I’m much more optimistic about the Dublin conference now* – and thus able to be excited about it again. It’s going to tackle important subjects, and Ireland needs it. Lucky lucky me to get to be involved.

There’s a bit of privilege for you.

The clouds really are parting here, the band of blue really is bright, the colorful sails on the many sailboats on the Sound are festive.

*Because there’s been some communication.… Read the rest

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I’m still thinking about “privilege” and its discontents. It interestes me, for several reasons, not just the ones that have to do with Ron’s talk at Women in Secularism 2 and the disagreements and battles that ensued.

Sometimes (often in fact) people hear things that aren’t intended in the use of any particular claim or word or phrase. Words and phrases can be used in many ways, some of them less reasonable than others.

Is that enough platitudes to get us started?

I do have a point. I’m thinking that one thing people who bristle at the word “privilege” hear is an added “unearned” in front of it. That can be massively annoying if one has in fact earned the … Read the rest

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Some Alabama pastors say they don’t want any pesky Boy Scout troops meeting in their churches now that the organization has gone all queer.

The Rev. Mike Shaw, of the First Baptist Church of Pelham and former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, says his church will no longer sponsor Troop 404 after the policy takes place next year.

“We’re not doing it out of hatred. The teachings of the scripture are very clear on this. We’re doing it because it violates the clear teaching of scripture,” Shaw told the Birmingham News.

And obviously a three thousand year old book is right about everything, and its “clear teaching” must be obeyed, and never mind what actual thinking about the issue… Read the rest

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The hacker known as KYAnonymous went after the rapists in the Steubenville case:

he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim.

The FBI busted him, and if he’s convicted he could get a lot more time than the rapists did.

He’d read about the Steubenville rape in the New York Times, but didn’t get involved until receiving a message on Twitter from Michelle McKee, a friend of an Ohio blogger who’d written about the case. (You can read about her story here.) McKee gave Lostutter the players’ tweets and Instagram photos, which he then decided to publicize because, as he put it, “I was

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Maureen Brian at Pharyngula, on PZ’s post about the limits to any perceived right to anonymity on the internet. She addresses a couple of commenters.

You both seem to be to be ignorant of or deliberately ignoring a key aspect of how we human beings work.

Plead innocence and confusion all you want but it is a factor which the bullies and harassers know well and exploit to the full.  Bullying and harassment work by the cumulative effects of abuse, lies, threats over time.  We may appear to brush off an individual incident but that does not mean we are unaffected or that we recover instantly from the hurt.  Bullies know and exploit this, keeping up the pressure and

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From Jason’s megapost on privilege and strawprivilege.

Our minds are notoriously buggy machines, being made of meat and all. We’ve evolved toward certain biases in daily living, one of the biggest of which is that we can filter out things as white noise. Normally this is a huge advantage — there is so much going on all the time that we would be immobilized by trying to process it all, since our brains — fast though they are — are pitifully underpowered. Evolution came up with the trick of being able to ignore certain inputs as unnecessary. Thus, you stop hearing rain on your window after laying in bed for a while. Thus, you stop noticing every tiny

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Tunisia is considered one of the more secular states in the region. And yet -

Thirty-year-old Tunisian blogger and secular activist Lina Ben Mhenni is concerned about death threats posted on her Facebook page and sent to her mobile phone.

“You see this message is in Arabic, it reads: ‘You infidel, we will kill you.’”

Pointing to another message, she says: “And this is just as clear: ‘We will find you.’”

If there’s anything that’s not secular, it’s the concept of being an “infidel.”

But many of the country’s more radical religious groups do not like people like Ms Ben Mhenni pushing to keep post-revolution Tunisia liberal and secular.

“This is not Tunisia it used to be,” she laments

“Radical

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Continuing in the poetic vein – the Cuttlefish has a great one.

I love to start fires; it’s just what I do—

I’ve started them all over town—

But recently, folks have begun to complain,

And they’re working on shutting me down.

I’m just having fun, but they say that it’s wrong;

I’m a danger, or that’s what they say.

I want lots of fires; they’re screaming for none:

Why can’t they just meet me half way?

Read the whole thing.

The analogy speaks to me, because about 20 years ago there was a bad arsonist at work in North Seattle, where I lived at the time. His fires were frequently very close to my neighborhood. Worse, my … Read the rest

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Mona posted a sonnet poem on my Facebook page.

