Mehreen, Nighat, Sana, Nabiha

This sounds so familiar. It’s an account of feminists being harassed and vilified on twitter and blogs, with misogynists creating multiple twitter accounts to insult, photoshopping photos to degrade, trolling and labeling and sneering at women who speak out.

What is disappointing is that no one will view this as violence against women. No one will say that this is cyber harassment. No, if these women even dare to call this cyber harassment, they will be called attention-seekers, whiners, immature. Every time a woman is attacked, and she fights back, she is the one who is vilified. No one will see that someone made a rape threat to a woman, but instead, they will say, look at her foul language, look at how rudely she is speaking. Is one really supposed to cheek-kiss someone and smile sweetly when they’ve issued rape threats to them? No wait, I forgot. If someone makes a rape threat, you take it like the good little woman that you are.

It’s taking place in Pakistan. You would think the people in the West who do exactly the same thing would feel a little shame at the company they keep, but I don’t expect that level of self-awareness from them, unfortunately.

Maybe every wolf should have a name

We’ve been having a wolf hunt here in Minnesota this year, and so far about 150 wolves have been killed (by the way, don’t read the comments at that link; our bold brave wolf trappers are accusing critics of being “trannies” who have to squat to pee — it’s amazing how this toxic machismo poisons so many things). But the news in the NY Times is that a famous wolf has been killed. That’s 832F, the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack in Yellowstone.

She’s wearing a radio collar. She was a prominent member of a visible pack, and well known to journalists and tourists. Unfortunately, she wandered out of the protected confines of the national park (funny how animals don’t notice artificial boundaries) and was shot. The male in this photo was also shot a few weeks ago. All of these kills were perfectly legal, as are the kills in Minnesota.

It’s disturbing that we should have a desire to restore and maintain the richness of a complex ecosystem, but our solution is to hand ignorant yahoos a license to flex their barbaric masculinity by gunning down key species; a solution that also props up an unsustainable compromise that allows agricultural interests priority over rational land use. We use national resources to subsidize a small number of ranchers — we basically set aside these tracts of land as a national preserve, and instead we bought grazing land for sheep farmers.

You want to profit off the open land? Consider wolf kills of your livestock to be a tax on your privileges.

Hey, it looks different around here

We had a sniny new theme applied to all of freethoughtblogs last night…what do you think?

I already leapt in and overrode some of the default font choices, and a few other things (the change killed Mr Gumby! And Comic Sans! Don’t worry, I resurrected them.) If you have suggestions, I can make some tweaks by modifying the CSS, but I can’t do major rearrangements — so let me know.

Gary needs a new pair of shoes

Gary Farber is a blogospherical fixture; a long-time member of the Skiffy community, an entertaining writer, and an all around good guy. He blogged for 11 years at Amygdala, and still holds forth at Obsidian Wings.

He’s also the guy who wrote my favorite piece of negative literary feedback I ever got for a blog post.

And as those of you who have followed him over the years might know, he’s kinda reluctantly used to being broke. Long-term disabilities have made it hard for him to match his income to his outgo. Which leads to situations like this one, which he documented Wednesday on his Evil Empire page:

A few minutes after coming inside from the drenching rain, where I’d put a last piece of garbage in the garbage can, the bottom half of my left sneaker fell off, rendering it unusuable. These were my Last Backup Pieces Of Footwear. This follows the sudden demise of my main pair of sneakers three weeks ago when the plastic in the upright part of the rear right heel completely jabbed through the cloth, turning the plastic into something resembling a syringe, or at least a knife. Since I was now wearing my Last Piece Of Backup Outside Footgear the last three weeks, I’ve been meaning to try to find replacements at a thrift store, or at least get my sizes from a new shoe/sneaker store, as the last time I had myself sized was in the 20th century. I’m now pondering how to get to such a store. Try to temporarily tape up one of these pairs of dead footwear somehow or other for one last use, I guess.

Gary lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had an Atmospheric River land on it this past weekend out of which several inches of rain precipitated, which makes walking around in duct-taped sneakers especially poignant. It’s supposed to rain again in a week. It’s hard enough to keep yourself afloat in the US with no real income if your feet aren’t swaddled in moist duct tape.

As someone who’s in slightly better shape — read “currently supporting two people on a freelance writer’s income” — I can imagine being exactly here in about three years. You burn through your personal economic seed corn. I had a good fulltime job about five years ago, and I am still taking advantage of the pair of boots I bought back then with that, um, what was it called? Oh right: “Disposable income.”

At some point in 2015 I may be reaching for the duct tape myself, who knows?

Gary’s got a PayPal account (the Other Evil Empire) reachable through the PayPal buttons in the Amygdala sidebar. A hundred of us giving him $3 each would mean he can get a pair of sturdy shoes and pair of sneakers. It’s maybe not the biggest evil in the world, or the cause with the greatest degree of personal suffering, but come on. He’s one of us. He doesn’t have shoes because he’s fallen through the United States’ otherwise unimpeachable social safety net. That’s just wrong.

Have you been counted?

Participate in the Atheist Census It’s quick and easy, and then we get to see the stats, too.

Currently, the most godless country in the world seems to be…Brazil. Somebody is doing a good job of promoting it down there, I think.

Get on the list. As a bonus, I think every participant gets the Mark of the Beast and is automatically enrolled in a sweepstakes where the grand prize is an evening with the Whore of Babylon. Also, any Christians who try to skew the poll will be instantly damned to hell by Jesus. Just warning you.

Friday Cephalopod: Self portrait

It’s the last day of classes, after a very long and agonizing semester, and this guy looks how I feel: stressed, with gnashy tentacles and a livid complexion. I feel for any students who come to my office with questions about the final — I’m straining to be nice and helpful, but what I really want to do is rampage through the ocean shredding everything I meet.

OK, deep breaths. Deeeeep breaths. I will get through this day. Just dream of Squidmas, all will be well.

(via Arkive)