Author: Dana Hunter

He's a Sexist AND a Sockpuppet!

Dana Hunter68 Comments

Why, this is adorable!

This comment appeared today on my open letter to Nature regarding that loathsome bit of sexist dumbfuckery known as “Womanspace.” It’s under the handle “Disappointed.” Observe how it appears to be a supporter of the author:

Amazing: someone writes something whimsical, which pokes fun at middle-aged men, and suddenly it becomes about stereotyping women?  Really??  You don’t think that possibly, just possibly, the author was attempting satire?
Ah, well – turns out I like the other two stories held up as being “problematic”, over on Contemplative Mammoth.  That HAS to label me, too.

Actually, Ed, it’s your comment’s metadata that labels you – as the bloody stupid author hisownself.

Sock puppets aren’t loved round these parts. But I’m loving it. I’m loving the fact you couldn’t come right out and defend your own story, but felt you had to drum up “outside” support. It’s precious.

And now I will turn you over to the tender mercies of my readers and my fellow Freethought Bloggers, who shall now do what they will.

Have fun, my darlings. No need to be gentle. He is, after all, wearing a sock.

He's a Sexist AND a Sockpuppet!
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My Country 'tis of Thee, Bad Land of Police Brutality

Dana Hunter26 Comments

This is what America’s Finest are up to these days:

Note the technique: the insouciant stoll, the pepper spray held at a casual yet effective angle, the expression that says he could just as easily be spraying cockroaches as students, because they’re equally vermin to him. Note that his safety and the safety of others is in no way imperiled by a bunch of students sitting on the ground, yet he feels it necessary to spray them full in the face with a chemical weapon because they were, y’know, protesting. Defying his authortay. Can’t have that.

This is Lt. John Pike. You can go say hello.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/JC_Christian/status/137781926219104257″]

Let him know what you think of actions and injuries like this:

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood. [emphasis added]

If, like me, you have no desire to speak to that piece of shit directly, contact the UC Davis police directly. Maybe you can send them a link to this video and ask them how this comports with their mission to protect and serve the students of UC Davis. And you can let UC Davis know what you think on their Facebook page.

Read this letter from UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi trying to explain away the violence:

And then let her know what you think of her excuses. Maybe just send her a copy of this letter, if you’re too disgusted to write one of your own.

Actions like this are truly disgusting. This is an outrageous way to respond to people peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. But it also shows how terrified those at the top are. They’re terrified enough to make their precarious position even worse by attacking students for the crime of sitting in front of tents.

Keep ’em running scared.

Occupy.

My Country 'tis of Thee, Bad Land of Police Brutality

Dear Nature: There is a Crucial Difference Between Being Contentious and Being a Misogynistic Asshole

Dana Hunter148 Comments

Update: Bonus fun! “Womanspace” author Ed Rybicki has appeared in the comments, trying to sockpuppet himself some support under the handle “Disappointed.” Be sure to take this opportunity to speak your mind directly to the responsible party. Enjoy, everyone!

You may wonder what I’m doing here with a can of kerosene in one hand and a match in the other. Why, I’m about to burn a bridge.

Writers are typically advised against doing so, as the person you’re pissed at today may have been the person who’d publish you tomorrow. And yes, it would have been nice to be published alongside our own Stephanie Zvan someday, as I’d figured any publication wise enough to choose one of her stories might prove an attractive market for my own fiction, should I be fortunate enough to make the cut. However, there’s the matter of the other company I’d be keeping. I refer, of course, to the wretchedly sexist story “Womanspace” that appeared in your formerly-august pages in September. No, I won’t link to it. Interested readers will have no trouble finding it, by way of Dr. Anne Jefferson’s masterful takedown of it.

I gave the story a glance. It’s one of those stories in which a writer masturbates to the tune of exhausted stereotypes, and believes the resulting mass is original simply because it emerged from them, and they haven’t got out much. It contains the kind of overdone sexist humor that tickles the underdeveloped funnybones of men who are too inept to figure out teh wimminz. I understand the author’s wife giggled. I’m certain she did. If she hadn’t learned to laugh at her husband by now, she’d be a divorcee. A laughing spouse, however, is no guarantee of quality, a fact which writers who attempt to publish in professional fiction magazines soon learn to their sorrow.

Continue reading “Dear Nature: There is a Crucial Difference Between Being Contentious and Being a Misogynistic Asshole” →

Dear Nature: There is a Crucial Difference Between Being Contentious and Being a Misogynistic Asshole

Rising Up

Dana Hunter1 Comment

I’m making an exception to my “no links to HuffPo because they are a repository for woo and wackaloonery that should not be rewarded” because this is important:

Jesse Kornbluth: The Police Riot at Berkeley: If They’ll Beat a Poet Laureate, Will They Kill a Student?

Go read it in its entirety before coming back here. Yes, even if you despise HuffPo as much as I do.

