Wednesday night last week Cooper and I took our post-dinner walk down to Kerry Park, which is a little pocket park on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill with a sweeping view of the southern Cascades, Mount Rainier on the few days it’s clear enough, downtown, the harbor, and Puget Sound. If you’ve ever seen a postcard or generic photo of Seattle, it was taken from there. It was a beautiful windy night with clouds ripping across the sky. When we got to Kerry Park we found people arranging big illuminated squares on the grass, squares that held letters, one per square. While Cooper sniffed all the things I looked at the squares to read the message (upside down: I was standing at the top of them) – and got NET NEUTRALITY NO.

NO?? That seemed incongruous. The NO people would be at corporate dinners or on the phone to lobbyists, not messing around in Kerry Park at night. Huh. Then here came someone carrying another square. Ah. “Is that the W?” I asked her. “I hope?” It was, of course.

They asked us – the random people in the park at that moment – to help hold up the sign and be in the photo. Fun! So I wrapped Cooper’s leash around one of the railings and beed in the photo.

I found the photo at the Northwest Progressive Institute.

(Photo: Rick Barry/Broken Shade Photo)

I’m behind the L, looking lumpy because in a hoody jacket.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The New York Times has more on the Chapel Hill murders.

A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars.

If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking.

They were all parked that day in a permitted way that didn’t interfere with Hicks – one in their assigned space, one in an unassigned space, one on the street. Nobody was parked in Hicks’s space.

The murders happened at Finley Forest, a complex on the eastern edge of this city popular with graduate students at the nearby University of North Carolina. Mrs. Hicks owns 270 Summerwalk Circle, a second-floor unit in Building 20 that looks out south over the parking lot. Her husband moved in after the couple married seven years ago; it was his second marriage after a disastrous first.

The contrast between the paunchy, balding Mr. Hicks and the rest of the complex’s residents was stark. Many were aspiring professionals and academics at a premier public university. Mr. Hicks was unemployed, taking night classes at a community college in hopes of becoming a paralegal. He spent long hours in his apartment with a collection of at least a dozen guns, including four pistols and a Bushmaster AR-15. Mrs. Hicks told her lawyer that Mr. Hicks would stare out the second-floor window, obsessing over neighbors’ parties, patterns and parking.

Ah; class. The Times is hinting that that could have played a role, and who knows, maybe it did. Nobody knows, and perhaps nobody ever will.

Hicks was increasingly obnoxious to them in the weeks before the murders. There’s speculation that it may have been the hijabs that pissed him off.

There is no question Mr. Hicks had a problem with religion. His Facebook page was full of quotations and memes denigrating Christianity. On Jan. 27, he shared a graphic that may have made reference to Islam: “People say there is nothing that can solve the Middle East problem … I say there is something. Atheism.”

Well, I have a  problem with religion too, and you can find masses of evidence for that on Facebook. I don’t kill people though. One of the reasons I have a problem with religion is the fact that it can be used to justify violence and murder.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The BBC reports India has shut down India’s Daughter.

Police in India have secured a court injunction blocking the broadcast of an interview with one of the Delhi gang rapists on death row.

The Delhi court order also prevents publication of the interview, which has angered many in India.

As well it might.

Film maker Leslee Udwin’s interview appears in India’s Daughter, a BBC Storyville documentary due to be broadcast on 8 March, International Women’s Day. It was also due to be shown in India on NDTV.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh was taking the matter “seriously” and had spoken to the Tihar jail director-general to demand an urgent report, PTI news agency quoted officials as saying.

Police in Delhi say they have registered two cases against the film, alleging breach of India’s penal code.

“We urge the Indian media not to show it,” said Delhi Police chief BS Bassi, the Times of India reported.

It’s not made clear what the law is that was breached, or why they’re shutting it down. It could have to do with not interfering with the legal process (the men are appealing their convictions) or it could be just reputation-protection.

Udwin says she got all the right permissions.

Earlier, prominent women activists wrote a letter to NDTV, asking the channel to refrain from showing the film which they said would amount to contempt of court.

…

Ms Udwin defended her film on an NDTV studio discussion, saying it “tries to show the disease is not the rapists, the disease is in society”.

The parents of the gang rape victim were alongside her and, while angered by Singh’s remarks, appeared to support the film.

A BBC spokesperson said: “This harrowing documentary, made with the full support and co-operation of the victim’s parents, provides a revealing insight into a horrific crime that sent shock waves around the world and led to protests across India demanding changes in attitudes towards women.

“The film handles the issue responsibly and we are confident the programme fully complies with our editorial guidelines.”

