Craziness spreads to Dartmouth with a “prostitute pumpkin”

November 9, 2017 • 11:30 am

Reader Thomas called my attention to a post by student Joseph Asch at Dartblog, the daily blog at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Note that Dartmouth is a very good school, considered one of the “Ivy League” institutions. Sadly, the virus of Pervasive Offense has spread to that school.

This is apparently the winner of a biology laboratory pumpkin-presentation contest for Halloween (the Bosco lab, by the way, works on fruit flies, and “MSB” is “molecular and systems biology”):

Look at that pumpkin closely. Can you see The Big Sin that was committed? Well, it looks like it has a woman’s hair, and because it was designed, like all Halloween pumpkins, to hold a light and glow in the dark, it was called “Lady of the night.” (The theme for the contest was “pumpkin of the night.”)

Yep, you got it, for “Lady of the night” is also a term for a prostitute. And so feathers got ruffled, and the Bosco Lab, via its head, had to apologize:

How much crazier can you get? The name wasn’t even intended to convey the notion of a prostitute, but some people snowflakes decided that the pumpkin above “disrespects women and glamorizes prostitution.” Are they kidding?

Apparently not.  The pumpkin is not offensive, was not designed to upset people, and only by stretching the meaning of the name can you even see any connection with prostitution. Moreover, putting what looks like Spanish Moss on a pumpkin to mimic a woman’s hairdo is not disrespectful to women. And truly, that’s an ugly face, so how on Earth could it glamorize prostitution?

Were I Bosco, I would have just said “stuff it” to those who asked for an apology. Those who were offended were clearly looking for any excuse to be offended. And it bothers me to see a fellow fly biologist cave in this way to Regressives. I’m surprised Bosco wasn’t forced to sit in the hall outside his lab wearing a conical paper hat and wearing a sign around his neck saying, “I carved a misogynistic pumpkin”.

 

NYT: Quebec’s new ban on the face veil is Islamophobic

November 9, 2017 • 10:15 am

The New York Times continues its move toward the Regressive Left (really, Lindy West as a columnist?) with the op-ed below (click to go to the piece). The author, Martin Patriquin, is a journalist from Montreal who writes for iPolitics.

The story is that in mid-October Quebec passed a law banning face coverings (not hijabs or niqabs, but any covering of the face itself, which would also include face-obscuring scarves, sunglasses, or anti-disease masks) for those receiving public services or working in government jobs. Face coverings are not banned in most other circumstances, but of course nearly all those affected by the law will be face-veiling Muslim women, which the article at the top estimates to be about 100 women in a province of about eight million Quebecers. The link in the first sentence of this paragraph leads you to this:

The Quebec provincial legislature on Wednesday barred people who are wearing face coverings from receiving public services or working in government jobs, a move that opponents criticized as unfairly singling out Muslims.

The law will prohibit public workers like doctors and teachers from covering their faces at work, and will effectively bar Muslim women who wear face veils from using public transportation or obtaining public health care services, although it will be possible to apply for exemptions.

Proponents said the legislation would ensure state religious neutrality, and Quebec’s minister of justice, Stéphanie Vallée, who sponsored the bill, said it would foster social cohesion.

But Canadian Muslim groups have long complained that the legislation, which languished for years before it was passed, 66 to 51, on Wednesday, would penalize Muslims, particularly in a province where few women wear face coverings.

But this bit is weird (from top article):

Quebec’s justice minister, Stéphanie Vallée, recently confirmed that the ban would include not only Muslim veils but accessories like sunglasses as well. This is ripe for satire similar to that inflicted on Quebec’s infamous language police, which must ensure that English on signs is less prominent than the French. It will be up to bus drivers to not only ferry passengers, but to measure the size and tint of their spectacles.

