Loony left feminist Taliban strikes again

Colin McGinn forgot someone for his all-male contrarians list. Toby Young should be on it, because he’s very like Colin McGinn, right down to the thinking he’s funny when he isn’t.

He doesn’t like feminism. Wo, that’s original!

Right, that’s it. I’m not shopping at the Co-op again. The bog-standard supermarket chain announced this morning that it has caved in to growing pressure from loony Left feminist campaigners and given the publishers of lads’ mags an ultimatum: place your magazines in “modesty bags” before 9 September or we’ll no longer sell them. [Read more…]

They were right there

Soraya Chemaly offers answers to the perennial, silly question, “where are all the women in ___?” Actually it’s not in ___, but it might as well be. It’s in atheism, but it could be philosophy or gaming or politics or you know the drill.

In a Salon piece last week called, “Where are the women of new atheism?”, Katie Englehardt described what looks like diminishing participation of women in atheist life. She also encouraged atheist women to more openly embrace their beliefs.

Yeah it’s not that we don’t embrace our beliefs openly – it’s that people always forget to mention us, including Engelhart herself. Yes, Engelhart herself – in the very act of writing (yet another) article wondering where we all were, she herself concealed the names of a lot of us for no earthly reason. Look at it again – the article wondering where we all were. [Read more…]

Frankly incandescent

The Telegraph has more.

The social networking site’s move came as a female MP called in police over rape threats she received via Twitter and detectives continued to investigate similar highly offensive messages sent to a feminist campaigner.

Caroline Criado-Perez, a writer, faced a deluge of online vitriol, including warnings that she would be killed, after she successfully lobbied for a woman to appear on a British banknote.

The trolls also targeted Stella Creasey, the Labour MP for Walthamstow in east London, for speaking out in support of Miss Criado-Perez.

Miss Creasey said she was “frankly incandescent” at Twitter’s response to the vile abuse she suffered over a 24-hour period. [Read more…]

Twitter says oh all right

It will add a report abuse button.

Twitter today said it had introduced a button for reporting abuse on its latest iPhone app and is now looking to expand this function.

A spokesman said: “The ability to report individual Tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone, and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.

“We don’t comment on individual accounts. However, we have rules which people agree to abide by when they sign up to Twitter.

“We will suspend accounts that once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules. We encourage users to report an account for violation of the Twitter rules by using one of our report forms.” [Read more…]

Being totally right entirely altogether

And then there’s McGinn’s Plea for Calm with its paean to epistemic virtue.

Shouldn’t we philosophers be setting a good example of epistemic virtue? We are supposed to be rational, judicious, calm, impartial, non-ideological, just, fair, balanced, careful, scrupulous, accurate, above-the-fray. But such virtues have not been evident recently. Instead we have seen hysteria, presumption of guilt, ignoring of evidence, ignoring of due process and procedural justice, sloppiness, inaccuracy, ideology, vindictiveness, lack of reflection, simple stupidity, ideological fervor, ad hominem invective, and so on and on. [Read more…]

How can we know?

From What is it like to be a woman in philosophy – some commentary.

How can we know who the predators are?

On a day when the profession is all abuzz about the resignation of a senior philosopher due to allegations of sexual harassment, I find myself wondering about all the women who have been suffering in silence.  Many commentators on this issue add remarks along the lines that they know of much worse cases where nothing has been done. [Read more…]