Reposted from here.
My grandfather was a war veteran. I didn’t get to say goodbye before he passed away, from long-standing health concerns that finally caught up to him. I was in Toronto at the time, and was actually in the process of saving up to make a visit back to Nova Scotia when I got the news. I arrived two weeks after his burial.
I miss him. My familial neglect at the sunset of his life is going to haunt me for a long time.
Don’t mind the repeating — it’s not ritualistic chanting, it’s a technique to allow the people at the back to hear the speaker. It’s completely necessary in these protests because megaphones or speakers or other volume amplification techniques require city permits.
Heh. That last guy doesn’t know how to work this crowd-based megaphone very well, does he? Still, their stories are important and the 13-year-old girl was great. Schools shouldn’t be privatized. The more for-profit you make something, the more it benefits the rich and detriments the poor. Shoring up education benefits the country in question’s economy, though it explicitly does not benefit one particular side of the political spectrum ideologically.
The latest imbroglio here at Freethought Blogs appears to be an ongoing systemic campaign of trolling and attempting to silence several voices via liberal application of a megaphone and a large and varied vocabulary of misogynist slurs and outright libel about certain individuals. One aspect of this campaign and one possible course of action that we’ve stumbled across, having had Franc Hoggle’s identity dropped into our laps by one of his real-life acquaintances, has repercussions that have drawn out a contingent of slimepit denizens to amp up the silencing campaign. I will refer herein to these crusaders collectively as “douchebags” or some variant thereupon.
So far, PZ Myers and Ophelia Benson have borne the brunt of the assault by the douchebags, though Stephanie Zvan is rapidly climbing the ranks of people being targeted. Greg Laden and I are thus far mere also-rans.
One of the things that I do around these parts is observe the larger knock-down drag-out fights, and pull out the side concerns — the little individual jabs and parries in conversations — and dissect them. During this ongoing fight, one of the largest bête noires raised by the douchetariat is the question of censorship. Specifically, that when one of them gets put into moderation for refusing to stay on topic or for outright flaming or spamming or otherwise disrupting conversation, they are being censored in violation of their freedom to douche publicly.
Continue reading “Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB”
Apropos of the video I posted yesterday about biotech, here’s Dara Ó Briain on the IT industry.
He’s mostly right. Those of us who do real work frown on the goons he’s talking about, though. There’s a showboat in every crowd.
A few quick links that show that being a woman on the internet is inherently dangerous to your sanity and your sense of security. So many needed voices have been drummed out of public view by misogynistic trolling that said trolling has become a tried and proven silencing technique. I am tired of seeing articles or videos authored by women getting ignored, with real debate getting supplanted by rape threats and objectification. Thankfully, we’re finally starting to see a pushback not only in the skeptic-atheist blogosphere, but by women who try to make their voices heard in other venues. I only hope enough momentum has built that we might see the end of the slut-shamers and cunt-criers once and for all.
Continue reading “The General Pushback against Misogynist Trolls Begins”
This video’s wending its way through the intertubes being all meme-like. If this is what it’s actually like to work at a biotech lab, I’m kind of glad I’m just a computer nerd.
Then again, being in the IT industry has its share of grind. And far fewer instances of meetings breaking out into song.
There’s a battle raging presently over at Ophelia’s and Stephanie’s over a guy by the ‘nym of Franc Hoggle. I say ‘nym, because a real-life friend of his learned of his online identity, evidently by him outing himself to this friend — leading to his friend discovering his blog, Grey Lining (no link, sorry). Said friend decided to tell Ophelia Franc’s real name so she could use it to defend herself and the rest of us by extension from his ongoing misogynist, anti-feminist, anti-FtB, anti-Ophelia and downright obsessive anti-PZ campaign.
To be clear, Franc Hoggle, despite making a great many oblique and yet threatening comments like “if I were a woman, I’d kick [Ophelia] in the cunt”, has never directly threatened anyone. In his nascent proto-Mabus state, he has compared PZ Myers, popular atheist blogger and small town professor of biology, of being like Idi Amin and Kim Jong-Il, the only admitted difference being that PZ was lacking only the opportunity to commit mass-murder.
The constant drumbeat of anti-feminist sentiment from his site and his commentariat (whom we would probably leave largely alone if they would only stop staging raiding parties!) is evidently intended to inculcate a hostile environment for our bloggers, shaming and othering and invoking fear to speak our minds lest we incur the wrath of some people who happen to think that including feminism in the skeptic and atheist blogosphere is the Wrong Direction For The Movement™. But he has made no direct threats to anyone, and short of the fact that he has visited the Melbourne-based Global Atheist Convention in 2010 under his real name, and PZ was planning on being at the 2012 GAC, he poses no physical threat to anyone in real life.
Yet.
Continue reading “The Case Against Outing Franc Hoggle”
A pipeline is going to be built between the Alberta tar sands and Texas to extract more oil from these sands. First Nations activist Clayton Thomas-Müller is protesting this pipeline for the devastating effects on the environment that the pipeline will have when it inevitably ruptures.
Continue reading “The protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline”
Interesting bit of news from a study on medical cannabis’ legalization. The prohibitionists have long suggested that legalizing medical marijuana would just lead to more kids smoking up after school. Turns out that’s a claim that’s easily studied! Which, as you must know by now, you should avoid doing at all costs when you’re advocating something so anti-reality as prohibition of a substance less harmful than alcohol — because you’ll just get caught making claims that don’t bear any level of scrutiny. There’s even two states that are fairly close culturally to serve as subjects.
Rhode Island legalized medical marijuana in 2006, but Massachusetts did not. “We wanted to pair these two states because they have so much in common culturally and geographically,” says Dr. Esther Choo, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and emergency medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital.
Choo’s analysis used data collected from 1997 to 2009 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The analysis involved nearly 13,000 youth in Rhode Island and about 25,000 in Massachusetts. In each state in any given year, the study found, about 30% of youth reported using marijuana at least once in the previous month.
In other words, while marijuana use was common, there was no significant difference in rates of pot use between the years before and after legalization in Rhode Island. “We found no effect of the policy change,” says Choo.
Emphasis mine. Wow, giving patients access to pot for medical purposes doesn’t turn kids into stoners. What a surprise!
Grant Theft Auto 3.5: San Andreas is widely regarded as the best GTA game ever made. So, since GTA 5 is set in Los Santos, one of the towns from San Andreas, some wag with a video editor and the capability of inserting Comic Sans floating text decided to remake the new game’s trailer in the old game’s engine.
I love the part where in the San Andreas engine the player tries to punch a guy and misses — it’s at the part in the GTA 5 trailer where a pedestrian is shoved and hits the ground face-first.
