On the “Talibanesque”-ness of harassment policies

The trollitariat have been out in full force recently about the real progress we’ve made recently in finally putting into place structures that will protect women from unwanted sexual advances at atheist/skeptic conventions. They’re getting some help from prominent skeptics like Russell Blackford, who evidently created the meme of the Talibanesquery of this initiative according to some commenters, resulting in wave after wave of sockpuppeting trolls repeating the meme despite being debunked repeatedly.

The trolls are even getting some help from local FtB bloggers who apparently bought that line of argumentation without looking at the policy itself, when actually looking at the policy in question is all it takes to turn the whole issue on its head.
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On the “Talibanesque”-ness of harassment policies
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An evil Easter treat for us atheists

Not only am I only celebrating the secular part of the holiday, I’m doing it in such a manner that onlookers might think I was the single most evil person in the universe for doing it. See, for lunch, I’m eating deviled live baby chickens, whole.

Deviled eggs made to look like chicks

The beak’s a little crunchy, putting it at odds from the rest of the chick’s squishiness, but what can you expect?

Idea shamelessly stolen from this image.

An evil Easter treat for us atheists

How easy it must be to be Be

Natalie Reed is a transgender activist and an atheist, and possibly more importantly, a fantastic writer. She wrote an insightful post (like she does) regarding a meme spreading amongst the transgender community that “God loves trans people”, wherein she vehemently disagreed with the statement, because there is no evidence for the existence of this corporeal entity that people claim loves them. She also lays out the fact that religion, historically, has been aggressively anti-gay and anti-trans and, well, extraordinarily xenophobic with regard to anything and anyone that does not fit into the “traditional” (e.g., “DEFINED BY GOD!”) gender roles. These facts are well in evidence around these parts, so I won’t rehash them.

Be Scofield is a Divinity School pantheist and a pro-theism activist, and probably more importantly, terrible at both reading for comprehension (as Chris Hallquist covers), and at writing persuasively. He rebutted Natalie in a most repetitive and anti-Gnu-Atheism manner that she is wrong because she believes supporting religious delusion also supports the more extremist of the religiously deluded. Maybe not in exactly those words, but that’s the gist of his argument, which, while he demands sociological evidence for Natalie’s assertions, he supports his own via argumentum ad nauseum. He also makes several assumptions about Natalie’s line of thinking, about her method of argumentation, her reasons for making the arguments she does, and about her general psychology.

This, by the by, is the same person who, not long ago, accused Greta Christina of racist imperialism by pullquoting Sikivu Hutchinson, one of the biggest contributors to Black Skeptics.
Continue reading “How easy it must be to be Be”

How easy it must be to be Be

Not one of us is a token

On my own blog, an argument came up — while I was so slammed with work as to be all but totally disengaged from the greater blogohedron — that just happened to become extraordinarily timely through a coincidental confluence that bears mentioning. Liam, on an older post, defended the idea that people encouraging diversity were in fact engaging in “reverse racism”, serving as an excellent foil for my argument that diversity is itself a laudable goal.

This happened concurrently with John Loftus’ rather abrupt departure from Freethought Blogs, and his slamming the door on the way out hard enough to rattle the china on the walls — he intended to do damage on the way out by picking several fights with so-called “mean atheists” when his chief concern was that the commentariat, not the bloggers, were mean to him when he launched on our network and that he’d therefore have a harder time reaching out to Christians. He was invited expressly because he had a perspective that was, while not totally unique, certainly underrepresented in our blogging group, with the hope that when people move their blogs to our network it grows the network readership overall. That doesn’t make him the “token ex-Christian” not even the “token ex-Protestant minister”, so when he suggested that Natalie Reed was only brought on for diversity’s sake rather than her personal qualifications, many of us bloggers rightly rankled.
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Not one of us is a token

So let’s hear you out then, John Greg.

Over on my post about the UK rape survivor campaign, John Greg threadjacked the entire comments thread to be about the ongoing so-called Great Rift between various factions in the skeptic and atheist blogosphere over Rebecca Watson’s trip to Ireland and into the “right to flirt” rabbithole, which I’ve covered extensively in the past. Part of this fight is about feminism, about the inclusion of feminist ideals in the skeptical and atheist communities, and about splash damage that some ostensible supporters of these ideals are taking during fights with various trolls.

