“Why aren’t there more women on YouTube?”

Wait wait wait wait. This was two months ago.

What the hell happened to her after that??

Update: Ok well I rushed this post before watching the whole short video, bad bad me. She hasn’t changed all that much. After a surprising beginning she says

Now I know people are going to leave me comments on this video saying how men on YouTube also get a lot of hate too, and I’m not trying to be a feminist, I never have said that, but be honest, I mean when’s the last time you’ve ever seen a man accused of sleeping their way to the top or when you’ve seen a man on YouTube be told that their videos are great on mute and they make great fapping material, come on.

Now I know I probably just made this sound awful but ladies who are out there listening to this, don’t leave me alone, make videos, speak your mind, because honestly, it’ll be harder to criticize whenever an outspoken woman is not such a rarity. I will support you, tweet me your videos, I will share them.

One: she should get a clue about what feminism actually is so that she can stop saying stupid things about feminism.

Two: she should get a clue about the outspoken atheist women who already are outspokenly speaking out so that she can stop claiming to be alone. She should also get a clue that videos are not the only possible medium for being outspoken; writing is also a fine old tradition, and many of us actually prefer reading to watching videos, because it’s much quicker and we can do it at our own pace instead of the video personality’s pace. She should also think hard about what her patron has done to drive outspoken women out of atheism.

St. Anne’s residential school

I’ve posted a lot about Irish industrial “schools” but not much about the Canadian version. That was negligent. From CTV News last January:

For the past year and a half, lawyer Fay Brunning has been fighting to get the federal government to hand over documents about the St. Anne’s residential school.

It’s a school that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a judge described as having the worst cases of abuse out of any residential school in Canada. Brunning, who represents survivors, says they were taken away from their parents at age five or six for 10 months a year. They were forced to eat vomit, subjected to sexual and physical abuse and put in an electric chair.

[Read more…]

This is to avoid possible conflicts

Ok so sports are mostly sex-divided – women and men mostly don’t play on the same teams, and when they do the word “mixed” is attached. There are moves to erode this at least in schools, and that’s a good thing. But humans are mildly sexually dimorphic, so one can see that there are reasons for sports to be dimorphic also.

Sports, but not games. Games don’t need to be dimorphic.

Or do they?

A user on Reddit’s Hearthstone community yesterday shared this image—from an announcement pagefor a Hearthstone qualifier taking place during Finland’s Assembly Summer 2014. What made “Karuta’s” post notable was a single, highlighted sentence: “The participation is open only to Finnish male players.”

That is, to state the obvious, a strange requirement for a Hearthstone tournament; and it makes the qualifier’s organisers, the Finnish eSports Federation, seem like childish boys in a treehouse, hanging a “no girls allowed” sign on their front door. Only, the qualifier is for for the IeSF World Championship, and it’s this global event that has stipulated the all-male line-up.

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The theocrats get started

More nostalgia – May 21 2012 when the bishops announced their lawsuit against the administration. Catholic News Service was there, slavering.

The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

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The bishops want more, and more, and more

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops – which aspires to tell the secular government what to do, and has much success in doing just that – has a campaign for religious libery, by which of course it means the USCCB’s liberty to tell everyone else what to do. It’s pushing for a “Health care conscience rights act” – and we all know what they mean by that. They want Congress to make it a law that they have a “right” to refuse to do their jobs if that involves medical treatments they choose to have “religious” objections to. They have a fact sheet on the subject.

The right of religious liberty, the First Freedom
guaranteed by our Constitution, includes a right to
provide and receive health care without being required to
violate our most fundamental beliefs.

No it does not. No no no. That is not a right. There is no “right” to practice medicine while refusing to do part of the job because of your made-up religious scruples. The right that matters here is the right to get medical treatment on equal terms with everyone else. There’s no “right” to refuse to serve people of color or LGBT people or women, for example. There’s no “right” to refuse to perform abortions or dispense contraceptives. [Read more…]

USCCB triumphans

Let’s have a blast from the past: Katha Pollitt in the Nation in December 2011.

Who matters more to President Obama, 271 Catholic bishops or millions upon millions of sexually active Catholic women who have used (or—gasp!—are using right this minute) birth control methods those bishops disapprove of? Who does Obama think the church is—the people in the pews or the men with the money and power? We’re about to find out. Some day soon the president will decide whether to yield to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has lobbied fiercely for a broad religious exemption from new federal regulations requiring health insurance to cover birth control with no co-pays—one of the more popular elements of Obama’s healthcare reform package. Talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

There’s already an exemption in the law for religious employers, defined as those whose primary purpose is the “inculcation of religious values,” who mostly serve and employ people of that faith, and qualify as churches or “integrated auxiliaries” under the tax code. That would be, say, a diocesan office or a convent or, for that matter, a synagogue, mosque or megachurch. Even this exemption seems unfair to me—why should a bishop be able to deprive his secretary and housekeeper of medical services? The exemption is based on the notion that people shouldn’t have to violate their religious consciences, but what makes his conscience more valuable than theirs? I would argue that it is less valuable—he’s not the one who risks getting pregnant.

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How did we get here?

So now I’m trying to work my way back through the history of RFRA, to try to figure out why it had so much support, from the left as well as the right.

The ACLU has a relevant article on its site…but it has no date, which is very unhelpful. But for what it’s worth…

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right that is guaranteed by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment clauses.[1] It encompasses not only the right to believe (or not to believe), but also the right to express and to manifest religious beliefs. These rights are fundamental and should not be subject to political process and majority votes. Thus the ACLU, along with almost every religious and civil rights group in America that has taken a position on the subject, rejects the Supreme Court’s notorious decision of Employment Division v. Smith. In Smith, Justice Scalia wrote that the accommodation of religion should be left “to the political process” where government officials and political majorities may abridge the rights of free exercise of religion.[2]

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Christian football

You know how team sports is the source of all virtue? Not so much.

Conor Friedersdorf talking to New York Times religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer

I was particularly intrigued by your article about Christians who play football–how they reconcile their faith, with its emphasis on humility and turning the other cheek, with their sport, where hitting opponents as hard as one can, to the point of trying to hurt them, is the norm. How was that article received in our football loving culture? Did any of the feedback help you to better understand the phenomenon? [Read more…]