Inviting men and boys to join the fight

Emma Watson, who played Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, said some words at the UN on Saturday.

In her role as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, the British actress andHarry Potter star gave an impassioned speech at UN headquarters Saturday, inviting men and boys to join the fight to end gender inequality:

“I want men to take up this mantle,” Watson urged. “So their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too.”

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The creep list

PZ has some new information from Alison Smith. It’s…not exculpatory of Michael Shermer, to put it mildly.

It wasn’t actually the next day that I left Shermer’s room. The entire amount of time that passed between me asking someone to come get me after leaving the party and me calling again to say please come get me I need help and don’t know where I am was around two hours. Some commenters seem to think that I had some kind of morning after regret or something, but in actual fact I was calling it rape immediately.

The other part is – me asking Shermer to be on that panel for the Sex workshop wasn’t a reaction based upon victimization (like, it wasn’t that I was pushing aside how I felt about him in order to accomplish something; and I wasn’t in denial).

It was incredibly calculated – because I knew for an absolute fact that his views on consent were different from the other panelists. [Read more…]

In this video, you sexually violate a number of unsuspecting women

In another part of the forest entirely – a nasty guy who is nothing to do with atheism or secularism (how refreshing!) has made one sexist video too many, and received pushback from Laci Green in an open letter.

You may have noticed that your latest video “Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank” has garnered considerable negative attention.  In this video, you sexually violate a number of unsuspecting women on the street, many of whom are visibly confused and upset at being touched by you without permission.  One woman even says “I don’t like that!” while you proceed to laugh and touch her more.  In “How to Make Out with Strangers”, made a year ago, you pressure women on camera to make out with you – again, many of whom are visibly uncool with it.  Confused and caught off guard, they painfully follow through with your requests, clearly uncomfortable.  In “How to Pick Up Girls with a Lasso”, you physically restrain women on the street with lassos – many of whom look alarmed to be restrained by a stranger.

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Probably irritated by exaggerations

A comment on Annals of dismissive contempt by a first-time commenter calling himself Vincent:

Unless you waterboard them, you cannot “make” someone drink. So, one can never say “he made me drink” without being a hypocrite. That is what Dawkins was talking about, probably irritated by exaggerations like “plying a woman with alcohol”, “sexual predator” and “meat market”. Predators kill, market is where you buy stuff, meat is dead. The use of exaggerations to amplify emotional impact is a sure sign of lack of otherwise convincing arguments. I consider that people old enough to drink alcohol are mature enough to stop drinking before getting themselves into trouble. [Read more…]

Big drums

A friend on Facebook alerted me to an item:

COME ONE, COME ALL TO A PROTEST ON SEPTEMBER 27, 2014 AT THE GATES OF ST. PAUL’S UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO, WATERLOO, ONTARIO, CANADA.. A FINAL ATTEMPT WAS MADE TODAY TO CHANGE THE MINDS OF THE UNIVERSITY PUNDITS. MOONSTONE REMAINS OUT OF THE POWWOW.

BELOW IS THE MEDIA RELEASE, THAT WENT OUT THIS EVENING.

On July 21, 2014, the Thunderbird Women’s Big Drum Group and their drum Moonstone, were invited to participate in a powwow hosted by St. Paul’s University College, University of Waterloo on September 27, 2014. The participation would take the form of sitting in the main arbour with the men’s big drum groups. The invitation was subsequently rescinded by the University, when at a secret meeting held on August 26, 2014, witnesses reported that if Coast Tsimshian Elder, Shannon Thunderbird, keeper of Moonstone came to the powwow she would be “forcibly removed or worse.” The threat was issued by Mark Lavallee, Chippewa Traveller’s Men’s Big Drum. Twenty-four hours earlier, when Elder Thunderbird requested to come to the meeting to speak for herself and her drum, she was ordered by a University administrator to stay away. [Read more…]

Guest post: 12 kittens and 35 cows

Originally a comment by canonicalkoi on The arbiter of what feminists should or shouldn’t get upset about, with added video.

I wish someone could explain something to me. Nugent has 12 kittens and 35 cows over tone and language. He gets extremely prissy about language, about how it’s not right to demonize people over things that they haven’t been convicted of in a court of law. So, here’s where I’m confused:

On Nugent’s website, he has a list, a directory if you will, of atheist/secular songs. All well and good. One of those songs is by the extremely talented and personal favorite of mine, Tim Minchin. The Pope Song. C’mon, you know the one that starts out, “Fuck the motherfuckers…..” It seems a strange choice for Nugent to list since it’s chock full o’ outrage (rightfully so). It’s a good song, but let’s look at this. It deals with:

A. Calling the Pope to account for something he was never charged with in a court of law.
B. Equating him and anyone who supports him with a rapist.
C. Equates anyone who ever covered up for an abuser with a rapist.
D. Deals with assuming the stories of all child-abuse victims whether or proven in court or not, are facts.
E. Uses naughty language that could, in no way, be considered conciliatory.
F. Expresses extreme outrage. [Read more…]

Everything they can to pin hateful labels

Another one, this time from Dan Arel: one Patheos blogger disagreeing with another Patheos blogger (Adam Lee, who dared to criticize Dawkins (and got called a liar by him as a reward).

Arel doesn’t use punctuation much so what he writes can be hard to follow. With that warning –

Much like Lee, I came to atheism on my own and Dawkins played a major role in my activism, but unlike Lee, I am not ditching Dawkins for simple disagreements.

Lee would most likely argue that these are not simple disagreements however as he seems to have joined the ranks of Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers in doing everything they can to pin hateful labels to Dawkins, instead of dissecting what he has said or simply realize that I cannot agree with everyone on every issue and that sometimes I will disagree with some of my favorite people.

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The arbiter of what feminists should or shouldn’t get upset about

Michael Nugent has a terrible, patronizing, let-me-fix-this post chastising Adam Lee for his article quoting Dawkins’s recent forays into anti-feminism. I’m very tired of Michael’s self-appointed let-me-fix-this posturing, and I was going to ignore the post, but then I saw on Twitter that Adam had responded so I clicked on the link, which turned out to be to a comment – a very good comment – on Michael’s post.

You said that you were going to address the question of where my article was “inaccurate”, but the majority of your article is a complaint about various choices of wording I made, the thrust of which is that it’s unfair for me to use emotive language in support of the conclusions I advocate. I reject this. [Read more…]

Sleepwalking towards that feared world

Adam Lee is taken aback at Richard Dawkins’s comment on Jerry Coyne’s blog post yesterday (the one about Adam’s Comment is Free article about Dawkins).

I saw that comment yesterday, and I saw that it was bad, but I didn’t have time to do it justice. Adam has done it justice; read his post. I want to say a thing or two about it myself.

Thank you, Jerry.

I long ago declared that I would not wish to go on living if I found myself in a world dominated by people who no longer care about what’s true and express open contempt for factual evidence. Either a 1984 world where the Party in power is the sole arbiter of what is “true” and enforces it with violence; or a world where truth is whatever society deems it to be, regardless of evidence, and where dissenters are ruthlessly punished by vitriolic abuse or ostracism rather than violence.

I fear we are sleepwalking towards that feared world, where people shun evidence and despise facts: a world where dogma is king, emotion is queen and evidence is exiled; and where dissent from orthodoxy is suppressed by verbal if not physical jackboots.

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