Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of honeybadgers

The ‘Honeybadgers’, a group of women affiliated with the MRA brigade at A Voice For Men, infiltrated the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, applying for a booth by pretending to be somehow affiliated with nerd culture, instead — they were Fake Geek Girls, for real (although at least one of them authors a webcomic, so not totally fake)! Apparently they set up a booth promoting Gamergate and their version of ‘ethics’ and being anti-censorship before derailing at least one panel on Women in Comics with a lot of “What about the Menz?” and victim blaming.

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Going ionic, dissociating all over the place

dissociation

Everyone is breaking up with everyone else, and it’s a good thing. Secular Woman states how silly it is to dissociate someone from an organization they don’t belong to, but goes on to point out that persistent pleas for civility are often used to displace concerns about more serious issues, as a way to silence dissent from the status quo, and that maybe we ought to be more concerned about the prolonged campaigns of harassment against women in the atheist community.

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A weird, strange, sad argument against gay marriage

shotgun-wedding

A different group has sided against gay marriage before the Supreme Court: gay men who are married to women. This is not at all unusual, that homosexual individuals enter into a marriage contract with heterosexuals, and in fact it’s actually what the right-wing wants to promote, by compelling people to only have heterosexual relationships. As is always the case when one group wants to deny rights to another, though, their arguments are sad and petty. The gay-men-married-to-straight-women have to actually argue that allowing gay-men-married-to-gay-men would somehow mean their relationships would be excluded. It always boils down to some group claiming that removing a restriction from another group is exactly the same as adding constraints on them.

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The Sad Puppies are goddamned idiots

amazingstories

The Sad Puppies are what the gomers who undermined the Hugo nominations are calling themselves. I’m interested in seeing how they defend themselves…or was, until I read their arguments. And all I can conclude is that these are really pathetic, brainless people.

For example, this guy Brad R. Torgersen. He tries to explain their cause by first setting up an analogy.

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Someday, it might be safe to drink coffee in Minnesota again

cuppajoe

Perhaps the memory of this story will fade. Or perhaps our esteemed state legislature will get around to making ejaculating in other people’s coffee without their knowledge illegal. Maybe. The state actually has a case like this, with a man secretly ejaculating into a co-worker’s coffee, but the initial charges were dismissed because, apparently, that’s not illegal in Minnesota.

The original charges against Lind were dismissed in November by Ramsey County District Judge Patrick Diamond, who said the crime required nonconsensual touching of the victim’s intimate parts.

The city of New Brighton then charged Lind with a misdemeanor charge of engaging in lewd or indecent behavior in her workspace at the Beisswengers hardware store in New Brighton.

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@ChrisWarcraft coming to Morris

Beautifully-Unique-Sparkleponies_Chris-Kluwe

On April 17, Chris Kluwe will be speaking at the Morris Area High School at PFLAG’s Break The Silence day. Good news! This area is dreadfully homophobic — the most interaction town had with gown was the time the student body elected a gay man to homecoming queen, and just try getting local schools to attend UMM plays that touch on gay issues — and I’m actually impressed that he gets to speak at the high school. Normally the district would melt down at the slightest hint of a pro-tolerance speaker.

Gender Workshop: How to think like you’re not

Redundant posts are redundant

Except when they aren’t.

Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.

I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.

I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.

So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not.  [Read more…]