Introducing Edwin Hodge

It is my great pleasure to introduce a new contributor to the Manifesto, Edwin Hodge.

A picture of Edwin Well hey there! You’re probably asking yourself exactly why, after finding your way to the blog of the Crommunist, you are instead reading a pile of words written by me, a complete stranger.  Well, that’s a great question, my friend, I’m so glad that you asked it! Introductions are in order, and so I will oblige!

My name is Edwin, and I am a blogger, author, and political scientist soon to be attached to the University of Victoria. While my academic work is focussed almost exclusively on the subjects of gender and white supremacy, my non-academic ramblings are rather more wide-ranging. Over at my own little piece of the Internet – an obscure blog called the “Skeptical Cubefarm” – I write about pretty much anything that interests me, which usually includes the nonsense that is cult archaeology, the vapid mouthings of creationists, or the baseless assertions of alt-meddlers.

Every now and again though, I get it into my head to pick a fight with those groups who I feel are specifically poaching on my professional turf, and that more often than not tends to include the perpetual whiners from the Men’s Rights Movement. When I said that my academic work is concentrated around gender, it’s more accurate to say that I study masculinities in contemporary North American society – an area that MRAs seem to think is their area of expertise. It’s not. It’s mine, and they can’t have it. [Read more…]

Because I am an atheist: Zinnia Jones

Today’s contribution is courtesy of fellow FTBorg Zinnia Jones, who can be found at her eponymous blog.

Because I am an atheist…

…I’m able to pursue my own chosen path in life, free from the fear of displeased deities and controlling religions that would tell me what I must do with myself. Most religions have little of any value to say to a woman who was raised as a man, assuming they have even the most basic grasp of such a concept. And when going through a process of self-discovery and change that’s so intensely personal, the hostility from a world that views you with suspicion and doubt is challenging enough without having to guess at the desires of a god and whether you’re in compliance with them – desires which the religions of the world still can’t come to an agreement on.

Because I’m an atheist, I’m free to explore who I am and decide what’s best for myself, and that’s exactly what I need for this to work. It is necessary for me to be someone who’s truly happy with herself, and this is too important to let a god get in the way. Because I’m an atheist, I’m unattached to any religion which would try to push me into a conservative, hetero-normative, gender-typical life that would never fit me. [Read more…]

Some administrative notes

Hey all, just want to keep you in the loop about what’s going on.

Today’s post

Will be late. This was the first really nice weekend we had in Vancouver, so I spent all of it outside and shunned my computer almost entirely. Lots to talk about though, so I will do my damnedest to catch up.

The return of Brian Lynchehaun

Long-time Cromrades will remember guest contributor Brian Lynchehaun. Brian has been running all over hell’s half acre (by which I mean Japan) for the past few months and hasn’t had an opportunity to do much writing. I’ve just heard from him that things have evened out a bit, so expect more from him soon.

Welcome a new face to the Manifesto

I’m happy to report that there will be another new guest contributor here, Edwin Hodge. Edwin writes the insightful and compelling blog Skeptical Cubefarm. I will let him introduce himself in his own post.

Remnants of the Blogathon

Two people are still owed song requests. I haven’t forgotten them, and I am working on them but I’ve had my hands rather full over the past couple of weeks. Luckily I have a bit more free time coming up, and I plan to record and post those songs as soon as possible. JT Eberhard and I are also working on getting out duet recording underway, so I appreciate your patience.

Busy busy busy busy. I wish I could say that I see an opportunity to go back to ‘normal’ on the horizon, but abnormal appears to be the new normal. More to come soon.

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A response to geraldmcgrew on harassment

I have been going back and forth with a commenter under the handle ‘geraldmcgrew’ who was ousted from a Pharyngula comment thread. He feels that his expulsion was unfair. For the record, while I understand why he received the rough treatment he did, I think the initial response to his question was egregious and unfair. I don’t have a banning procedure here, but I am satisfied that geraldmcgrew’s behaviour (specifically, repeatedly posing a question to which he had received several responses) was the reason for his banning, not simply the fact of his dissent.

That being said, he asked the following question in response to the related question of sexual harassment policies:

Except “being hit on = sexual harassment” is exactly what is repeatedly stated in this community. Heck, it was expressed in PZ’s first post to TF!

“The argument encompasses meetings, but also the larger geek and atheist culture, which turns out to be pretty damned sexist. You do not correct the broader problem by turning a blind eye to the specifics; it doesn’t work to say that you reject misogyny, but oh, that meeting there? It’s OK if you hit on women there. It’s OK if you abuse women in a bar; bars are free-range markets for men to exercise their will.”

Hitting on someone is lumped in with abuse of women? Sheesh…

My response to this question, coloured as it was by my zeal to provide a mindful response (as opposed to the accusations that I “mindlessly” defend anything), ran a bit long. I am posting it here both to avoid making the already-loaded comments section of that post grow to an absurd length, but also to highlight what I think is a reasonable response to a question that I suspect many people do not fully understand.

[Read more…]

I have amazing friends

I know what my role is in the ‘struggle’ for minority equality and greater understanding. I’m a writer, a describer, an arguer. That’s what’s in me to do. Although I am more or less content with my ‘job’, I can’t help but feel a deep and quasi-envious admiration for those people who actually go out there and do stuff.

Case in point:

The 13 girls and their families are mostly recent immigrants, from Nigeria, Pakistan, Jamaica, Somalia and Iraq. Two girls have only been here a month; they’ve just arrived from Iraqi refugee camps in Syria. Their friends help to translate, and they soaked it all in.

