That’s going to be an expensive book-burning

The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will set you back about $350; it’s a massive great thick book. So the homophobes better start saving their pennies, because the Oxford Dictionary is changing to include gender-neutral definitions of marriage.

It really is a marvelous book. Way back when I was in Junior High and High school, my nerdy friends and I liked to hang out in the library and go to random pages in the OED — no, we weren’t looking up dirty words (mostly), we were expanding our vocabulary!

The racialization of danger

Tim Wise reposts an essay from 15 years ago; it’s remarkable for how nothing has changed since. It’s about this peculiar asymmetry in which, when a black person commits a crime, most people are quick to generalize the behavior to their race; when a when a white person commits a crime, blame falls on the individual. I thought it was enlightening to see the litany of crimes primarily committed by white people.

It’s amazing how many crazy whites there are, none of whom feel the wrath of the racial pathology police as a result of their depravity. Killing parents is among our specialties. So in 1994, a white guy in New York killed his mom for serving the wrong pizza; last year, a white kid in Alabama killed his parents with an axe and sledgehammer; and in 1996, Rod Ferrell, leader of a “vampire cult” in Murray, Kentucky, bludgeoned another member’s parents to death and along with the victims’ daughter, drank their blood so as to “cross over to the gates of hell.” Which brings me to rule number one for identifying the race of criminals. If the crime involved vampirism, Satan worship, or cannibalism, you can bet your ass the perp was white. Never fails. But you’ll never hear anyone ask what it is about white parents that makes their children want to cut off their heads and boil them in soup pots.

Ditto for infanticide. When Susan Smith drowned her boys in South Carolina, she had hundreds of people looking for a mythical Black male carjacker, because that’s what danger looks like in the white imagination. We should have known better, especially when you consider how many white folks off their kids: like Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg, in Delaware, who dumped their newborn in the garbage; or the New Jersey girl at her prom who did the same in the school bathroom; or Brian Stewart, from St. Louis who injected his son with the AIDS virus to avoid paying child support; or the Pittsburgh father who bludgeoned his 5-year old twins to death when they couldn’t find their Power Ranger masks, and were late for day care; or the white babysitter outside Chicago who bound two kids with duct tape, before shooting them and turning the gun on himself. None of these folks’ race was offered as a possible factor in their crimes. No one is writing books about the genetic or white cultural causes of such behavior. In 1995, when a poor Latina killed her daughter in New York by smashing her head against a wall, every major news source in America covered the tragedy, and focused on her “underclass” status. But when a white Arizona man the same month decapitated his son because he was convinced the child was possessed by the devil, coverage was sparse, and mention of race or cultural background was nowhere to be found.

Or consider thrill killing, spree killing, and animal mutilation: three other white favorites that occur without racial identification of the persons involved. In October 1997, a white male teen obsessed with Jeffrey Dahmer killed a 13-year old to “see what it feels like.” In New Jersey, a 15-year old white male killed an 11-year old selling candy door-to-door, but only after sexually assaulting him. Late last year, a white couple in California was arrested for “hunting women,” and torturing and mutilating them in the back of their van. At Indiana University, a white male burned four cats alive in a lab, while in Martin, Tennessee, two white teens set a duck on fire at the city’s recreational complex, and in Missouri, two white teens killed 23 cats for fun, prompting their white neighbors to say, not that there’s something wrong with white kids today, but rather, “boys will be boys.”

So all that’s what my genes predispose me to do…good to know. If people are going to assign genetic causes to black people’s behavior, it’s equally legitimate to do the same to use white people, right?

His prescription for what we ought to do about it did make me cringe a bit, though.

And the next time you hear about some flesh-eating, Satan-worshiping teenager who just pickled his grandma, you’ll know his race before you even see his face on the nightly news, and you’ll know that if he’d just spent a little more time in church with the Black folks, none of this might ever have had to happen.

