Shining a light on cockroaches

Australia is doing the right thing and launching a royal commission into child abuse. It is clearly motivated by recent revelations that the Catholic church (of course!) has been covering up instances of child rape, but the commission will rightly look at “all religious organisations, state care providers, not-for-profit bodies as well as the responses of child service agencies and the police”.

But don’t get too excited yet. Governments sometimes use the formation of a committee as an excuse to avoid doing something more substantial. The proof will be in what they accomplish, not whether the committee exists and holds meetings.

Also, George Pell has announced his approval of the commission, which would be suspicious if Pell weren’t so goddamned stupid. He thinks it will vindicate the church. I don’t think so.

  • 400 known victims of child sexual abuse by clergy

  • 11 clergy charged and convicted since 1995

  • 6 Catholic teachers convicted since 1995

  • 3 priests currently on trial

  • First priest charged this year with concealing the crimes of another

  • 12 priests involved in substantial compensation claims

  • Highest known compensation payout to a victim – $3 million

The facts are no friend to the Catholic church. Let’s just hope the commission exposes those facts.

It’s looking like a global war on kids

Kristen Cunnane was raped and sexually abused by two teachers at her middle school in Northern California. This is not in question: one of the teachers was convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison, while the other committed suicide as the accusations piled up. As an adult, she recently sued the school district for damages. She lost her case, for an interesting reason. The court found her responsible for her own rape.

Defendants allege that Plaintiff was herself careless and negligent in and about the matters alleged in the complaint, and that said carelessness and negligence on said Plaintiff’s part proximately contributed to the happenings of the incident and to the injuries, loss and damages complained of, if any there were . . . .

[Alternatively, d]efendants allege that Plaintiff was herself responsible for the acts and damages of which she claims herein, and by reason thereof is estopped from obtaining any damages as result thereof.

Hear that, teenagers? You can be raped by an adult and it’ll be your fault.

Some days, it doesn’t pay to read the blogs

OK, I’m neck deep in work, and I browse Freethoughtblogs for a little light relief, and what do I find? Cuttlefish tells me this ghastly (but familiar) story about a man who murders his ex-partner and children because she spurns him. Then Stephanie has another horror story about the nightmare a woman suffered when she dared to tell a man “no”.

I think I’m motivated to go back to the books now.

Canadian tragedy

The Parti Québécois won an electoral victory yesterday, and unfortunately the victory celebration for Pauline Marois was interrupted by a man opening fire with a rifle, killing one person and wounding another. When will people learn that murder solves nothing?

I’m afraid I know little about Quebec politics. The killer apparently shouted, “Les Anglais se reveillent. (The English are awakening) There’s going to be payback” in French, with an accent, as he was hauled away by the police. Whose side is he on? Or does it even make sense to discuss the political alignment of a demented mass-murderer-wannabe?

Zero surprises

Another child-raping pedophile has been arrested: Caleb Hesse. He’s been busily raping little boys for 30 years.

He’s nobody famous, and his history is totally unsurprising.

An anti-gay activist and donor to California’s Proposition 8, 52-year-old Hesse was a teacher at the Morongo Unified School District who was recently teaching first grade at the Friendly Hills Elementary School.

According to KTLA, the incidents occurred mostly during Hesse’s overnight volunteer trips with the church. Hesse allegedly met many of his underage victims during these outings. Authorities believe the most recent crimes occurred as early as last week.

OK, teaching elementary school was unfortunate, but taking advantage of church trips to abuse children is weirdly typical. School administrators will stomp down hard on any offenses, but churches seem to have a far, far wider range of tolerance of adult male’s behavior.

I don’t understand how this works, though. Thirty years of screwing little boys, and no one noticed? Or more likely, no one cared enough to stop him?

Summary of Thunderf00t/Phil Mason’s disgrace

The story so far: Thunderf00t/Phil Mason was invited to join our blog network last month. All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on; we could not understand why he even accepted the offer to join us if he hated us so much, and his inane rants certainly weren’t going to persuade us that we were wrong, so we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.

The latest development is that it turns out that almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions we’ve been having. He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. We have logs of all of this computer activity on his part.

He doesn’t have anything of actionable substance — we really haven’t been planning the overthrow of the government or any bank heists or anything nefarious — but he does have personal information about some of the contributors to FtB who want their privacy respected. That is his threat, and it’s not something we can trust him on, given that he’s already sent some emails to other people. And there was no legitimate reason for him to even need to be browsing our private email.

