An enormous confetti bomb of white privilege and transphobia has exploded through my entire life in the past week, and as I’ve been doing a lot of pretty important writing about it, I’d like to share some of it with you here. There are two core issues at work here. The first concerns SlutWalk, …
Category Archive: skeptivism
Mar 20 2013
Some Extremely Effective Grassroots Protest Methods & Exactly Why They Work
Last week, I wrote about an annoyingly pervasive blight of unchecked male privilege at grassroots protests, which is actually angry-making when the protest concerns an attack against women’s rights. But when that attack against women’s rights involves multiple layers of outright racism on top of that (racialized women’s rights being particularly vulnerable already, due …
Mar 13 2013
Philosophy Dudebros & Grassroots Don’t Mix
Hi-dee-ho, there, FreeThoughtBorg. I know a lot of you are eager to-be activists and even more of you have a lot of philosophy under your belt buckles. But you may not know yet that being Philosophy Dudebro in a grassroots action is terribad form. And if you don’t yet know this, you need to know …
Mar 04 2013
SFU hosts dangerous anti-science crank group
Vancouver is a city in which one must be willing to put up with quite a bit of pseudoscientific woo-woo nonsense. There are reflexology and acupuncture and naturopathy clinics on every commercial block, each hawking their distinctive, heady mix of scientific ignorance and pure unadulterated bullshit. One learns to mutter epithets under one’s breath and …
Feb 06 2013
Bravo to Canadian skeptics: Jenny is Dropped
About a week ago, I read that Jenny McCarthy, the celebrity face of the anti-vaccine movement, was going to be headlining an event called “Bust a Move” at the Ottawa Cancer centre. I was horrified, and spelled out my objections in a letter to their CEO: Hello Ms. Eagan, I am writing this letter to …
Oct 31 2012
Abortion: It’s Not Auschwitz
In Vancouver, BC, there is a rather annoying anti-choice blight on the corner across the street from one of the only two clinics that are not associated with a hospital. They call themselves pro-life, co-opt famous quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., and directly compare what they are doing “for the unborn” (i.e., by standing …
Aug 21 2012
Special Feature: Crommunist does alternative medicine
Many of you will remember that I attended the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops, BC in May of this year. It was my first ever atheist meeting/convention, and I had a really positive experience there. I was asked to me a somewhat last-minute addition to a panel on alternative medicine, based (I imagine) on …
Aug 13 2012
Cool stuff is happening!
There are two very nifty things happening this week that may be relevant to your interests. Edwin appears in Meatspace Co-blogger Edwin is giving a talk entitled “Digital Hatred: White Supremacy in the Information Age” this Friday night at the Oakridge Library in Vancouver (41st and Cambie): The Internet has been something of a double …
Aug 01 2012
The new hotness: Bad Science Watch
My skeptical teeth were cut on religious claims – I got into the skeptical blogosphere (and learned the resulting jargon and necessary facts) as a direct result of my wrangling with my own newly-recognized atheism. I rather quickly and seamlessly migrated from there to my discussions of race and social justice, but there was a …
Jul 05 2012
Jamie’s story – two months
This is a further update of the activism being undertaken by friend and fellow skeptic Jamie here in Vancouver. You can read part one here: Two Months In: So shortly after I posted about what I had accomplished in the first month (including the inciting incident which prompted someone else to start organizing these demonstrations), …
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