Lousy Canuck

May 24 2013

Mock The Movie: Expect No Mercy transcript

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Again, I managed to forget to start my scrape bot to pull tweets from Mentions directly. CA7746 bailed me out of a bit of a jam by reparsing the raw HTML of Twitter, a trick I’ve done once already but have evidently lost the code for. I was going to rewrite that parser tonight, but CA7746 has evidently spared me the difficulty.

My usual scrape bot, which pulls from @-mentions from the account proper, could only grab the last 200 statuses — a limitation of the API, it seems. Either I haven’t figured out how to paginate through the results properly, or it simply won’t let me do so the same way as paginating through a direct search for @MockTM would. I might rebuild the engine to grab transcripts from @MockTM searches, though that would mean we wouldn’t be able to limit the tweets pulled to only those people @MockTM has followed. That would mean letting potential spam in.

In case there’s anything spammy above the double-dash (haven’t had time to reread it all), let me know and I’ll pull it out.

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Tags: Billy Blanks, Expect No Mercy, geekery, humour, Mock the Movie, movies

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May 22 2013

Listen more, be more charitable, moderate blogs and forums

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Asshats, Blogosphere, Gender, Privilege

by Jason Thibeault

I pity the poor sod who has to wade through and moderate all the comments over at CFI’s blog. Frankly, they’ve got possibly the worst job in the world right now. However, I’m going to push that fact aside for a moment, mute that in-built empathy for my fellow human being for just long enough to complain that they’re not actually doing that job to any degree one can call reasonable.

I’m not necessarily going to BLAME them, per se, though. The tone has been set in Ron Lindsay’s three blog posts that are about his experience at Women In Secularism 2.

Note that these blog posts are not ABOUT Women In Secularism 2, which was a tightly organized and implemented CFI conference, and which by my understanding, through the rumour mill, is the CFI conference closest to breaking even this year (can we get independent verification of this?). It was by all accounts a success, but by no accounts an unmitigated one. It was bookended by tone-deaf missives about how terrible feminists have been to certain clueless, privileged dudebros in our community. In fact, the first one, by Ron Lindsay, carried with it a heavy dose of shame for daring to invoke the sociological concept of privilege, showing a blatant misunderstanding of the word.

But that’s not what I’m talking about today. I’ll be fisking his post another day — and on that day I’m sure I’ll be called irrational and compared disfavourably to some despotic country. Today, instead, I’m talking about the CFI Open Letter, and how it reflects upon the community what’s being left up in the comments on those blog posts.
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May 21 2013

Relief efforts for Oklahoma tornado

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Climate, Current Events

by Jason Thibeault

Just a quick note to let you know about the fundraising going on for relief efforts in Moore, Oklahoma, in case you haven’t already seen them elsewhere.

Foundation Beyond Belief

We Are Atheism

Feel free to add links below. And if you’re in OK, let us know you’re safe.

Tags: charity, climate, current events, tornado

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May 19 2013

Asking the Wrong Question about Ingersoll #wiscfi

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Blogosphere, Gender, Privilege

by Jason Thibeault

I ended up missing the last two talks of the Women In Secularism conference because I had to catch a stupid plane that was stupid ten hours earlier than I would have stupid liked. Stupid. Blah.

Okay, I’m happy that I’m home, and completely bloody spent, but in a good way. A mostly good way. There were a few nasty objectionable ragey bits, but that’s okay, we can all disagree here on the internet. And it’s not like disagreement with those nasty bits weren’t put front and centre on the stage through the entire conference.

Those ragey bits had a minor trend among them — several of them were expressly about how uninviting such a conference or such a social justice movement in general might be to men. In the one case, you have CFI CEO Ron A Lindsay’s opening speech claiming that feminists are using the word privilege to shut down civil disagreements or as a club to end arguments (without providing examples), and “cautioning” the feminists in the audience that men should not be told to “shut up and listen”. (As though only men did that.) We won’t talk about this poorly thought-out exercise in well-poisoning, this abuse of Lindsay’s bully pulpit, because many people have already expended far too many words (though here’s some excellent ones) about a man’s point of view during a conference attempting to expand women’s input in the secular movement. Suffice it to say, I strongly disagree with Ron, but making this conference even more about him undercuts all the worthy content from the women who spoke this weekend.

Sadly, I didn’t get to see one of the other ragey bits in person. During the second-last slot of the day today, R Elisabeth Cornwell of the Richard Dawkins Foundation presented a talk titled Who Speaks for Feminism. Kate Donovan was on hand to live-blog it. There were a few sticking points in it, but I’m most interested in this brief post (well, brief compared to all the other transcription I’ve done this weekend!), in challenging only one part.
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