A pony, a pony, a pony!
The whole set is at Jason’s – Greta, Natalie, Sikivu, Rebecca, Taslima, Jen, Stephanie – The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse. Yesssss!
The artist is embertine.
I mentioned yesterday that a Karachi police station was being attacked by a mob who wanted to kill a guy who’d been arrested for blasphemy. It was eyewitness news on Twitter, not published news. Now there is published news.
A police station in central part of the city was attacked by an angry mob on Sunday that tried to break into the lockups to kill a blasphemy accused.
The Taimuria Police Station in North Nazimabad became a warzone when it arrested and booked a man under section 295(b) on accusation of desecrating a copy of Holy Quran.
…
“Then slowly people started gathering outside and it turned into a crowd. The screaming mob was demanding of us to hand over the accused to them.”
Police claim to have recovered some drugs from his possession as well. As police resisted, the mob turned violent and barged into the police station, breaking furniture and beating at least one policeman.
Another step down the spiral.
Greg has an interesting followup comment on his claim about how intentional it all is.
I am not suggesting that people sat down in a board meeting and made a plan and DJ Grothe is carrying it out.
I am suggesting that a male dominated society within a society (JREF/TAM within Western Culture) is blind to certain things, and has certain self-serving expectations, and smooth sailing is defined when those expectation are not interfered with by, well, by “Feminist Bitches.” Are there no conversations happening amongst (there’s that word again) JREF financiers, board members, DJ, others? Are there no emails distributed among any of the various mainly male defenders of DJ Grothe in social networking circles that say anything about anything? Is there no background discussion going on at all? Of course there are. How organized is all that? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that an important part of the culture of the skeptical movement is being threatened and JREF is one of the pillars of that culture. JREF, TAM and DJ Grothe do not need to defend the status quo, and they shouldn’t. Yet they are. After a while, that ceases, all due respect to my colleague Crommie, to be attributable to incompetence.
Agreed. I don’t think it was a plan, but yes I do think it emerged from a particular culture (and is getting cheered on by that culture now).
I said this at Greg’s:
I think a lot of it is just dislike and contempt, simmering in those background discussions you mentioned. I think DJ blurted some of that out…maybe thinking that it was an “everybody thinks” kind of thing, because of the background discussions – and lots of people do think, so he wasn’t all wrong. I suppose he expected us all just to go “ouch” and creep away to the corner and stop bugging everyone until maybe late July or so. I don’t think he expected the conversation to go the way it has. But the idea that we’re (we pesky women, we feminist bitches, to use Rebecca’s term) threatening the Normal skeptical movement – yes, I think that.
I’ll say more here.
It’s like other male enclaves, or places that men think are male enclaves.
They think we’re going to make it all boring, and weak, and puritanical (or Talibanesque, however bizarre that might seem for feminists), and unfunny, and sexless, and schoolteacherish. They think it’s bean sprouts and Birkenstocks and puzzled frowns and homemade toothpaste.
They think they have a monopoly on all the good things – jokes, irony, sex, energy, noise, sex, color, hippitude, argument, sex.
The trouble with that is, The Great Penis Debate. Not funny.
I heard a bit of news on the radio late Friday evening that froze me to the spot with surprise –
A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has declared Canada’s laws against physician-assisted suicide unconstitutional because they discriminate against the physically disabled.
I thought immediately of Eric. I very nearly got back online to email him (but went to sleep instead).
In a 395-page ruling released Friday, Justice Lynn Smith addressed the situation faced by Gloria Taylor, a B.C. woman who was one of five plaintiffs in the case seeking the legal right to doctor-assisted suicide.
Taylor has ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, and she sought the ruling to allow her doctor to help her end her life before she becomes incapacitated. [Read more…]
It’s Sunday, Boko Haram bombs in Nigeria day, so there have been bombs going off in Nigeria today (because it’s Sunday). Boko Haram keeps its appointments.
Multiple blasts have hit at least three churches in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna.
A local Red Cross worker told the Associated Press that at least 12 people had been killed and 80 injured in the attacks.
