The Art of the Hissy Fit, Digby, AlterNet, October 24, 2007
Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.
There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.
Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris Are Old News: A Totally Different Atheism Is on the Rise, Chris Hall, AlterNet, June 4, 2014
Just as in any other group, there are scores of people in atheist and skeptic communities who don’t want to have discussions about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotries, or say they’re irrelevant to the agenda at hand. The increase in diversity isn’t happening quietly or easily, and it’s often brought out the ugliest sides of people who base their entire identities on being rational and humane. Direct challenges to racism and sexism haven’t traditionally been the domain of the large organizations like American Atheists or the Secular Coalition for America. It’s been far more typical to fight incursions against separation of church and state or educate against pseudoscience like homeopathy.
It’s not that these aren’t important issues: separation of church and state is one of the linchpins of American democracy. As the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Town of Greece vs. Galloway shows, it’s also extremely fragile, and there is a very loud and insistent portion of America who would like to see it disappear entirely.
But such a narrow focus also means that atheist and skeptic groups have a history of looking at these issues in isolation, without considering how race, gender, or class play into them. That isolation has been one of the great limiting factors in the growth of movement atheism. Too many activists and groups trapped themselves in rhetorical Möbius strips, where their conferences and literature were dominated either by debunking the same pseudoscience over and over again, or fighting cases of church-state intrusion that were more relevant as abstract principles.
Really? Are We Still Genre Shaming People For The Books They Like? Lauren Davis, io9, June 6, 2014
Yesterday, Slate caused a bit of a stir with an editorial reprimanding adults for reading books marketed to young adults. This song-and-dance — saying that we should be ashamed of what we like to read — is a familiar one for fans of genre fiction. And frankly, it’s getting old.
The meat of Ruth Graham’s anti-YA screed is that no one over the age of 17 should be reading young adult novels—no Hunger Games, no Divergent, no The Fault in Our Stars (whose movie adaptation seems to have inspired this manifesto). No, instead, proper mature adults should be reading appropriately literary fiction—which, presumably, you find in the part of the bookstore marked “Literature.”
