I’d never heard of “GirlWritesWhat” until a few days ago when I saw a video of hers in which she accused “FTB” – on the basis of absolutely nothing – of filing a fake DMCA complaint on her in order to force her to reveal her address. A couple of days later I saw a second video of hers in which she again blamed FTB for a DMCA complaint on the basis of nothing whatever.
So now there’s David Futrelle pointing out where she says a good word for domestic violence. [Read more…]
Well isn’t that sweet – the Russian Orthodox Church declares it has “forgiven” Pussy Riot. It forgave them all along. It wanted to see them severely punished, certainly, but hey, that doesn’t mean it didn’t “forgive” them.
Two top clerics in the Russian Orthodox Church said Saturday that it has forgiven the members of feminist punk band Pussy Riot who were convicted of hooliganism and sent to prison for briefly taking over a cathedral in a raucous prayer for deliverance from Vladimir Putin.
Tikhon Shevkunov, who heads Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery and is widely believed to be the Russian president’s spiritual counselor, said on state television Saturday that his church forgave the singers right after their “punk prayer” in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow in February.
“The church has been sometimes accused of not forgiving them,” the bearded and bespectacled cleric said. “We did forgive them from the very start. But such actions should be cut short by society and authorities.” [Read more…]
Never forget: it’s Freethought bloggers who are the bullies.
Trigger warning for sheer vicious ugliness:
There are two (yes two!) women working at Gizmodo now. One of them has a few tips for some of their readers.
Some of you seem to be under the misguided impression that sexual favors are the only way a woman could possibly end up writing for a tech blog—wrong. And you know what? It’s not just wrong, it’s rude.
It’s rude to come into our posts and say that the only reason we have the jobs that we do is because Gizmodo needed to fulfill some imagined gender quota. [Read more…]
Paul Fidalgo has a gut-wrenching open letter to Alexander Aan at Friendly Atheist. The petition failed, you know. I should have done more, maybe – I blogged about it twice, the second time with considerable urgency, and tweeted and re-tweeted often. I guess I figured blogging a third time would be counter-productive, like begging Mummy for ice cream once too often and being put on an ice cream fast for a month. But I was probably wrong.
Anyway – it failed, and failed pathetically.
In order to guarantee such a response — and it was a loose guarantee at that — we had to collect at least 25,000 signatures. Alexander, I promise you, I and my colleagues truly believed this was a very achievable goal. We felt very confident that if thousands of American nonbelievers could rally in support of someone like Jessica Ahlquist, the brave young high school student who stood up for separation of church and state against her entire community, sending her good wishes, writing in support of her, and even donating money for her college education; if we could get, by some estimates, between 20-30,000 atheists from across the country to gather on the Mall in Washington, DC, in the rain, surely we could get 25,000 folks to click a couple of buttons on your behalf. [Read more…]
Remember the 9-weeks pregnant Dominican 16-year-old with acute leukemia whose doctors refused to give her chemo because she was pregnant? Well, great news: you don’t have to worry about her any more, because she’s dead.
Her plight gained attention over the last few weeks as doctors debated whether it was morally correct to start treating her cancer, given as Article 37 of the Dominican Constitution states that “the right to life is inviolable from the moment of conception and until death.” It took doctors and the Dominican government a full 20 days to decide that God and Country might care about the actually living mother’s life, too, not just the fetus inside of her, and allow the treatment. By then, it was too late.
Oh well. Plenty more where she came from.
Ron Lindsay has an interesting post on Jonathan Haidt and his insistence on the importance of “sanctity” as a foundation of morality, which is something I’ve been disputing for more than five years.
In arguing for the importance of sanctity, Haidt relies heavily on the reactions of individuals in other, non-Western cultures to conduct they consider degrading and violative of various taboos, such as a woman eating a meal with men. Haidt maintains, with some justification, that these reactions show that conventional morality in many cultures includes prohibitions based on sanctified custom and a sense or revulsion as opposed to any reasoning about the harm caused.
Yes, but he does it by pointing to the people who end up on the top of those cultures instead of those on the bottom, which is both incomplete and drastically anti-egalitarian. [Read more…]
Russia tells the world it has learned nothing from its authoritarian history and goes right on being authoritarian by sentencing Pussy Riot to two years in prison. For what? For staging a political protest in a church.
“The girls’ actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church’s rules,” Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.
Maybe all three of those claims are true, but they still shouldn’t be subject to punishment by the state. The state shouldn’t be telling people what is “sacrilegious” or whether or not they’re allowed to do things that are “sacrilegious.” The state shouldn’t be concerning itself with what is or is not “blasphemous.” The church’s rules should be for the church to enforce, along with proportional, reasonable state enforcement of privacy and/or property laws if they applied. But sacrilege, blasphemy, the church’s rules? Not the state’s business. Putin isn’t a tsar. [Read more…]
Correction time. Al Arabiya says the “Saudis planning to build a city for women only” was a dud. Says it ain’t true.
Mind you, the real story isn’t very attractive either – the city will be for men and women but there will be lots of segregated facilities, so women will have more job opportunities.
Still separate but equal, in other words. Good that they don’t actually have to go live in WomenOnlyWorld in order to have a job, but bad that they have to work there, since separate is not equal. [Read more…]