Russell Blackford, surprisingly, has announced that

We now know that Ophelia Benson did not receive threatening emails (she received a couple of earnest, concerned emails from people who were on her side … unless the emails were actually intended as parodies).

The way that’s worded, and in the context where it’s worded that way, it’s clear that that is an accusation of having, at least, exaggerated – and at most, lied. That of course is the view of the troll who keeps dropping in here under various names, but I expect reasonable people to take a slightly more nuanced approach.

I expect reasonable people at least to see that the messages I got are very peculiar, and that it is not obvious that they are not threats disguised as “earnest, concerned” advice. That’s because it is not obvious that they are not threats disguised as “earnest, concerned” advice. It’s really not. The “earnest, concerned” advice is itself exaggerated, wildly exaggerated; so exaggerated that it made me frown in puzzlement and try to figure out exactly what was going on – was this really advice? Was it mockery? Was it a warning?

In fact, it was so exaggerated that it triggered skepticism – which is exactly what Blackford is urging. That’s what led up to his announcement of what we now know:

Note, however, how Chris Mooney fell for the Tom Johnson/Wally Smith story because it confirmed his biases. This should be a lesson to us all. Be sceptical about every such story, even if it tends to confirm your biases. In fact, especially if it tends to confirm your biases.

I was skeptical. I couldn’t figure out what the hell the first message was. I didn’t just read it and think oh, great advice, I’ll do that – I’ll book myself into a different hotel while keeping the one I’m supposed to be in, and make JREF pay for both; I’ll demand a “Green Room”; I’ll agree with the writer of the message that I’m a big star and of course JREF won’t mind obeying my every command because I’m such a big star.

No, I didn’t do that. Instead I thought wtf? This is ridiculous. Green Room?? Escape taxi??!

So I replied, to express my skepticism and try gently to calm the guy down. I’ve already reproduced my reply to him, but I’ll just remind you of what I said –

I really don’t think things will be as bad as that. I’ll have some friends there. I think it could be extremely awkward at times, and I’m dreading that, but I don’t think I’ll be torn limb from limb or anything. PZ went to the GAC and we know there were people there who hate him, but nothing happened.

See? I was skeptical. All I was expecting was extreme awkwardness. That’s all.

But the guy replied, and what he said at the end shaded into what looked more like a veiled threat than ever.

I’m happy that PZ was not shot (gun or uppants camera) at GAC, but that gives me scant reassurance that you will *not* be shot either way in Las Vegas.

Please do not respond to this message. If you adopt safety measures, whether I’ve suggested them or not. DO NOT TELL ANYONE, including me.

As I said in Closing the file, I went back and forth, and I asked friends what they thought. I didn’t say omg it’s certainly absolutely a threat! I just felt creeped out and wary and doubtful. I asked people, they replied, I swayed back and forth – and then I got fucking sick of the whole damn thing – of DJ’s putting a metaphorical target on me in the first place, and failing to take it off once it was on, and (however inadvertently) creating a situation where I was dreading that extreme awkwardness, and now this – I just got totally sick of it.

I don’t think I was terribly unskeptical in calling those two paragraphs threats. They certainly felt threaty to me, thank you very much. It’s easy for Blackford to sneer; they weren’t addressed to him. I wasn’t certain that they were threats, but they certainly did feel threaty. There’s a difference.

So less of the triumphalist “We now know that Ophelia Benson did not receive threatening emails,” please. “We” now know that only because I reported what came next, which was Tim Farley’s generous help, including a tense phone conversation with the guy who sent the messages. I wasn’t trying to con anybody when I said I’d had threatening messages, and I wasn’t being credulous, either.

If you want to feel inspired and hopeful (and who doesn’t?!), read the messages of support for the Council of Ex-Muslims at Maryam’s place.

Congratulations on 5 years, Maryam and Anne Marie and all the exes.

xxxxxxxx

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…]