Just a quick one. Because he says

I’ve been confirming that I left of my own accord all over the ether, including my farewell post on Ftb, and my Welcome post here, on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

It was Ophelia who decided to let the cat out of the bag several days before I had planned, and posted a piece that insinuated the exact opposite. This left me with a shitload of work to do changing links, redesigning graphics, etc., on a night I planned to spend with my family.

The quick note is just to say that I didn’t know it was a secret. I didn’t know I was letting a cat out of a bag. Part of the reason for that is that the ragey podcast with Reap Paden was already out there. Given the nature of the podcast it didn’t even occur to me that Al was keeping his departure a secret. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. I didn’t intend to leave Al with a shitload of work on a night he’d planned to spend with his family.

This made me quite angry, but not at FtB as a whole. I still maintain there are a lot of talented writers there, and regardless of anyone’s personal opinion about individual writers, it would be perfectly understandable if they stayed with their favorites.

I’ve commented on this blog, as well as other places, that the only two who’ve been given the boot from FtB have been Thunderf00t and Laden, and that JT, Dan, John, etc., left on their own accord, as well.

There are, however, individuals at FtB who are REALLY starting to piss me off – and the results will be predictable, and not pretty at all.

Got it. We can look forward to another ragey podcast, with extra added fucking bitches and stupid cunts. Noted.

Update: I forgot to say that it’s just not true that I “insinuated” that Al had been pushed out of FTB as opposed to deciding to leave. That’s a falsehood.

In a comment by adriana at Stephanie’s.

One interesting fact about this whole affair of rejection of feminism or the word feminism, is that a bunch of atheists (I don’t know how many, but they sure are vocal) think Western women, and especially atheist women in secular democracies, have nothing to complain about. Equality has been reached, according to those people, and misogyny eradicated. Therefore, any complaints of unequal treatment or misogyny are signs of bitchiness, basically.

I hadn’t thought of that before. That’s illuminating.

It certainly seems to fit well with “Dear Muslima” and all the subseqent bullshit that has amounted to amplification of  “Dear Muslima” – so much amplification that we all feel a bit deaf.

Yeah, we’re just being bitchy when we object to being called bitches and cunts. We’re being bitchy, because hey, Nancy Pelosi, and SUVs, and Real Housewives of New Jersey, and bikini waxes, and slate countertops, and Sex and the City, and Greek yogurt, and contraception. What more do we want?

Biatches.

As you may know, Greta’s father just died. She has a wonderful post about him – a daughter’s biography, I would call it, rather than an obituary.

A small excerpt.

My father used to read to us — me and my brother — from fun, brainy books for kids: The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice in Wonderland. His copy of Alice, the Annotated Alice with annotations by Martin Gardner, is the version I fell in love with, the version I still think of as the classic. I learned the poem “Jabberwocky” by heart when I was in third grade. I got the Jabberwock tattooed on my arm when Ingrid gave me a tattoo for my wedding present. And I didn’t just get my dad’s love of Alice. I got his love of ideas. [Read more…]

The CBC’s Doc Zone had an interesting show last night about the sexualization of children. At one point a group of high school girls were talking about the way porn affects boys, and they said it teaches them to treat girls with contempt and call them bitches, sluts, whores, cunts – you know the drill.

If they’re right, that seems a rather depressing sign for the future.

The German bishops have told German Catholics that if they don’t give the church money they don’t get the sacraments.

Last month, German bishops warned that if members of the Catholic Church don’t pay the country’s church tax, they’ll be denied the sacraments — including baptisms, weddings and funerals.

In increasingly secular Europe, Germany is one of the few countries where the state collects a special levy from tax-registered believers and hands it over to three organized faiths. [Read more…]

A picture Dil Nawaz shared on Facebook.