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Occidental College is a small school in northeastern Los Angeles. It’s got about 2,000 students at any one time. And it’s got a huge sexual assault problem: yesterday, 38 students and alumnae of Occidental filed a Title IX complaint with the Federal Department of Education claiming that the college violated civil rights law in its handling of reports of sexual assaults and rapes — which seem to happen on the Oxy campus with terrifying frequency. Survivors of rape and sexual assault at Occidental report that administrators threatened them with unpleasant consequences when they enquired about the process of reporting a sexual assault. Survivors were warned that the hearings process was “long and arduous.” One survivor was told she’d be the one switching dorms rather than her assailant. When men were found in the course of college hearings to have indeed committed rapes of their fellow students, they were often merely suspended temporarily — and in at least two cases, those suspensions were lifted on appeal and the rapists “sentenced” to writing book reports instead. Gloria Allred, who is providing the 38 plaintiffs with representation in their Title IX complaint, reports in the video embedded below that when Occidental President Jonathan Veitch was informed that an accused rapist was on the guest list for a social event at Veitch’s home, he responded by issuing a dis-invitation … to two members of the school’s sexual assault task force. Here Allred speaks, along with several remarkably brave survivors and supportive faculty member Caroline Heldman, the school’s Politics Department chair. What’s been the response of Occidental College president Jonathan Veitch to the issue? Browbeating sexual assault survivors in the campus press when they dare suggest he’s sitting with his thumbs up his ass: I’m dismayed that having agreed to that conversation, a number of...
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I only just learned she even exists a few minutes ago. She calls herself “a pagan and a left wing democrat” in the tagline of her blog “Yellowdog Granny,” where she also says “I got older but I never grew up.” She’s a friend of someone I’ve known online for a few years. She’s in her late 60s.  She lives in Texas. Oh, and I know that she works a day or two a month in the West Rest Haven, a nursing home in her town. And I also know how she spent her Wednesday evening, as recounted in her blog: Read more
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Bad news: I’m informed offline by Mattir that fellow hordeling crowepps has passed away, not particularly expectedly. She wasn’t the most loquacious commenter here, and I didn’t know her at all aside from reading what she wrote here. But I always liked what she had to say. She was funny: I am boggled by the lack of logic behind “Make me a sammich.” Seriously, so you don’t want to listen to someone’s opinion, you want to treat them as having no more value than a household appliance, so you send them into the kitchen, where all the *poisons* are, to prepare food? Want a side of Valium overdose with that, or just a garnish of the traditional rat poison? I didn’t know her well enough to say with certainty that she made the world a better place — those who knew her can weigh in on that — but she definitely made Pharyngula a smarter place. Thanks for that, crowepps.  

You’ve all seen it, the increasingly common inept attempt people make to defuse valid criticism of their untenable positions. Most recent sighting for me was this comment at The Mary Sue, which consisted mainly of the commenter saying that no way would any man have pulled the “fake geek girl” routine on Rae Johnston and even if they did no way could she have been clever and snarky enough to leave him in the funniest smoking crater of all time, and then said commenter ended with: Let the bashing commence I guess. You’ve seen variations on this trope. “Flame away,” “I’ll get flamed for this,”  references to asbestos undergarments and SPF 400 flameblock. And there’s a commonality among the people who use that trope, generally having to do with shitty argumentation. As Sally Strange said here last week, Has there EVER been a time when someone preemptively complained about flaming, when the content of their post was NOT eminently flame-worthy? Not in my experience. Sally’s correct, and there’s a reason for that. Well, two reasons. Sally is smart; The reason people adopt the “I am Daniel and you are Teh Lionz” approach is because they’re feeling defensive about their arguments, and seeking to defuse the rhetorical spanking they fear they’re gotten themselves into by way of the deft use of our old friend passive aggression. Frankly, if even the execrable H*go Schw*zer has seen through this particular pathetic trope, it’s time to stop it. As that post with its triggering comments (and OP) points out, trolls use this trope because it works. So I’m calling this a New Rule. It covers my posts here, and it should cover every other person’s posts everywhere else online as well. If you tell people to “flame away,” you will not be taken seriously. Because as any well-read atheist knows, the lions took no interest in Daniel whatsoever...
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This cocktail, called “The Kraken” by its purveyors at the Whitehouse-Crawford restaurant in Walla Walla, WA, is one of the worst abominations I’ve ever seen. Here’s the description by the restaurateurs: spicy, dirty vodka martini with tentacles In other words, they take an innocent little cephalopod and mercilessly plunk it into a so-called “martini” made with Read more