Victim Blaming 101

Talk about missing the point — now we’ve got someone declaring the TAM harassment problem solved — why, just call casino security, and they’ll take care of it!

Uh, yes. We know. We can go to a meeting, and if there is a jerk causing problems, we can seek out authorities and maybe get it resolved (although, in the case of women complaining of harassment, we’re more likely to see the problem treated dismissively). That’s always been an option, and it’s really patronizing to bring it up as if no other person on the planet ever even thought of it.

It’s not the issue. What’s wanted is a recognition of the fact that no one has the right to harass others at a public meeting, and that the meeting organizers have a zero tolerance policy towards sexual harassment, to discourage harassment before it happens.

Why is this so hard to understand?

These events are safe: they are well-bounded, contain security staff, and all the organizers want them to proceed with little disruption. Nobody has complained that there was no available recourse to deal with jerkwads.

The problem is that they are not safe spaces, which means a place where women can feel comfortable speaking without risk of unwelcome advances. You can’t just announce that there are security guards outside the door to create a safe space; it takes a bit more effort than that.

The author of that blog actually hit on the real problem by accident in a comment on that thread.

Honestly, if your a woman at an event like TAM, expect to be hit on.

EXACTLY!

You know, there’s a lot of whining that Rebecca Watson or myself have claimed that TAM is unsafe, a claim that we actually haven’t made at all. To the contrary, we’ve both supported TAM and encouraged people to attend. But we’ve also asked that it be better, and I do give DJ credit — it has improved in the representation of women speakers during his tenure.

But if you’re looking to pin the blame on people who have said TAM isn’t a good place for women, who might be spreading the word that women shouldn’t attend, you might want to start with people who declare that women ought to “expect to be hit on”.

Some people seem confused by the phrase “safe space”. They seem to be unaware of the fact that in English, one word in context can modify the meaning of another: like “parkway” is actually a place where cars drive, rather than park. But to help out those poor naive simpletons, here’s an explanation of “safe space”.

As usual, Cuttlefish distills the whole wrangle down nicely.

Another douchebag: Marty Klein

Ladies, aren’t you used to this yet? Marty Klein is a sex therapist who writes for Psychology Today; he’s also a dishonest hack who will distort the facts to make his case.

You may remember that strange incident in which Elyse of Skepchick was working at a conference, and out of the blue, was handed a card offering group sex by a pair of strangers. Klein has taken that story and turned it into a tale of a prude squawking hysterically at a kindly offer by a pair of friends. It’s one of the more egregious manglings of a story I’ve seen in a long time.

What I find particularly outrageous, though, is that Klein is exactly like Ken Ham: nowhere in his fractured fairy tale does he include a single link to the actual participant and witness to the story, where readers might have discovered how he lied, and of course his article doesn’t include comments, where readers might correct him.

Douchebag rising

We are privileged to witness something in our generation that will change the world, a series of legal events of awesome import.

Step 1. Humorless organization lacking in creativity builds humor site called FunnyJunk by aggregating webcomics. Not their own creations, of course; they just harvest them off the web without their creators’ permission.

Douchebag Level: Throbbing.

Step 2. One of the victims of this theft of intellectual property, The Oatmeal, complains.

Response Level: Reasonable

Step 3. FunnyJunk hires a lawyer, Charles Carreon.

Douchebag Level: Expectant.

Step 4. Carreon demands that The Oatmeal take down its complaint, and also pay FunnyJunk $20,000.

Douchebag Level: Boiling.

Step 5. The Oatmeal launches Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad. Not only won’t The Oatmeal pay up, but it’s going to raise the money and donate it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. Almost $200,000 is raised.

Response Level: Epic

Step 6. Carreon expands his lawsuit against The Oatmeal to include the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. He’s suing charities to harass a web cartoonist!

Douchebag Level: OFF THE SCALE

You do realize what this means, don’t you? Suddenly, lawyer jokes are obsolete, and ordinary shysters look angelic next to Mr Carreon. All the lawyer jokes will have to be changed to Carreon jokes. Lawyers everywhere will at last be able to defend themselves with the simple words, “At least I’m not Charles Carreon,” and we’ll all stagger back at the enormity of the gulf between “lawyer” and “Carreon” and say, “No, no, you’re not — I think I love you, you sweet person, you.”

Either that, or all the lawyers will see Carreon as a new standard of douchebaggery, and they’ll rise to meet it by, for instance, including baby-punching in their billable hours.

Also, the homophonic properties of Mr Carreon’s name are perfect.

How about some good news to cheer you up on a Monday morning?

Gregory Paul has been looking at trends in the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and other polling data. We’re behind in some countries (I’m looking at you, USA), ahead in others, but the overall trend is good: atheism is winning out around the world.


(Note: These are predominantly ISSP results. Solid lines indicate atheists from absolutist to marginal, empty spaces to the right are theists from marginal to absolutist, and results for western and eastern Germany are combined proportional to their populations. Differences between the 1998 and 2008 ISSP results are indicated by dashed segments.)