Another horrible world

Read this interview of Dr Jen Gunter by Maggie Koerth-Baker on the consequences of illegal abortions. The nightmare of blood and death for women is what religious conservatives want, apparently.

But there’s hope, and it’s so simple and easy — we could make everyone happy with one solution.

Study after study after study shows that when women have access to long-acting contraception like IUDs, and when they don’t have financial or access barriers, their risk of abortion just plummets. The irony is that this is all just posturing. Because the answer is right there. If you actually wanted to make abortion very rare, the answer is there. It’s long-acting, reversible contraception.

The only catch is that the religious right also hates contraception.

Lazy writer is lazy

Salon’s Katie Engelhart has a perplexing question: Where are the Women of new Atheism?

Where were the women?

Why, they were right there: stolidly leading people away from the fold. They were irreverent bloggers and institution founders. And scholars. Around the time that the Dawkins–Hitchens–Harris tripartite published its big wave of Atheist critique, historian Jennifer Michael Hecht published “Doubt” and journalist Susan Jacoby published “Freethinkers“—both critically acclaimed. And yet, these women, and many others, failed to emerge as public figures, household names. “Nobody talked about [Doubt] as a ‘phenomenon,’” Hecht has noted. “They just talked about the book.” What gives?

Credit where due: At least Engelhart links to Jen McCreight, Skepchick, Secular Woman and the Amazon page for one of Ophelia Benson’s books. Without mentioning any of the individual women involved by name, other than Hecht and Jacoby as above.

And without a single mention of the misogynist campaign within New Atheism to silence women through constant harassment and occasional worse behavior. It’s as if Engelhart’s wrote a piece asking the question “Why Do So Many People Have Bullet Wounds?” with no mention whatsoever of people who commit assaults, or even of guns.

Those of us who’ve been in the blog world for a while might be excused for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

Nope, it’s not that the women in the movement have persevered in the face of outrageous contempt that eats up time and emotional energy they could be spending getting shit done. It’s because they have “failed to emerge as public figures, household names.”

I expect Engelhart had the best of intentions. But her article did whatever the opposite of “helping” is.

There are of course other aspects of the article that could be profitably dissected. Help yourself to the chum, oh fair denizens of the shark tank.

I don’t ♥ Texas

Texas legislators are doing it again, abusing the law to force-feed religious ideology on the public and specifically, to opress women. They’re pushing a ridiculous new law, following a lead set by North Dakota (seriously, if you’re looking for model legislation, don’t look to North Dakota).

On Thursday, three Texas Republicans filed a measure that would criminalize abortion services after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which typically occurs around six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant.

I ask, what’s so special about a heart beat? I have killed cats in the lab by slicing out the bulk of their brain, and their hearts still beat. I have seen the beating hearts of monkeys, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, mice, grasshoppers, fish, daphnia, cockroaches — I’ve held the larger ones in my hand and felt them throb. You can take them apart, dissociate the cells, and put them in a dish, and they still beat.

They’re wonderful and beautiful, but no more so than any muscle, or any cell for that matter. A myocardial twitch is not the magic marker for ensoulment that you’re looking for, it’s simply a mechanical property of certain kinds of cells, a consequence of an entirely natural appearance of specific ion channels on the cell membrane and an orderly array of molecules in the cytoplasm. This is an arbitrary, emotional decision based entirely on folk wisdom that the heart is the center of life.

But you might just as well pick any arbitrary differentiation decision. Hey, stupid Texans, did you know that gastrulation is probably the most important embryonic decision in development? Maybe you should start testing for the expression of Brachyury in the embryo before allowing an abortion. That would let you set the cutoff point for an abortion at two weeks after fertilization! (I probably shouldn’t give them ideas, should I…)

But lets make no mistake and assume they’re looking for scientific, legitimate reasons to limit abortion. They really want to ban it altogether with no consideration for evidence or reality, for that matter, and in particular they don’t give a damn about the women they’re forcing their tribal wisdom upon.