It would be nice to see changes in attitudes towards women sufficiently radical to do away with men thinking they get to punish women for being outside by mangling their intestines with metal pipes and their hands. That would be a good change.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s not just Catholic priests. It’s not just Catholic priests and Amish patriarchs. It’s not just Catholic priests and Amish patriarchs and yoga gurus. It’s not just Catholic priests and Amish patriarchs and yoga gurus and FLDS patriarchs.

It’s also Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Candace Conti was repeatedly sexually abused by such a nice friendly man when she was a child.

It is really hard for kids to speak up when they’re abused. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses make it a lot harder.

They have a “2 Witness” rule, which says that anyone who accuses an adult of abuse must have a second witness.

If there is no second witness, the accuser is punished for a false accusation – usually by ordering that no Witness may talk with or associate with the “false” accuser. This is called dis-fellowshipping.

Brilliant! It’s a rapist’s charter. All your enterprising rapist has to do is skip the part about bringing along an observer and Bob’s your uncle, he can rape away to his heart’s content in the happy knowledge that no one can accuse him. A bit rough on the raped child though. Not even her parents can talk or associate with her, and she’s branded a false accuser.

What my parents didn’t know, was that Jonathan had sexually molested another girl in our congregation. The elders knew this and had kept it a secret. They were following orders from Watchtower leaders, based in the world headquarters in New York, who in 1989 had issued a top-secret instruction to keep known child sex abusers in the congregations a secret. This instruction became Exhibit 1 at my civil trial.

They knew it and kept it a secret and thus allowed Jonathan to molest more girls in perfect freedom.

The elders and the Governing Body all knew that child molesters hide in religious groups and often are people who are likeable and friendly – like Jonathan. They knew molesters would likely do it again. But they chose to ignore the safety of the kids, in favor of protecting their image – and their bank account – from lawsuits. It was all in that 1989 letter.

A recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that they have continued to issues directives urging silence around child abuse. Last November,elders were instructed to avoid taking criminal matters like child abuse to the authorities. Instead, they were told to handle them internally in confidential committees. The report also showed that Jehovah’s Witnesses evoke the First Amendment to hide sex abuse claims.

I suppose they’ve been observing the Vatican and taking careful notes.

H/t Kausik Datta

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Kausik Datta on “In our culture, there is no place for a woman.”

People in India are wondering why this criminal is being given a spotlight, and what good would come out of it. I echo that sentiment in this case, despite generally being known to favor the stance of “all knowledge is worth having”. The documentary in question would be an instrument for pointing out ad infinitum how bad the situation of women is in India, but it will not be a teachable moment.

Why? Because this despicable criminal is a product of his society, culture, tradition – a triumvirate that considers women to be chattel, property to be owned, toyed with and disposed of at will. The disgusting statements put out by this man’s defence lawyers stand a testament to that.

As long as these three conditions don’t undergo a radical reform, this horrendous and shameful situation will not change – even if Mukesh Singh is eventually given the death penalty, which many people are clamoring for.

Here is a link to a relatively recent study carried out amongst school- and college-age kids, and the results of the survey have been quite eye-opening about highly regressive attitudes extant in the Indian society. Just as an example:

* 65% of college students disapprove of boys and girls from different religions meeting in public places.
* 44% of college students “agree” that women have no choice but to accept a certain degree of violence.
* 51% college students believe women must mainly take care of the household and bring up children.

This highlights the need for a great deal of introspection as a society. But I am not hopeful that that is ever going to happen.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on To be found superficial and contemptible.

The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence.

Bollocks. The heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today is that it is relatively easy to ignore persecution so long as you aren’t the one being persecuted, and tyranny is relatively easy for the one who holds the power to be the tyrant.

The liberal philosophy of today is that human affairs are fundamentally malleable, and can cover a wide range of possibilities – therefore we have to work hard to make sure that it is the possibilities that get realized are the ones that we most want to live with.

This is the central core to the concept of privilege and the main reason liberals tend to oppose too much power being concentrated in too few hands, whether that be via dictatorship or the economic hegemony of major corporations.

It is also the central core to the value of education and access to reasonably accurate information. From a liberal perspective the more people have power the harder it is for a tyranny to form, as more people have the ability to oppose it.

Knowledge is power, and it is religion that tends to consider ignorance to be the same as innocence. Adam and Eve were rendered sinful because they ate of the tree of knowledge.

Liberalism tends to associate ignorance more with racism, sexism, homophobia and various forms of xenophobia.

For religion ignorance is bliss, for liberals ignorance is fear.

From a “New Atheist” perspective, the core issue with religion is that it gives a small group of people in the form of clerics unearned authority, with which they can devolve towards tyranny and thus harming other people. Religion is not the root of all evil, but it is an enabling factor for much of it.

