Brave hero and the impersonation-of-me Twitter accounts

Brave hero JREF Saviour ElevatorGATE storifies an “exchange” between two Twitter accounts that use my real name as their handles. No harassment here folks! Public figure! Freeze peach!

Conversation with @OPHELlABENSON and @OpheIiaBenson

  1. ACHTUNG! send us donations to annoy zee haterz ! zend us all the moneys now! #ftbullies#opheliabenson
  4. @OPHELlABENSON who ist dast femfuhrer? You ist dast femfuhrer! Hail thinky femfuhrer Ophitler!

Ain’t that funny? Tim Minchin, look to your laurels.

A disproportionate amount of verbal abuse

A new study provides evidence that yes Virginia in online gaming women are harassed much more than men. (This is in sharp contrast to philosophy, math, computer science, engineering, the military…wait…)

Using Halo 3 and choosing its most popular playlist as a sample group, they established three gamer tags, each assigned to either a pre-recorded male or female voice, or no voice at all, and recorded the reactions of their opponents after playing back innocous phrases designed to engage, but not anger, them (ex: “Hi everybody” or “I like this map”).

Taking into account negative and positive comments as well as neutral queries, this simple experiment (the full methodology of which you can read here) revealed that of the three gamertags, the one established as female received “roughly three times as many” directly negative comments than the male or control (no voice) gamertag did.

While the conclusions are unsurprising to anyone who plays games online, nonetheless the study provides verifiable evidence that women are in fact on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of verbal abuse, and the many entries at Fat, Ugly, or Slutty are not isolated incidents so much as they are a grim illustration of status quo.

And the verbal abuse is just for being female, not for saying anything irritating like “I have an opinion on this.”

H/t Sarah Moglia.

 

Oh, did you say something?

You know that thing where you make a point, and it gets ignored, and then a guy makes the same point – (yes, “you” are a woman in this particular that thing) and the guy you were talking to is all “good point, dude, thanks, I totally get it now”?

That.

Stephanie summed it up in a tweet. (One of the virtues of tweets, innit. Summing up.)

Nothing like watching a male colleague be thanked for making the point I’d just made in a different form. Especially when talking sexism.

Ayup.

 

Baroness Warsi will defend

The Telegraph rejoices at another paean to theocracy from “Baroness” Warsi.

Baroness Warsi will defend the right of Christians, Muslims, Jews and others to publicly practise their faith insisting that “people who do God do good”.

Her comments come in a speech in London marking the first anniversary of a landmark visit to the Vatican by a delegation of ministers in which she claimed that British society is under threat from the rising tide of “militant secularisation”.

Lots of work done in two sentences.

Warsi will “defend the right” – that’s not under attack. Nobody is taking away anyone’s right to publicly practice a religion, unless (of course) the “practice” is against a law or a set of local rules or the like. If someone’s religion requires her to scream under my windows at 3 in the morning, then I’m going to summon some cops to interfere with her right to practice in that way. If someone’s religion requires her to beat the crap out of her children then social services need to interfere with her right to practice in that way.

“People who do God do good.” Not necessarily. Some do, some don’t. Some do harm. Some do appalling harm.

How was Warsi’s junket to the Vatican a “landmark”? Who cares that it was exactly a year ago? Why is a delegation of government ministers visiting the Vatican – a religious institution, not a real state, despite its status as a pretend state courtesy of Signor Mussolini – at all? And what business does a government minister have attacking secularism? What business does a government minister have promoting or even demanding theocracy? Secularism doesn’t threaten the right to publicly practice a religion. It threatens only religious interference in or replacement of this-world government.

Lady Warsi, who combines a ministerial role in the Foreign Office with being Britain’s first minister for faith, will say that she went to meet Pope Benedict last year “to tell the world that Britain does do God”.

She will say: “There is one big reason why I made the case for faith that day … and why, I have made freedom of religion and belief a priority, and that’s that people who do God do good.”

Why does Britain need a “minister for faith”? For that matter why does “faith” even need a minister for faith?

Warsi is spectacularly clueless if she doesn’t realize that freedom of religion and belief depends on secularism.

H/t Roger.

Check your funding

The Ottawa Citizen reports –

OTTAWA – An evangelical organization that describes homosexuality as a  “perversion” and a “sin” is receiving funding from the Government of Canada for its work in Uganda, where gays and lesbians face severe threats.

Well that seems like bad planning. The funding is for unrelated activities, but the government of Canada should find non-homophobic organizations to fund for unrelated activities.

The federal government has denounced virulent homophobia in that East African  country and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has condemned plans for an  anti-gay bill that could potentially include the death penalty for  homosexuals.

At the same time the government is providing $544,813 in funding for  Crossroads Christian Communications — an Ontario-based evangelical group that  produces television programming — to help dig wells, build latrines and promote  hygiene awareness in Uganda through 2014.

Until Tuesday, the organization’s website carried a list of “sexual sins”  deemed to be “perversion”: “Turning from the true and/or proper purpose of  sexual intercourse; misusing or abusing it, such as in pedophilia, homosexuality  and lesbianism, sadism, masochism, transvestism, and bestiality.”

Not a good fit for work in Uganda.

To be fair, the government is apparently looking into it.

Crossroads defends its position on homosexuality as grounded in  scripture.

“Crossroads’ views on sexuality are informed by our Christian faith and values,” spokeswoman Carolyn Innis told The Canadian Press in an email.

And that’s the problem with letting one’s views on sexuality be informed by one’s Christian faith and values, isn’t it. The views are shitty, and the adjective “Christian” doesn’t make them one bit less so. On the contrary, the adjective creates a halo effect for the views, which shields them from careful reasoning.

