Oh look, it’s Jessica Ahlquist and Twitter all over again. A primary school principal in Brooklyn says no to a rebarbative-sounding song titled “God Bless the USA” for the kindergarten graduation.  Well I should think so! If you want god, go to church.

But of course she’s getting the foul name-calling and threatening on Twitter.

Hawkins scrapping of the patriotic song has resulted in nasty hate mail aimed at the principal that’s being investigated by the schools and N.Y.P.D.

One letter says, “You are a filthy, dirty, ugly subhuman gorilla,” another says, “Lets hope that AIDS will do what sickle cell anemia failed to do, exterminate your whole simian race.”

And there’s this one “Niggers and their Jew commie bosses are the scum of the earth.”

Nice. They’d be right at home at ERV. (They’re going nuts here these days, by the way. Hundreds of hits every day. Hi Justicar! Hi franc, hi gang. Sure you don’t want to call Greta Hawkins names on Twitter by way of a holiday?)

It’s good that religion makes people nicer.

 

Heh. PZ takes a look at a post by Benjamin Radford saying how awful blogs are.

So he makes up a statistic and doesn’t bother to cite anything, so blogging is all noise and doesn’t include references (hint, Mr Radford: it’s called a “link”, some of us use them heavily.) And nobody reads them, except a few of the bloggers’ friends. He could make a case for that, I suppose; I sure don’t read Radford’s attempts at blogging, and only ran across this one because DJ Grothe praised it on twitter. (Oh, I so want to see Radford’s critique of twitter — I’m sure it will be as perspicacious as his complaints about blogs.)

DJ praised it on Twitter, huh? Gee, I wonder why. Actually I saw that myself, and I didn’t really wonder why. It was kind of obvious. (What was and is much less obvious is why, in that case, he invited me to speak in the first place. If blogs suck, why invite me? Not for my tweets, I assume.)

PZ’s last line made me laugh.

(Also, I have to add: DJ, your proxies aren’t helping.)

Snort!

A tweet by Mary Beth Williams:

I’m going to start a feminist magazine called Holy Fuck We’re Really Still Arguing Over These Things Are You Shitting Me? Monthly

Alex Gabriel alerted me to a gem: an EU promotional video to get girls interested in science.

The Southern Baptist Convention…

A day after electing their first African-American president, Southern Baptists on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution opposing the idea that gay rights are the same as civil rights.

The resolution adopted at the denomination’s annual meeting in New Orleans affirms Southern Baptists’ beliefs that marriage is “the exclusive union of one man and one woman” and that “all sexual behavior outside of marriage is sinful.”

Oh give it up, baps. Drop it along with the “Southern.” Just let it go, you’ll feel better.

It’s sex. Do you take sneezing to be sinful? Eating? Scratching?

Give up “sinful” while you’re at it. You’ll be amazed at how much better you get along. You’ll know better than to bully people on buses, and you won’t try to take people’s rights away.

“We deny that the effort to legalize ‘same-sex marriage’ qualifies as a civil rights issue since homosexuality does not qualify as a class meriting special protections, like race and gender,” the resolution says.

Because they say so. It was good enough for Moses, so it ought to be good enough for us.

 

Now this is bullying. A 68-year-old woman driving who’s a monitor on a school bus was taunted by four teenage boys.

ABC News says that despite the relentless taunting from the group of boys about her weight and physical condition obviously bothering her, 68-year-old Karen Klein will not leave position as a school bus monitor.

In the video, shot on a school bus in Greece, N.Y., four teens repeatedly call Klein fat, make fun of her hearing aid and, and one point, call her “dumb, poor and sweaty.”

I haven’t looked at the video and I’m not going to. I can’t stand that kind of thing – and I mean literally can’t stand; I’m going all scrunched inside just thinking about it. I’ve told you the story about that time I was on a bus…

…well I say “you” but it’s not the same “you” over time, so I’ll just tell it again. I was on a bus and a woman got off and then a teenage boy in the back got up and rushed to the door to call after her – and I felt faintly pleased, thinking he was going to tell her she’d forgotten her sweater or something helpful like that – to call after her, “Miss? Miss? Lay off the doughnuts!” Some other asshole laughed. It was well over ten years ago but it’s scorched into my memory.

That’s bullying. Humiliating people because they’re fat, ugly, old, brown, black, poor, sweaty, wearing a hearing aid, spotty, shabby, foreign – that is bullying.

You browse #bullies at Twitter and you see a lot about Karen Klein and a lot about school kids…and some guy ranting about “FTB.”

I’m as bored with the subject as you are now, but there were some questions outstanding and I can answer some of them now, so I’ll do that.

To put the conclusion first: I think the threats weren’t really threats. They were advice about my safety at TAM, but they were so over the top that they read more like veiled threats than like advice. But I now think they weren’t.

Jason checked out the headers for me on Tuesday, and found nothing sinister. Tim Farley, with my permission, investigated further yesterday and today. Tim did useful investigating of Dennis Markuze last year, so I was very glad to have his help. He phoned the guy who sent me the “advice” this morning, and what he told me was enough. [Read more…]

There’s a thing I don’t understand. Well there are a lot of those, but one in particular. I saw a re-run on Nova last night of a 2010 episode about telescopes and the universe. (As usual I was multitasking at the time, so I probably missed some technical information.)

They showed us one of the giant telescopes, this one in Arizona; the narrator said dramatically that they open the eight-story doors while we saw the doors opening. We saw lots of images via that telescope and the Hubble and others, while various people explained that they can see to the very edge of the universe. [Read more…]

Uganda continues on its terrible course.

Uganda plans to ban 38 non-governmental organisations it accuses of promoting homosexuality, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo has said.

…

The minister says the organisations are receiving foreign support for Uganda’s homosexuals and accused gay people of “recruiting” young children into homosexuality, Reuters reports.

On Monday, police raided a gay rights conference being held at a hotel just outside the capital, Kampala.

Gay activists from around the region were detained for a few hours.

Not recruiting. Not promoting. Demanding equal rights for. There’s a difference.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in the world understood this?

Feminists don’t “recruit” anyone to be a woman. Feminists don’t “promote” being a woman. We just demand equal rights for women. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to other kinds of people where “kind” is not any kind of crime or harm. Criminals and people who do harm also get to have human rights, but the arguments and campaigns are somewhat different. But when it comes to what people just are, then the basic claim is the same: this particular status or identity or label is not a reason to deny people of that status or identity or label their rights.

It would be nice if everyone got that.

This one is on an oldish thread, and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it, because it’s so…choice. It’s from someone indignant about my thoughts on the Vatican’s attitude to “radical feminist” nuns, so presumably from a devout Catholic, who presumably thinks that he is therefore A Good Person. [Compassion is at the heart of every great religion. – Karen Armstrong]

Here’s devout good Phil’s pious comment:

What a bitter and twisted immoral egotistical imbecile you are. No one wants your obedience, they would prefer your absence, permanently. No doubt you’ve found yourself a comfortable little billet where you can open your big mouth as wide as you like as often as you like with impunity. Bully for you. Lesbian narcissist. Go back to kissing your reflection.

Doncha just love the virtue of good Catholics like that?