Aha. My response to Shermer’s response to me is now online.

At Free Inquiry

Outraged shouting and tweets and photoshops in 5, 4, 3….… Read the rest

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Birds!

My god the bird life here. I don’t know what the birds are – they’re not the birds you see in Seattle, so I don’t know. There’s a ubiquitous one that’s black with a long tail and a very loud voice. After I crossed the Congress Avenue bridge and Cesar Chavez Street I approached a cluster of oak trees on the corner and my god the din – it was an absolutely deafening racket of those black birds, whatever they are, shouting. You never hear bird noise like that in Seattle – let alone in downtown Seattle! It was very impressive and foreign and cool.

In the Capitol grounds there were a lot of mourning doves making that call. … Read the rest

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1. On the Capitol grounds (which are very nice, very broad and seweeping and parklike) a memorial thing to brave…Confederate soldiers. Signed by Jefferson Davis.

Oh right. This is the Confederacy.

2. Also on the Capitol grounds, on the north side, a big granite slab with…the ten commandments.

Oh Dave, I thought. Actually I said, because there was no one around; it was very early. Oh Dave; got one for ya.

3. On Congress Avenue, a statue of a ragey woman firing a cannon.

She made me giggle.… Read the rest

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No seriously. I’m in Texas. It feels like being in a foreign country. The trees are different. The birds are different – very different.

I got here in time for the auction dinner. I sat between Richard, from San Francisco, and Glen, from Philadelphia, who had donated one of the items to be auctioned – and what an item it was: a week at a retreat he designed and built in Costa Rica. Whooo…It was a fund raiser for American Atheists. Funding buys their work, Dave told us, like that case they won at the Supreme Court this year.

And Anthony Grayling was there! It’s lovely to see him again.

Now I have to go out and see a little … Read the rest

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In Austin. Among the atheists. Dinner. Auction. Amanda, Dave, Matt, Ingrid, Greta, Anthony. Didn’t see the bats though.

Love Austin.

More later.… Read the rest

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I’m leaving for the airport in three hours.

I just thought you’d like to know that.… Read the rest

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Waleed Al-Husseini

Leo Igwe

Marie-Thérèse O’Loughlin

Maryam Namazie

Gina Khan

 … Read the rest

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So in North Dakota, as I mentioned in passing a few hours ago, the legislature has decided to define eggs as people.

North Dakota lawmakers voted on Friday afternoon to pass a “personhood” abortion ban, which would endow fertilized eggs with all the rights of U.S. citizens and effectively outlaw abortion. The measure, which passed the Senate last month, passed the House by a 57-35 vote and now heads to a ballot vote, likely in the next November election.

The fertilized eggs have all the rights of US citizens with the result that their mothers don’t. All rights for the egg, no rights for the woman the egg is in. The egg is everything the woman is nothing. Some … Read the rest

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The Onion…

Supreme Court Justices Brought To Tears By Heartfelt Testimony Of Bigot Who Hates Gay People

WASHINGTON—Listening to oral arguments Wednesday regarding the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, all nine Supreme Court justices were reportedly moved to tears by the heartfelt and highly personal testimony of a bigot who despises homosexuals unreservedly. “It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t spent their whole life in a state of benighted prejudice to know the pain and hardship that people like myself endure every day in our efforts to ensure that gays and lesbians remain oppressed and unequal,” said the immense homophobe, whose stirring, emotional speech about his harrowing daily struggles to impede social progress prompted a weeping Chief Justice John

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Now look here. Politicians get caricatured. There’s a long and glorious tradition of caricaturing politicians. Right? Right.

Therefore, bloggers should get caricatured too. It’s the same thing, after all – being a politician and being a blogger.

Or is it?

No, actually. It’s not. Being a blogger isn’t the same as being a politician.

Frankly it wouldn’t occur to me to caricature a blogger. It wouldn’t occur to me to caricature anyone (even a pol, actually) because it sails way too close to plain old meanness. It would feel awful, for that reason – it would be like pinching a smiling baby or kicking a friendly dog. It makes me flinch just to imagine doing it.

That’s not to say … Read the rest

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Adam Lee did a post in Amy’s series a week ago and I missed it. (Too busy stuffing my face with cupcakes, probably.)

Most of us became atheists for intellectual reasons, because we find the arguments for theism unconvincing, or for moral reasons, because we find its teachings intolerable. But it seems to me that there’s a small number of men (and a smaller number of women) who are atheists purely because they delight in being offensive, because they believe no one has the right to tell them what to do. They think this community is a place where they can indulge those impulses: where they can be as crass and boorish as they want, where they can leer

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Anne Marie Waters had a depressing experience a couple of weeks ago.

On Sunday, I spoke at the University of Kent’s Critical Law Society conference under the heading of ‘Equality: Are We There Yet?’

I was invited to speak alongside pro-sharia advocate Aina Khan (more on her later) and a PhD student (more on her later as well) and found myself in a not-too-unfamiliar situation of having to argue against domestic violence in opposition to a room full of “feminists”.

Having described how sharia family law in Britain allows men to beat their wives – as the testimony of women who have been through it confirms – the “feminists” weren’t quite sure whether or not they disapproved. I was met

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A very pointed Jesus and Mo today.

Aha. It makes him look like Jesus’s wife, and thus his subordinate.

Think about it, Mo.… Read the rest

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Guest post by Tom Foss.

Quoting “vjack”

Harassment involves repeated, unsolicited behavior in which the target is demeaned, threatened, or offended in such a manner that a hostile environment is created for the target.

I wonder if Vjack’s workplace ever includes presentations on sexual harassment. If it does, I wonder if he just spends his time during them sleeping or doodling, because even cursory attentiveness would show what kind of bullshit this is. “Repeated” is often the case (and includes microaggressions that add up to create a hostile environment) but is not a necessary component–and, in fact, the sources I found (like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) don’t include “repeated” as a condition. Instead, the necessary components are … Read the rest

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It’s psychic Surly Amy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj2606dG20

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It’s still going on, Michael Nugent’s project to create a “dialogue” between harassers and the people they harass. He doesn’t call it that. In fact he doesn’t call it anything – he’s being so carefully neutral that he refers to it as just two “perceived sides.”

I find the whole thing rebarbative, because nearly all the participation so far is by people who have been harassing me and others for months–>almost two years now. I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to talk to them on the forum they set up to harass me and others, I don’t want to talk to them here, I don’t want to talk to them on Twitter, I don’t want to … Read the rest

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Desperate Syrian women who find themselves refugees in Jordan can…sell themselves or their daughters, for usually a very small sum of money.

Her daughter Aya is their best hope.

“My daughter is willing to sacrifice herself for her family,” Nezar says. “If the war had not happened I would not marry my daughter to a Saudi. But the Syrians here are poor and have no money.”

Nezar’s daughter is 17. The Saudi groom is 70.

Maybe he’ll turn out to be a nice guy.

The surplus of desperate Syrian refugees means marriage has become a buyer’s market with some grooms offering as little as $100 cash for a bride.

The legal age of marriage in Jordan is 18

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David Robert Grimes has the unmitigated temerity to consider evidence for claims that guns make us safer.

Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case? Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault. They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these “controls”

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