Ewan answered my request for suggestions by asking for reasons to support the SSA. Greta has a good selection of quotations on that.

JT Eberhard, a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance, gives us his personal account of what he does. He starts with Jessica Ahlquist on what the SSA did for her:

When JT Eberhard contacted me and gave me the support of the Secular Student Alliance I felt like I had friends again.  Over the course of two years the SSA provided me with support and JT closely monitored the actions of the school committee, always ready to come to my defense at any minute.  He expressed that he cared not only for the issue at my school but also for my well-being and shared personal stories and advice.  Anyone can tell that for JT and the rest of the SSA staff, their positions within the organization are not merely a source of income, but a life-long passion and a genuine desire to help young secular people.  When I attended their annual conference last summer and was given the opportunity to share my story I felt a sense of community I had never experienced before.  I know so many other students who share my feelings and are thankful for the SSA and their brilliant staff.  They are literally changing lives.

You know (if you’ve been reading here) how isolated Jessica has been and still is at her school and in Cranston. You know what it’s like to be a teenager. Adults have had time to thicken their skins and get used to conflict, but teenagers are raw. Given the bizarre way the religious majority has been encouraged to see itself as a persecuted minority over the past two or three decades, their unleashed rage can be incredibly intimidating. That right there is a good reason to support an organization that can give isolated bullied teenagers a set of allies and friends.

Donate to the SSA!

It’s 8:05 – no, 8:06. Get going.

An item on Twitter just now caused me to read the Wikipedia entry on the atheist’s wager, an alternative to Pascal’s of the same ilk.

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in god. If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.

Not alternative enough, if you ask me. It’s still too focused on postmortem, as if we were going to be alive postmortem to care what people think of us. It’s also too focused on incentive or reward. Try to make the world a better place so that people will remember you fondly. That’s a stupid reason. If you’re going to try to make the world a better place, do it so that the world will be a better place, not so that people will remember you fondly. Jeez. Get over yourself.

Here’s a news flash: apart from a few intimates, most people won’t remember you at all, fondly or otherwise. After a few decades no one will remember you at all. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” said Keats on his tombstone. Well he was wrong, but for most of us, that’s the story.

Vanity and longing for posthumous affection is a pitiful motivation for making the world a better place. Come on. Write your name in a few toilet stalls and on a few garage walls and garbage cans, and let it go at that. For the rest, just concentrate on making the world a better place so that the world will be a better place.

8:14. Woo hoo! Bags of time to catch up on Twitter and write the 9:00 item.

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Here we go. The miniature blogathon begins.

Brianne did hers yesterday, except hers wasn’t miniature: she did the whole 24 hour thing. I encouraged her by reminding her that the second half was going to be much longer than the first. I’m kind that way.

You were supposed to suggest things for me to post about. Seriously: any suggestions? But then it’s Sunday, when nobody reads this. People read this exclusively during working hours, so that they’ll know for sure they’re not wasting their time.

Not to worry. It’s not as if the world is empty of things to talk about.

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Via Tarek Fatah, a Calgary conference has invited Bilal Philips as the top speaker; Philips has repeatedly said homosexuals should be executed. Get the name of the conference – The Power of Unity: Islam in a MultiCultural Canada. Some unity!

And there’s a slew of other craps, too.

Munir El-Kassem, a dentist from London, Ont., wrote a column back in 2001 that condemned the West as hypocritical and defended the Taliban regime for destroying the sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamiyan…

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj recently lost his job at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female circumcision. He later tried to clarify his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right off.

And George Galloway is on the dance card too.

Abraham Ayache, chairman of the Muslim Council of Calgary, said the conference is being organized to celebrate 50 years of Islam in Calgary and is all about unity and celebrating multiculturalism…

But a recent posting on the MCC website under the heading “Ask the Imam” seems to  indicate that some of the organization’s hired imams haven’t read the memo about  cultural tolerance and unity.

In answer to a question by a single mother concerned about her children no  longer being obedient to her, an imam on the site wrote: “You should instil a  hatred for this culture and its ways in the hearts of your children.” He also  wrote: “It is haraam (forbidden) for you to give your children free rein in  forming friendships with the children of the kuffaar.”

That’s not multiculturalism. Calling people “the kuffar” is not multiculturalism. Advocating the execution of gays is not multiculturalism. Happy Canada day.

 

Athena Andreadis is disgusted but not surprised at the spectacle of Golden Dawn spokesman Elías Kasidhiáris hitting Liána Kanélli in the face on a tv talk show the other day.