I sympathize that good people might be getting hurt by the pushback against misogyny in our community when they point out that some folks are being emotional rather than rational, but I empathize (which is significantly stronger than sympathy) with the people who are getting emotional because I get emotional when I see my friends and allies getting shit on over nonsense, and other friends and allies not even lifting a finger to rebut.

So this stuff needs to be talked about. Yet again. And yet again, at the explicit demand of the people who claim that we’re the ones stirring the pot.

However, it was cluttering up a perfectly good thread about helping rape victims get the help they need, so I’ve moved it here.
Continue reading “So let’s hear you out then, John Greg.”

So let’s hear you out then, John Greg.

Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

I could not ask for a more perfect bit of compare/contrast. The mainstream American media is stone-silent about Sergeant Justin Griffith of Rock Beyond Belief fame, with the obvious exception of Fox News. The only news you’ll get about this atheist-in-a-foxhole Stateside is the fact that one of the acts for Rock Beyond Belief once did a music video that included images of a church burning, in a song denouncing sectarian religious violence, and Fox News spun it all to hell and back as though it was military-sanctioned encouragement of violence against religions.

Meanwhile, across the Pond, the BBC has covered Justin and our shared fight asking if the US army can embrace atheists. Their answer is significantly more reality-based than Fox’s, of course.
Continue reading “Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast”

Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

More ^Than Men: The Problem With Privilege

I’ve submitted a post to the More ^Than Men project, run by Sasha Pixlee for the Women Thinking Free Foundation. A teaser:

I am engaged actively in a number of struggles with which even some of my more adversarial readers at my blog, Lousy Canuck, must sympathize. I cater specifically to a few niche audiences by virtue of who I am — I am an atheist, and feel that public policy should be made only with regard to real science rather than personal beliefs. I am a skeptic, and feel that people who sell anti-scientific nonsense should be chastised for stealing money from the underprivileged who fall for their chicanery. I am a feminist, and part of my feminist leanings involves understanding that all women are fully human, and that almost all objections to reproductive rights stem from religious or pseudoscientific beliefs and are in direct contradiction with the scientific facts at hand. I am a humanist, where I believe each human being has the same net inherent worth and their caste in society matters less than the merit of their opinions. I am a science-booster, in that I believe wholeheartedly that empirical, testable, reproducible studies of how this universe actually works is the only way to model our decisions, and that any view that is held in contradiction with the established facts that come from said study should be excised from the public discourse. The running theme here is that if you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t make any decisions by it.

I am also a white male. That’s right, I’m swinging pale pipe.

This means I have at least two major positions of privilege over many of my compatriots in all of these various fights, and that my privilege causes my words to be amplified while others’ meritorious positions are muted. In addition, I am cisgender, where my societally-expected gender comports with the physical sex I was born with; and my heterosexuality is likewise considered “the norm” in society, and I am therefore privileged by virtue of happening to be part of a majority where the minorities are often silenced, excluded or ignored, whether purposefully or not. I often don’t realize I have these privileges — the fact slides neatly into the shadows behind my thoughts, and it’s simply forgotten. As a result, sometimes in trying to help on one front, I’m unintentionally doing damage on another.

Continue reading.

More ^Than Men: The Problem With Privilege

Shit Theists Say to Atheists

I really need time to unpack this “Shit X Say To Y”, considering most of them perpetuate stereotypes and probably do more damage in general to the aggrieved parties than the “satire” intends. However, this one… this one.

I have heard every single argument made against my atheism. I swear to you, every one. Not a single one has not been said, directly to me, by someone who believes in a deity.

The video explicitly says it’s “shit CHRISTIANS say”, but this nonsense is not exclusive to Christianity — they are the most common theist reactions to news of a person’s atheism, and probably owe a lot to the religious programming that demands that adherents proselytize to the unconverted. A few of the bits I’ve heard personally came from Muslims, in fact. It’s a problem of theism, not of any one specific religion.

Update: This is apparently a contribution to a post at Friendly Atheist.

Shit Theists Say to Atheists