Good teachers? We don’t need no stinkin’ good teachers.

Tom Porton is used to drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45 years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

So therefore the new principal decided to hassle him into quitting.

Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works of literature.

So he’s leaving.

Mr. Porton has been teaching and coordinating student activities long enough to see Monroe go from a large urban high school to one housing several smaller schools, including his, the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property and one another.

Um…what? Was that a move to shame students for having to pee? Captain Queeg in the Bronx?

H.I.V. and AIDS may have faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.

Mr. Lyons, who would not say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr. Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.

“School is not pleasant, the way it was when I started,” he said. “They pay lip service to the social and emotional well-being of the child. My generation of teachers had a mind-set about how to teach a child. Today, many young teachers see teaching as a way to kill time on the way to something else.”

Selling real estate, probably.

So the students lose and toilet plunger guy wins.

Among the things people shouldn’t waste their time doing: fretting about festivals and celebrations that come from other cultures and therefore are not local and Authentic. That’s especially true for government officials, and even more so when their fretting intensifies into forbidding.

The president of Pakistan for instance:

Pakistan’s president has denounced St Valentine’s Day, saying the festival has no connection with Pakistani culture and should be avoided.

President Mamnoon Hussain told students that it was a Western tradition and conflicted with Muslim culture.

So what? We can learn from each other’s cultures. I find over-the-top commercial Valentine stuff rather silly, but that’s just me. Let’s have celebrations of everything. It was Darwin day yesterday; maybe today could be birdwatching day or daffodil day.

His remarks came after a district in north-western Pakistan banned Valentine’s Day celebrations.

Valentine’s Day is popular in many cities in Pakistan, but religious groups have denounced it as decadent.

Religious groups specialize in forbidding things that are completely harmless, simply because humans enjoy them. God the Massive Grouch, taking away all our ice cream.

In past years, conservative social groups, who view the day as a festival of immorality detrimental to traditional marriage, have declared the day to be “shameless”.

Renowned civil society activist Sabeen Mahmud once set up a demonstration with slogans including “Karachi says Yes to Love”. (Last April, she was killed in a drive-by shooting, although not necessarily for that particular issue.)

In neighbouring India, Valentine’s Day also garners opposition, usually from Hindu conservatives who say it is alien to Indian culture and – as argued by Pakistani Muslims – contrary to traditions such as arranged marriages.

Ah yes, well it would be, wouldn’t it – and a good thing too. Oddly enough it’s not a particularly brilliant idea to force people to live in intimate proximity for life regardless of whether or not they can stand each other. Humans aren’t machines for the production of more human machines for the production of more human machines ad infinitum. Why should we be made to live with people we don’t like and didn’t choose?

Knock yourselves out, Valentine people.

Now that’s how Malheur is supposed to be occupied.

The same day four final holdouts ended the armed occupation of a remote wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, a new occupation was just getting underway.

According to two decades’ worth of federal data, Feb. 11 is, on average, the earliest date migrating tundra swans begin appearing at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, exiting the Pacific Flyway to rest in the vast wetlands of the high desert oasis.

Northern pintails have probably already arrived. Red-winged blackbirds, too. This weekend, expect snow geese, then killdeer and sandhill cranes. They will keep coming deep into May – fresh wing beats descending unarmed and unintimidated.

And not talking about freedom while stealing public land at gunpoint.

On the other hand the occupation has made Malheur better known.

“We do have the migratory bird festival in April, and my hunch is that festival is going to be bigger than ever because Malheur being in the news has increased the awareness of an awful lot of people,” said Harv Schubothe, the president of the Oregon Birding Assn.

Membership in the Friends of Malheur has soared in recent weeks, as has the number of people offering to volunteer with the Oregon Natural Desert Assn. As Jeff Holm, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon, which operates the refuge, put it: “Make lemonade out of lemons, I guess.”

But there’s stuff that needs doing, water management and invasive species control, that’s not getting done because of the occupation and now the investigation.

The FBI said Thursday it was bringing in an expert from its Art Crime Team to work with the service and the Burns Paiute Tribe “to identify and document damage to the tribe’s artifacts and sacred burial grounds.” Greg Bretzing, the head of the FBI in Oregon, said the investigators would determine whether there had been violations of federal laws protecting tribal and archaeological sites.

Charlotte Rodrique, tribal council chairwoman for the Burns Paiute Tribe, said in an interview on Friday that she was concerned after seeing videos of armed occupiers rifling through tribal artifacts stored at the refuge and that they had apparently used heavy equipment to carve out a roadway near an area where tribal members who died in the 19th century were reburied.

