The BBC’s Panorama was just on, and Twitter lit up like a plane with a wing falling off. It was about Jimmy Savile and how the Beeb looked the other way for a few decades.
I haven’t seen the episode, but I saw a lot of tweets about it, and then the hashtag, which led to some very pungent comments. I gather the gist of it is, the Beeb couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) do anything about it, because the sources were
just the women.
Ah.
After all these somber and/or infuriating items, a funny one. Justin Vacula on Facebook.
A lengthy post I authored months ago concerning what certain Freethought Bloggers are calling ‘stalking’ and ‘cyberstalking’ is below. This is especially relevant considering Ophelia Benson’s recent post “It’s all trolling, when you come right down to it” in which she claims that the “pro-misogyny crowd” stalks bloggers “day in and day out.”
TL;DR – criticism, even when it is excessive, isn’t stalking or cyberstalking. Public figures who make their controversial opinions known to the world will get responses. Reductio ad absurdum: Major cable news networks must be stalkers for their coverage of Obama and Romney. [Read more…]
The New Yorker has an article on billionaires who’ve convinced themselves they’re “victimized” by Obama.
A hedge-fund billionaire called Leon Cooperman wrote an open letter to Obama which has been “widely circulated in the business community.”
Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T. J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack Obama’s treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities—an approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to. [Read more…]
As you probably know already, Paul Kurtz is gone.
The Center for Inquiry marks with great sadness the passing of Paul Kurtz, founder and longtime chair of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry, who died at the age of 86. A philosopher, activist, and author, Kurtz was for a half-century among the most significant and impactful figures in the humanist and skeptic movements.
“Impactful”…ah well, I won’t do a fogeyism about it. Anyway yes, he was.
Kurtz’s legacy includes the above organizations, the creation of the skeptics’ magazine Skeptical Inquirer, the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, independent publisher Prometheus Books, and a library of books and scholarly articles that will continue to inform discussions of morality, ethics, reason, and religion for generations to come.
I knew him a little. I was at CFI Amherst for almost three weeks in 2007; I did a talk and hung out. PK was a fan of B&W at the time, and he was pleasant to me. He took a bunch of us to lunch one day and invited me to go in his car. We talked about B&W and he said (very flatteringly, so perhaps not truthfully) that he’d had thoughts of setting up a skeptical inquiry website but then decided it would just duplicate B&W so why bother.
Free Inquiry has been one of my favorite magazines for years and years, with Skeptical Inquirer close behind it. I have a lot of Prometheus books on my shelves. I’m not the only one.
I’m grateful for all of it. I’m not the only one.
Hey kids! Got dreams of being a scientist? Well don’t do it – because if you do, you risk being thrown in prison for six years, barred from public employment for life, and liable for court costs and damages, all because you failed to say exactly when an earthquake was going to happen.
Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L’Aquila.
A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter.
Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes. [Read more…]
Tahrir Square. Another live broadcast, another reporter attacked and groped by a mob. The French journalist Sonia Dridi was the target this time.
A mob of about 30 men has turned “crazy” and groped and robbed a French television journalist near Tahrir Square in Cairo, in the latest case of violence against women at the epicentre of Egypt’s protests. [Read more…]
CNN describes American Atheists as calling out religion; that term again.
American Atheists has a long history in using billboards to call out religion and get its message out. During the political conventions in August and September, the group put up billboards attacking Mormonism and Christianity, taking aim at the faith of both presidential candidates.
It’s such a standard idiom by now. I don’t think it can be seen as particularly ideological, let alone loony.
Anyway. The Mormons say it’s all a misunderstanding, of course. [Read more…]
And speaking of posters and messages – American Atheists has a new one. It’s on wheels, and it’s going to follow Romney’s campaign throughout southern Florida. Yessss.
I hadn’t heard of Backbone Zone before. Ant Allan informed me via tumblr. They have some great posters.
You can order them at their site.
I like this one, too: [Read more…]
About Polk County and the 14-year-old girl charged with first degree murder of her newborn…and about Amanda Todd, and many other people and incidents, and a way of thinking.
From the Handmaid’s Tale, chapter 13. The scene is a Testifying session during the re-education phase of Gilead.
It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion. She told the same story last week. She seemed almost proud of it, while she was telling. It may not even be true. At Testifying, it’s safer to make things up than to say you have nothing to reveal. But since it’s Janine, it’s probably more or less true.
But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger.
Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison.
Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us.
She did. She did. She did.
Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen?
Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.
Aunt Helena, meet Brady Judd. You two will get along just fine.