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor,
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes. If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never set the wrong to right.
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

– Charles Mackay (26 March 1812 – 24 December 1889), author of a history of popular folly, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

It’s very appealing, but I have an inner daimon or teaser or pest or red flag … Read the rest

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In better news – althought it’s better news we shouldn’t have needed in the first place – the Obama admin has lost its more-Republican-than-thou battle to delay a ruling that makes emergency contraceptives available to women and girls of all ages.

Three judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did grant the White House its requested delay to keep one-pill products, like Plan B One-Step, restricted to females 15 and over. The court will not, however, allow any age restrictions on other two-pill emergency contraceptive products.

Well good. Thank you for small favors.… Read the rest

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Jessica Valenti is not a fan of “don’t feed the trolls.”

Don’t feed the trolls: it’s probably the most common refrain in online  discussions, especially when dealing with misogynists in feminists conversations. The idea is that the best way to deal with sexists is to starve of them of the attention they’re so clearly desperate for. Besides, we think, why sink to their level?

But the high road is overrated. It requires silence in the face of violent misogyny, and a turn-the-other cheek mentality that society has long demanded of women. A vibrant feminist movement has ensured women don’t take injustices  lying down offline—so why would we acquiesce on the Internet?

Because it’s trivial. It’s just messing around. It doesn’t … Read the rest

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Lindy West gets a torrent of abuse for…the horrible crime of arguing that

comedy’s current permissiveness around cavalier, cruel, victim-targeting rape jokes contributes to (that’s contributes—not causes) a culture of young men who don’t understand what it means to take this stuff seriously.

What kind of abuse? Silly. You know what kind. She screencapped a slew of it. Ugly, nobody wants to rape you, cunt, fat, panties in a bunch. That kind.

Take a look. You’ll recognize one or two of the fun-loving abusers.

 … Read the rest

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It gets crazier every day. You would think it couldn’t, but it does.

The new thing is to send open or closed letters to Michael Nugent, telling him a pack of lies about me (mixed with a small amount of truth) and demanding that he take a stand and denounce me.

The first was the work of Tim Skellett aka Gurdur, who took a violent dislike to me years ago – something to do with the closing down of the forum at the Dawkins Foundation, and my having the wrong attitude to it – and has occasionally posted nasty stuff about me ever since. His open letter is all about my criminal act of not sufficiently protecting the secrecy … Read the rest

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In Greece the cops are torturing anti-fascist protesters, apparently; at least that’s what the protesters claim.

Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) – the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard – and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation.

Members of a second group of 25 who were arrested after demonstrating in support of their fellow anti-fascists the next day said they were beaten and made to strip naked and bend over in front of officers and other protesters inside the same police station.

One wonders if the cops are Golden Dawn.

Several of

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London again: a protest calling for an end to deportations to Uganda of known lesbians who face death if returned there.

Around 20 protesters from Queer Strike (part of the Global Women’s Strike movement) and the Movement for Justice protested this afternoon against the deportations of gay asylum seekers to countries such as Uganda, where gays are persecuted and even killed.

The protest came months after lesbian Jackie Nanyonjo died following injuries inflicted on her during her forced deportation by thugs contracted to the UKBA in March, and a single day before flights are due to return Linda N on Qatar Airways and Josephine by Royal Air Maroc.

… Read the rest

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Why look who’s there.

More on Facebook.… Read the rest

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But at least “Beatriz” got a C-section at last.

Health Minister Maria Isabel Rodriguez said the baby had died five hours after the C-section.

Doctors decided the procedure had become necessary when the woman started having contractions on Sunday night, Ms Rodriguez said.

She insisted that the medical intervention did not contravene the court ruling.

Under the ruling, she said, “mother had to be given all the necessary protection to save her life, while analysing how long one could wait and do the utmost to save the baby’s life”.

For no reason since the baby had no brain and would not survive more than a few hours no matter what. One should not have waited one single second.

A medical

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A terrible story out of the Burzynski clinic, the story of Amelia S., told by Bob Blaskiewicz.

3-year old Amelia S. lived in Reading. In about September of 2011, Amelia started displaying neurological symptoms–wobbliness and a trembling left hand (often drawn into a fist). The family brought her in to the hospital after she started falling down. On Jan 30th, 2012, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and on the 1st of Feb it was determined to be a large tumor on the brainstem. Surgery revealed a grade 2 diffuse astrocytoma, which the family was given to understand meant that the core of the tumor was likely grade 3. Doctors were unable to remove much of the tumor,

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