When I was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, I received a few serious death threats – as did the female sports columnist, who got more abuse and harassment than I ever did. The people that threatened me, and two that have gone on to harass and stalk me to this day, have done so with their real names proudly on display.

- Violet Blue

But you go on believing those old myths about anonymity if you want to.

I get that you don’t want homeless people using your electricity. I’m sure this homeless guy doesn’t want to use your electricity either; he’d rather be using his own.

Here’s the thing: If he’s ever going to get off the street and buy his own electricity, he needs a job. To find a job, he needs to have a phone. For his phone to be of any use, the battery needs to be charged. Maybe I’m wrong, but the fact that he had the phone at all (two of them, for whatever reason) is a fairly good sign that he wants very much for this to happen.

So rather than flip out over the 1/4 of one cent worth of electricity, rather than taking up the time of police officers to arrest and book him, rather than paying the costs involved in feeding and sheltering this guy in jail and then trying him for “Theft of Services,” why not leave the guy alone until he found a job and got off your streets on his own?

Where is he going to go when he finishes his 90 days in jail? Back out onto your city’s streets. This time, without his cell phone. This time, with a criminal record giving employers yet another reason not to hire him.

Good job.

People used to help each other in this country. Then somewhere along the line, the more greedy among us convinced people to hate anyone who needs our help. They’re all criminals and drug addicts and leeches, right? It’s downright unAmerican to give taxpayer money to people who need help. And so, today there are laws against feeding the homeless; people have actually gone to jail for this.

I can no longer recognize the America they told me about when I was growing up. I don’t know where it went, but I miss living there.

(via)

Still, you shouldn’t walk into a bank wearing a ski mask. It makes everyone in the bank nervous. Don’t do that.

He chuckles with his audience at the silliness of having to point out something so blatantly obvious, then moves on to give his hour-long keynote speech.

The next day, he awakes to find that the world of banker bloggers has erupted into outrage. How dare he compare some innocent person wearing a mask on a cold day to a bank robber? Not everyone wearing a mask is a criminal. MOST people wearing masks are not criminals. It’s COLD outside. Is it any wonder the person was wearing a mask?

How can you take anyone seriously when they whine about every silly little thing that makes them vaguely nervous?

Either you get why it’s bad to walk into a bank wearing a ski mask or you don’t. Either you get why this needs to be pointed out or you don’t.

If you are one of the people who can’t understand why it needs to be pointed out, you are the reason. You. Until your reaction to the story is “well duh,” you are the reason it needs to be pointed out.

Now, with this ridiculous, fictional story fresh in your mind, read about what happened to Rebecca Watson.

It should go without saying that men should not hit on a woman standing alone with them in an elevator. That should be obvious. But men do it anyway. So Rebecca said it, because it needed to be said.

And then she was upbraided for saying it. Really. And you know what? That’s even worse.

The first part? I get that. It’s dumb, but guys act dumb sometimes. Admit it, fellas. Sometimes we just step on it and we have no idea.

Being in an elevator – or any other tight space – alone with us when they don’t know us, sometimes that makes many women a little nervous. Not all women. Not always. Sometimes. Not because we’re doing anything creepy. Not because they’re being oversensitive. Because of things like this:

1 of 6 U.S. women has experienced an attempted or completed rape. More than a quarter of college age women report having experienced a rape or rape attempt since age 14.

Don’t roll your eyes. That’s how it is in America. It’s even worse elsewhere in the world. Women live in a world where that’s the reality. Even if that blurb I quoted doesn’t describe the woman standing next to you in the elevator, it very likely describes someone she knows.

We’re guys, so those are numbers we’ve probably never seen before. Why would we notice that? We’re not thinking about things like that when we’re around people we don’t know. The only thing we’re worried about when we’re alone in an elevator with a woman we don’t know is trying not to be too obvious when checking her out and regretting the onions we ate for lunch.

Just imagine it’s you and another guy on that elevator. A guy dressed as a biker. A biker who stands a foot taller than you. And outweighs you 2-to-1. It would be a little awkward to stand there and have a conversation about how much money you make. Right?

I get that there may be a few blockheads who don’t realize that the 60 seconds spent alone in an elevator is the wrong time to ask a woman back to your hotel room. If you’ve decided to take your shot, that’s fine. Please wait until the door opens and there are other people nearby.

I understand if it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t need to understand it. It won’t be the first time your wife / girlfriend / female friend-with-benefits leaves you standing there completely baffled. They do that sometimes. Just go with it.

