Good work, Wife of Rieux!

You may remember Rieux, indefatiguable quality poster who wrote many good things here before getting overwhelmed by the volume of comments, and who more often now comments on various other blogs around these parts? He was at the CONvergence party this weekend, and he kept fretting that he ought to get home to his greatly pregnant wife, and I kept telling him things like ‘nah, she’s probably just sleeping, stay longer’ and ‘it’s your first, she’ll probably have a late delivery anyway,’ and I kept him around ’til 1 am. I was a cavalier jerk.

Well, now I learn that after the late night carousing, when he was probably all worn out, of course his wife went into labor the next day and delivered a robustly healthy baby boy. Now I feel guilty. Although probably with the adrenaline and the terror and the yelling, he probably didn’t fall asleep during his wife’s labor, so maybe it was OK in the end.

Somebody is going to have to explain comedy to me

I know it’s often offensive; it’s supposed to be offensive, especially if it’s targeting people in power. When Michael Richards had his temper tantrum, calling black members of the audience racist slurs, he crossed a line by targeting a more vulnerable group, and echoing a sentiment that was the product of centuries of oppression. It’s not surprising that the audience walked out on him and that his career took a crippling hit.

But something very similar just happened. Another comedian, Daniel Tosh, uses the stage to tell rape jokes, and when a woman in the audience calls out that rape jokes are never funny, he has a totally inappropriate response.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

And there’s what I don’t get. The audience laughed and stayed for that? Talking about raping a heckler is now a laugh line?

I don’t know, has his career taken a hit? It might be hard to tell — hosting a youtube clips show on basic cable isn’t exactly the pinnacle of comedy.

It’s just odd that people can have a sense of shame about racism, but it’s still considered hilarious to laugh at the idea of women being gang-raped (or, since I know it’s coming, that joking about prison rape is good for a laugh. Please don’t try to turn the joke around and make it about Tosh getting raped, because that isn’t funny, either.)

The Saga of Paula Kirby

This is going to confuse some angry trolls. We’ve got one thread persecuting Thunderf00t, and now I’m going to add another one dissing Paula Kirby. I love the stuff Kirby has written before, so it was horribly depressing to read that illogical hash she recently wrote: The Sisterhood of the Oppressed. Apparently, it’s really bad and bullying to call people names, so she calls me and many others Feminazis and Femistasi.

I know! It makes no sense!

I just find it too depressing, so I’m just going to pass the baton on to Jadehawk and Suirauqa to administer the drubbing. They do it well.

My skin is at stake!

The Stiefel Foundation is backing a huge charitable donation: they want to give $1,000,000 to cancer research. They need godless atheists to join in, though, to show the world that we care and we can get things done, so Todd Stiefel has started a recruiting drive on Reddit to bring in donors and participants in a charity walk. We need 5,000 more people to sign on this week to meet the goal. And we’re volunteering our flesh and, umm, hair to motivate you. Let’s get some Pharyngula people involved!

our goal this week is to go from 400 to 5,400 people on the Foundation Beyond Belief international team raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. We need your help. Please join our team at http://pages.lightthenight.org/2012/FBB. Please encourage your friends and local freethought groups to join as well. If we make this viral, we can hit this stretch goal!

If we are able to add 5,000 people before the end of Saturday, July 14, I will shave to a mohawk while at Camp Quest South Carolina next week. Additionally, PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta will get tattoos. (Watch their blogs today for proof.) Yeah, they are more braver than I am.

I also want you to know that while Hemant was trying to decide what sacrifice to make, I came forward with my plan to get a tat if we reach 5,000, and then he succumbed to his competitive instincts. Hey, Hemant, if I said I was going to jump off a cliff…?

But heck yeah, I will go through with it — in a tasteful, discreet way — if enough people step up and sign up for this endeavor.

(NO, you have absolutely no input on where or what tattoo I get. I’m not brain-damaged.)

No gods, no masters, not even me

I’m going to be speaking at the Midwest Freethought Conference in early August, and right wing Christian radio in Nebraska has caught word of this. They are upset that the meeting is being held on the University of Nebraska campus, and that some evil dork is going to be there.

It seems a group called the “United Coalition of Reason” is funding the billboard, and I am waiting for university officials to get back to me with answers on how this event will be funded — right down to costs of air conditioning, lights, security, parking attendants, clean-up, etc.

Even if no taxpayer funds are being used for this, is this really the type of event that UNO wants to align itself with? On the other hand, since the campus allows Christian Student Fellowship to meet weekly in the student center, they have to allow this travesty, don’t they?

After all, PZ Myers is going to be there! He’s the god of atheism!

And then they include a photo of me, looking like unto a god: fat, homely, sloppily dressed, with a goofy expression on my face while holding a toy panda bear.

This radio goon’s points are absurd. Atheists are citizens of Nebraska, and they have a right to use state facilities with fair recompense, just as do Christians. You do not get to demand special scrutiny for an atheist group that you do not impose on any other group. And yes, representing a significant chunk of their students and faculty and staff seems like an eminently reasonable goal for UNO to want to align itself.

And, you know, I do not take myself that seriously; I have no illusions that I’m a particularly special individual, let alone a god, and even the people who use my site as a gathering place and my words as a focus for discussion do not hold me in exaltation. I’m expecting to die in a few years, a most ungodlike behavior, and the atheists who congregate here will simply move on to some other genius loci than Pharyngula. That’s the nature of things: ephemeral and varied.

Jeez. We don’t even have a cult of personality in the atheist community. Gods? If one tried to arise here, we’d spit on it until it drowned.

You want to see bullying?

I’ll show you bullying. Laci Green has been hounded off tumblr by some very confused and evil people — they are threatening her and sending her pictures of where she lives.

You can see why I say confused: they’re accusing her of being transphobic and anti-islamic; I wonder if they even know what the first word means. She’s neither — she writes a sex blog — but it wouldn’t matter if she were. Trying to frighten people off the internet with physical threats is inexcusable, and I hope the police are on this case.

How can anyone do that to a kitten?

Some people are just sick, demented little bastards. And when they’re in a sick, demented church, it just magnifies the problem. And really, you can’t get much sicker than the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints — the church of Warren Jeffs, the abusers of women and children, the mega-patriarchal colony of polygamous parasites.

Like most cults, they’re very protective of their own and hate apostates passionately. They must send a message to anyone who dares leave the church, as Isaac Wyler discovered. He found a kitten on his property: a kitten half-encased in concrete, which suffered for a little while before it died.

Local authorities, also members of this inbred nasty sect, just laughed at the dying animal.

I just want to see that cult demolished and its members sent off to make an honest living on their own, the men without women to dominate.