Good old “we are pro-life so we try to kill women to show how pro-life we are.”

Investigators are still trying to determine what caused a fire at an obstetrics and gynecology clinic — the second suspicious fire at a Georgia reproductive clinic this week. No one was injured in the Wednesday morning fire that started on the third floor of the Cobb County clinic, which anti-abortion advocates regularly protest, according to local news reports. Employees told a local TV station they saw “suspicious activity” before the fire:

Clinic workers believe the fire started on the third floor. They said two unknown men went upstairs and left shortly afterward, minutes before the fire was discovered.

“We have patients here. They’re under anesthesia. This could have been life-threatening,” employee Angela Buckner told Channel 2’s Ross Cavitt.

That’s unpossible, because pro-life people are pro-life.

 

Ah-ha. Saudi woman in shopping mall is told to leave by some thugs. She tells them off.

Yes do more of that please!

H/t Tarek Fatah.

A message from Sile Lane (Sense About Science):

Many of you have asked how you can personally show your support for the GM wheat scientists at Rothamsted Research who face the destruction of their trial site by Take the Flour Back this Sunday. The team of scientists will be at Rothamsted Park, Harpenden AL5 2EF to answer questions from 11.30 on the day, where the protesters are apparently planning to gather. This is where you can show your support, but please do NOT attempt to go to join the anti-GM activists in moving to the trial site itself, for obvious reasons.

It is regrettable that the Green Party’s Jenny Jones has confirmed that she will be there to support direct action against publicly-funded research, particularly given that the wheat trial is expressly aimed at reducing the use of broad-spectrum insecticides which can damage farmland biodiversity.

Meanwhile, hundreds of you responded to the call to email Take the Flour Back with your request that they should call the protest off. To date no response has been received, so we can only assume that the attempt at a “mass decontamination” that the group has proposed will go ahead as planned.

Best wishes,

Síle Lane

 

UK blogger Avicenna writes about the murder of Shafilea Iftikhar Ahmed.

It is alleged that on September the 11th, 2003. Shafilea was picked up from her part time call centre job, driven home where an argument broke out.

At some point in this scenario, her mother pushed her onto the sofa and ordered her husband to “Finish it Now”. Farzana and Iftikhar Ahmed were then alleged to have held her down, forced a plastic bag into her mouth and covered her airways till she suffocated. Shafilea fought to live, struggling against this assault. Her father had his weight over her chest. Alesha described her final moments as a struggle to breathe with her eyes bulging in strain for a single breath of air and wetting herself as the life was choked from her. After she died her father struck her a single hard blow to the chest before getting up. [Read more…]

And another item. “Gender traitor.” People have been milking that pair of words for going on a year now. It’s a meme, a thing, a Masonic handshake, which rests on the idea that it’s a favorite pejorative used by the non-ERV faction of The Great Rift. ERVite “Commander Tuvok” for instance on Greta’s thread:

People all over FTB used “gender traitor” for that very same definition. [That is: “Sister-punisher: A woman who turns on other women to gain favor of sexist men.”]

Did they? That sounded wrong to me, but I didn’t look it up. Jen looked it up.

People all over FTB used “gender traitor” for that very same definition.

I just did some research. You see, it was really difficult, but that’s why I’m getting my PhD. I had to scroll to the top of the FtB main page, type in “gender traitor” to the search box, and then count the number of posts that came up. Two! Two whole posts!

But wait. I clicked the posts, and do you know the context “gender traitor” was brought up in? Quoting people from the slimepit! Shocking how not a single blogger has ever actually described someone using the term gender traitor. I must have missed something.

Two whole posts – for “all over FTB.” Interesting.

I wonder if the meme will be retired now. I won’t be holding my breath.

So, as I mentioned, Stephanie did those two posts on sexual harassment among teh atheists and what to do about it, and others did related posts, some of which I linked to yesterday, and then naturally Abbie Smith and her pals responded that THEY ARE ALL TOO UGLY TO BE HARASSED SO HA, and Jen hinted that there’s something just a little childish about that approach. (Still with me? And this isn’t even all of it, I assure you.) Now PZ has a post saying he won’t be accepting any invitations to conferences where Abbie Smith is also speaking.

The latest uproar from the misogynist mob is over a rumor that there is a secret list of people who won’t get invited to conferences. There is no list. There are petty people who think calling someone ugly is reasonable behavior, people who have not yet grown out of junior high school. There are personal preferences, as well.

For instance, I will not participate in any conference in which Abbie Smith is a speaker. If I’m invited, and later discover that she is also invited, I will politely turn down the offer.