The workshop is lead by a young woman, Heather Payne of  a non-profit called Girls Learning Code. I met Heather through the Mozilla Foundation, who has hired her and others like her to build a new generation of webmakers around the planet. This summer, they’re encouraging people around the world to run Kitchen Code Parties of their own. We thought it would be great to do so at the HIGHRISE highrise too, where we’ve worked with adults for almost 3 years now with such participatory photography an storytelling projects such as One Millionth Tower.

We also knew we needed to work with the youth at this building when our Digital Citizenship Survey showed us last year that a whopping 50% of the population at this highrise is under 20 years of age. That’s a lot of kids with not much to do all summer long.

“We know that if we advertise the workshop for both boys and girls,” Heather explains to me, “Only boys will show up. So making the group open only for girls ensures girls make it to the keyboard.”

“I was so excited to hear about this workshop,” says one girl, “Because all we do all summer long is stay in our apartment and clean.” The needs of the kids are high, and so few services exist in highrise neighbourhoods such as this.

Heather Payne is a friend from high school who I (in my self-centred undergraduate haze) lost track of for a few years. When she popped back onto my radar, she had decided that it simply wasn’t enough to merely comment on the obstacles facing young women when it came to career path selection. She decided to do something about it, and in the past handful of months her brainchild Ladies Learning Code has taken off in a big way.

Read the rest of the profile about what she’s doing, and if you are so moved, follow her on Twitter. And then tell her I said nice things about her. And then… I dunno, go do something else.

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Jamie’s story – two months

This is a further update of the activism being undertaken by friend and fellow skeptic Jamie here in Vancouver. You can read part one here:

Two Months In:

So shortly after I posted about what I had accomplished in the first month (including the inciting incident which prompted someone else to start organizing these demonstrations), I stepped out for my fourth week of protest. Of significance, I was approached for an interview with a youth-focused media co-op organization called Y57. I had changed my sign that week, and that had a strange effect on the outcome of my demonstration — but I wouldn’t know about just how strange until a week later. However, the immediate effect was that the end to slut-shaming and rape-speak we had observed a week earlier was now reversed. Read about week four in this post.

Somehow or other, but most probably the effect of gender dysphoria from week four’s round of Blatant Sexism Fuelled By Being Socially Read As Female, my thoughts went to a very dark place. I began thinking about how many people I have personally lost to aggravated suicide, as well as people I have survived in a very hostile social atmosphere that frequently robs us all of some truly exceptional souls. But I also began thinking about this because of the case of Bei Bei Shuai, who attempted suicide while 30 weeks pregnant, and who is now facing 45 to 65 years in prison on charges of murder and attempted feticide in the state of Indiana. Read more about it if you dare.

And then week five came. It was raining heavily, and with my politically impersonal sign already written out (atypical for me), I stepped out in attire that obscured my shape and gender. And that’s the week that all the weird came out in hostile force. I never before believed that I was actually safer in my underwear than fully covered, but that is a reality I can no longer ignore. Read more about what it’s like to experience sexism from both sides of the same coin while being dumped on by the skies in this post.

Go read the rest. Some pretty gripping (and scary) stuff in there.

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British Columbia flooded with drug money

The great challenge of being politically conscious is to remain critical (one might say ‘skeptical’, although I don’t think that word means the same thing in this context that we usually mean) of propaganda and showy announcements. Whether you think politicians are cravenly trying to pull a fast one on the populace, or if you’re like me and think that politicians simply begin to think in propagandist terms, the sign of a person who is cognitively engaged with politics is the ability to parse both the positives and negatives from political announcements.

To give you an idea of the way in which I wrestle through the political landscape, here’s an example of a recent development that I found particularly interesting: [Read more…]

Kiva project update: July 2012

Hey Cromrades,

I just sent out our 6th Kiva loan. Because of the speed of turnaround of many of the projects listed on the website, crowdsourcing the selection is very cumbersome. I’m sorry to preclude you from the discussion of which loans we select. I don’t see a way around this, but maybe you do. Maybe if I pre-schedule the day of the loan, y’all can submit your input in a flurry?

Anyway, here’s where our money went: [Read more…]

Free thoughts from the hive mind

There is a meme, perhaps more accurately described as a complex of memes, about Freethought Blogs. This complex is made up of at least one of the following statements:

  • FTB is run as essentially an extension of the egos of PZ Myers and Ed Brayton
  • FTB does not tolerate dissent, and enforces its repressive agenda through banning, mockery/ridicule, and flying monkeys (this being a descriptor of regular denizens of the Pharyngula comment threads)
  • FTB is run by (or home to, depending on who you ask) radical feminists
  • FTB is a leftist, ultra-PC, political entity
  • FTB spends too much time talking about things that aren’t material science and/or atheism
  • FTB is a hive mind that promotes a ‘party line’ of thinking that precludes disagreement on anything substantive

Now obviously, since I am part of Freethought Blogs, any and all opinions I have on the subject are irretrievably biased. It is in fact more than likely I am simply repeating instructions given to me from on high (in exchange for which I receive a monthly pittance that I give away anyway). However, given the recent nonsense that precipitated the ejection of one of our bloggers (Greg Laden left as well, but for an entirely different reason), I thought you might be interested to hear an insider’s perspective. You will have to judge for yourself, based on my history, if I can be thought of as a reliable narrator. [Read more…]