She said that in the long memories of wildlife and of the tribe, the refuge is essential and sacred. It is never truly off limits and it has no firm borders.

If only people like the Bundy gang respected that sort of claim.

PZ is recruiting new people to join Freethought Blogs.

So if you want to blog here, here’s what you do: send an email to ftbapplications@googlegroups.com, in which you give us this information:

Name

Contact email

Do you want your email public?

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Links to your current blog, any biographical material, or best examples of your writing in comments or forums or other media

Why do you want to write for us?

It’s that easy. This is a private communication to the bloggers here; none of this information will be made public without your permission.

Good luck, applicants.

Serious applications will be examined for their suitability. Our requirements are simple: we want godless Social Justice Warriors. If that’s you, why aren’t you writing for us already?

Hmm, good question, why is that? Why aren’t I writing for them already? Oh yes, I remember! It’s because several of the bloggers there united to trash me on their blogs because they decided I wasn’t orthodox enough on one plank of the Social Justice Warrior Platform. That’s why. So actually their requirements aren’t as simple as PZ makes it sound. Good luck, applicants, but be warned: it’s not true that there’s no orthodoxy enforced.

What are the rewards, you ask?

• You get space for a blog of your very own!
• You get to join a group of supportive people!

Ah, no. That’s really not one of the rewards. That shouldn’t be claimed as one of the rewards, because it’s not accurate. It’s not a group of supportive people, at least not currently. It could become that but it’s not that now.

Mind you, the chances are very good that it will improve, because nearly all of the most toxic ones are leaving to create their own super-toxic little network. There are some terrific people at FTB, like Taslima and Maryam and Yemisi and the Nirmukta crew. But don’t go expecting a whole group of supportive people, because that’s just not the reality. I know, I was there.

Peter Walker is reporting from the no-longer-stolen Malheur NWR. He was allowed in with the journalists today and posted a bunch of photos. This one coupled with his commentary is very striking.

Peter Walker

An example of how things have changed. When I visited the refuge during the occupation, there were always armed militants in this fire tower. They watched everything and had their long guns ready. It was unnerving. Now it’s a fire tower again and getting near it doesn’t give me a sense of deep anxiety. An example of things getting back to some sanity.

Can you imagine? That’s a public facility, and that structure is a fire tower – for spotting wild fires. Armed men who stole the facility stood up there with rifles threatening everyone below.

A happy ending though.

Peter Walker

The liberation of the refuge came just in time. Between early January (when the occupation started) and now, there’s already a dramatic difference in the landscape–the marshes are mostly thawed, there are geese in some areas, and the landscape is warming up for literally millions of birds in April. Life on the refuge, and in the community I believe, will return to normal soon.

Millions of birds, and zero Bundys.

The Guardian posted this video by Julie Bindel yesterday. It’s had 2.5 million views already.

It’s a specialty gallery.

Oenotrian’s Virginia:

David Richards’s Merlyn:

If you have any tilted cats you would like to add to the gallery, send them.

New: Peter Nothnagle’s Gus sharpening his claws:

latsot’s Fortran:

Rich Roberts’s Sugar:

iknklast’s Sir Winston and Mr Murphy:

Minnie The Finn’s Shiftie:

Josh Spokes’s Shredder:

One of those items that could be true or could just be something someone claimed. David Bernstein has an “o tempora o mores” piece at The Volokh Conspiracy at the Washington Post (too many levels already and I’m not even finished yet) which refers back to an earlier piece at the same place, both describing a thing that seems to be just a “she said” thing.

From the first one, the January 26 one:

Consider the following incidents described below that have reached my inbox or social media accounts over the past two weeks or so:

…

2. Anti-Israel sentiment at that most progressive of colleges, Oberlin, is bleeding into anti-Semitism (or maybe anti-Israel sentiment is simply providing a cover for latent anti-Semitism). Professor William Jacobson has the details here, but even if you don’t read the whole post, read the end of it, where he quotes a lengthy Facebook post from a recent alumna about anti-Semitic incidents she experienced or witnessed as a left-wing, but pro-Israel Jewish student there. I won’t endorse the claim that every one of these incidents was anti-Semitic, as such, but, assuming they are all true, they paint a very disturbing picture. I was particularly struck by her claim that multiple times she heard Oberlin students dismiss the Holocaust as “white on white violence.”

That is indeed a very striking thing to say, but did anyone say it? I hit the Google to try to confirm it and all I’ve found is people repeating Bernstein’s claim (which as I mentioned he repeated himself a few days later). What good is that? Especially now? When everything shows up on social media, surely if that were a commonplace thing to say it would turn up on social media?

