed that we deliberately fuel Islamophobia and encourage fascist groups like the English Defence League.

Of course none of this is remotely true, but it shows how warped the priorities of some student unions have become when those challenging bigotry are the ones attacked before those propagating it.

Or instead of those propagating it.

[T]he motion mandated the UCL Union to back ‘Real

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Good job, New York Times. Never let a woman try for a big job without asking the universe if she can have it all.

… Read the rest

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Originally a comment on Guest witticism by Anthony K: The purity of Engliſh ſpellyng. (I know; can I do that? Can I make a comment on a guest post another guest post? What if there’s a guest post comment on that post? How many levels can we take this? I don’t know. I’m venturing out into the unknown here. I can’t predict.)

End of preamble.

I think whenever we talk about gender in language we have to remember that the term “grammatical gender” often has almost nothing to do with the gender-as-social-construction we usually mean.

Take French. “le crayon” — masculine, “la plume” – feminine There is no logical reason for this whatsoever. (What could the possible difference between … Read the rest

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I’m being very bad, very truant and frivolous and unserious, and I’ll probably be banished from all the things as a result, but I just found Dawkins’s latest Tweetinspiration too funny to resist.

Philosophers’ historic failure to anticipate Darwin is a severe indictment of philosophy. Happy Darwin Day!

Yup. Also of music, poetry, agriculture, painting, weaving, pottery, history, drama – oh the list is long. Long long longitty long. Think of all the people who failed to anticipate Darwin. It’s a severe indictment of being a person.

So I’ve been preaching sombre sermons on the problem on Twitter. Twitter is terrifically good for writing about complicated things in ten or fifteen words, so I go there whenever I have sombre … Read the rest

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After their meeting with the Student Union the Southbank University AHS peeps went for coffee and what did they see?

what had already been placed behind protective glass??? #EpicWin #SecularSelfie

Posted totally with permission… Read the rest

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In (only slightly) better news – the Southbank University Student Union has apologized to the Atheist Society for trying to make it shut up. That’s nice, but it would be much better news if Student Unions just stopped trying to make atheists shut up in the first place.

Following a meeting this morning with their Atheist Society and the AHS, South Bank University’s Student Union has issued a full apology on its website, stating “We have apologised to the Atheist Society for the actions taken and the distress that it has caused… We remind students that the appropriate response to opinions they may find offensive is to engage in healthy debate respecting the rights of others to hold

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Possibly Non-stamp Collector’s most brilliant and hilarious video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK7P7uZFf5o… Read the rest

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Originally a comment on Humanity’s never-ending search for a synonym.

….to the point where they butcher their spelling of any word that has the letters “man,” or “men,”…

Goodneſs me! Wé ſhall not brook þeſe linguiſtic inſults! The purity of Engliſh ſpellyng ſhall not be ſullied!

SHUT DOWN THE TWITTERS, EVERYONE!

Mumble….godesdamned kyds þeſe dæġs with þeir ſpellyng…mumble…Chaucer…mumble

 … Read the rest

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Via Salil Tripathi, who shared it via PEN Delhi, Wendy Doniger’s statement on Penguin’s decision.

Statement from Wendy Doniger:

I was thrilled and moved by the great number of messages of support that I received, not merely from friends and colleagues but from people in India that I have never met, who had read and loved The Hindus, and by news and media people, all of whom expressed their outrage and sadness and their wish to help me in any way they could. I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate. And as

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This again – Hindu nationalists going after the scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger. They’ve been doing it for years. I did an article/resource stash on Hinduists attacking scholarship and scholars such as Doniger more than ten years ago.

Ill-founded claims are the ones that get backed up with sticks, car antennas, guns, threats, petitions, calls for silencing, fatwas. There is a lot of that sort of thing around. The anger at the American scholar of mythology James Laine and his book about the Hindu king Shivaji is one example. A mob attacked and vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in January, destroying books and irreplaceable manuscripts. Scholars sat in tears among the wreckage afterward. In March the state of Maharashtra

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Heh heh. Seen on Facebook:

Avery Thompson Yeah. There’s no such thing as a “feminazi.” It’s a term coined by Rush Limbaugh to demonize feminists. So far, the only consistent (and I use that term lightly) definition I’ve seen of “feminazi” is “a feminist that I don’t like.”

Mark P Constable Ok, so what word should I use to describe an overly dominant woman that thinks anything with a penis should be placed under heel, to the point where they butcher their spelling of any word that has the letters “man,” or “men,” and think bras and tampons are on par with shackles?

Ed Brayton You should call them “unicorns,” since they also don’t exist except as a caricature

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Jessica Valenti says why it matters how we treat claims about sexual abuse.

I’ve never watched a Woody Allen movie. My parents refused to rent them after he began a “relationship” with Soon-Yi Previn and their explanation stuck with me through adulthood. I was around 13 years old at the time, and always looking to pick a fight—I asked why it mattered since Previn wasn’t his “real” daughter. My parents sat me down and talked about the responsibility adults have to children, and certain boundaries that parents and parental figures must respect.

It’s more than a little sickening how that got normalized over the past couple of decades. The guy married someone he’d been in a semi-paternal relation to, … Read the rest

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