Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed.What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Saturday Vids: Good Girls Don’t Get Fat
- What a terrorist looks like
- Gendered Slurs and Chides in Politics
- Firefly unleashes her thunderbutt attack: Bidding farewell to Tao of Geek and looking for geeky women in web comics
- Not being honoured is not the same thing
- Remember "No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal?"
- Poll: churches to blame for suicides of LGBT youth
- Report Shows HIV-Positive Women in Chile Forcibly Sterilized, Denied Medical Treatment
- I hate the world
- Yet Another WisCon post or Why This Black Woman Isn’t Your Friend
- Confidence Without Jerkiness
- Is Atheism A Belief?
– "this video about Dr. Robyn Silverman’s book Good Girls Don’t Get Fat: How Weight Obsession is Messing Up Our Girls & How We Can Help Them Thrive Despite It should not be missed."
– “It takes some chutzpah to write a whole story about how you racial profiled someone, were totally wrong, and you’re not sorry at all.”
– “The fact that both men and women find this insult useful suggests that everyone has accepted sexism in politics and is willing to endorse and manipulate it to win.”
– “But with Naomi and Chris (the lead women of ToG) retiring, I’m realizing the fairly small selection of web comics that I read regularly will be lacking in geek fare that passes the Bechdel Test.”
– “To withdraw an undeserved honour is not to silence someone.”
– “Am I the only one who feels this way of addressing the chant bowdlerizes it?”
– “I’m glad to see that intolerant churches now have the finger pointed at them for the obvious role they play in creating an environment of fear, self-loathing and most of all, institutionalized condemnation of LGBTs that pushes vulnerable teens over the edge.”
– “This is misogyny, this is bigotry against people who are HIV-positive, this is ableism.”
– Violet Socks takes notes
– “Honestly, if you’ve bought into conflating a religion with the politics of some people in power in some places that ascribe to that religion then I’m going to doubt your critical thinking skills. Because some of America’s best known domestic terrorists have been white Christian men. Yet no one is advocating insulting and oppressing all the white Christian men as a result of the Oklahoma City bombings, the KKK, the Aryan Nation, or any of those abortion clinic bombings and assassinations. In fact last I checked they’re still being held up as the good guys by a lot of people.”
– “Over on Jill’s post, commentor Bagelsan responds to a guy who is taking the oh-so-boring-and-common line of thought that women (all of them!) like jerks.”
– “Is atheism a belief?
No.
I really wish I could just leave it at that.”
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
I just discovered the blog of the science consultant to The Big Bang Theory. Lots of fun.
I would have answered yes, but it’s a technical dispute. Greta Christina says that “If atheism is a belief, then any conclusion we can’t be 100-percent certain of is a belief. And that’s not a very useful definition of the word ‘belief.’ With the exception of certain mathematical and logic conclusions (along the lines of ‘if A and B are true, then C is true’), we don’t know anything with 100-percent certainty.” I’m fine with that meaning of belief: an opinion about reality, essentially. And yes, that means that everything we think about reality is a belief. I still find it a useful word when I consider matters epistemological (which is rarely at the moment, but there we are). It’s funny what people consider to be useful words and otherwise.
I’ve never really been totally on the side of Atheism is Nothing Like a Religion! It’s a position one takes on matters spiritual, or on dualism, etc. That’s something it has in common with religion. I certainly wouldn’t call it a religion, but a belief about religion or a belief about reality and similar framings is fine with me (as an atheist, and materialist, of the “the evidence suggests that the universe is a weird and unlikely place, but in ways unexplained by any religious framework I’ve heard of” variety).
Exactly, especially when with respect to religion there is an edifice of Belief versus simple beliefs about reality. Atheism is the lack of that special theistic Belief, but obviously it must involve what people believe or don’t believe about reality.
I sorta am, because I view Atheism as a reaction to/against imposed religion rather than a Belief system actively competing with religion. Religion is organised Belief, and despite a few conventions here and there, there’s nothing organised about Atheism.
That’s certainly a major point of difference, I agree: I think I move in such pluralistic circles religion-wise that I very rarely see the organised aspects of it and thus it is the fact of having a belief rather than the acting out and sharing of that belief that I think of when I think of religion as I personally encounter it.
I love love love the hitler-dolphin wordplay re confidence without jerkiness. I repeated it to a workmate earlier, and she laughed her head off.