Now I don’t approve of the no-sunglasses on public transportation law, which doesn’t comport with any good reason I can see for the other bans, but in general the law seems reasonable, especially given Quebec’s long history, documented in the article, of laïcité: the kind of public secularism practiced in France. (France banned all public wearing of face veils in 2010.) But truly, if they really don’t allow women to cover their faces with sunglasses in government jobs, then they also must prohibit women from wearing sunglasses on public transportation!).

Patriquin, however, sees Islamophobia in this practice.

Canada is perhaps best known for its cheery multiculturalism and its equally cheery prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Yet Quebec, the province where Mr. Trudeau spent much of his life, last month put a ban on the face coverings worn by a handful of Muslim women, prompting a fractious debate over the place of non-Christian religions in Canada’s only French-speaking province.

The law says that anyone giving or receiving a public service must do so without a covered face for “security or identification reasons.” It doesn’t ban head scarves. It doesn’t include the words “niqab” or “burqa,” Muslim headdresses that cover all or part of the face. And public officials have gone to great lengths to argue that the vague and poorly written law is not anti-Muslim.

Still, it’s hard to escape the law’s anti-Muslim intent: Few people other than some Muslim women cover their faces. It will marginalize Muslims, especially women, who will feel scrutinized, if not persecuted, even if they wear only a head scarf.

The law does have roots in Quebec’s history and culture. Quebecers have chronic discomfort with public displays of religion. Many people in the province have bleak memories of the era before the secular strides of the Quiet Revolution in 1960 when the Roman Catholic Church dominated public life.

Perhaps some people who voted for this law did indeed have “anti-Muslim intent,” but in fact there are good secular reason—reasons having nothing to do with Islam—to show your face in the situations covered under the law. Imagine being taught by somebody whose face you couldn’t see, or be treated by a doctor or meeting a government official whose face is obscured! Yes, there may be few Muslim women who cover their faces, but surely there will be more, and at any rate what matters here is the principle of seeing your fellow citizens face to face in important situations, not the number of people affected. And no, I don’t want to be taught by someone wearing sunglasses that cover their face, so any face-covering in this kind of non-public situation seems odious.

I have to say that I don’t object to this law. Rather, I favor it, and for the same reason Christopher Hitchens favored the anti-veiling law of France passed seven years ago. Writing in Slate in 2010, Hitchens emphasized that the secular value of seeing someone’s face in certain situations overrides whatever religious arguments there are for veiling:

Ah, but the particular and special demand to consider the veil and the burqa as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know: Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females.

. . . Not that it would matter in the least if the Quran said otherwise. Religion is the worst possible excuse for any exception to the common law. Mormons may not have polygamous marriage, female circumcision is a federal crime in this country, and in some states Christian Scientists face prosecution if they neglect their children by denying them medical care. Do we dare lecture the French for declaring simply that all citizens and residents, whatever their confessional allegiance, must be able to recognize one another in the clearest sense of that universal term?

So it’s really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.

I dislike talk of “rights”, and of “right X trumps right Y”, as assertions of “rights” are not arguments. But what I believe Hitchens is talking about here are societal values: the utilitarian value in society of mandating seeing someone’s face in certain situation versus that of allowing religious people to dress in the way their religion dictates.

How I miss that man! At any rate, Patriquin apparently sees no public, secular value in seeing one’s face in these situations, and simply calls the bill anti-Muslim—a violation of the freedom of religion. Would he mind if his kids were taught by a teacher whose head was completely covered? Or that people with covered faces could walk into banks? Or if someone with a sack over their head testified in court? He argues this:

Religious face coverings are divisive, even among Muslims. Yet the freedom to practice one’s religion is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The National Council of Canadian Muslims, along with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and a Quebec Muslim who wears a veil, recently filed a legal challenge of the law, calling it a collection of “blatant and unjustified violations of freedom of religion.”

Quebec’s government has not only opened itself up to legal challenges, it has also put the province in the dubious company of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where the governments also dictate what a woman can or cannot wear.

