Enormous splash damage

On the rest of Christian Munthe’s post on internet harassment in Sweden and in general.

The behaviour of the “net haters”, as the established term has come to be, is often equivalent or very close to criminal harassment, libel or threat. However, existing laws are obviously not constructed for a situation where these sort of patterns are the rule and occur in a systematic and coordinated (albeit perhaps not always in a specifically planned) way.

That’s an interesting point. So a one-off is criminal but a systematic campaign is free speech? [Read more…]

A thoughtful, fair, reasoned profile of the worst woman in the universe

This is a parody. I am being sarcastic. No bison were harmed in the making of this parody.

I have a question. It is this. Why does this one woman that I hate and that a lot of people hate get so much sexist abuse via the Internet? Why why oh why?

While this post applies to several prominent and outspoken women in the atheist community that I hate, I’m going to focus on this one woman because she seems to be the easiest target for most of the sexist online vitriol. Her name is Annabelle Jones and everybody hates her, including me. That makes it much easier for me to focus on her, because there is so much hate of her sloshing around out there already that I don’t have to think, I can just type. All those other prominent and outspoken women in the atheist community that I hate are just as bad though, don’t make any mistake about that. You know who they are. We all know who they are. We all hate them. Right? Right? We all hate those prominent outspoken women. Who doesn’t hate prominent outspoken women? I ask you.

First of all, let me say this. If you’re engaging in anything other than legitimate criticism of her arguments or behavior, I beg you to stop. Don’t be mean. It demonstrates to people who already despise atheists that atheists are immoral, and confirms their worst fears.

There, now that’s out of the way, I’ll explain why Annabelle Jones (whom I hate) gets so much sexist abuse. [Read more…]

A Call to Arms for Decent Men

by Ernest W. Adams

This piece was originally written as part of the Designer’s Notebook series on the game developers’ web site Gamasutra. However, they declined to publish it in its current form, and I refused to rewrite it. My thanks for permission to reprint it here. Please feel free to share or republish it with attribution. Contains strong language. 

Normally I write for everybody, but this month’s column is a call to arms, addressed to the reasonable, decent, but much too silent majority of male gamers and developers.

Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They’re as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They’re causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this.

Why us? Because it’s our job to see to it that a boy becomes a man, and we are failing.

When we were little boys we all went through a stage when we said we hated girls. Girls had “cooties.” They were silly and frilly and everything that a boy isn’t supposed to be. We got into this stage at about age seven, and we left it again at maybe 10 or 11.

Then puberty hit and, if we were straight, we actively wanted the company of girls. We wanted to “go with” them, date them, and eventually we wanted to fall in love and live with one, maybe for the rest of our lives. That’s the way heterosexual boys are supposed to mature, unless they become monks.

My point is, you’re supposed to leave that phase of hating girls behind. Straight or gay, you’re supposed to grow the hell up. [Read more…]