It is every mother’s worst nightmare to lose a child, and I have to feel Carla May Alcorn’s pain.
My sweet 16 year old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn went home to heaven this morning. He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck. Thank you for the messages and kindness and concern you have sent our way. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.
This is certainly not the time to take exception to the religious sentiments in her announcement. Except…
Scott Aaronson is clearly afflicted with the plight of the male nerd. He’s written a heartfelt comment about his misery as a young man.
Scalzi has made an announcement and revision.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on my personal feminism, in which I noted that while I can be considered a feminist on the fundamental level of “women are entitled to the same rights and privileges as men, with everything that implies in terms of access to education, economic opportunity and personal liberty,” I usually didn’t call myself one, for various and what I thought at the time were perfectly reasonable reasons.
Then 2014 happened, and those reasonable reasons now kind of feel like careful, rationalizing bullshit to me.
So, as an update to my thoughts on my personal feminism:
Hell yes, I’m a feminist.
I teach both human physiology and developmental biology — it would be entirely appropriate to ask my students to draw pictures of reproductive anatomy on an exam. Here’s a sample test in which a group of men were asked to demonstrate their knowledge of female anatomy with art work.
They basically failed.
The Atlantic has a long exposé of The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side. The leader of a Zen Buddhist group in New York has a long history of sexual harassment and abuse.
As you can see from the photo taken at the clinic, she was devastated by the experience.
It seems to me that there is a significant difference between maintaining internet anonymity to prevent being harassed, vs. anonymity used to enable harassment. But this distinction is routinely ignored, especially by the harassers, who just lump violating either into the category of the most sacrilegious of all internet violations, the total desecration of the holiest principle of all communication, doxxing. I suspect the only reason that “doxxing” has been elevated to such a sacred level of knee-jerk abhorrence is not out of some virtuous desire to protect the innocent, but entirely to protect the guilty.
So we now have a situation where there is a hierarchy of crimes, with “revealing the identity of a troll” at the very top of the list, followed by “giving a damn about social justice” just below that, and somewhere near the bottom, “threatening to rape and murder a woman and her family”. It’s upside down. It needs a polarity reversal.
Jamie Bernstein had to deal with a hypothetical, one that’s even better than the ticking time bomb scenario. This gentleman was wondering when it would be OK to rape someone, in response to this article on Skepchick, and he was straining hard to plop out a possible situation, and he came up with this one:
Both Alex and Heina have excellent articles on the association of religion with LGBTQ people. It’s an absurdity that Christianity accommodates both Fred Phelps and Marcella Althaus-Reid, telling us definitively what Jesus’ opinions on homosexuality were, and both of them giving completely contradictory answers. The problem is that Jesus and Mohammed and Moses are completely malleable imaginary authority figures who can be invoked to justify anything — Jesus simultaneously blesses the peacemakers and comes with a sword in that muddled book of myths, the Bible, so pacifists and warmongers are both happy to adopt his ‘philosophy’. It’s not at all surprising, then, that both queer folk and gay-haters happily quote their holy books to justify whatever the hell they believe.
But it’s dishonest. And it invalidates the holy books — they’re obviously just Rorschach blots for any gullible brain looking for an authoritarian fallacy to back up their bullshit.
