Laurie Penny says we’re winning.
There’s a culture war happening right now. It’s happening in games, in film, in journalism, in television, in fiction, in fandom. It’s happening online, everywhere. And everywhere, sexists, recreational misogynists and bigots are losing.
They are losing, and they don’t know why.
I don’t think they are losing – unless by “losing” she means “failing to drive all the women, especially the feminist women, out.” [Read more…]
Good news – Sam Harris is ready to rock & roll.
Sam Harris @SamHarrisOrg · 21m
I have a draft of my response to my feminist detractors. Just going to run it by my wife, my mother, and Martha, my copy editor.
Fabulous start. We’re not colleagues, we’re not people with reasoned disagreements – no, we’re his “feminist detractors.” I guess he’s so important and correct that there’s no such thing as reasoned disagreement with him, there’s only detraction.
But at least he knows lots of women, so that’s reassuring. He has a wife, a mother, and a copy editor.
A Pennsylvania kid age 14 poses for a photo in which a statue of Jesus appears to be giving him a blow job, and posts the photo on Facebook (as one does).
Christina Hoff Sommers is bragging about being at the top of Amanda Marcotte’s list of seven anti-feminist women in Salon.
Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers · 10h
Cathy Young & I at top of SALON enemy list. We are both pro-choice, pro-LGBT,libertarian-leaning feminists. Our crime? We check feminist facts.
No, that’s not it. If she just did that I’d be all for it. Fact-checking is good. She does much more than that. Amanda summarizes a little of it: [Read more…]
It’s good that Sam Harris isn’t at all smug or condescending.
Sam Harris @SamHarrisOrg · 5h
Alright, fans of pointless controversy, you win. My next blog post will address my alleged sexism and misogyny. #EstrogenVibe
God forbid he should just look at what he’s quoted as saying, and think about it, and realize the implications of it for half of all human beings, and do something other than sneering at people who object. Hell no. Listen up, peons: he had a best-seller, so he is better than you. End of story.
Here’s an explanation for the hard of thinking.
There’s a difference between taking a claim seriously and asserting that it’s true.
There’s a difference between not expressing incredulity about a claim and asserting that it’s true.
There’s a difference between finding claims credible and asserting that they’re true. [Read more…]
This is the kind of thing (and maybe the actual thing) Jessica Meier must have been seeing, to think there’s ” too much money to be made playing the victim”:
Barbara A. Drescher As far as wanting it to stop, the attention and money (yes, there is money involved in appearing to be a victim–lots of it) must be pretty attractive, not to mention the addictive sense of outrage.
Isn’t she supposed to be some kind of skeptic? I know she used to work for the JREF until she…stopped working there. What on earth would make a skeptic credulous enough to think there is lots of money in “appearing to be a victim”? What money?
It’s just batshit, that kind of thing. No, there is not Lots of Money in talking about sexual harassment and the assholes who defend it. There really really isn’t.
There’s the new chapter of the long-running serial “University invites Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak and then…Tune in next Thursday to find out what happens.” This time it’s Yale, and its William F. Buckley, Jr. Program.
Her speech is titled “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West”
Sigh. That’s not a good start. [Read more…]
So the approach is going to be to pretend that talking about sexual harassment is exactly the same thing as making a formal, criminal accusation of rape – is that it?
That seems to be Dawkins’s approach as of today at least.
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · 10h
Raping a drunk woman is appalling. So is jailing a man when the sole prosecution evidence is “I was too drunk to remember what happened.”
This is great. It starts with a powerful, inspirational talk by Dawkins in 2006, that changed a lot of minds about religion and related subjects.
That speech was a critical point for a great many people, spurring them to read TGD and other atheist books, to reevaluate their beliefs and to ask questions they’d not asked before – to seek answers they mightn’t have even known were possible to find. Perspectives were changed, as was the social landscape of the internet, not to mention many “real” communities: homes, towns, perhaps countries.
Now, the blogger says, Dawkins needs that kind of experience himself. [Read more…]