In an opinion piece in a Turkish newspaper, Melis Alphan considers the ongoing national debate on the appropriate clothing for women — the veil, for instance, was once imposed on women as a marker to distinguish them from prostitutes and slaves. What’s interesting, in particular, is that she has a view that the West is more liberal than we really are.
I don’t expect to win this one: it’s gotten the attention of github, the core of the dudebro universe, and it’s already gone far in the direction of delusion, with swarms of self-righteous gamer goons rushing to vote for their bias. The poll asks, What do you think is at the heart of GamerGate? (and like all badly designed polls, uses choices to split the vote). Here’s the status so far:
And this is right after the article tells you to go read a summary written by the GamerGate goons which starts like this:
We’ve got years of social justice ideologies, largely radical-feminist rhetoric, once thought safely contained within small blogging communities such as Tumblr, becoming more and more prevalent within games reporting.
How do you look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you are willing to so openly condemn “social justice”? Isn’t it also clear that what bothers these guys most is feminism?
Go vote. Despair that you’re outnumbered, but just remember: you’re atheists. You’ve always been outnumbered. You’ve also always been right.
Robyn Pennacchia writes about how the non-bros of progressive communities can be just as bad as the dudebros we spot so easily — she’s mainly addressing the alt-lit community and Stephen Tully Dierks, but she mentions the recent paroxysms in the atheist community as well — and she answers the question about how come just about every time I hear about a new and interesting progressive group, it turns out to be in the context of blatant sexism or sexual assault. It’s because it’s harder to police your own than others.
You people exceeded our goal in less than 24 hours!
I guess I’ll be meeting some of the Ada Initiative people at Skepticon this year.
Uh-oh. The Ada Initiative has piece about me, now. With pictures. I should have sent them a collection of George Clooney headshots.
My personal Ada Initiative fund drive is now over, and I’ve transferred all the money donated in the last couple of weeks, less the price of taking my wife out to dinner. You good people donated…
We’re off to a good start, because the fund drive at the organization continues for 8 more days, and the Ada Initiative is offering a little reward: if we can bring that total up to $5000, they are going to teach an Ally
Skills Workshop at Skepticon in November!
If you can chip in, do so directly now: click on the little button below, which will flag your donation as part of the Skepticon campaign. I’m actually most interested in running up the number of donors, to demonstrate the breadth of support, so any amount is excellent — go ahead, donate $1. It would make me very happy to see that goal of $5000 reached with 5000 donations (it would also make everyone happy if some billionaire donated $1,000,000 with one click. Wouldn’t complain at all. Really, any donation is good.)
Oh, and look: they’ve just done a profile of Stephanie Zvan, who’s also urging people to help out.
A woman pilot from the UAE led air strikes against ISIS. Brains were conflicted at Fox News. On the one hand, dropping bombs always makes them happy, but on the other, they’d rather good ol’ Merkins were dropping them. On the third hand, it was a chance to sneer at those regressive Mooslems who don’t let women even drive, but on the fourth hand, a woman was actually qualified to fly a powerful piece of high tech machinery.
I somehow stumbled across this essay from the great Molly Ivins on Camille Paglia. It made me happy.
This youtube comedian, Sam Pepper, made an awful little video of him startling women by pinching their butts (yeah, humor); the women look uncomfortable and unhappy with this inappropriate behavior, but Pepper giggles madly, so it was funny to someone. It was shocking, really, that he seemed to think distressing people was amusing.
So Laci Green wrote him an open letter — a very polite, too polite, letter describing what was objectionable, since he’s apparently not clever enough to see it himself, and asking him to stop (Ophelia linked to the letter yesterday).
You’ll never guess how Sam Pepper has responded.