I think if you’re going to talk about it – and more than once at that – in the Washington Post you need a better source than “someone on Facebook said.”

I wrote a whole post about the word “pussy” back in 2009 – a couple of years before it became routine for people to call me a cunt along with every other misogynist epithet in the arsenal. It generated a lot of interesting comments.

Here’s the post again:

I’m curious about something. To the best of my knowledge, a sexist epithet is a sexist epithet. There’s not generally a lot of ambiguity about it, although there’s always room for ironic uses in private conversation and so on. In public discourse, a sexist epithet is what it is. Yet – I keep encountering people who dispute that, in places where I wouldn’t expect to, such as comments on Jesus and Mo. So I’m curious about what other people think.

A commenter said ‘the god of Islam is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.’ I took exception, and someone replied by quoting one of Julian’s Bad Moves from here, on the fact that many words have multiple meanings. True enough, but is there more than one way to understand ‘pussy’ in that comment? Not that I know of.

What’s interesting is that I think that’s pretty widely understood, even by people who pretend or believe otherwise. One reason I think that is that I don’t know anyone who uses the word that way in conversation or correspondence with me. I don’t think that’s an accident; I think it’s because no one who knows me thinks it would be welcome – and for all I know this includes people who do use the word in conversation with other people. The point is that if people avoid the word with (at least) certain audiences, then the meaning is probably pretty clear. Am I wrong?

Certain epithets just are not really ambiguous; they can’t be. ‘Nigger’ is the best known in the US and maybe elsewhere; kike, raghead, kaffir are a few more. Queer and dyke have been reclaimed, and there is a school of thought that ‘bitch’ has but I think on the contrary, ‘bitch’ is more viciously misogynist than ever. And so are, as far as I know, pussy, twat and cunt. It is my considered opinion that no one who comments on Jesus and Mo would have the gall to call the barmaid any of those things, and that if I’m right about that, they should stop using them at all.

Originally a comment by iknklast on He’s just another dude on the planet.

Oh, yes, it’s all just offense. But who is the one actually taking “offense”, if we look at it from the big picture? Dawkins took offense that Rebecca Watson didn’t want guys hitting on her in the elevator. He took offense that people thought a young boy should not have been arrested for bringing a clock to school, because “he didn’t really make a clock”. Language purity. He took offense because feminists protested an inappropriate shirt. Dawkins seems to be just one big ball of quivering offense right now, and we’re being told by everyone to lay off being offended because it’s so not freethinking, etc.

I used to try to figure out whether Dawkins was oblivious or malevolent. Now I figure it doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. Over a million fans that think he can do no wrong, and so they rush in a horde to protect him from that feminist blogger who just called him a bad name. Rape threats, death threats – it’s all just being a contrarian, a provocateur. Don’t over react. Just because they posted your address with the subtle statement that someone ought to rape you? Hypersensitive! Thought police!

I’m so tired. I thought I have finally found a home when I joined the freethought community, a place where I could finally have something in common. Now I find myself going through the same terrible experiences day in and day out that I had in the patriarchal religious community I was raised in. Patriarchy doesn’t look too good no matter which clothes it wears.

I think Dalton is right not to expect to agree with anyone 100%. I never expect that (not even you, Ophelia; not even Katha Pollitt). But he’s being a bit disingenuous here, because there are always some things that are more important than others. We are allowed to dismiss Neo-Nazis as role models, even though there may have been some decent things they did. We are allowed to dismiss the KKK as role models, even though many of them are model citizens in other aspects of life. We can just totally refuse to be friends with them, to associate with them, to read their books. We can criticize them online and off. But when the topic is sexism or misogyny, that is just trivial stuff, and merely disagreement. Sorry, don’t buy that.

Dawkins’s statement about inappropriate touching around the water cooler was sort of the last straw for me. This is recognition that sexual harassment happens, but basically he writes it off as not important. Sexual harassment is not important, it’s just “inappropriate touching”. Yes. And inappropriate leering is just inappropriate leering. And inappropriate shirts are just inappropriate shirts. But they all contribute to a pattern that affects one particular group of people disproportionately…a group of people that neither Richard Dawkins or Brian Dalton is part of, which makes their lecturing look just a bit self-serving. It’s very easy to dismiss someone else’s problems as inappropriate. What would happen if we dismissed it as unimportant when someone violated them? (And I hope no one here would ever do that…we can be bigger than that, and show them how it’s done).

From the Columbia Tower observation deck:

Karlo G

That’s a ferry departing at the bottom left. You can just barely see one approaching or leaving Winslow at the top – the tiny speck between two points of land.