June 18
She just can’t stop.
June 16
A whole week with no documentation! That was a nice break.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
June 18
She just can’t stop.
June 16
A whole week with no documentation! That was a nice break.
Why would anyone think otherwise??!
May 4
First thing in the morning. Again, why Twitter blocking doesn’t work – because any old asshole can reply to someone you’ve blocked and then her sniping at you turns up in your feed. Lucky you.
AmbrosiaX tweets
One more thing,
@OpheliaBenson , try doing some actual critical thinking instead of just applauding any article that makes men look bad.Pfunk-the original @ Gluonsrule tweets
@AmbrosiaX@OpheliaBenson yeah, maybe that will happen.
“One more thing” is it – so there’s a whole series then. “AmbrosiaX” is obsessed with me, and I don’t even know who the fuck she is apart from being someone who spends hours every day sniping at me and other Hated Ones. Yet she accuses me of doing nothing but “applauding any article that makes men look bad.” Is that really what I do nothing but? No. [Read more…]
Update March 27 – the tweet was a mistake, and does not reflect AAI’s views on harassment. See comment 33.
Update 2 See also AAI’s post on the subject.*
______________
Aaaaaaaaand there’s this.
Atheist Alliance Int
Understanding Harassment | Atheist Revolution
And it links to the article at Atheist Revolution. There “vjack” explains what harassment is. Guess what!! It just so happens that it’s none of the things that the people I call harassers are doing to us! Is that a coincidence or what.
No, it’s not. It’s the whole point. Understanding Harassment=harassment is not what I’m doing to you.
How fucking convenient. [Read more…]
Religion News is interested in our little spats. (Well it would be, wouldn’t it – except that JREF and TAM actually aren’t atheist, and are a bit hostile to atheism, at least at TAM.)
Officials for The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, said Wednesday (July 11) that women would make up 31 percent of the 1,200 conference attendees, down from 40 percent the year before. A month before the conference, pre-registration was only 18 percent women, organizers said.
The explanations are many — the bad economy, that women, as caregivers, are less able to get away, and that more men than women identify as skeptics, whose worldview rejects the supernatural and focuses on science and rationality.
But in the weeks preceding TAM, another possible explanation has roiled the nontheist community. Online forums have crackled with charges of sexism in TAM’s leadership and calls for the ouster of D.J. Grothe, the male president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, TAM’s organizer. [Read more…]
In a press release.
American Atheists’ President Dave Silverman announced today that the organization was implementing a comprehensive Code of Conduct for all sponsored and hosted regional conferences and the annual American Atheists’ National Convention.
Dave Silverman said, “The Code of Conduct will allow all conference attendees to know that American Atheists’ events are safe, fun and informative. We want people to enjoy themselves but know there will be consequences for harmful behaviors.”
The Code of Conduct addresses conference attendees’ behavior during speaker’s sessions, access to sessions for ability-challenged attendees, respect for families who attend, as well as sexual and other types of harassment.
The Code of Conduct also provides direction for American Atheists’ staff and volunteers who will take reports of harassment and inappropriate conduct.
Silverman continued, “We are training our staff and volunteers to be able to take information from our attendees who have been harassed. These reports will be given directly to one designated senior staff member at each event to be assessed and to determine what action should and needs to be taken.”
“The Code of Conduct is a living document. We will adapt it as we learn from what works and what needs improvement. But the overall goal is to create fun, enjoyable, and safe conventions and conferences for everyone,” Silverman added.
The Code of Conduct will go into effect immediately and be used first at American Atheists’ regional conference in Minnesota, August 10-11.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a non-profit 501(c)3 national organization that defends civil rights of Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church-mosque-temple and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.
You can read the whole thing.
It’s rape culture day in the neighborhood.
There’s Alex’s Shouting arson in a crowded theatre: rape, reputations and reasonable suspicion.
The statements we have don’t warrant certainty. They may or may not meet legal standards of proof. But they do meet what standards we need to ask ourselves, ‘Should this person attend our conference?’ or ‘Should we invite them to our group?’ – and to answer these questions reasonably, if provisionally. This does not amount to pitchfork-laden mob rule; it does not amount to vigilantism; and the evidence we have, while many no doubt would welcome legal procedures, should not in my opinion be deemed wholly meaningless in the absence of court action. [Read more…]
Hilda Bastian has thoughts about outrage.
You didn’t need any academic theory, though, to know that wading into gender generalizations – even flippantly – was foolhardy territory for a formal guest at an event intending to honor women in science at a journalists’ conference. Progressing women’s rights to equal dignity and opportunity has always elicited outrage. But for the last couple of decades, sexist remarks and sexist jokes have, too.
This cartoon by Punch contributor, George du Maurier, comes from 1895. That was the era when anthropological claims about lower female intelligence had been losing ground as a way to keep women out of higher education (Joan Burstyn, 1973). So the ground had shifted to fanning medical fears to discourage women from higher study – nervous problems, threats to ovaries, and the like. [Read more…]
Sophie Elmhirst has a long profile of Richard Dawkins in the Guardian. It’s partly about his new career of creating uproars on Twitter, and whether or not that’s a good idea.
The two strands of Dawkins’s mission – promoting science, demolishing religion – are intended to be complementary. “If they are antagonistic to each other, that would be regrettable,” he said, “but I don’t see why they should be.” But antagonism is part of Dawkins’s daily life. “I suppose some of the passions that I show are more appropriate to a young man than somebody of my age.” Since his arrival on Twitter in 2008, his public pronouncements have become more combative – and, at times, flamboyantly irritable: “How dare you force your dopey unsubstantiated superstitions on innocent children too young to resist?,” he tweeted last June. “How DARE you?”
“Flamboyantly irritable” is a good way of putting it. There are problems with both, especially in a famous Oxford academic – and especially when they are irritable rather than witty or probing. Anybody can do irritable, and anybody does; it’s hard to see why Dawkins needs to join that massive and uninteresting crowd.
These days, Dawkins describes himself as “a communicator”. But depending on your point of view, he is also a hero, a heathen, or a liability. Many of his recent statements – on subjects ranging from the lack of Nobel prize-winning Muslim scientists to the “immorality” of failing to abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome – have sparked outraged responses (some of which Dawkins read aloud on a recent YouTube video, which perhaps won him back a few friends). For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage. “He could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett said of Dawkins’s public skirmishes. It is a legacy, Dennett believes, that should reflect the “masterpiece” that was The Selfish Gene and Dawkins’s major contribution to our understanding of life. As for Twitter: “I wish he wouldn’t do it,” Krauss said. “I told him that.”
Lots of people have told him that – friends and colleagues, I mean, not just onlookers. [Read more…]
What was it that James Randi said about Michael Shermer? Oh yes…
Shermer’s reputation really does precede him, and it predates the recent wave of attention given to sex crimes and sexual harassment. I reached the movement’s grand old man, 86-year-old James Randi, by telephone, at his house in Florida. Randi is no longer involved in his foundation’s daily operations, but he remains its chair, and he is a legend of the movement, famously not fooled by anybody. He seems not to be naïve about Shermer — although he’s not so troubled by him, either.
“Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference.
“His reply,” Randi continued, “is he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember. I don’t know — I’ve never been drunk in my life. It’s an unfortunate thing … I haven’t seen him doing that. But I get the word from people in the organization that he has to be under better control. If he had gotten violent, I’d have him out of there immediately. I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk.”
Shermer has just been added to the lineup at this year’s TAM.
I have friends who bought non-refundable plane tickets and booked hotel rooms on the understanding that Shermer was not on the roster at this year’s TAM. They are not happy.
But hey, no biggy. He never got violent.
