Point one. From the Open Letter to the Secular Community, April 2:

Our Approach

Here are some things that we plan to do to make our online secular community a place where we can exchange ideas and views instead of insults.  We hope that others may also find this approach useful.

• Moderate blogs and forums. Any organization or individual engaged in blogging or administering a forum has an obligation to moderate comments. Slurs, threats, and so forth beget more of the same. Keeping our online spaces free of these elements creates a civil climate that makes it much easier for people to engage issues productively.

Point two. From comment # 214, by one “MosesZD”, on Ron Lindsay’s “Rebecca Watson can be compared to North Korea” post, May 18:

Mr. Lindsay,

Do yourself a favor and read Paul’s (PZ Myers) blog and how he’s trashing Vacula who is at your conference.  Vacula is one of many people that he’s spent quite some effort and time demonizing and flaming over the years.  Doing his absolute best to destroy Vacula over something

See how he describes Vacula and his inability to get interviews for Brave Heart Radio.

Why is this?  Because PZ Myers, Watson, Benson, et. al., have spent close to two years lying about him and demonizing him because he doesn’t lockstep to their non-skeptical, non-atheist belief systems.

I don’t choose that comment because it’s the worst in terms of slurs and threats but because it makes a specific false accusation against me. I haven’t lied about Vacula. I have documented his harassment of me.

I’m back, by the way. I’m catching up. There’s a lot of reading and scrolling to do. (That was only four days? Really? Two of which were mostly travel? Really? It feels like…I was going to say a week but actually it’s more like some unknown unit of time that’s open-ended, it’s just Way More Than The Literal Hour By Hour Time. Could be a year. Big. A big unit. A big non-specific unit.) (Wait, that sounds…oh never mind.)

I even managed to fit some high-speed touristing in there. Would you believe it? What I mean by “touristing” here is just walking as far as I can to look at the outside of as much as I can. [Read more…]

On the plane, DC to DFW leg. To my surprise, I have free Wifi. I don’t know how that happened. (Then again the Wifi at National refused to connect, so it all comes out even.)

Sarah Moglia and I had a conversation with Ron later in the morning, shortly before I left. I’m not sure how much progress any of us made but at least we had a conversation.

Apart from that whole thing – the conference was amazing. I have so many terrific new friends – Sarah, Monette, Jason, Kim, Miri, Steve – and had so many good conversations with existing ones – Maryam, Melody, Michael DeDora, Debbie, Seanna, Steve W, Ania – oh shut up, I’ll make you all barf at this rate. But our Community is a good Community, don’t let anybody tell you different.

The panel I was on was fun, I thought. Maryam as always rocked the place. We took a solidarity picture with everyone holding a sign in support of the Bangladesh atheists.

I can’t begin to say how weird everything has become.

If you’ve been following the right blogs or perhaps Twitter you already know, but otherwise you don’t.

Oy.

Nevertheless – this conference has been FABULOUS. Just really brilliant. It’s way too late to do anything about that. Sorreeeeeeeee.

Some relevant posts.

Rebecca replies to Ron’s opening talk.

Ron replies to Rebecca.

Opening paragraph.

Rebecca Watson inhabits an alternate universe.  At least that is the most charitable explanation I can provide for her recent smear.  Watson has posted comments on my opening talk at Women in Secularism 2.  It may be the most intellectually dishonest piece of writing since the last communique issued by North Korea.

PZ comments on the resulting situation.

Oh and also – talk amongst yourselves. It looks so dead here when I’m busy elsewhere. Tell stories, complain, argue, explain, debate. Keep the lights on.

Twenty minutes before the first panel. Zoooooooooom.

No time! I was going to do a quick post last night just to say Rebecca Goldstein’s talk was brilliant, but using the lobby Wifi means one sees all one’s favorite people right in front of one – so, in short, I had deeply interesting conversations with Amanda Knief and Michael DeDora and Seanna Watson and others and the post didn’t get written. So: Goldstein’s talk was brilliant. I’ll tell you why later – meanwhile Miri has a post.

Maryam is on in half an hour, along with others. It’s going to be amazing.

It’s too bad Ron elected to open the conference by using a lot of anti-feminist talking points like “sister punisher” and “privilege” and “shut up and listen” by way of telling us to be Good feminists. Sigh. A couple of people have said “sister punisher” on one or two occasions; it’s hardly a central platform of the demonic Secular Feminists. Telling us, essentially, not to be stupid and dogmatic and coercive wasn’t really a good welcoming intro. (Hint: we weren’t planning to be stupid and dogmatic and coercive, and we’re not children, and we’re not thick.)

So that was a sour note, and has caused a good deal of puzzlement and irritation, but other than that – it’s being amazing.

I’m hee-eere – in DC. Sorry for blackout day; technical difficulty due to obstincacy of travel notebook but I’m back now. PZ is over there finishing a post he started on the plane; lobby blogging.

Stephanie took this in the hotel restaurant last night. I don’t think she’ll mind if I share it.

That’s Jason and Simon. We were having a good time. I’m looking sarcastic on purpose. I wasn’t really being sarcastic.

Maryam has a lovely message from Imad. (It was Imad day today, which I forgot to promote because of a deadline and a thing and another thing and an extended errand and leaving tomorrow).

I don’t feel sorry for anything I have said or for the actions I have taken part in, including the 20th February MASAYMINCH Movement, and the establishment of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Morocco – the first atheist organization in a country with Islam as the state religion.

Dear friends, we have a long way to go to break down those Middle Aged myths and ways of thinking, those oppressive and repressive rites in the name of religion or culture, those violations of human rights in the name of cultural relativism… We have to fight for this long awaited world, where people will live equally regardless of their gender, religious beliefs, or sexual orientations, where we will live in harmony with our environment, a world where wars and un-civilisation will only exist in history books. [Read more…]

From What Is It Like to be a Woman in Philosophy: “Don’t say shitty, undermining things”: how hard can that be?

I was scheduled to be a speaker at a workshop in my area, which was canceled due to lack of funding.  The conference organizer wrote this to me:

unfortunately for the only other workshop i have in mind the organizing theme is one where you won’t fit, but on the other hand for purely cynical political reasons i will need a token woman. [Read more…]

Gender policing? What gender policing? Garance Franke-Ruta says what gender policing.

Niall Ferguson dismisses economist John Maynard Keynes’s work as the product of an “effete” sensibility more interested in talking ballet than building a family with his wife.

Daily Caller writer Matthew K. Lewis blasts coverage of the gun control debate and declares, “Newsrooms should also hire a few journalists who aren’t effete liberal p*ssies.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas dismisses fellow Republicans who considered voting for a de minimis gun-control bill as “squishes.”

Effete squish liberal pussies; we hates’em. We hates women too, because women are where all that effete squish liberal pussiness comes from. [Read more…]