Farewell, Avicenna

One of our colleagues at Freethoughtblogs, Avicenna, has been on the receiving end of an astonishing flood of hate and patently baseless accusations. An online group of trolls, ironically many of the same people who are quick to accuse us of “witch hunts” and “lynch mobs”, have been baying for his blood for months, questioning his profession, his training, even his ancestry — all nonsense and known to us as completely bogus, pure dishonest attempts to harass him. Almost all of the accusations were lies.

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We’re going to need a lot more funerals

A Catholic nun was so distressed by the abortion of an unnamed fetus that she made arrangements to give it a funeral and a name. That sounds nice, except that it is also extremely creepy.

With permission to proceed granted, she began making arrangements for his memorial service by first giving this child a name. A beautiful small wooden urn would be engraved– but what name should she choose, she wanted to know? I gently suggested “Victor”, in honor of her mother, Victoria who had passed away two days earlier and she happily agreed. The middle name would come to her in an equally tender way as she told me of a conversation with a young woman she had met the previous day.

This woman had confessed to Sister that she had aborted her baby, an action she deeply regretted. But she could never give her little girl a proper burial since the remains were lost, and this deep sorrow haunted the mother’s memory. But when Sister told her about her plans for Victor and that she could include her baby’s name, Marie, with his, it greatly consoled her.

And so the service was held on Thursday May 2, 2013 – the same day Sister’s mother was buried miles and miles away. A fellow nun, a lay associate, two deacons, a priest and a bereaved family mourning the recent loss of their own stillborn child gathered around the altar for Holy Mass with little Victor Marie in their center.

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In defense of Avicenna

It’s hazardous duty, writing on FreethoughtBlogs. There’s a small squad of vicious trolls waiting to make up stories about you, and the latest target of their venom is Avicenna. It’s gotten ridiculous: the myth they repeat over and over again is that he’s constantly lying on his blog. The latest “evidence” is that some of the email from haters that he has posted can also be found on public sites.

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New year, same as the old year

Oh, yeah, the calendar rolled around to a new year last night. All I can say is…I don’t care. 2014 was an awful year, there’s no promise that this coming year will be better, and flipping a digit on my chronometer is not a magical transition that will make everything all better.

I can say that my tendency towards increasing cynicism maintains its steady trend. Nope, no discontinuity in the pattern was observed at the stroke of midnight.

Cristina is a kindred spirit.

It’s the culture that’s sick

The latest story out of the hothouse of stupidity that is 4chan/8chan is that they’re targeting tumblr users for harassment — with the specific intent of identifying troubled young people who have admitted to self-harm, and then goading them to commit suicide.

assholes

The trolls also wrote that they plan to post gore and self-harm photos in popular social justice and fandom Tumblr tags, as well as target individual users with anonymous messages, in an effort to pressure them into committing suicide.

One of their targets is any fan of some show called Supernatural, which I have not seen (although now I’m putting it on my list of shows to check out). There may be a hint of pathological skepticism here — people who like shows about supernatural phenomena must be subhuman, and therefore are acceptable victims.

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Twitter management is incompetent

It takes a lot to get me to try to report a twitter user for offensive content — I’m usually happy enough to simply be liberal with the block button (I block, on average, 3 or 4 people a day). But there have been a grand total of two occasions on which someone was so egregiously awful I thought it necessary to report them. One was a guy who was spamming with over-the-top death threats from multiple accounts, and taunting me with his knowledge that Twitter would do nothing about it. Another time, it was someone who was sending me explicit crime scene photos — rotting bodies, bloody suicides, decapitated or disemboweled people. So I tried to send complaints.

The Twitter complaint submission form is a nightmare — it’s a perfect example of putting up a bureaucratic roadblock to prevent people from complaining. These two cases were so extreme that I struggled through several pages of ridiculously detailed inquiries, submitted the final form, and sat back, thoroughly convinced that this was a cynical pretense by Twitter and that nothing would be done.

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Victory in Morris!

The City Council has spoken.

Members of the Morris City Council agreed with the assessment of Morris City Manager Blaine Hill: the chimes at Summit and Calvary Cemetery need to be play less often and at a lower volume to respect the rights of neighbors.

I haven’t heard the chimes this morning, or for the last couple of days. I’d fling my windows wide open and revel in the silence, except that it’s cold and snowy out there.