May 14 2013
Wahay – Bill Donohue (who likes to call himself “The Catholic League”) says there’s no sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church! Whew, we can all pack up and go home.
Bill Donohue comments on the 2012 Annual Report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the subject of sexual abuse:
The survey, done by an institute at Georgetown University, shows how utterly absurd it is to maintain that the Catholic Church continues to have a problem with priestly sexual abuse.
May 14 2013
I saw The Invisible War on Independent Lens last night, and was duly and thoroughly horrified.
It’s about sexual assault in the US military. There’s a lot of it, and it goes almost completely unpunished. 20% of women are raped during their service, and 1% of men are. Because there are a lot more men than women in the military, the 1% is a big absolute number.
The military is exactly like the Catholic church in this respect – sexual abuse including rape is dealt with in house – with the major difference that in the case of the military that’s legal.
But guess fucking what - that doesn’t work. It’s in house, so the people who should be policing are instead protecting. Rape victims have to go to their superiors to report a rape, and their superiors don’t want to do anything about it.
May 13 2013
Melvyn Bragg doesn’t like the way A C Grayling and Richard Dawkins talk about religion.
He said: ‘The intellectual slackness and terrorism of these atheists, people who I otherwise respected – Richard Dawkins as an explainer of zoology is peerless, and AC Grayling is a great explainer of philosophy. ‘But when they start discussing religion, it’s disgraceful. Religion is basically a great body of knowledge, and we don’t have many bodies of knowledge.’
No it isn’t. That’s just what it isn’t. It’s anti-knowledge. It’s un-knowledge. It’s a huge body of claims to know things that no one knows. It’s an insult to the very idea of knowledge.
Granted it is certainly possible to know a lot about religion…but it’s possible to know a lot about bears, too; that doesn’t make bears a great body of knowledge.
But he said “basically.” Maybe by “basically” he actually meant “not at all.”
May 13 2013
I watched quite a good show on the Discovery Channel last night, about grizzly bears. A crew got (we were told) closer than anyone ever before had gotten for an extended period to a bunch of grizzlies at a bay in Alaska where more grizzlies gather than anywhere else. They gather for the salmon.
I confide this bit of gossip to you for a reason. I noticed an interesting thing – not at all surprising, but interesting. It’s a hard life being a bear. You have to pack in the food in order to survive the winter. You can’t decide oh well it’s ok I’ll just keep hunting all winter, because you’ll be hibernating instead.
It’s a hard life, so naturally it’s a competitive life. The males grab food away from the females.
May 13 2013
The Minnesota Senate approved the same-sex marriage bill which the governor has already said he will sign.
12!
Twelve and counting.
May 13 2013
One of the things that proud or “movement” skeptics like to say is “you have to be skeptical of everything.” No sacred cows!
But I don’t think even proud or “movement” skeptics really believe that, apart from a few psychopaths. I can think of lots of things I think no one should be skeptical of, and I’d be surprised to get much disagreement.
May 13 2013
Rebecca has a post about the fetish for “dialogue” which starts with some great tweets by Jeff Sharlet pointing out how stupid the fetish is.
What I keep saying. There is no “dialogue” to be had with people who just enjoy harassing people. They’re not confused or uninformed, they’re just people of that type, who have found a safe way to engage in harassy behavior without paying any social costs. That’s all. Normally adults have to give up that kind of thing, or displace it into more covert and disguised forms like office politics. They are very lucky to be alive now when it’s possible to go on acting like a pubescent shit for the rest of your life. Trying to have (let alone force) a “dialogue” with them is futile at best and yet more harassment at worst.
The last Sharlet tweet Rebecca quotes is very apt.
Well-intentioned liberals always ask how we can “educate” haters. Elite haters don’t need “education”; they need to be challenged.
May 13 2013
PZ on his own post on Justicar’s latest jeu d’esprit:
You know what also annoys me about this? It’s explicitly counter to the goals of the wider atheist movement, in which we want people to step forward publicly and be the face of atheism. Look at that story about Gage Pulliam, for instance: he went public despite public opprobrium for atheists.
Jen puts her name and face up front for the cause. Regressive asshole atheists use that to harass her personally.
And conversely, this coward Justicar/Integralmath hides behind a pseudonym, bragging about how careful he is to keep his identity covered, while sniping at the atheists who have more guts than he does. You wanna know why he and other slymers are poison? Because they don’t stand up for any cause. They’re dead spots in the movement.
Precisely. We want atheists to be out. Jen is out, Rebecca is out, Amy is out, Melody is out, Greta is out, I am out. Justicar, on the other hand, is not out. Yet he uses his non-outness to harass us, for being out while female.
Counter to the goals of the wider atheist movement. Big time.
May 12 2013
The Audacity of being public post was mostly about this, but I was being cryptic for the time being. I’ll stop being cryptic now: it was about Justicar doing a video to call Jen a fucking nitwit for not totally concealing her location from creeping stalking peering thugs like Justicar – who takes very good care to keep his particulars secret, so that he can creep and stalk and peer and call names with impunity.
I watched it and it made me fucking furious, for the reasons mentioned in The Audacity of being public. I was disgusted by his fake rage at Jen for daring to tweet a picture that included a street sign, and by his starting with announcing that he doesn’t believe claims about threats from me or Rebecca, and by his boasting of his own carefully concealed identity, and by his pretending to be giving Jen advice while vomiting all this out in a VIDEO – I was disgusted by the whole venomous thuggish mess. As I said – I never thought about threats at all until people like him – very much including him – started fixating on me. I’m not some neurotic imbecile who thinks the streetlamp is about to kick her – and neither is Jen, or Rebecca, or Amy.
The only reason we think about such things is because Justicar and people like Justicar have been vomiting bile about us in public for two years.
That’s it. There is no other reason. They’re obsessed, and obsessed people are weird and disturbing and worrying. We do not know why they are so obsessed. It’s an amusement and game for them, it’s a social life, but why it revolves around us remains a mystery. But it is not a mystery that the objects of that kind of obsession should find it threatening. No it’s not. Fucking Justicar is just pretending it is, while he carries right on with the obsession and stalking and production of venomous stalkerish videos.
Hooray for Out Atheists, right?! Speak up! Walk tall! Come out of the closet! Be loud be proud be here. Of course if you do, and you have the bad sense to be a feminist or a mouthy woman at the same time, you will be persecuted. But come on out anyway!
May 12 2013
This thing about feminism and skepticism, and the idea that they make a natural pair…
I don’t think they do, really. I think they can be compatible, but I don’t think they’re made for each other.
You can be skeptical about any given social arrangement, but since feminism can be a social arrangement, that means you can be skeptical about feminism too. Or to put it another way, you can be skeptical about social arrangements and about proposed alternatives to those social arrangements.
:)
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