Why? Well, “adamgordon” dug up one example of why, quoting Abbie Smith commenting on her own blog in comment #14:

Im not working full days this week because Ive got a bad cold (*sigh* virologist infected with a virus). How is Jen reading blog comments/writing posts/etc in the middle of a work day? Weird…

I guess when youre young and pretty like her, you dont have to work as hard as other scientists.

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/11/26/periodic-table-of-swearing/comment-page-50/#comment-42913

That’s why, along with many more of the same quality.

Jen was awarded a NSF grant fellowship about a month ago, you know. Those aren’t easy to get, to put it mildly. I’m not completely sure she needs Abbie Smith’s advice on how to do better.

A guest post by “Inglourious Basterd”

I was fortunate to grow up in Athens, Greece to a middle class family before moving to the US a few years ago. Sadly, Greece has been getting a lot of attention in the news for the last two years. It was the first domino to fall in the still unresolved European debt crisis that saw the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF – collectively called the “Troika” – negotiate two rounds of emergency loans in exchange for tax hikes and spending cuts (mostly cutting salaries and laying off workers) at a time of already deepening recession that started in 2008. These austerity measures are so harsh that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was reported to have said about them before they took effect: “We want to make sure nobody else will want this”. The results are predictable: decreases in GDP, rising unemployment above 20% including half of all young people, rises in suicides, homelessnes, and violent crime.

The communists and far left political parties have achieved record polling numbers with populist rhetoric as working people abandon the two centrist political parties that supported the latest round of austerity measures and seek to take a harder line against the Troika while still largely supporting EU and Euro membership.

At the same time, the number of immigrants from other poverty and war stricken countries like Albania, Pakistan, and Afghanistan has been rising due in no small part to a broken EU refugee policy referred to as the Dublin regulation that dictates that asylum claims are to be processed in the EU state of arrival. According to Human Rights Watch “With more than three-quarters of migrants who enter the EU irregularly by land coming across the Greek border from Turkey, the Dublin regulation means that an EU country ill-equipped to assess asylum claims or to treat migrants humanely has to manage a disproportionate number of arrivals.” This means that hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants with are left to fend for themselves either in horrible detention conditions or in legal limbo.

A mass media landscape dominated by entrenched business interests that have profited immensely from the status quo is not keen on people questioning EU calls for further privatization and weakening of collective bargaining rules. Instead, viewers are inundated with sensational allegations of rampant crime by immigrants and constant scare-mongering about food and medicine shortages unless the Troika demands are not immediately met.

How this translates politically and socially has also been predictable. Violent organized racist attacks against immigrants – once unheard of – have now become a terrible reality in many working class neighborhoods. What was once a marginal fringe party called “Golden Dawn” went from .3% in the 2009 elections to almost 7% in 2012, more than enough to get representation in parliament for the first time.

In addition to holocaust denial, requiring journalists to stand in deference at their press conference, breaking up book presentations, a logo resembling a swastika, and a Nazi-like salute, Golden Dawn also made thinly veiled anonymous threat of violence against journalist Xenia Kounalaki last April on their WordPress blog. WordPress was notified and promptly took it down, however they still maintain many local blogs on Google’s Blogger platform despite Google’s terms of service having explicit prohibitions against hate speech and threats of violence.

Google has a staff in Greece. I find it hard to believe that they are unaware of the presence of this dangerous group on their service. Nonetheless, they must be banished from Blogger. Google cannot continue to provide a platform to this dangerous group in perpetuity. Despite repeated terms of service violations, the blogs are still there. The time has come for public pressure. With new elections in Greece on June 17, every day that goes by means more votes and more legitimization for Golden Dawn.

Please join me in signing this petition to tell Google’s Board of Directors to shut down the Golden Dawn blogs on their Blogger service.

More than 40,000 Haredi men filled a New York baseball stadium on Sunday to talk about Oh noes the internet.

Men. Not women. This isn’t like women just not showing up at wrestling matches because they’d rather do something else – it’s women not being allowed to attend. Not being allowed – as if they were children.

The organizers had allowed only men to buy tickets, in keeping with ultra-Orthodox tradition of separating the sexes. Viewing parties had been arranged in Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and New Jersey so that women could watch, too.  [Read more…]

Ron says we need another Women in Secularism conference. Why do we? Well because not everything got said.

This conference was rich and varied in its content, but it seemed to me that it merely served as an introduction to the contributions, perspectives, and concerns of women. It was a prologue, establishing the agenda and background for a more thorough investigation and analysis of the relationship between secularism and feminism, but we need to follow through on that investigation and analysis. And then we need to follow that with concrete action, the specifics of which also need to be hammered out.

I like the idea of building on the first. Thinking about it caused me to have the idea of a book (a collection), which could also build on it, and look ahead to the next one.