I’ll be compiling the responses to Thunderf00t’s lack of basic decency and ethics here, but first I have to highlight this, from Ed Brayton:

I really do find this outraged declaration that he does not “doc drop” to be almost laughably deluded. It’s like someone who breaks into your house because you forgot to latch a window. He comes into your house and steals your china and jewelry, then reacts in mock outrage when you suggest that he might steal your TV too. In fact, he screams “I do not steal TVs!” at the top of his lungs to the neighbors while he’s handing your other possessions out the door to someone else. And then he expects that declaration to be credible and to provide some assurance of his character.

Phil Mason also doesn’t seem to realize that his declaration that he broke in is in fact a confession. It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.

Here’s the current list of blog posts protesting Thunderf00t’s inexcusable behavior. I’ll add to it as more come in, but I’m also going to be traveling a bit today, so my access may be spotty.

Thunderf00t/Phil Mason, treacherous hack

Fuck Thunderf00t/Phil Mason. The accounts that Zinnia and Natalie and Ashley have revealed are true: for the past month, Thunderf00t took advantage of a security exploit to hack into our private mail server; when the hole was closed, he tried multiple time to use the same exploit to get back in. He knowingly and willfully violated a confidential email list. And worse, what he has since been doing (and this is how we discovered the security flaw in the first place) is disseminating some of this email to third parties.

Yeah, this is the guy who expressed such outrage at people ‘dropping docs’ on him, but he has absolutely no qualms about breaking legally binding confidentiality of an LLC, and thinks it’s just fine to hold hostage personal information on pseudonymous posters who, under the promise of privacy, had discussed personal matters and job-related issues. He is a colossal hypocrite.

Just to make matters even worse, I woke up this morning to find some reassuring email from some friends of his, who had basically staged an intervention, trying to get him to back off from his unethical behavior. I was told that he had listened and agreed, and piously assured everyone that he thought the goals of the freethought movement were most important, and that we should all step away from the petty divisiveness and concentrate on education, science, secularism, and politics. His friends wrote to me and they sounded quite convinced that he was sincere and high minded.

And then he turned around, no doubt chortling to himself, and posted another slimy, sneering, lying article about freethoughtblogs. It’s appalling. Not only has he stabbed FtB in the back, but he has no qualms about lying to and betraying the people he still regards as friends.

Yes, we want to make Thunderf00t/Phil Mason a pariah in the atheist movement, and for good reason: he’s a dishonest scumbag. The nice thing for us is that he’s making it easy: Phil Mason is destroying his own reputation with his sleazy behavior. Who in their right mind would ever trust that guy with any confidence at all?

Don’t go into the light…until I’ve milked this story for another book

A while back, I wrote a couple of articles on near-death experiences: The NDE delusion and Near-death, rehashed. It’s a topic I’ve been following off and on for quite a few years.

So I was quite surprised to see this name popping up in the news lately: Melvin Morse. Morse is one of those gullible paranormalists who has a couple of sloppily breathless books out about NDEs — he gets mentioned a couple of times in this nice article debunking a couple of well-known cases. His specialty is describing NDEs in children.

Yeah, children. Which adds a little extra disgust to the news.

He has been arrested for waterboarding his own daughter, punishing her by holding her head under a running faucet so she couldn’t breathe.

The daughter told police she “could never understand what she did to be punished” and felt scared, court documents reported. Once, she said, her father told her he “was going to wrap her in a blanket and do it so that she could not move.” In another instance, she said Melvin Morse told her that “she could go five minutes without brain damage.”

…

After her father did these things, the girl said she would “go outside and cry,” prompting Melvin Morse to come outside and then “hold her nose and mouth with his hand,” police said in court records.

“He would tell her she was lucky he did not use duct tape,” police said in the documents. “He would not let go until she lost feeling and collapsed to the ground.”

It sounds like he was trying to do a little “research” on his own child. There’s good money in almost-dead children, you know.

Comedy is dangerous

Abdi Jeylani Malaq Marshale must have been an awesomely brave person. He lived in Somalia, he was a comedian, he made fun of Islamists, and he worked to dissuade young people from joining the insurgency.

So someone shot and killed him.

And it’s not just comedians!

So far this year, at least one Somali journalist has been targeted and killed each month.