Still eating cat food

How cute.

Yesterday a guy invited me to do a podcast on Women in Secularism and “problems with online discussion (cyber bullying).” I said sure. Later he told me that he has a couple of partners on the podcast, one of whom is…Reap Paden. Oh. Not doing that then.

So what do we have here? Why it’s a blog post by Reap Paden wondering why I could possibly not want to chat with him.

Ophelia Benson was offered a guest spot on the A-News podcast today. She accepted too.  Then when she learned  the details ( I am a co-host on the show) She pulled out (so to speak) Ophelia has done public speaking before right? So it isn’t that she is unable to speak in public. What is it with these people who gleefully libel and slander people left and right showing no ability to grasp the concept of responsible behavior in even its basic form? They can spout off constantly claiming they want the world to be a better place but can’t be bothered to actually talk about it with anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to their thinking. What is Ophelia Benson worried about? Does she think I am  going to come through her computer monitor and steal all her cat food from her or somethin? [Read more…]

Anything to take away their humanity

One thing in that interview with Nick Turse…

On how the military trained U.S. troops to dehumanize the Vietnamese

“The idea was that the Vietnamese, they weren’t really people. They were subhuman, mere ‘gooks’ who could be killed or abused at will and, you know, veterans I talked to told me that from the moment they got into basic training they were told, ‘Never call them Vietnamese. Call them gooks or dinks, slopes, slants, rice-eaters.’ Anything to take away their humanity, to dehumanize them and make it easy to see any Vietnamese — all Vietnamese — as the enemy.”

Oh really? That’s very interesting. [Read more…]

Anything that moves

There was an interview on Fresh Air yesterday with a guy who’s written a book about civilian massacres and other atrocities in the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Apparently the received wisdom is that My Lai was an aberration. I actually didn’t know that – I thought My Lai was just the one that got a lot of publicity but that there were plenty of others. It’s the nature of that kind of war, and of that particular war. I even thought I remembered reporting on it from the time (yes I’m that ancient!), but the author, Nick Turse, says there wasn’t much in the US. (But there was in the foreign press, he says. Hmm. In that case surely at least lefty outlets picked up on it, in which case I probably would have seen some of it, in which case maybe I am remembering correctly. Ramparts, In These Times, Mother Jones – I remember them as paying attention.)

There was a huge archive, and Turse grabbed it, just in time. [Read more…]

Asking for brickbats

Laurie Penny says that internet misogyny should end.

“There’s nothing wrong with [her] a couple of hours of cunt kicking, garrotting and burying in a shallow grave wouldn’t sort out.”

Like many women who have public profiles online, I’m used to messages of this sort – the violent rape and murder fantasies, the threats to my family and personal safety, the graphic emails with my face crudely pasted onto pictures of pornographic models performing sphincter-stretchingly implausible feats of physical endurance.

There’s more attention to the issue (and yes, it’s an issue) now because Mary Beard spoke up about it.

According to its creator, Richard White, a lettings agent from Sidcup who started Don’t Start Me Off! “as a humour site to discuss issues of the day”, the site “is meant to be like a pub where people banter and try to be funny. It is not a hate site.” He went on to claim that “We didn’t allow certain words or people threatening to kill people.” That certainly wasn’t my experience. Clearly, one man’s ‘banter’ can be another woman’s ceaseless, dispiriting catalogue of sadistic fantasies and homophobic abuse. [Read more…]

Writing to be understood

Greta did a post the other day about someone who rethought something she wrote and then took it back. I hadn’t seen it until this morning.

This is how it’s done, people. She didn’t double down. She didn’t insist that she hadn’t done anything wrong; she didn’t equate “lots of people disagreeing with you” with tribalism, bullying, McCarthyism, or witch hunts. She kept it short and sweet, without a “making it worse” morass of defensive rationalizations/ making it all about her hurt feelings about people being mean to her. She heard the criticism, accepted that she screwed up, and apologized. This is how it’s done.

([cough] Michael Shermer [cough]) [Read more…]

What we need is a filter

Cath Elliott writes about What it’s like to be a victim of Don’t Start Me Off’s internet hate mob.

Note from Helen Lewis, who republished the post on her New Statesman blog:

Note from Helen: Cath Elliott’s Blog, An Occupational Hazard, was one of the pieces which inspired me to collect together the experiences of female bloggers about online abuse. I thought Cath was incredibly brave to write about the hatred she was subjected to – particularly since it was deliberately as humiliating and obscene as possible.

Funnily enough, her internet tormentors were from a site called Don’t Start Me Off! – which was taken offline last week by its owner after the unwelcome glare of publicity fell on it when Mary Beard spoke out about the thread about her posted there. As Richard White, the site’s owner, is now claiming that he has been badly misrepresented, I thought it was important to hear what it was really like to be harassed by DSMO. Here’s Cath, in a post originally published on her blog yesterday. [Read more…]

Will the archbish be a temporary floor mop?

I tweeted a link about an upcoming debate at Cambridge between Dawkins and Rowan Williams a few hours ago. There are replies saying Richard will wipe the floor with him. I’m not so sure. Williams was an academic before he was the archbish, and now he’s not the archbish any more.

He almost certainly knows of better arguments than the kind of highflown archepiscopal bafflegab he gave to the House of Lords and so on while he actually was the archbish. And since he’s not the archbish any more, he may feel less of a duty to sound churchy and archepiscopal.

There’s no chance that he’s actually stupid. The fact that he used to say a lot of stuff that comes across as stupid to atheists doesn’t mean he is actually stupid. It’s more likely a déformation professionelle. I would think that when arguing with Dawkins he’s well able to come up with things to say that will prevent the latter from wiping the floor with him. Whether he will choose to or not is another question, but I’m thinking he probably will.

The right to complain does not turn women into pathetic victims

More from Nussbaum on Christina Hoff Sommers and on “equity” v “gender” feminism more generally. It’s a very packed, dense essay.

From the end, this time. The penultimate paragraph.

In short, the feminist views attacked by recent critics are not the monopoly of a sect of radical extremists. They are commonplace in mainstream liberal, and even some libertarian, thought. These theoretical ideas have a very close relationship to the critique of existing preferences that led to the critique of rape law and to the demand for laws and policies dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace. [Read more…]

What they did about it

The BBC’s Andrew North tells us more about the Delhi rape victim.

Like the student’s family, at least two of the accused are from impoverished villages in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and source for many of the thousands of migrants who come to Delhi every year hoping for a better life
– the same journey her father made nearly 30 years ago.

And the other men are from similar migrant backgrounds. Where they differ, though, was in what they did about it. [Read more…]