A decent haul. They could do better, but 12 + 80 is respectable. [Read more…]
A religion allows men to have multiple wives. What could possibly go wrong?
When Dr Zabina Shahian married Pervez Choudhry she thought he would be the man with whom she would settle down for the rest of her life and start a family.
But she did not know the former Conservative party leader on Slough Borough Council was still married.
Choudhry, 54, who claimed he did not realise the marriage in Pakistan was legally valid in the UK, was given a community order after admitting bigamy.
A “devastated” Dr Shahian now wants to help other women who are victims of polygamous marriages – a practice a leading family lawyer says is “rife” within the British Muslim community.
Jeez, what a princess. What’s her problem? Just because he gets two and she gets half? He’s a man. Men need more. More what? More everything. More sex, more rights, more freedom, more power, more ability to tell women to cover up and shut up. The prophet said so. [Read more…]
What is “dogmatic feminism”? It turns out it’s not dogmatic at all, it’s stating things in strong terms. Well it’s too bad that Becky called it dogmatism then, because that’s a different thing, and much more blameworthy than stating things in strong terms.
A comment on Bad analogies are bad pointed out another strange claim of Becky’s, and I belatedly got curious enough to take a look.
Becky’s claim:
In Stephanie’s post addressing our episode, you in three words reveal your tacit agreement with one of the most egregious characterizations of atheist men I’ve seen condensed into one paragraph (the 5th, if you’re following the links), bolstering an us-versus-them mentality.
The “one of the most egregious characterizations of atheist men” she’s seen in one para is in comment 91 on Stephanie’s post, by Jacqueline S Homan of godless feminist. Para 5 says:
Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how many “rational” men who are “reasonable” resort to evo psych — the last refuge of scoundrels, a load of bullshit cooked up by professional bullshit chefs — in order to justify oppressing women and keeping the atheist community a privileged white ol’ boys’ club, where the only women that are welcome are women who don’t challenge men’s use of their unearned male privilege as a cudgel to beat women down and silence us.
But I “in three words” reveal no tacit agreement with that at all – my three words have nothing to do with that paragraph. I quoted a different paragraph – the second, not the fifth, and added my three words. That’s comment 97.
When the whole Elevatorgate thing erupted, what really bothered me the most was not the initial incident (although that was uncool), but the vicious misogyny and the threats of sexualized violence aimed at Rebecca Watson in response to her very reasonable request that guys not corner women in elevators. This same kind of vitriol was also hurled at Greta Christina.
And at me.
See? Nothing to do with para 5. Becky says my quoting a different paragraph and saying that the same kind of vitriol was hurled at me reveals my tacit agreement with a different paragraph. What an idiotic claim. There’s nothing else I can say about it, and I’m bored with this anyway. But really – it’s idiotic. Quoting one passage is not tacit agreement with a different passage. Pretending it is is just a silly gotcha move. That’s how flimsy her “case” is, yet they squandered two hours of talk and a blog post on it, all for the sake of gaining a bunch of ERVites hurling more vitriol at me.
I forgot to say!
Jen is doing her annual SSA blogathon – not the wimpy 6 hours I did but the big kahuna: twenty.four.hours.
You know why the SSA is a great thing and needs your support.
Donate to the Secular Student Alliance here.
I keep meaning (and wanting) to get back to more usual subjects – violence against women, persecution of “blasphemers,” bishops telling everyone what to do – but more shrapnel keeps coming in, so I keep reporting on it.
I could do the other thing. I could ignore it. I could skirt around it, leaving names out.
But I don’t think that’s the way to deal with bullying. There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately, with regard to the bullying of gays, atheists, women – lots of Others – and there’s a pretty strong consensus that advice to “ignore it” just lets it go on. It’s not Buddhist or Tolstoyan or pacifist, it’s lazy and callous and status quo-protecting.
So fuck that. I’m being subjected to systematic bullying, as are other women who are talking about this, and no I’m not going to smile politely and ignore it.
So I’m sorry about the interruption and the monotony, but there it is. There’s a grotesque awkward situation here and it’s not my job to try to smoothe away the awkwardness by pretending it isn’t happening.