We’re growing!

It appears that Ameroatheists have expanded by 10 million since the turn of the century—representing about a million a year, and about a third of overall population growth, to a total of 60 million out of more than 300 million. Atheism has made large gains among the young, while congregation size has dropped by as much as a fifth. Even so, the ISSP results confirm that the United States is still the most theistic prosperous democracy—yet not nearly as theistic as some Second and Third World countries.

A multinational waxing of atheism and waning of theism seems to be occurring, and may well be universal in Western countries. The increase in Western atheism appears to be continuing a long-term trend that probably started in the 1800s, if not earlier, and has accelerated since World War II with no signs of slowing down, if the ISSP results are correct. Losses in theism have occurred in both Protestant and Catholic nations, albeit with the latter somewhat more resistant to losses. In most Western nations, the religious right is already weak, and in the few where it is a strong minority, it is losing ground. Demographically driven by a growing loss of piety among youth, the rise of secularism in the advanced democracies is in accord with the socioeconomic dysfunctionality hypothesis that predicts and observes that improving levels of financial and economic security in middle class majorities strongly suppresses interest in supernatural deities.

That last bit is what worries me. Atheism thrives on economic stability; religion prospers when people are desperate and ignorant. Here in the US, the theocratic party, the Republicans, have no interest in keeping the majority in good economic shape — they’d like to destroy the social safety net and increase economic inequity. I see an awfully strong correlation there between religiosity and economy-wrecking.

The thesis that popular secularism is dead, or at least dying, is clearly false. In the most advanced and successful nations, it is religion that is in the demographic ICU. Also entirely discredited is the premise that religion is universal to the human condition, like language—while theists vary from constituting nearly entire populations to less than a third, verbal skills are nearly uniform across the board. Demographic extrapolations that suggest fast-reproducing fundamentalists are on a statistical course to outgrow low-fertility secularists are proving flawed because they fail to account for mass nonchalant conversion due to modernity.

Yes! I have never been concerned about all the people moaning about how the fundies and Muslims are outbreeding us — I see them as busily making minds that will be ripe for reason and knowledge.

Why I am an atheist – Christopher Bonds

I am an atheist primarily because I know of no evidence for any gods. I think that gods were invented by the human mind at some point in our evolutionary development. It was probably at the time when human intellect began to develop concepts arising from the elementary awareness of cause and effect, which I think behaviorists call conditioning. Some things happened seemingly randomly or without explanation or cause. When humans came up with the idea that events in nature could bring good or bad fortune to them, they probably attributed them to some unseen forces or power. Memory played a role as well. One thing that certainly helped develop the idea of spirits is the power of memory of persons close to us who died but whose presence lingers. In times when it was hard to distinguish what was going on in our heads from the events of the external world, memories and ghosts and spirits must have seemed quite real. Although we have evolved culturally since our first appearance as a species, our brains seem to be built pretty much the same was as our earliest H. sapiens ancestors. The reasoning function of the prefrontal cortex is a Johnny-come-lately. It seems to have progressed in fits and starts, but over centuries it has given us science, the best tool we have for understanding ourselves and the universe in which we live. Science has not as yet found any evidence for the existence of gods. Today’s struggle between faith and reason is really a battle between the more modern part of our brains and the more archaic areas that evolved to help us survive in a vastly different and more hostile environment.

[Read more…]

A conversation about TAM

A subset of Freethoughtbloggers and the Queen Skepchick got together on Google+ to discuss the recent contretemps. The people who participated were me, Al Stefanelli, Daniel Fincke, Greg Laden, Ian Cromwell, Jason Thibeault, Ophelia Benson, Rebecca Watson, and Stephanie Zvan.

Here’s how I introduced it:

The latest controversy to embroil freethoughtblogs is over the James Randi Educational Foundation’s big yearly meeting, The Amazing Meeting, or TAM for short. After DJ Grothe, the president of the JREF, announced his concern that, despite the fact that he’d done a fine job of making the roster of speakers well balanced, at roughly half and half men and women, the registration of women in the meeting was significantly down from last year. What to do?

Well, he could have asked big boosters of TAM, like Skepchick and Freethoughtblogs, to rally together and help get more women involved, as Skepchick has done every year. Instead, in a bizarre twist, he basically accused Rebecca Watson and a certain blog network, ours, of scaring women away with our horrible stories of sexual harassment. He also denied that sexual harassment had ever occurred, a story that has been steadily unraveling over the last few weeks.

Then, to make matters worse, a number of poorly informed people have been ranting that we, that is people like Rebecca Watson and Stephanie Zvan, want to “harm TAM” — another weird claim that ignores the history of our involvement with skeptical and atheist meetings.

So the point of our session today is to clear the air, get our position expressed, and maybe vent a little frustration.