A good thing (before I get to a bad thing) – someone sent an email to the people at The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe complaining about Rebecca feminism agenda females stopped listening fan ruined yadda. Steve Novella replied in a very good way.

Thanks for your feedback. Sorry you are unhappy with the “this day in skepticism” segment.

To investigate your claim that the segment overemphasizes feminism to a disgusting and off-putting degree, I tallied the last 52 TDIS segments (essentially the last year). This is what I found:

Topic did not involve a specific person – 24
Topic was a man – 21
Topic was a woman – 7

It seems you feel that men should be

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Toronto’s fun-loving mayor Rob Ford didn’t like the rainbow flag that went up on one of the many flagpoles outside city hall on Friday, and he tried to have it taken down.

The flag-raising was meant as a response to Olympic host country Russia’s anti-gay laws. Several other municipalities around Canada have done the same.

Ford wanted it taken down as soon as he saw it. 

The Olympics, ”is about being patriotic to your country, this is not about someone’s sexual preference,” he told reporters. 

It is? That’s funny. I thought the Olympics was about going beyond “your country” to international amity and friendly competition. Yes there’s a tension there; yes the nationalism often drowns out the internationalism; but … Read the rest

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I’m reading Maajid Nawaz’s book Radical. It’s intensely interesting, and (not surprisingly) disturbing.

One thing about it that’s slightly odd is that so far, at least (Part One), he describes a totally male world and discusses it from a completely male point of view. Women just aren’t there, nor are girls in his childhood. He mentions women only as consumer items, things to “chase.”

Sometimes their absence is really surprising. For instance there’s a part where he writes about his older brother Osman’s shift to Islamism. It includes one of those offhand mentions of women as things -

Osman started going with Nasim to his talks and study circles, and pretty soon became a changed person. Everything we’d been

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Quoth the Canadian Institute of Diversity and Inclusion:

The games have always been a little gay. Let’s fight to keep them that way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effb2JYiKXM… Read the rest

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I just wasted a few minutes arguing about sexism and language. Always a waste of time! And yet I keep doing it.

The issue this time is the insult of telling men they’re not men. The claim is that it’s not always insulting to women, because it doesn’t always mean “you’re a woman”; sometimes it just means “you’re a failed man.”

No. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that the qualities implied to belong to men by this whole line of talk are valuable qualities, and that it’s insulting to women to imply that they are unique to men. Can I?

Like the phrase “man up.” I hate that phrase. Why do I hate it? Because it implies … Read the rest

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A woman student at a Saudi university died after an ambulance crew was denied access to her because strangely enough they didn’t have a male relative of hers with them.

Amna Bawazeer, 24, died of a heart attack in the compound of the social sciences faculty of Riyadh’s King Saud University.

Local media said medics in an ambulance were denied access because they were not accompanied by a “mahram”, a legal guardian or male member of her family.

Obviously without her father or brother or husband or son along, they would have fucked her, heart attack and all, instead of doing what they could for her and taking her to the hospital. Also obviously even if they hadn’t fucked her … Read the rest

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There’s a review of 50 Great Myths About Atheism at the MIT newspaper The Tech. The author, Roberto Perez-Franco, is oddly unsympathetic to the whole idea – or maybe I’m the one who’s odd. I like the enterprise of collecting misconceptions and then saying what’s wrong with them, but Perez-Franco seems not to.

The authors deserve recognition for their exhaustive efforts of documentation. Personally, I feel for them. They dug through piles of writings and utterances from the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, acting as if such nonsense was worthy of a serious response, and then went point by point through the material to provide a thoughtful and rational response. This undertaking must have been masochistic, but it was necessary. Blackford

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The Irish state broadcaster RTÉ paid a €85,00 libel settlement to a journalist and the Iona Institute and they’re getting a lot of criticism for doing so.

The payout followed RTE’s Saturday Night Show presented by Sunday Independent journalist Brendan O’Connor on 11 January featuring drag artist Rory O’Neill, who is better known by his stage name Panti Bliss.

During the interview, O’Neill outlined the high levels of homophobia present in contemporary Irish society. Towards the end of the interview O’Connor asked O’Neill to name names which led to RTE issuing the payout.

That has to be some bad libel law there. RTÉ says it is.

…managing director of RTE television Glen Killane, said the broadcaster could not defend the

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Peace? Reconciliation? Music to unite people? We don’t want no stinkin peace and reconciliation and music!

MUMBAI: Shiv Sena activists on Tuesday disrupted a media gathering and vociferously protested the presence of Pakistani musicians at the Press Club here.

