May 16 2013

Privilege, Dialogue, Harassment, and the Anti-Availability Heuristic

The Availability Heuristic is a well-known cognitive bias that primes people to more readily believe something when they can easily come up with examples. Of the cognitive biases that I’ve encountered among rationalists in the skeptical and atheist communities, this bias is the one I’m most capable of coming up with examples. I am therefore primed to believe more readily that atheists and skeptics are not immune to this bias — myself included.

But there’s a little-discussed inverse to this bias, where examples are generally filtered out of one’s daily existence because they don’t impact on you directly, and thus, you are less ready to believe someone claiming to experience them. I call this the anti-availability heuristic, though I’m sure there are better names for it.
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May 15 2013

God’s America: weep for it. WEEP I SAY.

I’m pretty inured by now to blatant religious proselytization, bad acting, campy premises, and contrived patriotism, what with Mock the Movie and all, but this video almost made me gag, it was simply so syrupy.

Yes. Because a DOUBLE X porno watched with friends, or being intoxicated in public, is the END OF AMERICA. There is no hyperbole there. Just by doing things that are enjoyable to you and do no damage to others, you will destroy the very fabric of your country, setting flags ablaze nationwide. Just a second, I’m going to go pour myself a drink so I can end America. I guess that makes me a foreign terrorist, being that I’m a Canadian citizen and having a beer, amirite?

Hat tip to Christian Nightmares.

Unrelated note: Blogging about news events et cetera will be on pause for a bit, as tomorrow I’ll be flying out to DC. Remember that one big conference that’s happening there this weekend? You know, Women In Secularism 2? Well, you should, because you helped send me there. And in return, I’ll be live-blogging the living crap outta it, along with Miri Mogilevski of Brute Reason, and Kate Donovan, co-blogger at… um… everywhere. Seriously. Including over at Ashley Miller’s.

Look for the posts starting tomorrow.

May 13 2013

Cumberbaaaaaatch!

Okay, look, there are big spoilers for some relatively new nerd media that I’ve probably already given away by the title if you’re savvy, but I’m putting below the fold anyway. And to spoil the post proper, just to be meta for meta’s own sake: I’m going to rant about what I’m spoiling.
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May 12 2013

Trans woman refused at bridal shop in Saskatoon

I’m several days behind on most of my news and blog feeds at the moment, but this post at TransGriot caught my eye.

Rohit Singh, a young trans woman, was browsing wedding dresses at a bridal shop in Saskatoon for her upcoming nuptials. When she asked to try one on, she was refused, being told, “I’m sorry, we don’t allow men to wear dresses here.”
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May 10 2013

Mock The Movie: .COM For Murder

This movie was easily one of the best worst movies we’ve seen and targeted for Mock The Movie, and not just because of our tech-savvy participants. This movie took itself so seriously, and tried so hard, and yet it failed so miserably at everything it did. Every character was inept, even the supposedly hyper-adept evil hacker. Every action taken was ludicrous, and there were dozens and dozens of ways to short-circuit the evil hacker’s plans. It was ripe for the picking, and boy did we pick.

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May 07 2013

Geeks Without God: Crappy Religious Board Game Edition!

Two weekends ago, I went to OmegaCon in Siren, Wisconsin. And by “went”, I mean “was kidnapped and made to go”. There, I played some board games with a whole lot of local board game nerds who frequent the local convention nerdery circuit. Many of these games were fun. The one that Molly and Nick Glover and Tim Wick forced Stephanie, Brianne and I play, though… um… well, that was significantly less so. It was loosely based on the “hit” movie based on the “hit” Christian novel series, Left Behind. “Loose” is definitely the operative word when describing this board game, because it barely qualified as a board game. I shit you not — we played Left Behind: The Movie: The Board Game.

Click the thumbnail below for a fuller experience of the pain we endured for your entertainment. Screen reader users: it’s a picture of the board game. Sorry that you’ll have to make do with the audio descriptions — though really, you’re the lucky ones, with limited exposure to its whargarbl.

leftbehindboardgame

In a desperate effort to make the podcast fun — because the game’s mechanics are unbelievably boring even to someone with a vested interest in proving themselves the best Tribulation Forces fighters and redeeming themselves in the eyes of Yahweh, you know, like me — the Geeks Without God crew helpfully included the following drinking game to accompany the podcast. I need to disclaimer this, though. Unless you’re a bull elephant, you’ll have to drink something piss weak to survive.

