So DJ Grothe says the women who are talking about sexism among the skeptics are scaring away women.

…this year only about 18% of TAM registrants so far are women, a significant and alarming decrease, and judging from dozens of emails we have received from women on our lists, this may be due to the messaging that some women receive from various quarters that going to TAM or other similar conferences means they will be accosted or harassed…I think this misinformation results from irresponsible messaging coming from a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics who, in trying to help correct real problems of sexism in skepticism, actually and rather clumsily themselves help create a climate where women —

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Holy shit.

I just walked into the aftermath of a mass shooting.

I took the dog for a frolic in a park, as is my wont, and on this occasion we chose little Ravenna park, on the northern edge of the University District.

(We didn’t frolic in that kind of fragile area, but in a flat grassy area at the top of the ravine.)

I drove up pretty Ravenna Boulevard toward Green Lake to take the scenic route home, but was stymied by a big roadblock full of people and cop cars and tv trucks with the huge towers. Wussup, I thought, and seeing people wandering around, I parked and let the dog out and wandered around myself. I thought … Read the rest

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And another thing that’s actually like the actual Taliban. Poisoning 160 schoolgirls in their school is more like the Taliban than a policy against “booth babes” at atheist and skeptic conventions is. Much more.

Don’t go thinking you already know about this, as I did when I first saw it, because this isn’t that one, this is a new one. That’s right: this is a second poisoning of schoolgirls in their school in Afghanistan.

A hospital in northern Afghanistan admitted 160 schoolgirls Tuesday after they were poisoned, a Takhar province police official said.

Their classrooms might have been sprayed with a toxic material before the girls entered, police spokesman Khalilullah Aseer said. He blamed the Taliban.

The incident, the second

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The what? Yes – and by a Labour council at that. The Kensal Rise branch library, at 2 a.m., with an army of cops.

Kensal Rise library was emptied of its books and stripped of the plaque commemorating its opening 112 years ago by Mark Twain in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Residents who for more than a year campaigned to keep the library open were alerted in the middle of the night that Brent council workers, backed up by police, were stripping the branch of books, furniture, murals painted in the 1930s and the plaque marking the opening in 1900 by Twain. The move follows the council’s failed attempt to clear the library earlier this month, when

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Another message from Sile Lane (Sense About Science):

Dear Petition Signatory,

The planned direct action against the GM wheat experiment at Rothamsted did not happen yesterday. The Take the Flour Back group did not have enough support to storm the field and the local police kept them off Rothamsted’s grounds. Last night hackers attacked Rothamsted Research’s website but it is now back online. Your support has not only helped the scientists bear up under the pressure of the last few weeks but also made the threat to their research retreat in the face of opposition. There has been lots of media coverage in the last few days, including editorials in the Observer and the Times and articles in the Telegraph … Read the rest

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When I sat next to Wafa Sultan at the dinner weekend before last, she asked me if there were any penalties for being an atheist in the US, and I told her there were two states that ban atheists from running for office. She was amazed and incredulous, and I assured her it was true; Tennessee and I think Arkansas, I added.

But I was wrong. It’s not two, it’s seven.

[Update for clarification: these are all articles of state constitutions, and (I'm told) (by Matt Dillahunty) they could never be enforced. I kind of assumed that anyway, but it's better to spell it out.]

Matthew Bulger of American Humanists lists them.

Arkansas, Article 19, Section 1: No

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Is sexual harassment a thing? Is it just a fantasy of whack-job feminists (who of course are all way too ugly to be sexually harassed)? What about the military, for example? Lots of discipline there; probably there’s no sexual harassment in among all that discipline, right?

Well, one third of women in the military reported being sexually harassed in 2008. That seems like a thing. Maybe they were all whack-job feminists, but given the bad press feminism gets, I kind of doubt it.

The ACLU considers it a thing.

While it is estimated that over 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the military in 2010, a rate far higher than among civilians, the government has failed systematically to investigate

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Annals of horror. “Recovering” children from autism by dosing them with MMS, “Miracle Mineral Solution” aka bleach.

Basically, MMS is 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water. In essence, MMS is equivalent to industrial strength bleach. Proponents recommend diluting MMS in either water or a food acid, such as lemon juice, which results in the formation of chlorine dioxide.

MMS is what got Rhys Morgan started on his anti-quackery career, when he encountered people online recommending it for Crohn’s disease.

David Gorski has learned that now people are recommending it for autism.

Autism One, whose organizers claim that their conference is “all about the science,” featured a talk by a woman whose preferred form of therapy, besides hyperbaric oxygen,

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Is a no harassment policy like the Taliban?

Let’s start a little farther back. Is feminism like Nazism?

No, feminism is not like Nazism.

Nazism tried to kill all the Jews in Europe. Feminism does not try to kill all the Jews in Europe.

Nazism killed gays, gypsies, people with disabilities, and political enemies.

Feminism doesn’t kill gays, gypsies, people with disabilities, or political enemies.

Nazism rounded up its enemies and put them in camps.

Feminism does not round up its enemies and put them in camps.

Feminism is not like Nazism. Rush Limbaugh is wrong.

Is a no harassment policy like the Taliban?

No, a no harassment policy is not like the Taliban.

The Taliban forcibly keeps girls out … Read the rest

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I just took my temporary housemate, a black Lab named Cooper, to the beach for a good vigorous outing with the chuckit and tennis ball. We came back. I sat down at the desk, and he asked to go outside. I let him outside. He went around to the garden and then came back and sat outside the sliding screen door staring at me and making a low growly noise in his throat, as he does when he wants me to grasp that he wants something.

I got up to open the sliding screen door so that he could come in. He didn’t come in, but stood still staring up at me, with his roadkill toy* at his feet. I … Read the rest

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I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s new book The New Religious Intolerance, and finding it as exasperating as I expected.

For one thing, there’s what (or who) is not in the index. She puts much of the focus on Islam and what she uncritically calls “Islamophobia,” but who is missing from the index? Maryam. Irshad Manji. Kenan Malik. Taslima. Tarek Fatah. Deeyah.

She argues that “European nations tend to conceive of nationhood and national belonging in ethno-religious and cultural-linguistic terms” [p 94] and that that makes it hard for immigrants to be seen as belonging.

As we’ve seen, there is another option, realized in a wide range of nations around the world: to define national belonging in terms of political ideals,

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Hey how about this – Melody tweeted a link to a story about two women honored in Norway

 for their outspokenness across cultural lines. Both have immigrant backgrounds, from Algeria and Syria…

Oh! thought I, I might know one of them, and hastily skimmed down the page, and sure enough!

Sara Azmeh Rasmussen, who immigrated to Norway from Syria in 1995, has been carrying on her efforts to promote tolerance, improve the rights of persons regardless of sexual identity and criticize Islam over what she views as its lack of tolerance and repression of women and homosexuals. Rasmussen has been a frequent participant in demonstrations and commentator in the media, not least in newspaper Aftenposten.

I know her. When … Read the rest

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Indigo Jo takes a look at that myth via the report on sexual harassment in London.

The second [striking thing in a discussion on BBC London] was the suggestion (which I recall Simister saying the police had given to her after her assault) that women should “just ignore it”, which prompted me to write an email to the show (which Feltz read out), because the police have said the same thing to people suffering from the anti-social behaviour of local yobs and to people with disabilities who are being harassed by yobs or haters. It’s a fallacy particularly beloved of teachers as well, who will say the same to a child who complains of being teased in the playground

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