For those sequestered in silently running nuclear submarines, Golden Dawn got 7% of the vote in the May elections, gaining seats in the parliament – the first time such a thing has happened since World War II (not counting the junta). Its platform is the standard troglodytic garbage: ethnic purity, “natural” order – which includes the de jure disenfranchisement of women and Others – and bodily violence against those who disagree. Its members regularly assault immigrants, minorities and journalists as well as other “undesirables”, with tolerance (if not cooperation) from the police and portions of the media. Serial killer Anders Breivik listed Golden Dawn in his diary as the likeliest group to “cleanse” Europe.

The violence against those who disagree is not figurative violence, or “merely” threatened violence.

To anyone speaking Hellenic, it becomes obvious when you watch the video that Kasidhiáris was as well-informed as Sarah Palin. The two women, Kanélli in particular, let him know this. His response was standard: first he accused them of bringing “personal matters” (namely, his impending trial) into politics. Then, after a brief exchange of verbal insults, he flung a glass of water at Dhoúrou’s face. The three male politicians present sat through this like statues while the talk host made feeble mewling noises. The only one who did something was Kanélli, who went toward Kasidhiáris brandishing a newspaper.

To show that he doesn’t take guff from uppity broads, even ones old enough to be his mother, Kasidhiáris jumped out of his seat and hit Kanélli three times. On the face. The first was a slap. The other two were left-right closed-fist punches.

Yet again, I’m naïve. I’ve always thought that was taboo, and known to be taboo – at least taboo enough not to be done on television. Silly me.

He then threatened he would “return with reinforcements” and somehow managed to escape from the TV station to “parts unknown” (almost certainly the offices of Golden Dawn) to avoid the automatic arrest warrant for assault which, by a quirk of Hellenic law, expires within 48 hours of its issue. The police, not surprisingly, have been “unable to find him” – even though he issued a lengthy (and presumably traceable) statement from his ultra-secret location, in which he said that Kanélli should be the one to be arrested and face assault charges because she “attacked him first”. The head of his party stuck by him, arguing that the incident had been blown out of proportion and, in any case, the two women are really to blame because, well, they provoked him and what’s a manly man to do except respond (literally) two-fistedly?

The defense of men who beat up women everywhere – she provoked him. Bitchez always provoke.

Sound familiar? The tactics of cowardly bullies do not change across time and cultures. Yet even more mind-boggling is the enormous number of people who opined anonymously online that “the cunt had it coming” and “finally, someone put the fat ugly dyke in her place.” Kanélli infuriates many people because she won’t shut up or back down…

Uh oh.

“Thank You Hater” went viral yesterday; I saw it everywhere. It was all over my Twitter feed, including via Roger Ebert and Stephen Fry. Isabel Fay tweeted about the phone ringing off the hook and interviews lining up to be done. The Guardian reports on the instant virality.

It also reports a different cyber-bully story.

A woman has won court backing to force Facebook to reveal the identities of cyberbullies who targeted her with a string of abusive messages on the website.

Nicola Brookes was granted a high court order after receiving “vicious and depraved” abuse on Facebook after she posted a comment in support of the former The X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza.

The woman, from Brighton, was falsely branded a paedophile and drug dealer by anonymous Facebook users who set up a fake profile page on the website.

Now Brookes plans to bring a private prosecution against at least four alleged internet trolls, after the high court said Facebook should reveal their identities.

Interesting.

 

 

Sarah El Deeb is a journalist with the AP in Cairo; she tweeted about the protest against violence against women, and then about the attack on the protest. Before the attack she posted a nice hopeful photo –

 

That was before a mob of men attacked them.

Holy shit. Holy fucking hell god damn it piss crap.

A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment Friday, with the attackers overwhelming the male guardians and groping and molesting several of the female marchers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

What is the matter with them? What the hell is their point – that assaulting women is good? That women’s wish not to be assaulted is evil and deserving of punishment in the form of assault?

From the ferocity of the assault, some of the victims said it appeared to have been an organized attempt to drive women out of demonstrations and trample on the pro-democracy protest movement.

Misogynist fascists then. Lovers of violence, force, hatred, crazed hyper-and-pseudo-masculinity. The worst kind of people imaginable.

Friday’s march was called to demand an end to sexual assaults. Around 50 women participated, surrounded by a larger group of male supporters who joined to hands to form a protective ring around them. The protesters carried posters saying, “The people want to cut the hand of the sexual harasser,” and chanted, “The Egyptian girl says it loudly, harassment is barbaric.”

After the marchers entered a crowded corner of the square, a group of men waded into the women, heckling them and groping them. The male supporters tried to fend them off, and it turned into a melee involving a mob of hundreds.

The marchers tried to flee while the attackers chased them and male supporters tried to protect them. But the attackers persisted, cornering several women against a metal sidewalk railing, including an Associated Press reporter, shoving their hands down their clothes and trying to grab their bags.

Turning everything into shit. Nice job.

I saw this via Mona Eltahawy on Twitter. Three of her best friends were attacked.