Continue reading “Rising Up” →

Rising Up

I Adore Labradorite

Dana Hunter13 Comments

There’s a word, begins with s, means something like coincidence. Synergy? Sorta kinda not really. Szygy? Awesome word, totally incorrect. Synchronicity. That’s the word. This is synchronicity. Synchronicity has just happened. Because, you see, I wrote a bit about anorthosite and labradorite doing up my geolantern for the Accretionary Wedge, and whilst I was babbling about how totally amazing the mineral labradorite is, I thought that someday, I’d have to get round to photographing my bit of it and write it up. Along came a meme, and it seems someday is today.

Here she is:

Labradorite! From Madagascar!

I know, right? She doesn’t look all that exciting. You certainly don’t look at her and immediately think, “ZOMG the Moon is made of that stuff!” But it is. Anorthosite is what the lunar highlands are composed of, and anorthosite is predominately labradorite. This makes me want to grab a moon rock, polish it up, and start playing with its labradorescence, but NASA would probably become upset.

(If anybody’s got a bit of anorthosite from the moon that doesn’t belong to NASA and is within the price range of a second-tier cell phone tech support person, do let me know.)

So. We’ve got a rock that has exotic cousins and comes from a pretty exotic locale – I mean, Madagascar, amirite? But it’s just this dark little lump with a hint o’ shimmer. Pretty, but not extraordinary. Why all the fuss? It’s about this time that geologists and rock shop addicts in the audience start grinning that little oh-just-you-wait grin and do something that’ll make your eyes pop.

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I Adore Labradorite

Interlude with Cat: The Assistant

Dana Hunter3 Comments

I’m working on something which won’t have tremendous substance, but will have links to substance, and yummy photos. But it’s taking forever due to a few technical difficulties. Don’t talk to me about getting cats to pose with rocks, or getting enough light out of one bloody bulb, or trying to figure out why the computer won’t load the photos, or photo editing, or…

Anyway, here’s a cat. Helping me write. Enjoy that while you wait. Send it to PZ and tell him you’d like to see a cephalopod do that without suffocating in the open air or getting the paper wet.

Interlude with Cat: The Assistant

Dana's Dojo: Progress? What is This Progress You Speak Of?

Dana Hunter6 Comments

Today in the Dojo: Your progress mileage may vary. And that’s perfectly fine.

 

Anne Jefferson started a SciWrite challenge to coincide with NaNoWriMo. Now, before we have any talk of word counts or other arbitrary measures of success, go read her post on progress. I mean it. Do it now. Then you can head back over here and listen to me natter on.

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Dana's Dojo: Progress? What is This Progress You Speak Of?

Los Links 11/11

Dana Hunter1 Comment

This week seemed to last 10,000 years. Enormous amount of stuff going on: earthquakes, child-rape enablers getting fired, women fighting back against misogynistic assholes, anti-vax freaks sending infectious agents through the mail, Occupy Wall Street ongoing…. And, of course, this incredibly busy week is the one in which our server upgrade went horribly awry. Not to mention trying to do a fair bit of writing.

Fortunately for those who love the links, there was actually a bit of time to read in between calls at work at times. And if we’re very, very lucky, our long-suffering in-house tech has managed to put out most of the fires, so this post will actually stay up long enough for you to enjoy said linkage. If this one goes away whilst my back is turned, let me know via Twitter, Facebook or G+. I’ve got it backed up to Blogger in case we have to seek an alternative. I will not deprive you of your linkfest. Not during the last long week before Thanksgiving!

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Los Links 11/11

There Are Lines That Should Never Be Crossed

Dana Hunter4 Comments

Telling a suicidal Marine Corps veteran that she must “return to the light” and that her friends are “still in darkness and going to hell” is one of those lines.

This, in a nutshell, is why I am a New Atheist. I haven’t got a problem with religion, not as such. If that’s what you need to get you through your life, if you can’t give up the idea of god either singular or plural, I find it rather silly and sad, but that’s fine. Whatever floats your boat. Believe if you must.

But when those beliefs cross the line from personal to public, there’s a huge problem. And Christianity (amongst others) has a very hard time staying private. Far too many believers believe their way is the only way, that all of the rest of us are going to be condemned to eternal suffering if we don’t bow down to your sadistic little “loving god,” and then you do remarkably damaging things like trying to legislate your morality, and pushing a suicidal Marine very nearly over the edge.

When you cross that line from personal belief to public crusade, you demonstrate why your beliefs can’t be treated gently, but must be fought. You don’t understand how much suffering you cause, because you think you’re preventing suffering in the life to come. You harm people because of a myth. And then you scream persecution at the least little criticism. You demand your dreadful, damaging beliefs be shielded, uniquely respected, while you strip the shields away from good and hurting people and disrespect them in the name of god.

You don’t get to have it that way.

You can have your faith. But if you think that gives you a free license to bully, berate, and belittle people, if you believe the rules of your profession don’t apply to you, you’ll have consequences to face. And there will be people there, some atheists, some more compassionate and tolerant believers, who will confront you, criticize you, and if you have broken the law, ensure you face the penalty.

And those of you who have asked me why I speak out, why I can’t just leave well enough alone, what’s the harm if people believe, this is part of the answer.

This is the harm.

And when we set religion apart as something we cannot criticize, we perpetuate that harm.

There Are Lines That Should Never Be Crossed