The King of YouTube's Atheist Slime Pit

There are so many triggers here I wouldn't know where to start in listing them all.

From Manboobz:

Amanda’s story illustrates what can happen to young girls when sexualized images of them floating around online, whether they’ve put these pictures up themselves in a moment of poor judgement or whether someone has stolen them from password-locked private photo albums, or whether someone has surreptitiously taken an “upskirt” or “down-the-blouse” or some other compromising picture of them in public. This is the sort of damage that things like the Jailbait and Creepshots subreddits can do to young girls. This is why it’s so important that things like these subreddits be shut the fuck down.

Sadly, even after her suicide, Amanda remains the target of bullies and assholes online.

One of these assholes? The MRA and atheist videoblogger and all-around terrible person known to the world as The Amazing Atheist, whom we first met when he had a Reddit meltdown and started spewing misogynistic abuse at his detractors. Now he’s spitting on Amanda’s memory.

It's possible a lot of atheists strictly identify in the dictionary sense, philosophically, but want nothing to do with the movement.  Who can blame them?   There's some real problems in this sub-culture.  It's not just one blogger.  The people who passively observe and don't say anything share part of the blame.

Source.


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Gay is the Word

I was in the gym tonight when Toronto Archbishop Tom Collins came on the television.  The Ontario government is currently fine tuning proposed anti-bullying legislation, which of course affects catholic schools.  The legislation would allow students to form anti-bullying, anti-homophobic groups, sometimes known as Gay-Straight Alliances.  The issue right now seems to be the use of the word gay in the groups name.  I had a hard time understanding this at first, but that's it. (Well, that and the existence of the groups themselves.) The government wants to head off the obvious tactic of the local catholic boards disallowing students to use the word gay in their group name. Ironically, such a rule would in itself be a form of bullying.

Collins struck me as glib and narcissistic. He claims these groups and their name amounts to religious persecution. Perhaps he should read some of Amnesty International's reports to put his suffering in better context. The Cardinal thinks the word gay is a distraction in the process of stopping the bullying of gay teens. I don't think they're even trying any more to sound logical.

Collins was followed by a female trustee with a spacey smile who informed us that we can't very well accept the title Gay Straight Alliance because it is a political movement which seeks to inject politics in a political way. We know how much Catholics hate that kind of thing.  Out Heroding Herod, she added that it was an American political thing.

At that point I had had enough and walked away from the television.  I spent the rest of the night thinking thoughts that would most certainly constitute persecution of the Cardinal's religious liberty.  I couldn't help it.

Collins, many trustees, and some Conservative MPPs maintain that the local boards should be able to deal with this on their own.  I think this legislation would be an obvious sign that this has not, or will not happen.  It would have been nice if the Southern American States had desegregated themselves without the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and  fairly aggressive enforcement by federal law agencies.  In retrospect that collision was inevitable.  It's not an entirely unfair comparison.

As far as Alberta goes, i'm pretty sure this controversy is coming our way.  And in the past the PC Party Government has sided with religious groups against those who are being discriminated against.


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Dan Savage and the Economist

A few days ago the Economist magazine ran a short opinion piece on the Dan Savage "bible bullshit" speech and the predictable reaction that followed from the religious right.  A good number of atheist and humanist bloggers that I read were not entirely happy with the Economist's comments.  I think this is because they focused on the opening paragraphs where the writer tries to make an issue of Savage's style, rather than the real issue of substance which is the bullying of Gay youth.

But the last paragraph of the piece really lays it out well:

Mr Savage's apology did not stop the outrage machine. Some seem to have taken particular delight in hurling Mr Savage's epithets—bully and basher (of Christians and Christianity, rather than gays)—back at him. The American Thinker harrumphs, "Evidently, bullying is one of those things that is defined by the 'victim'." Well, yes: in fact it is. Bullying is the strong picking on the weak, not the other way around (the other way around is satire). One could make the argument that in the case of Mr Savage's speech, he was the strong one, and the high-school students were "victims", but that would be weak tea indeed. Mr Savage is one person, not a movement, and of course those students whom he gave the vapours were free to leave. Not everyone has such freedom. Gay teens, not Christian teens, kill themselves at higher rates than the general populace. Nobody calls Christianity an abomination. One blogger accused Mr Savage of "Christian-bashing" for pointing out the Bible's position on slavery. A writer for a Focus on the Family site said that "using profanity to deride the Bible...is obviously a form of bullying and name-calling." In fact it is neither: Mr Savage, however intemperate his language, was arguing, not name-calling. That is a crucial distinction, and one that too often eludes the showily devout. If the Bible is in fact the word of God it can survive a few arguments about context and application.

And then there's a letter writer's acerbic comment about the piece:

The reason the psycho end of the right wing is *really* angry at Dan Savage isn't over the one word "Bullshit". The actual reason the psycho end of the right wing is angry at Dan Savage are the three words he brought into public consciousness: "It Gets Better".

There shouldn't be any doubt as to who the real victims are in this debate.


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