Uh-oh. The Ada Initiative has piece about me, now. With pictures. I should have sent them a collection of George Clooney headshots.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Uh-oh. The Ada Initiative has piece about me, now. With pictures. I should have sent them a collection of George Clooney headshots.
My personal Ada Initiative fund drive is now over, and I’ve transferred all the money donated in the last couple of weeks, less the price of taking my wife out to dinner. You good people donated…
We’re off to a good start, because the fund drive at the organization continues for 8 more days, and the Ada Initiative is offering a little reward: if we can bring that total up to $5000, they are going to teach an Ally
Skills Workshop at Skepticon in November!
If you can chip in, do so directly now: click on the little button below, which will flag your donation as part of the Skepticon campaign. I’m actually most interested in running up the number of donors, to demonstrate the breadth of support, so any amount is excellent — go ahead, donate $1. It would make me very happy to see that goal of $5000 reached with 5000 donations (it would also make everyone happy if some billionaire donated $1,000,000 with one click. Wouldn’t complain at all. Really, any donation is good.)
Oh, and look: they’ve just done a profile of Stephanie Zvan, who’s also urging people to help out.
A woman pilot from the UAE led air strikes against ISIS. Brains were conflicted at Fox News. On the one hand, dropping bombs always makes them happy, but on the other, they’d rather good ol’ Merkins were dropping them. On the third hand, it was a chance to sneer at those regressive Mooslems who don’t let women even drive, but on the fourth hand, a woman was actually qualified to fly a powerful piece of high tech machinery.
I somehow stumbled across this essay from the great Molly Ivins on Camille Paglia. It made me happy.
This youtube comedian, Sam Pepper, made an awful little video of him startling women by pinching their butts (yeah, humor); the women look uncomfortable and unhappy with this inappropriate behavior, but Pepper giggles madly, so it was funny to someone. It was shocking, really, that he seemed to think distressing people was amusing.
So Laci Green wrote him an open letter — a very polite, too polite, letter describing what was objectionable, since he’s apparently not clever enough to see it himself, and asking him to stop (Ophelia linked to the letter yesterday).
You’ll never guess how Sam Pepper has responded.
Every single goddamned organization with any kind of social presence at all seems to be afflicted with the problem of sexual harassment — including, now, library conferences. Librarians! I love librarians, they always seem to be the most sensible people, and here it comes, a familiar story. Two people, Lisa Rabey and Nina de Jesus called out a guy named Joe Murphy for his predatory behavior at library conferences, in a post titled Time to Talk About Community Accountability. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.
Atheists have been fighting stereotypes for as long as I’ve been one, and longer: that we’re all Communists, that we’re Vulcan robots, that we’re amoral and likely to rape small children (no, ma’am, you’ve confused us with Catholic priests), that we all think we’re so much better than everyone else. Thanks to the behavior of our Great Atheist Thinky Bigbrain Leaders, though, another one is taking currency fast: that we are all MRA-style anti-woman freaks.
You’ve seen Emma Watson’s speech to the UN. Go ahead, watch it again. It’s worth it, and it’ll highlight the contrast with 4chan’s reaction to it.
Members of 4chan’s b board lost their very minds over this, and embarked on a campaign against Watson almost immediately.
So far, this has included a threat to release hacked nude pictures of her in the manner that other celebrity photos have been leaked over the past two months–complete with a sad little countdown website titled Emma You Are Next. Although this is almost definitely a hoax, it is an incredibly sick one.
Excellent talk at the UN.