So-called “heartbeat” bills are so radical that they divide the anti-choice community. In addition to criminalizing the vast majority of abortions, they also mandate invasive ultrasound procedures for women seeking abortions. In order to detect a fetal heartbeat so early in a pregnancy, doctors typically have to use a transvaginal probe.

That’s the bottom line: it’s Texas conservatives exercising their god-given right to decide what gets put into women’s vaginas.

Reddit kills free speech again

Reddit finally took action and shut down an incredibly racist forum. How racist? It was called “r/niggers”.

As the offensive name implies, r/niggers was a place for users to bond over their disdain for black people. While Reddit itself boasts 69.9 million monthly users, r/niggers had only 6,000 members. On the other hand, on a percentage basis, it was one of Reddit’s fastest growing online communities this year.

Visiting r/niggers was a mental chore. Emblazoned with icons like watermelons and fried chicken legs, the site maintained a rotating roster of photographs of whites who have presumably been the victims of violence by blacks, as if no white person has ever committed a violent crime. Most of the community’s content was about what you’d expect: news stories about crimes committed by blacks, pseudoscience about black inferiority, and personal anecdotes about troublesome interactions with black people.

But it wasn’t just some dead eddy, a backwater full of inbred ignorant haters slapping each other on the back and telling each other how smart they were to hate black people — no, they proudly intruded on other groups, especially groups frequented by people of the color they hated, to spew out slurs and ignorance. They remind me of a certain other group that will be doing their damnedest to intrude on FtBCON this weekend (and are already dumping crap on the twitter feed).

They also remind me of that group by another attribute: the fetishization of free speech.

Much like posters on r/creepshots and r/jailbait before it, r/niggers subscribers maintain that theirs is firmly a free speech issue; they see themselves as “the last bastion of free speech on Reddit.” They argue that despite their calls for racialized violence and liberal use of slurs, r/niggers is a legitimate “venue for discussing racial relations without censorship or political correctness.”

r/niggers users even see their shadow-bans as “dying” for the cause of free speech. When their accounts are banned, the community’s moderators add their names to r/RedditMartyrs, a kind of online graveyard that honors former r/niggers subscribers with names like CatchANiggerByTheToe and CoonShine. Its sidebar proclaims that they died for their cause, noting, “In 2013, Reddit declared war on freethinking subscribers of an uncensored community known as r/niggers. These martyrs were shadow-banned by reddit admins and turned into ghosts. Gone but not forgotten, we honor their memory and their sacrifice.”

Right — every word plopped out of the mouths of bigots is precious and must be protected.

No, that’s wrong: you get to say it, no one should have any power to reach out and stitch your mouth closed or break your typing fingers, but no one is under any obligation to host bigotry, and free speech shouldn’t mean you are completely free of responsibility for what you say. I’d be more sympathetic to the cause of their free speech if they actually owned their hatred instead of hiding behind demeaning pseudonyms, the internet equivalent of white sheets and hoods, and actually had something intelligent to say.

Here’s one of the milder racist whines posted in that article.

Here’s what anti-whites need to understand. It’s not the skin color that we hate. I mean we hate that too because it looks like the color of shit. But really what we care about is the genetics underneath. Unless you show me a study showing black labs are more likely to murder and rape than golden labs. I’m going to assume they’re the same. That’s the difference between you and us. We look at facts. You think the demise of civilization is something to laugh about.

I really care about the mind underneath. And even if your skin is the same lovely pale shade as mine, the density of your melanocytes says nothing about the quality of your thoughts.

(By the way, a certain word used with high frequency in the linked article — guess which one? — is also on the blocked word list here. Take that into account in your comments.)

Scroobius Pip speaks

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival seems to be the place to go in early August. I can’t make it this year, but I’m trying to talk my wife into taking a vacation (I know, what’s that?) next year, and taking a little journey from Oxford up through the north of England and into Scotland and just relaxing with this sort of thing. Here’s the kind of event going on this year:

See? Relaxing.

