The best disinfectant

Phil Plait writes about Surly Amy’s art installation at CFI-Los Angeles in Slate today.

For having the temerity to say that women should have equal rights, opportunities, and treatment as men, she gets a tsunami of hatred, venom, death threats, rape threats, and more. It would be enough to break down hardened people, and it has. But not Amy. She manages to not only deal with this horrifying onslaught but also turn it into art.

I mean that literally. With the help of several other atheist and skeptical women, Amy has created an exhibit called A Woman’s Room Online: a free-standing 8×10 foot room that is being installed in the L.A. Center for Inquiry office. It will look superficially much like any office in which a woman might work, with the usual accoutrements. [Read more…]

Kansas City here she comes

Well it sounds like something from the Onion, but the Standard is a real paper. A flight from LA to NY had to make an unscheduled landing in Kansas City in order to boot off a passenger who wouldn’t stop singing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

Well, yeah. Five hours of that? That would be baaaaaaaaaaaad.

The domestic service from Los Angeles to New York was diverted to Kansas City so marshals could remove the woman from the plane because she kept singing the song repeatedly.

The singing began shortly after the flight took off, but around halfway through it became too much for fellow passengers and staff to bear.

The woman was filmed being escorted from the plane, in handcuffs, still belting out the 1992 number one hit.

It would be too much to bear, definitely.

It’s time to change the outlook

The Detroit Free Press reports on the protest in support of Barbara Webb.

More than 100 people attended Sunday’s nearly two-hour rally.

“We value human diversity,” said Amanda Ruud McVety, 29, of Birmingham, a 2002 Marian graduate who helped organize the rally to coincide with morning masses at nearby St. Regis Catholic Church. “It’s time to show that — through actions and through words. It’s time we look at (homosexuals) as equals and not shame them for who they are.”

[Read more…]

Unfire that pregnant teacher

There’s a petition you can sign urging Marian High School to unfire Barbara Webb.

STAND WITH BARB WEBB! We demand that Marian High School rethinks its policies and support LGBT staff and students

Barb Webb was recently forced to resign as a teacher at Marian High School in Michigan because she is pregnant and starting a family with her female partner. Webb was a well-loved teacher at the school – having been a chemistry teacher and volley ball coach for 9 years. There has been outrage from students, parents and alumni at a school that prides itself in ‘enabling young women to value human diversity and live responsible lives and inspiring its students to ‘Empower, Explore, Excel’ [Read more…]

How to ask rape survey questions

The deniers and minimizers are starting to succeed in training me to see deniers and minimizers where they aren’t. Like in this tweet from The New Republic:

The numbers on how many women are raped each year might be off by more than 88%: http://on.tnr.com/Yue1dc

I assumed they meant what Sommers would mean by tweeting that. Wrong. By “off” they meant too low, while Sommers of course always means too high.

The article by Claire Groden: [Read more…]

An effort to put women back in their “place”

Soraya Chemaly explains some reasons Cathy Young is wrong to say that men get harassed online more than women do.

In addition to the difficulty of comparing data sets of varying size and depth, however, comparing male versus female online “harassment” is problematic for many reasons.

First, as Young points out, women’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

[Read more…]

Stand by your man

So now Janay Rice is saying she’s pissed off at all these meddling people who got her husband kicked out of the NFL. She did a post on Instagram saying so:

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend. But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass of for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!

[Read more…]

“Failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.”

Ok so catching up on the Ray Rice thing, which I didn’t follow before – I just watched the “apology” video. It’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.

First he apologizes to the bosses, the fans, the kids – “everyone that was affected by this situation that me and my wife were in.”

Situation? They were in? He punched her in the head and knocked her out.

That’s a terrible beginning, and it doesn’t get one bit better. He goes on that way for six and a half minutes. It’s all about him. He talks about generalities without ever actually admitting to what he did, without ever mentioning it, without ever saying the words, and using “we” and “us” the whole time as if both of them had punched Janay Palmer in the head.

When you’ve seen this thing happen with me and my wife. People asked questions about what happened. Sometimes in life you will fail, but – I won’t call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.

He actually said that. Dude, you’re not the one who got knocked down, she is, and she was knocked down by you. To the floor. You dragged her out of the elevator and dropped her face-down on the floor outside.

Me and Janay wish we could take back 30 seconds of our life.

No. Just the one. Just Ray Rice, not the woman he punched unconscious.

People told him “You’ll get through it.” He chokes up. “One thing you gave me is trust.” He gets all maudlin and emotional…about himself. It’s disgusting.

  • “I’m working on our relationship. I have Janay’s best interests.”
  • “Just wanted to thank my supporters.”
  • “Showing us a better way. Bringing us together.”
  • “We were able to get through this. To let y’all know – we’re still the same people.”
  • “I think my wife has something to say – we were in this together.”

And what does she say? “I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night.” She does deeply regret being so annoying that he was forced to punch her in the head and knock her out.

I’m just fucking gobsmacked and disgusted and enraged.

You know what? One of the things we’re constantly told when we wonder why schools and universities spend so much money and time on football is that it builds character and wonderful social skills.

BULLSHIT.

A year in jail, $225,000; a year in school, $8,000

The library came up with that book I told you about last June, Nell Bernstein’s Burning Down the House, about the US’s horrendous and out of step with other developed countries way of dealing with juvenile offenders by throwing them in jail for years. I’ll share some items.

On average, we spend $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person in a state facility – more than eight times the $10, 652 we invest in her education. In many states, this gap is even wider. In California, for example, the cost of a year in a youth prison reached a high of $225,000, while education spending dipped to less than $8,000. [p 6]

And what’s the payoff? Children turned into repeat criminals. Locking children up does nothing to rehabilitate them and does much to wreck them. [Read more…]