The Telegraph is outraged because Richard Dawkins had the temerity to say that Mormonism has ridiculous stuff in it. It uses loaded language to convey its outrage.

Richard Dawkins on Sunday accused Mitt Romney of being a “massively gullible fool” as he launched into a furious tirade against the Republican’s Mormon faith.

Britain’s most prominent atheist attacked the core tenets of Mr Romney’s religion, saying that the Church of Latter Day Saints’ founding prophet was “a fraud” and that the presidential contender was “too stupid to see it”. [Read more…]

Today was Cooper’s last trip to the vet, to get the stitches taken out. His paw is healed! I still can’t take him out to run after the tennis ball at 90 miles an hour or to race over rocks to swim in the waves, but we can go for long walks.

Whew. Glad that’s over.

Another in Amy’s series: another guy saying yeahno, harassment and bullying and threatening aren’t funny or cute. Eran Segev, contributor to the Skeptic Zone podcast and to the Skeptic magazine (in Australia), and former President of Australian Skeptics.

He’s had some of it himself. Way too much of it.

When organising TAM Australia, my fellow organisers and I were the subject of some astonishingly rude and unfriendly tweets and blogs over some decisions we made. Not one of the authors had contacted us to ask for the reasons behind the decisions. All were skeptics; people who wanted to attend the conference, and most eventually did. And over the past year or so, I have had a cruel and nasty campaign of vicious defamation directed at me. [Read more…]

Yeah here’s Wooly Bumblebee’s “Anatomy of a Bully” post.

Her name is Kristina Hansen, by the way, she made it public the other day on a blog post about how evil atheism+ is. Hansen is easier to type than Bumblebee, and besides Bumblebee makes her sound cuddly. That doesn’t work for me.

So here’s her “Anatomy of a Bully” post that all the FTB haters were so wowed by.

What is bullying? [Read more…]

Fucking hell. I keep thinking they can’t go any lower, but they always do.

Remember when all the FTB-haters were retweeting that post on bullying by “Wooly Bumblebee” at Is God a Squirrel? She’s an expert on bullying, she said. The haters were way impressed.

Today she has a post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post saying boo talking shit on the internet and yay Jen.

Yes you read that correctly. Wooly Bumblebee/Is God a Squirrel wrote a longish blog post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post defending his daughter.

You could light a small city with me right now.

Here’s some of Wooly’s shitting:

But, some parents are abject failures, such as Jen McCreight’s father. He has written a short blog post for and about Jen. He has come to her rescue, like a parent does for their small child, only Jen is not a child… She is an adult. Well, an adult in the sense that she is over 18 and looks older than 12. But apparently she still needs daddy to come to her rescue when she gets emotional. She still needs daddy to kiss her boo-boos and frighten the monsters away. She needs this because her daddy failed as a parent and never equipped his daughter with the tools she needs to get through life. It’s quite sad, and a great example of bad parenting.

When you coddle your kids constantly, refuse to see them as their own person, and feel the need to constantly prop up their ego, you get people like Jen. Jen should be completely embarrassed by the fact that her father wrote what he did. If she had any self-esteem she’d be furious that her daddy felt he had to come out and publicly chide everyone as if we are all 5 year olds because she got a boo-boo. She doesn’t because she is just like a child, and doesn’t see her daddy saying what he did as him actually infantilizing her.

This has to be the most pathetic thing I have yet to see. A grown woman being rescued by her daddy. It’s a fucking joke, and speaks volumes as to why she can’t handle the slightest little bump in the road. She is completely incapable of functioning as an adult. I rather pity her, and that is not a good thing.

Congratulations daddy dearest, and thank you for proving once and for all how completely incapable your little Jen really is.

Unfuckingbelievable.

 

I’ve turned on comments registration for awhile. The trolls have stepped up their merry pranks, so it can’t be helped. Sorry for the inconvenience.

An anti-corruption cartoonist in India has been arrested for sedition.

Mr Trivedi was arrested on Saturday for a series of cartoons lampooning politicians. He refused to apply for bail at Monday’s hearing, and said if telling the truth made him a traitor then he was happy to be described as one.

Cartoons lampooning politicians – if there’s anything you’re supposed to be able to do without interference from the state, it’s lampooning politicians. [Read more…]

The UK neuroscientist who blogs as (and at) Neuroskeptic reviewed Naomi Wolf’s new book for the New Statesman blog. I was surfing Twitter the other day at the moment when there was a deluge of tweets about Wolf and the book because everyone was watching Paxman interview her (and because I follow a great many people who watch things like that). Most were funny, all were scathing, and taken together they made for a hilarious few minutes. The review, however, just makes me cringe.

NS starts with an extract.

Words, when deployed in relation to the vagina, are always more than “just words”. Because of the subtlety of the mind-body connection, words about the vagina are also what philosopher John Austin, in his 1960 book How to Do Things with Words, calls “performative utterances”, often used as a means of social control. [Read more…]

What’s the deal with people talking about sexism and someone asking “So is this only for women who experience sexism?”

The dialogue continues.

Someone: Women, then. I guess sexism doesn’t happen to men.

Replier: Always “What about the menz?”

Someone: No… always what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

Well duh, but why does that mean we can’t talk about sexism without being jostled and chivvied and harried for talking about something that happens to women? [Read more…]

An ad I keep noticing here and there. The copy says

How Cruise Lines Fill All Those Unsold Cabins

And the image is

It couldn’t get much cruder, could it. (Well it could. It could skip the bikini and aim the camera up between her legs. But other than that…)

Hay! Look! Legs bum sex! Now click on the ad.

(I suppose they fill all those unsold cabins with women’s bums? That must be it?)