Here’s a much-needed campaign, run by CFI.

Yes, do. [Read more…]

Originally a comment on To hell with making sense, eh?

Ah yes, Wimmin’s Lib. Burning bras. Damn uppity women jumping in front of the king’s horse. Patronising sitcoms. Patronising sketch shows. Bluff, honest CEOs explaining why they can’t possibly pay women the same as men because babies, menstruation, hormones and they’d only spend it on fashion and hair anyway.

I spend half my time being genuinely shocked on remembering that we live in the 21st century and the other half being even more surprised that we obviously still live in the fucking 70s.

I grew up in those exact fucking 70s in the UK. The very concept of feminism was widely and blandly treated as a joke. Why, feminists didn’t even shave their armpits! They wanted non-sexist language! They frowned upon rape! Ridiculous, I know, but we men indulged their little fancies. We gave them a weekly pittance so they could indulge their fascination with gossip by visiting their non-threatening friends on the way back from doing the shopping. And all we asked in return was our dinner on the table and couldn’t you just put a nice frock on once in a while despite working, looking after the children and looking after me as if I myself were a child? We as a nation rolled our eyes at their silly attempts to be like men and smugly congratulated ourselves for indulging feminism by mocking it on a societal level. We sure as shit spent more time creating media that portrayed feminism as infantile than we did actually, you know, listening to complaints, raising our consciousness or adjusting society so it was fair.

And here we are four decades later and though many things have changed for the better, the prevailing attitude seems to be exactly the same. It reminds me of those experiments – also done in the 70s (and earlier) – where people wore special glasses that split their vision in half. The subjects had difficulty commanding their limbs to do various things.

There’s an idea some people have that their brains are split in half because they feel they have to accept what they know is true (women are people) while simultaneously pining for the days when it was acceptable, even desirable in society, to treat them like they weren’t.

I think those people blame women for their brains being split in half. Their brains aren’t split in half, though. Get over that cognitive hump – men – and everything is better. Dawkins made two good points right at the start of The God Delusion: the concepts of Raising Consciousness and I Didn’t Know I Could. It’s an astonishing shame that he doesn’t apply either of those excellent concepts to himself.

Sorry, I’m ranting again but LATSOT MAD, pink trousers ripped, and I hope you’ll excuse it. My work is about making tools people can use to level playing fields and it’s so frustrating that I can hardly tell the attitudes of today from those of forty years ago.

Gwyneth Paltrow thinks water thinks you are thinking about it, and that it can tell when you are thinking mean things about it versus thinking nice things about it.

Gwyneth Paltrow loves nothing more than imparting life advice to her followers, and while that advice has dabbled in the pseudoscience before, it’s rarely been as totally off the rails as the May 29th edition of her newsletter goop. Paltrow begins:

I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr. Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.

[Read more…]

This is what I mean. kellym linked to a bit of Twitter harassment of Pamela Gay, so I took a look at the guy doing the harassing, and this is that guy.

[Read more…]

Catherine Corless has a synopsis of her research on that Facebook page but it’s hard to read in the FB format. I made an easier to read version.

The Mother/Baby Home Tuam

The Mother/Baby Home in Tuam was opened in 1925 and was run by the Bon Secours Sisters to cater for unmarried mothers and their babies.

This was an era in our history when pregnancy before marriage was deeply frowned upon by church, state and family. The unfortunate woman who found herself in this predicament was quickly sent to an institution such as the Mother/Baby Home out of sight of prying neighbours and relatives. [Read more…]

Here (a public page on Facebook) you can find an interview with Catherine Corless by Mark Patterson on Radio Ulster May 27.

The children were segregated from other children in the classroom.

He’s asking why she cares, when she doesn’t suspect “foul play.” For some reason neither of them is really talking about the neglect, the malnutrition, the conditions in which infection could spread easily.

At 11:50 they agree that there must have been such “homes” all over Ireland.

There’s a Facebook page Mother/Baby Home Research.

 

Damion Reinhardt:

Originally Posted by Brive1987
The current tag team efforts against DJ, with no real objective other than to get him fired or grind him into resigning sums up why I loathe the SJ brigade.
Agreed! They really seem to hate his guts, for some reason. Elyse even took a poll of whom they hate the most and he was right up there with Professor “Dear Muslima” himself.

Originally Posted by Brive1987 
Only consolation is that both the CFI and JREF Boards must have become inured to the relentless calls for the sacking and discipline of their CEOs.
It does seem to be a constant refrain. I’d go so far as to wager that Women in Secularism has become an annual sacrificial atonement at this point, an offering of flights and hotels and booze to appease the pantheon of wrathful bloggesses.

Yes it’s all for the free booze, or it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze, which there isn’t. Or it it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze and I loved inhaling large quantities of booze, which I don’t. Or it it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze and I loved inhaling large quantities of booze so much that I was willing to travel 11 hours eastbound and 14 hours westbound for a total of 25 hours within 4 days just to get it.

25 hours. To get…what? Maybe $15 worth of free booze (which wasn’t on offer at all, don’t forget)? I don’t think I can drink more than that over three evenings. 25 hours of acutely uncomfortable travel for $15 worth of free booze which actually wasn’t provided anyway?

I did get some nice hotel lotion. They had nice lotion, the Alexandria Westin. But they’re just those tiny little tubes. I wouldn’t have spent 25 hours of travel time to get them.

Also? I’m not a “blogess.” Blogging isn’t more of a guy thing. I’m every bit as much allowed to blog as Damion Reinhardt is (and I’m better at it, too). I don’t need a special feminized ess word to name what I do as opposed to what normal, male people do.

Also? That’s so fucking insulting to women such as Taslima Nasreen, Barbara Ehrenreich,  Katha Pollitt, Rebecca Goldstein, Susan Jacoby, Soraya Chemaly, Lindsay Beyerstein, to name only a few of the brilliant women who were speakers at that conference.

It’s also fucking insulting to CFI.

Other than that, good call.

Oh yay, CAFE volunteers tell you why EQUAL RIGHTS are so great and why they are for EVERYONE and not just some…like…you know…women.

Pay special attention at 15 seconds in – see that guy in the blue shirt next to the guy in the fedora? Handing out leaflets? That’s Justin “oh no not Justin Trottier but a different Justin altogether” Trottier. Justin Trottier, is who that is.

More on the mass grave discovered on the site of a Mother and Baby home for “fallen women” in County Galway in Ireland.

Catherine Corless, the local historian and genealogist, remembers the Home Babies well. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” Corless tells IrishCentral. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them.

“They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years,” Corless recalls.

They were outcasts. They were shunned. They were treated like dirt. They were treated like dirt by the nuns. So much for the Catholic church’s endless efforts nowadays to present itself as Caring and Compassionate. [Read more…]

Another entry in Ireland’s squalid, hateful, brutal history – the discovery of a mass grave holding the remains of 796 infants and children in County Galway. Yes that’s right – mass grave, holding 796 infants and children. A crime scene, in short; a massive crime scene; a crime scene reminiscent of the crime scene at Robert Pickton’s pig farm.

According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in Tuam, north of Galway city, between 1925 and 1961

Run by the Bon Secours nuns, “The Home” housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children over those years. 

According to Irish Mail on Sunday the causes of death listed for “as many as 796 children” included “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.”

[Read more…]