Here are the rules (feel free to add your own rules in the comments):

Take a drink every time moonshine soaked cherries are passed out or someone mentions consuming one

Take a drink whenever we make a Ghostbusters reference

Take a drink every time someone mentions game theory

Take a drink every time someone says the game sucks

Take a drink every time someone lands on a Carpathia square

Take a drink every time someone says “Flightplan.”

Take a drink every time we get a question about the bible correct

Take a drink any time someone mentions Omegacon

Seriously, just don’t do it. You’ll die.

Go listen. We played so you never, ever, ever have to.

Though if you really must, it’s fairly cheap.

May 06 2013

Memo to blowjob-forcing fan: it’s a RAP concert, not a RAPE concert.

Here’s another of the myriad ways that patriarchy and rape culture hurts men. I know this is going to be counterintuitive to some of you mouth-breathers, but if your first reaction to this story is “that guy has all the luck” or “but he’s a rapper who raps a lot about sex” or anything other than “holy shit that’s rape”, then you’re part of the problem.

A rapper by the name of Danny Brown is on tour, and stopped in Minneapolis at the Triple Rock Social Club recently, and during his concert a female fan pulled down his pants and started sucking on his penis.

He backed up quickly, later tweeted jokingly with people who congratulated him on Twitter (saying things like “never missed a bar”), and generally tried to play it off like he’s perfectly fine and it was just a blowjob. Fans are talking about how he was given oral sex. Hell, the MEDIA is calling it oral sex. But his close friend and fellow rapper, Kitty Pryde, is framing things very differently.
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May 05 2013

Copyright Board of Canada: “palpable error” in 15x inflated music tariffs

Michael Geist covers the Copyright Board of Canada admitting to having made a “palpable error” in accidentally super-inflating music company royalties well beyond the original decisions for reproduced music in movies intended for personal use:

The Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters had proposed a tiered tariff approach of a maximum of 2 cents per copy containing 30 minutes of music or more (less music would result in a lower tariff). The Copyright Board mistakenly established a tariff of three cents per copy, mistakenly treating three tiers as three cents. As the Board now notes:

CAFDE was seeking a rate of 2 cents per DVD copy containing over 30 minutes of SODRAC music; the Board’s interpretation leads to royalties that are 15 times higher or even more.

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Apr 30 2013

A familiar story of pettiness and spite

I haven’t seen a lot of George Waye recently on the blogotubes. Once upon a time, we fought shoulder and shoulder on the topic of rape with nascent MRAs before I even knew the term. I know him to be a principled, insightful and strong person, whose blogging time is limited these days by being a father-of-fiveish . Even the strongest people have skeletons in their closet, though, and George shook one free from his closet and set it to electronic paper to illustrate a point.

My girlfriend and I once broke up around the end of May in my Grade 13 year. The whole thing was rather anti-climactic as far as break-ups between us usually went; there was no yelling or fighting or schisms within our group of friends. It was really just her telling me that things were done, and me not really liking it but trying my best to be mature about the whole thing.

There was an end of school party planned by several of our friends- we were all going to camp out in tents and toast the end of another school year. My ex didn’t want me to go to the party. She made that pretty clear to must of our common friends, perhaps hoping that I would get the hint. At the time I thought it was pretty childish of her to try and prevent me from going to this party, after all these were our mutual friends and I knew and had good relationships with many of them. Why should I have to stay home while she has a good time? In her defence, this party was going to be overwhelmingly occupied by people who were closer to her than to me- and I knew this. In my mind though, these were my friends too, and I was not about to sacrifice my social life for the increased comfort of my ex girlfriend.

Just to make sure my bases were covered, I took special care to let as many people as possible know that I was going to be coming to the party. Most were very supportive of my coming, though some indicated some trepidation at the prospect of having to be put in the middle of things. Those who were closest to me were of course excited that I would be coming and considered my ex’s protestations to be petty and unfair. The friends who were closer to her tended to suggest that maybe my going was not necessarily wrong per se, but that it might significantly impact the enjoyment of everyone there and that I might want to avoid her as much as possible if I did decide to go.

This story drew a rant to the surface, if you’ll indulge me.
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Apr 29 2013

“But I’m a nice guy!”

Okay, if you haven’t already seen this video that’s been floating about recently, you probably should. I see this absurdism, and reductio ad absurdum of the entire Men’s Rights Movement, as a defense mechanism against the completely counter-intuitive pushback against feminism. I mean, how else do you deal with ideas that are so patently absurd as that women are somehow oppressing men by trying to get the same rights as them?

But I’m A Nice Guy from Scott Benson on Vimeo.

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