Shortly after the programme to launch the first joint India-Pakistan band comprising musicians from the two countries started, a large group of Shiv Sena activists barged inside the club carrying party flags.

They raised slogans against Pakistan, the visiting artistes and waved banners with “Pakistan Murdabad” printed on them, thereby disrupting the media briefing even as a large posse of policemen attempted to control them.

The stunned artistes, comprising visiting members of the Mekaal Hasan Band and the organisers, were pushed

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From The Annals of Valentineophobia, three years ago:

Islamic morality police in Malaysia have arrested more than 80 Muslims in an operation to stop them celebrating Valentine’s Day.

Officers raided budget hotels in the central state of Selangor and capital, Kuala Lumpur, detaining unmarried Muslim couples who were sharing rooms.

The religious authorities in Malaysia say Valentine’s Day is synonymous with immoral activities.

Those arrested could be jailed for up to two years if convicted.

I have a feeling unmarried Muslim couples share rooms on days that are not Valentine’s Day, too. Just a hunch.

On Monday evening, religious enforcement officers launched co-ordinated raids, targeting budget hotels and public parks in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur.

In Selangor alone, officials

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I think “Valentine’s Day” is one of those stupid pseudo-events like “Mother’s Day” and “Father’s Day” that exist to funnel money to florists and greeting card companies. But I don’t think it’s Forbidden or Impure or Pollution.

Unlike some.

… Read the rest

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Unrepentant Jacobin makes a good point in his post from yesterday on Maajid Nawaz and the cartoon uproar:

It’s interesting to note that secular and progressive Muslims also seem to be those who complain least about ‘Islamophobia’. What drives them to distraction is the refusal of Western relativists to offer them support in their own confrontations with the Islamic far-right. Meanwhile those identitarians who complain most often and most noisily about ‘Islamophobia’ are often the same people doing their utmost to confirm the bigot’s view that all Muslims are childish and intolerant. Not only do they behave in a childish and intolerant way, but they insist that it is they who really represent Islam.

That’s exactly what I kept noticing … Read the rest

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I was looking through things earlier today and found an old post that is reminiscent of recent events. (You can’t be reminiscent of something that happened after you happened, but I can’t think of another word for it, and I’m sure you can figure out what I mean.

I’ll just repost it here.

Respect us or we’ll smash your art

November 11, 2008

Hey don’t forget, if that smelly guy grabs your jacket, give him your cashmere sweater too. If somebody belts you in the face, say thank you. Forgive people seventy times seven. Be generous, and more than generous. Like those super-nice people who worry about art works.

Christians have warned of a backlash of art world vandalism,

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Heads up – the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society has a call for papers. It’s having a conference in Florence next September, so get those papers in.

The International Veterinary Acupuncture Society (IVAS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting excellence in the practice of veterinary acupuncture as an integral part of the total veterinary health care delivery system. The Society endeavors to establish uniformly high standards of veterinary acupuncture practice through its educational programs and accreditation examination and process. IVAS seeks to integrate veterinary acupuncture and the practice of western veterinary science, while also noting that the science of veterinary acupuncture does not overlook related treatment modalities.

It seeks to integrate. I suppose that means it adds acupuncture onto … Read the rest

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Amanda Marcotte talks about the value of using a preponderance of evidence standard in the court of public opinion as opposed to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.

No feminists that I know of have ever in sincerity said that the court should throw out the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard in proving a crime. However, as Brady points out, that’s a criminal standard. It’s perfectly reasonable to have other standards for other situations, such as determining if you feel someone in your community is guilty and needs to be shunned as a danger to women. Or hell, just determining if someone is guilty enough to lose a lawsuit. In civil court, a “preponderance of evidence” standard applies. Remember that

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The Guardian reports on a cunning plan from lawmakers in Afghanistan.

A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called “honour” killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse.

The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering.

That’s family values. The family comes first, … Read the rest

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Originally a comment on Creating false memories.

There is growing evidence that memories are actually stored in the brain in a very fragmented fashion, with individual fragments held in the place where the data point was processed. That is to say, your memory about driving to work this morning might consist of the sound of traffic and horns stored in the sound processing part of the brain, the route is stored in the part of the brain that processes spacial relationships, individuals signs stored in the parts that deal with vision, color, shape and contextual meaning, etc. These fragments are stored as archetypes: you do not have hundreds of memories about how bacon tastes, for example, you have only … Read the rest

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