Sorry, but there is no comparison here. Muslims are allowed to cover their faces under the new law, except in situations where it violates the “equality and openness” principle underscored by Hitchens. (I still object to the public transportation thing.) In Iran and Saudi Arabia, all women have to veil, and for religious rather than secular reasons. Further, the law in Quebec applies to both sexes, not just to women, and so is not nearly as gender-oppressive as what Saudi Arabia and Iran do. As Hitchens points out in his piece, the issue of whether Muslim “choose” to wear the veil is up for grabs, and my own view is that this kind of “choice” very often reflects familial and social pressure that begins at an early age.

Wildlife photos: the bizarre Horned Screamer

November 9, 2017 • 7:45 am

This tweet isn’t from a reader, but from wildlife illustrator Jessica Roux via Matthew Cobb.  When I first saw this, I thought that some wag had glued horns to a bird:

But no, the Horned Screamer is a real bird! Wikipedia says so!:

The horned screamer (Anhima cornuta) is a member of a small family of birds, the Anhimidae, which occurs in wetlands of tropical South America. There are three screamer species, the other two being the southern screamer and the northern screamer in the genus Chauna. They are related to the ducks, geese and swans, which are in the family Anatidae, but have bills looking more like those of game birds.

Neither Matthew nor I had any idea that such a bird existed:

Here’s a photo of three of them:

And a photo from Arkive:

And the range from the Cornell site; the purple area is the year round breeding and feeding range, and they don’t migrate:

Now as for that “horn”; it really is a horn (my emphasis)

The horned screamer is a massive 84–95 cm (33–37.5 in) long, 3.5 kg (7.7 lb) bird, with a small chicken-like bill. The upperparts, head, and breast are black, with white speckles on the crown, throat and wing coverts. There is a long spiny structure projecting forward from the crown. This structure is unique among birds and is not derived from a feather but is a cornified structure that is loosely attached to the skull and grows continuously while often breaking at its tip.

From Animal Diversity Web (note that they also have bone spurs on their wings):

Horned screamers are large, heavy bodied, fowl-like birds that are most recognizable by their two bone spurs at the bend of each wing and the 15 cm, yellowish-white horn-like projection at the top of their heads. The 2 to 5 cm long bone spurs are a result of fused carpel bones and are covered with keratin. The horn-like projection, which gives these birds their name, is composed of cartilage. When young are born they lack the horn but it slowly grows as they age. Horns seem to be ornamental as they do not have a defensive purpose. They are not firmly attached to the skull, swing back and forth as the birds’ heads move, and are easily broken off. After breaking off they will grow back over time.

A video (you can hear its vocalizations here):

Now your first question will be: why do they have these unicorn horns?

And the answer is, “I have no bloody idea!” My research this morning (granted, enacted at 5 a.m., and without coffee) gives no good answer. Both sexes have the horns, which suggests that it’s either mutual sexual selection or perhaps a form of species recognition, but the males don’t seem to “joust” with these horns, even though the species is territorial.

It seems that little is known about this species. If the horn really is “ornamental”, why it’s there is still unclear. “Ornaments” can be involved in sexual selection, but it’s unlikely that only females use the horn to choose males, for it’s found in both sexes, and natural selection would seem likely to eliminate the metabolically expensive and cumbersome horn in females if they don’t “need” it themselves. Animals don’t have such “ornaments” just to look pretty, so it almost certainly evolved for a reason we don’t yet understand.

Regardless, the horned screamer is the only unicorn bird I know, and the only bird that has a cartilaginous horn.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 9, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a chilly Thursday in Chicago: it’s November 9, 2017, and it’s both National Greek Yogurt Day and National Chocolate Cupcake Day. It’s also Schicksalstag (Day of Fate) in Germany, celebrating five events that happened on November 9, including Kristallnacht and the end of a divided Berlin.

