As many of you probably already know, Greta is in a situation where some financial support would relieve her of some extra worry that she doesn’t need. Passing on that message would help her too, including if you can’t help financially. Kind words also help. So do suggestions of stuff to watch or read while recuperating.

If you can’t or don’t want to donate money, but you still want to help, other helpful things would be:

Help spread the word about this fundraiser: on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, your own blog, any other reasonable means that you have access to.

Buy my book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and/or encourage other people to buy it and publicize it.

Give me suggestions for books and DVDs to keep me occupied during my recovery. I’m looking for books, movies, and TV shows that are engaging and entertaining, but not heavy or serious, and that don’t take too much brainpower to follow.

Send kind words. They help, more than I can say.

Buttons to donate, again, here. 

I just had a lively few minutes of being spammed by Be Scofield on Twitter. He’s written another article, and wants people to read it. Telling me it was about Atheism+ and interfaith didn’t do the trick, so then he told me he’d mentioned me in it so I might want to read it. Transparent, but effective – ohhhhhhhhhh all right, I’ll go see how you’ve dissed me this time. Fortunately it took only a few seconds to read, and I just said meh (in effect). Disappointing, so he tried telling PZ that he needed to stop doing what he was doing for the good of the whatever. Then he said he wasn’t telling us what to do. Good fun. I looked at his feed; he spammed the article to lots of people – Jessica Ahlquist for one. What’s Jessica done to deserve that?! Nothing.

Back to serious biz. Turkey has put yet another valuable person on trial for “insulting Islam.” How? Climbing to the top of a minaret and shouting “Islam sucks!!” through the loudspeaker? No. Tweeting. [Read more…]

How useful, how apropos, how…right. An online article at the New Yorker on the wrongness of the idea that harassment is part of our glorious heritage of free speech.

It starts with Amanda Todd.

Todd’s suicide is easily analogized to Tyler Clementi’s, mostly because the  public has diagnosed both cases as the result of “cyber-bullying.” Yet, as a  descriptive term, “cyber-bullying” feels deliberately vague. Somewhere in the  midst of the “mob” there is usually at least one person whose cruelty exceeds  the tossing off of a stray insult. [Read more…]

Almost as if in reply to the “liberal bullies” article, some US publishers say that words matter.

Despite promises to reform their textbooks, the Saudi education system continues to indoctrinate children with hatred and incitement. Seven current and former heads of major publishing houses address the critical importance of words.

The critical importance of words? But aren’t we always being told that words don’t matter? That we “radfems” are just batshit crazy, making all this fuss about mere “werdz” because it’s only fists and sticks that make any difference. [Read more…]

The pro-misogyny (yes, misogyny) crowd is passing around an article on “liberal bullying.” Of course they are. The people who stalk a few bloggers day in and day out for a year and a half are “brave heroes” and freedom fighters; the people they stalk relentlessly are liberal bullies.

Still, there’s something to it, at least if the descriptions are accurate.

Increasingly, I’ve started recognizing this kind of behavior for what it is: privilege-checking as a form of internet sport. [Read more…]

The philosophical primate recommended John Scalzi’s article on Redditt and Brutsch and “free speech” and creepy woman-hating shit, and sure enough.

If someone bleats to you about any of this being a “free speech” issue, you can safely mark them as either ignorant or pernicious — probably ignorant, as the understanding of what “free speech” means in a constitutional sense here in the US is, shall we say, highly constrained in the general population. Additionally and independently, the sort of person who who says “free speech” when they mean “I like doing creepy things to other people without their consent and you can’t stop me so fuck you ha ha ha ha” is pretty clearly a mouth-breathing asshole who in the larger moral landscape deserves a bat across the bridge of the nose and probably knows it. [Read more…]

A guest post by the philosophical primate. Originally a comment on Using anonymity to speak more freely.

Reddit’s terms of service do not in any way guarantee users’ privacy, and anyone who thinks their privacy is protected when using the internet is an idiot anyway. The only privacy that actually *matters* here is the invaded privacy of women and girls having their images exploited without their consent, which is morally reprehensible regardless of its legality. John Scalzi wrote something particularly clear and scathing on this topic yesterday: I encourage all to read it. [Read more…]

Damon Poeter at PC mag takes a more rational view than Redditt. (Probably 99% of human beings take a more rational view than Redditt.)

This isn’t very complicated. Posting pictures of people without their knowledge is both an invasion of their privacy and a form of outing them to the Internet. [Read more…]

Reddit speaks. Reddit says what it’s going to do about stuff like “creepshots.” Nothing, of course.

But Redditt doesn’t admit the nature of the stuff it’s going to do nothing about. Reddit bullshits. Reddit pretends the subject is “distasteful” stuff. That makes Redditt a lying dog.

Social news site Reddit will not censor “distasteful” sections of its website, its chief executive has said. [Read more…]