A poll for the Irish gay folk

The Irish Constitutional Convention has decided in favor of gay marriage, but it is likely to be opened up to a referendum of the people next year. So we get a little poll, testing the waters.

How will you vote on gay marriage?

Against 48%
In favour 44%
Undecided 7%

I see the problem! They misspelled “favor”, so everyone is confused. I’ll help: in Ireland, voting “in favour” means you approve of gay marriage.

There. That should swing the voting around just right.

We can get those, too?

Speaking as a man, I think I should have all the things and be the final authority on everything. Perhaps some of my resentment of women is because they are biologically permitted some experiences that I can’t share, which is NO FAIR. I must be the boss of everything!

So I am deeply impressed with this Brave Hero, who has apparently discovered a way to do something that I once would have thought was unique to reproductive females.

abortionregret

Well, he certainly has all the authority on that issue now, doesn’t he?

It’s good to be the king

As I sit here wracked by some rather intense intestinal distress (I think my travels are catching up to me today), it’s rather nice to read words acknowledging my malevolent power. They don’t seem to alleve these nasty mundane illnesses — I’m still going to have to sporadically run to the bathroom — but I’m glad someone somewhere is keeping up the illusion. Unfortunately, it would be someone who lives permanently in a fantasy world, so it’s not all that esteem-bolstering.

The embittered acknowledgement of my puissance is coming from Paul Elam, at A Voice for Men.

I am sure this might have wowed the crowd at FTB, as they are a rather insulated group thanks to their mindless allegiance to the edicts of PZ Myers.

Ah, good ol’ mindless allegiance. It’s going to be great this weekend at CONvergence, where many of my zombified minions will be in attendance — I shall be carried about on a palanquin, fanned by my lickspittles, fed chocolate and wine at my merest gesture.

Oh, heck, wait — I’m going to be expected to help haul supplies to our room. They’re probably going to bring me crashing down to earth about as effectively as these bacteria.

What could have caused Elam to sneer at me this time? What did I do? Nothing, as it turns out: someone else at FtB pissed him off, and I’m just the puppetmaster. He’s actually really unhappy with Ally Fogg, who has been writing about domestic violence perpetrated by both men and women. Apparently, this is supposed to rouse my wrath.

Though I do expect we will eventually see a one-up as followup article from PZ not too far down the road. If Fogg gets traction with the FTB crowd, Myers won’t long stay silent. He will be there with the “real, real, real” story on intimate partner violence. It will be alpha wars, a secular death match.

Wait, I’ve been promoted to Alpha now? I thought I was a beta mangina or something.

I guess I’d better not stay silent — I must roar with fury (uh, except that I think that’s just my guts rumbling) and attack my challenger!

Except…

There are so many misconceptions there.

I don’t run Freethoughtblogs. Ed Brayton is in charge.

None of us have any say in what other bloggers write. There’s no seal of approval required, you can even disagree with the alpha-male-sort-of-master-of-FtB-only-not-really.

We try to sign on people who are on “our side”, who we can work with reasonably well, but that’s about it. That definitely shapes the general views here, but it’s a looser and broader perspective than Mr Elam thinks.

And this Ally Fogg guy? When he was suggested as a candidate for the network, we all reviewed his writings to see if he’d be a good fit, and we agreed. I voted for bringing him on, because I thought he was a thoughtful person who was writing about significant issues in social justice. I still do.

Contrary to certain lunatic opinions, this is not the man-hating network (that would be awkward for me if it were), nor is it the woman-are-perfect network. Having someone on board who is able to advocate for men’s rights without doing so by hating women is actually a legitimate part of our cause.

Sorry, Elam! At least you can console yourself over being so stupidly wrong by knowing I’m feeling less than wonderful today!

Now, guts, OBEY ME! OBEY ME NOOOOOOW!

Damn, I think they’re going to be as obedient to my wishes as all those other bloggers here, and you commenters, too.