If for no other reason, keep in mind that your chances of scoring with a woman go up in direct proportion to how much you’re not creeping her out. Anything that improves your odds is a good thing, right?

Nobody is saying don’t flirt with women. Really guys, they’re not saying that. I see men everywhere saying that’s what they think women are telling them. I don’t know if they really think that or if they’re just being deliberately obtuse to avoid answering a point that’s beyond them. Either way, guys are not being told to stop flirting.

[Update July 12: Also? Read this. Seriously.]

Flirt away. In public, not inside a 6-foot-wide box. Please do a breath check first.

Like I said, I get the first part. What I don’t get is the second part, the part where people criticized Rebecca for having the nerve to be publicly annoyed at clueless elevator guy. She was very polite about it. Her exact words were “Umm, guys, don’t do that.”

Hitting on women in an elevator is something that people obviously should not do. That this should be pointed out is also obvious. The fact that people exist who don’t understand why it’s important to point it out is exactly the reason why it needs to be pointed out.

They aren’t bad people who have done something wrong. But they are clueless. As long as people who don’t get it exist, the people who do get it need to keep pointing it out. That’s the only way things change.

If I were going to criticize anything about Rebecca’s part in this, it would be bringing up and responding to comments about elevator guy made by another blogger on YouTube while she was onstage at the conference where this all blew up. I think that should have been kept on YouTube I think responding to specific comments by specific bloggers should be done specifically on one blog or the other. But the elevator incident itself? At a conference where she’s speaking about feminism and skepticism? I don’t see the problem with that.
[Correction: It was a blog post about the YouTube post, not a comment on the YouTube post. Minor point, but anyway...]

That is the one valid criticism of all this that I’ve noticed. And yet, very few of the people with an opinion on any of this have anything at all to say about that point. Most of the reaction is from people calling her out merely for bringing up the elevator incident in the first place.

And then, there’s Richard Dawkins. Oh man…

You know, I’ve been a bad atheist. I’ve never actually read any of Dawkins’ books, though I always meant to get around to it eventually. But after this? I don’t want to read them now. Dawkins has burned his credibility to the ground with his ignorant, moronic comments about this.

For the last several years, Richard Dawkins has been the poster boy for atheism. From now on, I guess he can be the poster boy for sexism too.

NOTE: If you happened to see an earlier draft of this a couple of hours ago, it’s because I’m an idiot who can’t tell the difference between “publish” and “save draft.” Forget you ever saw the other version.

The fact that a lot of people believe something is not necessarily a sign that it’s true; it’s just a sign that it’s been effectively marketed.

Cynthia Boaz (referring to Fox News Channel)

You do? Well then, you’re an idiot. What Weiner did was practically nothing compared to what goes on at Capitol Hill.

David Vitter sat on the floor of the Senate, during debates and votes, and arranged to meet with prostitutes. A Supreme Court Justice has failed to disclose the income from his wife’s political activities and still refuses to recuse himself from cases where he will directly benefit from the rulings. Congressman Joe Barton is so corrupted by British Petroleum that he actually apologized to their CEO for the White House’s demand that his company pay for cleaning up the mess they caused in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now what did Weiner do again? He flirted with women on the internet and sent them pictures. He flirted with women he never actually met in person or had any other relationship with. By what idiotic person’s fucked up sense of priorities is that a reason to demand someone resign while ignoring what those other people have done?

Nobody but he and his wife have any right to comment on Anthony Weiner’s private life. I am enraged and disgusted to see such prudish, puritanical outrage about this coming from liberals who are always the first and loudest to shout that the government should stay out of our bedrooms. Fucking hypocrites.

He should resign because he lied? So he lied to the press, boo-fucking-hoo. The press was snooping into a private matter that was none of their business. He didn’t lie about his job, legislation, national security, campaign contributions or anything else that actually matters. The worst thing he did here was demonstrate catastrophically-bad PR skill after an accidental disclosure about his private life. That calls for the hiring of a new spokesman, not a resignation.

How many Republicans repeated that “Death Panels” lie? How many Republicans repeated that “jobs killing bill” lie? How many Republicans repeated that “government takeover of health care” lie? How many Republicans said America has “the best health care in the world,” despite it being blatantly obvious that our system is the worst in the industrialized world? How many politicians blatantly lie about important things every single day with nobody demanding they resign over it?

Weiner lied to the press about something that was none of their goddamn business. If you think that’s a reason he should resign, you need to pull your head out of your ass and reset your priorities to be in line with reality.