We may have some snow today in Chicago, and tomorrow we’ll have a “hard freeze”, with a high temperature at the freezing point (0°C). Winter is here, and I hope my duck will be all right. Will Honey return next spring to raise another brood?

I’ll be out of the office this morning doing shopping for my upcoming Mexico and India trips, so posting will be light today. As always, I do my best.

On this day in 1620, the Pilgrims aboard the ship Mayflower first spotted land: at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They were stymied trying to sail south to Virginia, and so settled in what is now Massachusetts. During that first winter, half of the 130 settlers died of cold and disease. On November 9, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting U.S. President to make an official trip outside the country: he went to Panama to inspect the progress of the Canal.  On November 9, 1967—my first semester at college—the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published.  Here it is:

In 1985, Garry Kasparov of the Soviet Union beat his countryman Anatoly Karpov to become, at just 22, the youngest World Chess Champion.  On November 9, 1989, the beginning of the end of a divided Germany: checkpoints at the Berlin Wall were opened and it wasn’t long before the Wall started coming down. Finally, it was on this day in 1998 that capital punishment in the UK, which had already been abolished for murder, was also abolished for other crimes.

Notables born on this day include Ivan Turgenev (1818), Hedy Lamarr (1914; not just an actor but an inventor, devising a radio guidance system for torpedoes), Spiro Agnew (1918), Imre Lakatos (1922), Anne Sexton (1928), Carl Sagan (1934), Mary Travers (1936), and Jill Dando (1961).  Those who fell asleep on this day include Dylan Thomas (1953), Charles de Gaulle (1970), and Art Carney (2003).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili was out last night, but Andrzej and Malgorzata have made her a warm nest on the front porch that she can use until she’s taken inside the next morning:

A: Didn’t you get cold?
Hili: I can stand it in a nest like this.
 In Polish:
Ja: Nie zmarzłaś?
Hili: W takim gniazdku da się wytrzymać.

Gus is curled up on his Katzenbaum in Winnipeg’s cold, so we have a photo called “Cat Sushi”:

From reader Charleen we have two cat tweets. First, two cats see a moving ceiling fan for the first time:

And a remarkable example of kin selection, or is it kit selection?

https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/850830869329784838

Finally, a cartoon from reader Barry showing amity between science and religion!:

Kindly kayaker gives tired and lost iguana a four-mile ride to shore

November 8, 2017 • 3:30 pm

I’m surprised that a reptile can swim four miles through salt water without dying, but this iguana wasn’t going to survive—until a kindly human in a motorized kayak came along. From laughing squid, we have this story of a man and his reptile. The description follows:

A really affable guy named Steve of Key West Kayak Fishing was out in the water about four mile from shore when he came across a very tired iguana who swam over to his rig, and after a few cautious moments and some encouraging words, jumped aboard to rest awhile. Concerned, the compassionate kayaker decided that he’d give the wayward lizard a ride back to shore. Steve somehow convinced the iguana to move over to a safer spot on the cooler and away they went. Steve chatted with the iguana the whole way, but when a group of mangroves were in sight, the lizard jumped off the boat and climbed up a tree.

“Most likely, because of the King tides that are occurring it got caught in one of the swift outgoing tides and got pushed out to sea. I was just inside the reef so it was close to four miles from land. Most likely it would have died out there as the current that far out would most likely push it East with very little chance of coming back inshore. But you never know and it could be it’s [sic] normal daily swim back and forth between Cuba and the US. Regardless, it was pretty cool see it trust me enough (versus dying of course) to swim toward the kayak and hop on.”

 

 

h/t: Tom

Why is the U.S. uniquely prone to mass shootings? The New York Times says it’s guns.

November 8, 2017 • 1:00 pm

This article in the New York Times (click on screenshot to go there) says that the “answer” to the deeply worrisome problem of mass shootings lies in both the number of guns we have, the ease of procuring them, and the ability to get guns in the U.S., like semiautomatic weapons (or ones that can be converted easily to automatics), that can do far more damage than simple rifles or pistols. The article rests largely on a study done in 2005 by Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama, a study I haven’t read.

