Chocolate chip ice cream

There’s been a fair bit of discussion of Edwin Kagin’s post on atheism+ yesterday. I haven’t read most of it though, just seen it in passing. I want to comment on a couple of things.

We are now experiencing a most divisive phenomenon where some atheists are viciously excoriating other atheists for not embracing loudly enough certain of a list of worthy causes to which they are joined.

That seems a very back-to-front way of putting it. [Read more…]

That is some boring “story”

Ew. One of those Creepy Moments in Cyberstalking things, when you realize there’s a whole level of stalking you didn’t know about, and you’re being itted.

I hadn’t bothered to find out what Storify is. Then I saw a piquant tweet of Martin Robbins’s –

Martin Robbins‏@mjrobbins

40+ yesterday. When Mabus did this, skeptics were up in arms. When a deranged ‘skeptic’ targets women, silence. http://bit.ly/OTNg9Z

So I followed the link and found myself at the Storify of [shudder] the stalker behind ElevatorGATE, who took the time to make more than 40 stories out of Twitter conversations in one day. Including one of mine. Or maybe more, I don’t know.

I should start charging a percentage.

In Kurdish

I got two copies today of Does God Hate Women? translated into Kurdish. The alphabet is Arabic.

The cover is beautiful. In pale green, with a faintly William Morris look, a woman’s face with snakes for her hair, a holy book, chains, lizards, a hand with an eye in the palm…very cool.

A throwaway piece of old fashioned Australian slang

An unpleasant man, who is the Executive Director of The Sydney Institute, a conservative think tank, talks some drearily familiar unpleasant crap about Jane Caro and sexist epithets and destroying the joint.

Who would have thought that a throwaway piece of old fashioned Australian slang  could, within a few days, become a matter of international interest?  But that’s  the modern world of instant communications , home to the ”IIA” syndrome.   Meaning ”insult, indignation, apology” in that order. [Read more…]

Reporter stunned to learn that poverty makes people desperate

The BBC’s Rahul Tandon reports on a woman in India who gave her daughters away because she was too poor to give them a decent life.

Media reports in India suggested that she sold the girls for 185 rupees ($3; £2).

When I ask her if that is true, her voice rises: “I could never sell my children. I could never do such a thing. I gave them to good families where they would be well looked after.” [Read more…]

Reverse trolling

The stats have been showing a lot of hits via New Matilda for the past three days, and via a comment rather than the post. New Matilda must be big.

Anyway, the post is by Jane Caro, and it’s about the waves kicked up by her piece on “the wave of misogynistic remarks recently” (gosh, why does that sound so familiar?) and her tweet inviting suggestions for “new ways of ‘destroying the joint” being a woman & all.’

I had no idea whether I’d get any takers, but it took off like wildfire. Surgeon Jill Tomlinson added the hashtag #destroyingthejoint and a twitter phenomenon was created. [Read more…]

Receiving a daily flood of hatred

Bullying works. Systematic relentless daily bullying can break people and make them give up. Jen is sick of it, so they have succeeded in silencing her for the time being. She’s getting out.

I love writing, I love sharing my ideas, and I love listening to the ideas of my readers. But I simply no longer love blogging. Instead of feeling gleeful anticipation when writing up a post, I feel nothing but dread. There’s a group of people out there (google the ironic term FtBullies to find them) devoted to hating me, my friends, and even people I’m just vaguely associated with. I can no longer write anything without my words getting twisted, misrepresented, and quotemined. I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few). If I block people who are twisting my words or sending verbal abuse, I receive an even larger wave of nonsensical hate about how I’m a slut, prude, feminazi, retard, bitch, cunt who hates freedom of speech (because the Constitution forces me to listen to people on Twitter). This morning I had to delete dozens of comments of people imitating my identity making graphic, lewd, degrading sexual comments about my personal life. In the past, multiple people have threatened to contact my employer with “evidence” that I’m a bad scientist (because I’m a feminist) to try to destroy my job. I’m constantly worried that the abuse will soon spread to my loved ones.

I just can’t take it anymore.

I don’t want to let them win, but I’m human. The stress is getting to me. I’ve dealt with chronic depression since elementary school, and receiving a daily flood of hatred triggers it. I’ve been miserable. And this toxic behavior is affecting all parts of my life. With this cloud of hate hanging over my head, I can’t focus or enjoy my hobbies or work. It has me constantly on edge with frayed nerves, which causes me to take it out on the ones I love. I spend most of my precious free time angry, on the verge of tears, or sobbing as I have to moderate comments or read what new terrible things people have said about me. And the only solution I see is to unplug.

That stinks.