Quickies
Skepchick Quickies, 1.25

- If you spot Bigfoot, should you shoot him? Inquiring minds want to know.
- Man’s defense for being accused of punching his wife? A ghost did it. (From Brad.)
- “An Indonesian civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on his Facebook page has been taken into police custody for his own protection after he was badly beaten.” (From Madfishmonger.)
- Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes.
The term suffrage refers to voting rights, yet the article says nothing about their politics (is it even a democracy?)
Also, they conflate ‘Matrilineal’ and ‘Matriarchy’. A matrilineal society can still be a patriarchy.
There’s a short post raising a few reasons the comparison is misleading here: http://mixosaurus.co.uk/2012/01/bbc-where-hyperbole-rules-and-suffragettes-arent-really-suffragettes/
Disclaimer: I know the author! But partiality aside I think it’s worth reading and haven’t seen a more detailed response to that article.
There’s more information on Alex Aan on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-Alex-Aans-Human-Rights/194025204028128
the people running the page are raising money and writing a petition, which should be ready sometime soon.
Re: bigfoot.
Only people that are completely ignorant of anesthesiology throw around the idea of using tranquilizer guns. Most anesthetic agents have a very narrow safety margin. So if yyou hit your target (in a muscle, not a blood vessel or the eye or something) and if you estimated the dose of anesthesia correctly, it would still take anywhere from 5 to 30 min to take effect. So you would have to find your bigfoot in the dark, in the woods, after he ran several miles. We use tranq guns in confined animals Assuming he didn’t get far, you could easily kill him with the drugs. Here’s to hoping it’s not a guy in a bear suit!
I was going to mention that several of the drugs used to tranqualize animals are incredibly fatal to people, and would be a disaster if it was a guy in a gorilla suit. But now I wonder if those drugs would be just as dangerous to other hominids, and thus wouldn’t be used anyway.
…should you shoot *him*?
And why would any bigfoot spotted be necessarily male? A mythical beast has just as much chance to be female as male. You chicks are usually much better at not auto-masculating pronouns
I wouldn’t shoot Bigfoot. I mean, what has Bigfoot done wrong?