A valentine for Karen Armstrong

Good old NPR, always middlebrow to a fault. Talk about atheism and religion? Well you know what will be said, because NPR wouldn’t allow anything else to be said.

Sometimes the debate between atheism and religion can be enlightening, showing us how both of these different approaches dive deeply into the currents of human experience. Sometimes, however, it can be deeply depressing, devolving into hard lines and acrimony. As an atheist, I often find myself exasperated with what I call “strident atheism.”

The banality, it…well it doesn’t burn. It stifles with fuzzy fluffiness. [Read more…]

Target

Update February 13 – Well that last update turned out to be a mistake. Anton Hill asked me to update to say there was a truce, so I obliged, but he was bullshitting me. There’s no truce. He’s still talking shit about me on Twitter (compared to my saying nothing about him at all) and he’s still blogging about me, and tagging me in the hopes that his blog posts will infect internet searches about me.

This entry was posted on February 8, 2013 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

February 8. Three days after he asked me to update saying there was a truce, and I complied.

Lee Moore is still trying to con people into having a “discussion” with people like this. Yeah right, that’s a good plan.

Update February 5 – We have managed to arrive at a truce behind the scenes, and Anton took the picture down, so that’s progress. He points out that I can’t know he was “pretending,” and he’s right.

Anton Hill hadn’t talked about me enough yet, so he did another post about me today…pretending he’s now in full truce mode.

But he helped himself to a picture of mine to publish (for no apparent reason, unless it’s in hope of inspiring new photoshops) on his post. That’s a peculiar thing to do. I don’t post pictures of people I blog about, except truly public (and powerful) people like the pope. It’s kind of…off, posting a picture of someone for no apparent reason. In the context of all the threats and jeers and photoshops and mutterings about acid, it has a bullying note. It’s not clear exactly which kind of bullying note – whether “look at this ugly bitch” or “here she is, this woman who has ‘chosen to be a public figure on multiple public forums’ but doesn’t want me hassling her on Twitter” or “got a funny caption?” or “hahahaha prune hahahahahahaha” or “photoshop please!” or “I bet you could take her down with one punch” – but it has the note.

I doubt that he has permission to post it. I asked for permission to post it, myself. I asked him on the post if he has permission. The comment got held for moderation, but now it’s posted, so he’s seen it – but he hasn’t bothered to reply.

That’s a “truce”? No, that is not a truce.

The home life of a “religious scholar”

[inarticulate scream of rage and disgust]

PZ tells us what a Saudi father – a “religious scholar” – did to his five-year-old daughter. Read it, if you can bear horrors.

Maryam tells us too.

The father had to pay a little blood money. That’s all. Half the blood money he would have had to pay if Lama had been a boy. (But if Lama had been a boy he wouldn’t have done what he did to her.)

I know heinous child abuse, rape and torture occurs everywhere. I’ve heard some of the worst cases right here in Britain. But it is only under Sharia (and religious laws) that there is always some Islamic justification for leniency or for blaming the mother or child. This case reminds me of an Iranian asylum case I worked on years ago where the Sharia judge told the woman that she was responsible for her child’s sexual abuse as she was not satisfying her husband…

And in the wonderful Islamic tradition of obsessing about females, one Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa calling for parents to put burkas on their babies to prevent child sexual abuse…

Ana Lama

Ana Lama

Ana Lama…

I despise Sharia

I despise Sharia

I despise Sharia…

Sign a petition calling for justice for Lama here.

Global pushback

Laurie Penny went to Dublin to report on women fighting to legalize abortion in Ireland, then she went to Cairo to report on women fighting sexual harassment in Tahrir Square. In both places, women told her they were sick of feeling ashamed.

From India to Ireland to Egypt, women are on the streets, on the airwaves, on the internet, getting organised and getting angry. They’re co-ordinating in their communities to combat sexual violence and taking a stand against archaic sexist legislation; they’re challenging harassment and rape culture. Across the world, women who are sick and tired of shame and fear are fighting back in unprecedented ways.

And because of the internet, we know about each other, we’re in contact with each other.

Sexism often functions as a pressure-release valve in times of social unrest – and when it does, it takes different forms, depending on local values. Right now, in Egypt, it’s groping, heckling and mob attacks; in Ireland, it’s rape apologism and a backlash against abortion and sexual equality; on the internet, it’s vicious slut-shaming and “revenge porn“. But this time, women are refusing to take it any more.

Like the Arab spring and Occupy in 2011, local movements with no apparent connection to one another are exchanging information and taking courage from one another’s struggles. The fight against misogyny is spreading online and via networks of solidarity and trust that develop rapidly, outside the traditional channels. I met Swedish and Iranian feminist activists in Dublin, and British feminist activists in Cairo, and have seen live information about the women’s marches in Egypt spread quickly through chains of activists from South Africa to the American Deep South.

What I’m saying. We’re linked up.

It’s too early to say whether the mood of mutiny will last. When people fight misogyny, they aren’t just fighting governments and police forces, religious organisations and strangers in the streets – they also have to deal with intolerance from their loved ones, from their colleagues, from friends and family members who can’t or won’t understand. Over the last few weeks I have been humbled by the bravery of the activists I’ve met, particularly the women. It takes a special sort of courage to cast off shame, to risk not just violence but also intimate rejection for the sake of a better future. And the thing about courage is that it’s contagious.

Dealing with friends who can’t or won’t understand is a tough one. Courage isn’t really even relevant to that. I’m not sure what is, other than resilience. At any rate, it’s a long game, to say the least.