It’s a good idea. It’s depressing that it’s necessary.

There’s a funding campaign going on to raise money for DrinkSavvy. It’s a clever idea to address a dismal problem.

What it is is a simple plan to sell drinking straws and cups that contain a material that responds with a color change to the presence of GHB, ketamine, or rohypnol — date rape drugs. I wish I lived in a world where that wasn’t necessary (well, actually, I do live in a world where it isn’t really necessary for my personal safety; I understand though that some of you live in that dangerous world where people might try to drug you to nullify your lack of consent.)

You know, the existence of this product is evidence for the validity of the Schrödinger’s Rapist argument.

How not to be a good person

OK, kids, today I’m offering a simple lesson in basic human decency. I know most of you already know all this — I picked up on it when I was a child — but this is the internet, and a few of its resident have been raised by wolves or read too much Ayn Rand as a teenager, and they’ve lost some really basic principles.

  1. When someone is hurting, don’t spit on them because someone else is hurting more. It’s smart and sensible to invest your time and money wisely, and if you see two people in pain, you get to choose which one you’ll help first, and that’s fine. But it’s counterproductive and destructive to dismiss efforts to help the other person, and it’s particularly repellent if you choose to kick at the people who are helping someone you consider a lesser cause to the extent that you aren’t helping anyone at all.

    There’s a principle in medicine called triage—look it up. It does not mean “stick a knife in the patient you don’t want to help.”

    See? This is so simple. If you see someone donating money to prostate cancer research, don’t berate them because they should donate to breast cancer research instead, because you think it’s a more serious disease. Or vice versa. Both are bad, and it’s good that we have people supporting research into both.

  2. So you’ve decided to help someone — good for you. However, you shouldn’t then advertise your goodness and throw a tantrum if people don’t praise you enough. You especially shouldn’t then retract your offer of assistance because there wasn’t enough love given to you. You aren’t the one in trouble, and the situation isn’t about you at all.

    You see, that makes it obvious to everyone that you weren’t offering to help because you’re a good person: the offer was patently a bribe to win good will for yourself, and when you announce your refusal to help you’re really just trying to extort some flattery out of others. This is not good behavior.

    I hear a version of this all the time: don’t annoy the Christians with that atheism stuff or they might retract their support for science and science education. Well then, they weren’t really good supporters of science in the first place, were they?

I know, you’re all saying that was really obvious to the point of being stupid, but there are people on the internet who don’t understand these basic concepts. Sad, I know, but don’t get cranky if I occasionally reach out to help the ethically benighted in addition to bashing creationists and that sort of thing. There are many good causes we can all fight for.

Sunday Sacrilege: Free speech is not freedom from responsibility

I’ve been struck by the twisty complications of the recent outing of the creepy redditor Violentacrez as Michael Brutsch, a programmer for a financial consulting company, by Adrian Chen of Gawker. I’m particularly interested by the fact that the case has become a focus of concern by defenders of free speech — people who regard free speech as sacred and absolute.

Well, you know what I think of the sacred.

[Read more…]

The Amazing Atheist reveals his lack of humanity again

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who killed herself after prolonged bullying. Normal human beings will read about her and be near tears; she was broken by callous sexual predators, her life made miserable, and she finally gave up on it.

The Amazing Atheist is not a normal human being.

Instead, The Amazing Atheist raged at the fact that this young woman was getting attention when other people have died, too. She was a well-off Western girl with plenty of privileges, so how dare we consider her story particularly tragic? There are so many other people who are worse off than she was!

Well, you know, we have a couple of choices in our lives.

We could, for instance, search the world for that one person who is in the worst circumstances of anyone; the person who is suffering the very most right now. We can do this while turning up our nose at each other afflicted individual who isn’t hurting enough for our standards; why, you’re a quadriplegic dying in a ditch? But you don’t have shingles! And both your eyes are intact! I’m sure we can find someone worse off than you. And then when we find that ultimate person in pain, we can promise to do everything we can to help them.

But I’ve noticed that people who make that kind of argument aren’t actually offering to help anyone. Their perversely inverted, demanding standards are really an excuse to turn away from the miserable they consider undeserving, to justify refusing to help…because that ultimate sufferer will never be found.

But you do have a choice. The other thing you could do is recognize deep pain in others and do what you can to help them. If one person had sincerely and honestly turned to Todd when she was being abused, and offered to help, maybe she’d still be here, and the world would be a slightly better place.

She wasn’t asking for much.

The Amazing Atheist begrudges her that much.

I don’t see any difference between him and the bullies who beat her up and mocked her on facebook and poured scorn on her in school.

And some people wonder why there is a growing rift in the atheist movement. All you have to do is look at people like the Amazing Atheist to see that some atheists, people who are convinced that there is nothing beyond ourselves, that we are dependent entirely on our fellow human beings and nothing more, lack that humanity that is our only source of unity and our only true reason for living.

Don’t be surprised that some of us want nothing to do with such sociopaths.

SRS has more targets

ShitRedditSays, the subreddit that exposes the worst of Reddit, is going on the warpath. They’ve published a long list of sick subreddits and are asking that the news be spread far and wide. Here’s an example of the kind of subreddit they dislike:

Reddit also has subreddits which publish images of women’s and underage girls’ private areas, including "upskirt" and "downblouse" pictures, without the knowledge or consent of their subjects. The users of these subreddits trade tips on how to stalk and photograph women and minors and encourage each other to go out and take more such pictures.

I know exactly how people will fight back on this one. They will claim that it’s a bunch of prudes who don’t like sex who are trying to shut down the more risqué discussions. But it’s not about sex.

They already cite reddit management that makes the argument that it’s all about free speech. But the objections have nothing to do with free speech.

It’s about consent.

Look through their long list of nasty subreddits, and that’s the theme running through them: these are forums dedicated to obtaining revealing images of minors, of people in private situations, of people being raped or beat up, and making them public. Or dedicated to teaching people how to violate others. It shouldn’t be about taking down things some people find offensive, it should be about demanding responsibility and requiring permission before publishing photographs of someone’s breasts (oh, hi, Kate Middleton!) and making special efforts to shelter people who can’t give informed consent, like children.

That’s what makes the people who participate in those subgroups creepy. It’s not that they like to talk about sex, or that they’re defenders of free speech…it’s that they don’t give a damn about privacy or autonomy.

The Primate of All Ireland speaks

I don’t follow the who’s who of the Catholic hierarchy; when I hear the phrase “Primate of All Ireland”, I think of Ussher, the fellow who notoriously calculated the age of the earth using a combination of crude genealogy and numerology. He’s gone down in history for getting it all wrong; so will this one.

While I felt that Ireland as a whole had begun to progress, Cardinal Sean Brady recently issued a statement declaring that any attempt made by the government of Ireland to legislate for abortion due to a judgement made by the European Court of Human Rights would be; “vigorously and comprehensively opposed by many”.

This is nothing new. The Catholic church has always taken a strong stand against human rights.

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.

I’m sure there’s someone in Louisiana with this fetish who is just ecstatic right now

It’s going to be so much fun for them. “Hi, little girl. Piss in this cup for me.”

Although they never seem to get around to catering to my fantasies. “Hey, mature and intelligent woman, the law says you have to play with my squid.” Maybe if they did, more people would sit up and question the invasion of privacy.

The only abortion argument that counts

We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.

For the sake of your sanity, do not read the comments. The Catholics have descended upon it.