The study (and article’s conclusion: “The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.”  To demonstrate this, the author (and NYT) show some data, including this correlation between the number of guns (showing how much of an outlier the U.S. is) and the number of mass shooters:

 

Well, of course this is a correlation, and we all know that correlations don’t show causation, as there are third variables that could increase both, like an increased propensity of Americans to be criminals, which could prompt the acquisition and the using of guns. But that’s taken care of in data below.

Further, if you eliminate the U.S from the graph as an outlier, it’s hard to see much of a positive correlation for the rest of the countries (it may well be there, but you can’t really tell from the plot alone), which is what you need to establish to see if there’s a general relationship between gun ownership and number of mass shootings. You’d also want to control for population size, for what we want is not the number of guns and mass shootings, but the number of guns per person and the number of mass shootings per person.

All this appears to be taken care of in the next bit, which shows this figure:

As you see, the U.S is an outlier along with Yemen, the only country that has a higher number of mass shootings—and also has a high rate of gun ownership. If you remove these two countries, and look at the remaining dots, it’s not clear to me that there’s a correlation here, either, but it’s hard to tell (no statistics are given).  But the article also notes that the relationship holds even when you remove the U.S., so I’ll trust Lankford here.

Further, if you look at confounding factors that may explain a correlation without saying that the cause of mass shootings is guns, they don’t appear to be involved. Lankford found, for instance, that there is still a relationship when you control for homicide rates, general criminality (the U.S. “is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries”) and the rate of mental illness, which doesn’t appear to be higher in the U.S. than in other “wealthy countries”. (How would that cause a spurious correlation? Well, if Americans were more mentally ill than inhabitants of other countries, the disturbed people might go out and get more guns and then use them to kill others, so that the causal factor wouldn’t be availability of guns, though it would still involve gun ownership.) At any rate, countries with higher suicide rates have lower rates of mass shootings, the opposite of what you expect if the rate of mass shootings were correlated with the type of mental illness that lead to suicide.

There are other data as well:

America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

You can read the article for yourself, as I don’t want to simply regurgitate the data, but it all points to the fact that the easy accessibility of guns in America, the lack of gun controls, and the kind of guns that we can buy, are the variables that best explain the number (and rate) of mass shootings in America. (Note that this article doesn’t deal with individual homicides, but there are other data on those issues that implicate the accessibility of guns.)

In the end, the problem seems to come down to America’s Second Amendment, which was intended to allow arming of a militia, but has been interpreted (wrongly, I think) by U.S. courts as allowing fairly unrestricted individual ownership of guns—no militia needed. That Amendment appears to have fostered a sense of entitlement that we should have guns—that it’s our right. Barring the Second Amendment, you’d have a hard time justifying that we have a “right” to own such lethal weapons. (I’m always dubious when “rights” are asserted as arguments, but they become prima facie legal rights if they’re in our Constitution.)

Referring to the tighter gun laws of Switzerland (even though they’re second to the U.S. in the rate of gun ownership, the rate of Swiss gun homicides is far lower), the article notes this:

Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

And it is that Second Amendment that makes us think we have a right to own guns. Would that we could repeal that Amendment, but of course that wouldn’t end the problem, for we’d still have to legislate firearm laws for each state under the amended Constitution, and in a populace that largely thinks they have the right to have guns. The idea that we have such a right is alien to me, but it’s so deeply instilled in America that the problem seems harder to solve than that of Donald Trump himself, who, after all, will be gone in at most seven years. The article ends on a poignant note, one that shows how deeply sick we are with our guns fetish:

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

 

Once again: Why atheism is toxic—this time by Chris Stedman

November 8, 2017 • 9:30 am

I don’t want to write too much about this, since this new Washington Post piece by Chris Stedman, formerly a humanist chaplain at Harvard but now a “freelance humanist”, is pretty much a clone of all the articles in Vox, Salon, and BuzzFeed claiming that atheism (or New Atheism) is toxic and moribund: it’s sexist, racist, and xenophobic. Atheism, it’s said, makes fun of religious people, thus not fostering “dialogue” and driving away possible converts.