Politicians lie; that’s just how it is. If you want to start to holding them accountable for it now, then there are far better targets for that than someone who was just trying to keep his private life private.

He should resign because it’s a distraction? The birth certificate was a distraction. The beer summit was a distraction. The “OMFG OBAMA IS GOING TO INDOCTRINATE OUR CHILDREN!” hysteria was a distraction. Did you think President Obama should have resigned over any of these things so we could deal with more important matters? Well, did you?

These nationwide displays of moral outrage always go away in a couple of weeks. Remember the FCC commissioner who approved the Comcast / NBC merger shortly before resigning to take a job as a Comcast lobbyist? That was blatant, in-your-face bribery and corruption that infuriated the entire nation. Even some of the corporate-sponsored Republicans were outraged.

Is anybody still talking about that? No, America’s short attention span has moved on to other things. Demanding Weiner resign over this silly scandal when it will blow over on its own anyway is ridiculous. In a week or two, we will all be griping about something else, hopefully something that actually matters.

We have too few Democrats in the House as it is. Thanks to the childish temper tantrums of some people on the left, not enough people last November fulfilled the one moral duty required of any citizen of a democracy and so now the House of Representatives is dominated by Republicans.

Anthony Weiner may have lost some of his clout but we still need his vote and his voice. He was always one of the few willing to call out Republicans and Blue Dogs on their ignorant, narrow-minded, corporate-sponsored bullshit. We need more people like Anthony Weiner, regardless of how frisky they get in online chats. If he resigns over such a ridiculous, irrelevant controversy, it will be an absolute tragedy.

A recent Gizmodo story, "Are Cameras the New Guns?," created quite a stir in journalism circles recently. Gizmodo found that there appears to be an increase in the number of citizens arrested for filming abuse by police, or just police in action: "In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty po … Read More

via Through the Viewfinder

Some of the replies were what you would expect and probably sound familiar to any gay rights activist in America, such as (paraphrasing) “not that I know of,” “this is not the right time,” “there are more important issues,” “no, it would be used against us on other issues” and, inevitably, one guy who said “I’d support lesbian rights, I love to watch girl on girl!”

There were a few (a very, very few) responses I would say were positive.

Unfortunately, the mild responses were a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of the replies to the question were truly cringe-worthy, at least to my eyes. I’ve compiled a list of some of the worst responses, along with a couple of the more positive responses.

Now just to be clear, you’d see the same sort of hate and bigotry from any random group of Americans on the subject of gay rights, although I would think there would be an equal or greater number of positive responses to balance it out. This is by no means a comprehensive survey of all Egyptians, just a small sampling of opinion from people all following the same person on Twitter. Still, considering the tone of these responses, I don’t think I’d want to live in Egypt right now if I were gay.

Someone I follow on Twitter wrote that they had published a “Discordian Date” WordPress plugin. Not having a clue what a “Discordian calendar” is, I followed the link to Wikipedia to read about it.

While reading the entry, I found an odd sentence:

“it is included in nearly all Linux distributions, despite some resistance.[7]“

That piqued my curiosity, so I followed the citation which led to an old Debian Linux bug report. What I read there made me facepalm literally.

From: “Silas S. Brown”
To: Debian Bug Tracking System
Subject: util-linux: ddate should probably be in a different package
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2002 18:50:16 +0100

Package: util-linux
Version: 2.11n-4
Severity: normal

The ddate utility supports the printing of Discordian dates,
as used by the (apparently fictional) Church of the
SubGenius.

People with more traditional moral values might not
appreciate a reference to or advertisement for this movement
being present on their system. However, because it is in
util-linux, they will not be able to selectively remove it
(unless they write a script that is to be run after every
upgrade).

This is significant because it can prevent such people from
recommending Debian. It would be much better if “ddate”
were in some other package (perhaps a package of its own) so
that it is easier to maintain a system without it, should
the user wish to do so.

I never knew the existence of other calendars was a moral issue. I sure hope Silas Brown never discovered that Jews, Muslims and the Chinese also have their own calendar systems. It would probably give the poor fellow a case of the vapors.

Let’s hope he never cracked open the Linux kernel itself. Some of the source code contains some very naughty language (Thanks for that link, @alasta). The shock might have been fatal.

Noun

Definition:
Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

Example:

Photo taken by Jeff Widener, Associated Press

If I am ever faced with a life or death situation, I hope I prove to be half as courageous as the young man in this picture.