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Via Escher Girls, a fantastic illustration of what, exactly, is wrong with “male gaze” in comics when depicting women.
Don’t see anything wrong with it? Robinade will help you with that.
A traditional girl comic book pose, redrawn to make a point
February 22, 2012 at 10:15 am 
Jason Thibeault Vic Toews: Gun registries are invasion of privacy. Internet snooping is great though!
February 21, 2012 at 9:31 pm Jason Thibeault During the Conservative fight to fool everyone into believing the long gun registry is a bad idea, one of the most frequent and most proximate reasons the CPC and their spambot flaks gave for dismantling and bonfiring the database was that it served as an invasion of privacy that allowed the government too much insight into its citizens’ lives by telling them who had guns and where. One of the folks touting this line was Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who primarily expressed concern that an NDP or Liberal government would get their hands on that info.
He said then, “In order to protect the privacy of law-abiding, long gun owners, those whom that member and his party subjected to gross violations of their privacy, records held by the Canadian firearms program on currently registered long guns will be destroyed.”
Fast forward a few months, and Vic Toews has introduced the Tories’ newest salvo on freedom in bill C30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.
A few quick thoughts on gamifying religion
February 21, 2012 at 9:30 am Jason Thibeault There’s still a lot I need to unpack from this article at Kotaku about gamifying religion. I wanted to get a few thoughts out about the base idea of creating a “morality hub”, a sort of user-driven voting scheme like Reddit where people can submit ideas about what morals should be followed and let the crowd vote up and down what should be prioritized. The corollary idea that the most popular morals become the most valuable (points-wise) morals to express is a bit disturbing.
First, there’s the ever-present fear of people gaming that sort of system, where on the internet, with anonymity, people give in to their baser ideals. Look at those places where giving offense is considered the highest virtue. The integrity of the voting system and the integrity of the submission system is quesitonable from the outset.
Second, there’s the very idea of competing with one another for the ability to do certain “moral” deeds. Must we elbow one another out of the way to tackle the little old lady looking to cross the street? And what of “grinding” certain low-level, easy to complete positive moral actions?
Third, is it really decent morality if you’re doing it for some (earthly or otherwise) reward? If you stop a mugging just because it’ll win you twenty points, is that a net good for society, or would people look for more altruistic reasons to stop that mugging before it’s considered moral?
Gamifying religion seems to suffer from every poor outcome and exploit that video game karma systems do. It might have some benefits in the real world, though. What do you folks think?
Dispatches from the Intersection of Law and Religion
February 20, 2012 at 1:57 pm Jason Thibeault Sadly, it looks like the religious folks with power to create laws are opening new fronts just about every day. While I was going crazy with work, there’s a bunch of news items worth highlighting that I simply missed.
Flight of the Conchords – Sugalumps
February 20, 2012 at 12:30 pm Jason Thibeault I gotta say, those are some sexy dance moves. Unusual from guys, but hey, I’m egalitarian and all that!
BRB, going to go bust a move and see what my wife thinks.
Cat hug
February 19, 2012 at 9:17 pm Jason Thibeault 
Christian rap from the 90s
February 19, 2012 at 2:15 pm Jason Thibeault Via Everything Is Terrible, some rapping straight from the streets and the soul. Just another episode in the ongoing series of ways Christians need to Jesusify everything. Fucking secular rap, how does that work?
Admittedly, it’s light on the rapping, and heavy on the justification for why these Christians are representing for the Middle-East Side.
Okay, I’m just posting this for that one joke. I admit it.
Canadian acupuncturist: “Cervical cancer is for prostitutes”
February 19, 2012 at 9:10 am Jason Thibeault Our allies at Skeptic North cover a Canadian acupuncturist who claims that cervical cancer is a disease for prostitutes and promiscuous women.
My research about cervical cancer at the time told me it was very rare and that it occurred most often in women who had multiple sexual partners, who also had multiple sexual partners. In other words, the nurse said, it’s mainly a disease of prostitutes.
Well, I said, “That’s not me!”Although my gut instinct was horror that she would imply that women with cervical cancer are prostitutes or they deserve their illness, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was simply recounting what this extraordinarily judgmental nurse had told her. Maybe she wasn’t actually implying that only whores** get cervical cancer as some sort of retribution for their immoral behaviour. (Though in my head I couldn’t help wonder if she also feels that AIDS is a “gay disease.”)
So let’s hear you out then, John Greg.
February 18, 2012 at 12:02 pm Jason Thibeault Over on my post about the UK rape survivor campaign, John Greg threadjacked the entire comments thread to be about the ongoing so-called Great Rift between various factions in the skeptic and atheist blogosphere over Rebecca Watson’s trip to Ireland and into the “right to flirt” rabbithole, which I’ve covered extensively in the past. Part of this fight is about feminism, about the inclusion of feminist ideals in the skeptical and atheist communities, and about splash damage that some ostensible supporters of these ideals are taking during fights with various trolls.
I sympathize that good people might be getting hurt by the pushback against misogyny in our community when they point out that some folks are being emotional rather than rational, but I empathize (which is significantly stronger than sympathy) with the people who are getting emotional because I get emotional when I see my friends and allies getting shit on over nonsense, and other friends and allies not even lifting a finger to rebut.
So this stuff needs to be talked about. Yet again. And yet again, at the explicit demand of the people who claim that we’re the ones stirring the pot.
However, it was cluttering up a perfectly good thread about helping rape victims get the help they need, so I’ve moved it here.
The Dragonborn Comes
February 17, 2012 at 11:52 pm Jason Thibeault I used to be a blogger like you, then I took a server to the knee. Work has well and thoroughly kicked my ass. Six straight 12+ hour days, many of them 16 hours, two of them full-on graveyards, , and I am nothing short of exhausted. Really hoping I’ll be able to get back into the blogging groove sometime tomorrow.
In the meantime, have a damn cool Skyrim bard cover by Malukah, who is good enough to provide this song free at her website.
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