So your assignment this morning is the short piece, “I’m an atheist, but I had to walk away from the toxic side of online atheism”, and I ask for your reactions in the comments. I’ll put a few of mine here:

1.) Note that the title is “online atheism”.  Well, yes, many people—and not just atheists—tend to turn nasty when they can post anonymously online.  Some atheist websites are cesspools, which is why I try to keep the atmosphere civil around here. That said, there’s no evidence that atheist websites are worse than other secular websites.  Further, when Stedman raises the usual victim trope about all the nasty names he’s been called (and I do deplore those who made fun of his sexual orientation, appearance, and so on), it’s not clear that all of it, or even much of it, came from atheists. He gives several examples of online name-calling, but how many of those were from the faithful, or people who weren’t atheists at all?

2.) While online trolls may make some atheist sites unpleasant, my own experience giving talks and attendng many humanist and atheist meetings is not one of pervasive sexism, racism, or bigotry. Yes, I’m a man and not subject to sexual harassment, but all I can say is that I haven’t ever seen it—not once. It is true that there’s a paucity of minorities at these meetings, and in the community as a whole, but I’m not convinced it’s because “movement atheism” is racist. Rather, blacks and Hispanics, for instance, tend to be more religious than other groups, which may make them less likely to join atheist organizations. We need to do better in welcoming minorities, but I think nearly all atheist groups now make a conscious effort to include women in the program. While some people may have left atheism because of its so-called toxicity, I haven’t seen the egress that Stedman has, nor does he give any data supporting that. If so many people are leaving atheism, why is it growing?

3.) To repeat, the data in fact show that nonbelief is increasing in the U.S., and not just among men. If atheism has failed, why this growth? (Granted, many “nones” are “spiritual”, or accept a god but don’t affiliate with a Church, but pure nonbelievers are also becoming more common.) If you simply look at the data, atheism is winning, regardless of whether a few individuals leave “the movement.”

4.) Contra Stedman, I have talked to many people who have been exposed to atheism (and converted to it) by the Internet. In fact, that’s the main way atheists found each other, and found support, over the last two decades. Many people have been converted by listening to videos of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, regardless of any statements they’ve made that have caused them to be demonized.  Not everyone can afford to travel to meetings, but the Internet is free. And even if some website commenters were nasty and ad hominem, those talks (and their books) will remain as eloquent critiques of faith, and will continue to deconvert the faithful as the years pass.

5.) Personal note: Right at the beginning of his piece, Stedman includes me along with the Blog That Shall not be Named as one of his nasty critics after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show. But I reject his implication that I was unfair. Here’s what he wrote:

A number of prominent atheist bloggers criticized my interview, saying I was awful and suggesting I was allying with O’Reilly. The comments were worse. Anonymous posters ridiculed me, saying I should decline future television invitations because I was too “effeminate,” my physical appearance made atheists seem “like freaks” and my “obvious homosexuality” made me an ineffectual voice for atheists.

Well, check the second link for yourself. I maintain that my post was constructively critical, did not make fun of Stedman, and, in fact, neither did my commenters. Since Stedman says he welcomes constructive criticism, what’s he beefing about here? (I’ve added the O’Reilly/Stedman clip to the original post, and you can see it here.)

6.) Stedman argues that the nastiness of online discourse impedes the course of mutual understanding:

My experiences helping people better understand atheists have been deeply rewarding, and so has working to support atheists struggling with life’s challenges or with families that don’t accept them. I can say without hesitation that my shift from blogging about atheism to community-building was the right decision.

h/t: Diane G