And one must further note it is not the nature of a tyrant to simply gain power, but also to deny it to others. Arguments which center around controlling the masses “to maintain order” or some sort of ill-defined “social good” are generally about depriving the masses of their power, and thus enabling the tyrant presenting the arguments.

We have to be exceptionally careful with the power we grant, because we know that it is within ourselves to misuse it.

Tyranny and persecution are not aberrations within the heart of human affairs, from the liberal perspective they’re the status quo – hence the need to be liberals.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

John Gray has a characteristic piece in the Guardian rehearsing the familiar old saws about how naïve and delusional atheists and liberals are, how it’s all just Christianity turned inside out, yadda yadda…but despite the staleness it’s not all wrong.

The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and other minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any different in future.

That bit isn’t wrong. Many liberal values are at war with some aspects of what human beings are like. We’re hierarchical, so egalitarianism is always at war with many of our impulses and urges. I think Gray is right that there’s no reason to think that’s going to change in the future.

We like hierarchies for one thing because we think there’s a chance we’ll scramble our way to somewhere high or highish up on them. We like them for another thing because we like bullying people and putting them down.

We also have impulses and urges that push us the other way, fortunately. We can discourage the first and foster the second. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that Kumbaya is more natural or innate than Islamic State.

An older generation of liberal thinkers accepted this fact. As the late Stuart Hampshire put it:

“It is not only possible, but, on present evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life, which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialised societies will often seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies and even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies … As a liberal by philosophical conviction, I think I ought to expect to be hated, and to be found superficial and contemptible, by a large part of mankind.”

Today this a forbidden thought. How could all of humankind not want to be as we imagine ourselves to be? To suggest that large numbers hate and despise values such as toleration and personal autonomy is, for many people nowadays, an intolerable slur on the species. This is, in fact, the quintessential illusion of the ruling liberalism: the belief that all human beings are born freedom-loving and peaceful and become anything else only as a result of oppressive conditioning. But there is no hidden liberal struggling to escape from within the killers of the Islamic State and Boko Haram, any more than there was in the torturers who served the Pol Pot regime. To be sure, these are extreme cases. But in the larger sweep of history, faith-based violence and persecution, secular and religious, are hardly uncommon – and they have been widely supported. It is peaceful coexistence and the practice of toleration that are exceptional.

Yes. And as climate change bites harder and harder, peaceful coexistence and the practice of toleration are likely to become every more exceptional until they disappear altogether.

But hey, maybe there will be a miracle.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Reza Moradi stands up to Islamists at London Metropolitan University.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrDooPpt6SA

The University and College Union (@UCU) invited Mohammed Kozbar (Muslim Association of Britain Vice President) to speak at @Londonmentuni in a panel on immigration.

Diane Abbott (Labour MP) and Sally Hunt (UCU General Secretary) sat very comfortably with the MAB representative, despite the MAB’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood, its defence of death by stoning for adultery and support for the death penalty for apostates such as me. MAB is what is known as a “soft” Islamist organisation, normalising and justifying terrorism, the Caliphate and Sharia rules.
I am outraged that my union would share a panel with, and promote, an Islamist organisation in this way. This is not standing with immigrants and refugees – many of whom have fled the brutality of Islamists in our own countries, including myself and of course many Muslims.

The Unions’s job is to address the many issues we face in our workplace and to help people work for a more just and humane society. They have no reason or excuse for allying with the religious-Right anywhere in this remit. This relationship is very shameful for my union and for all those who welcome groups like the MAB as friends onto panels like these. Islamism is our fascism and the union should stand against all forms of fascism without any exceptions.

Given this collusion and legitimisation of Islamism within this dominant strand of the postmodernist Left, it is unsurprising to see the Islamist influence at our universities. These so called left wing groups need to understand that the Muslim Association of Britain is not the representatives of Muslims or refugees and immigrants any more than the EDL or BNP are representatives of the British students in the university. It represents a political far-Right movement that should be opposed by academics and students alike. The University should not become a welcoming space for fascists of any stripe.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Taslima alerts us to an interview with one of the Delhi rapists reported in the Telegraph.

In an interview from jail, Mukesh Singh said that women who went out at night had only themselves to blame if they attracted the attention of gangs of male molesters. “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.

His victim, Jyoti Singh, 23, was returning from an evening at the cinema with a male friend when the six-strong gang offered them a lift in a mini-bus they were driving. She was raped and frenziedly beaten with iron bars, prompting widespread demonstrations for Indian women to have greater protection from sexual violence.

In an interview for a BBC documentary, Singh also claimed that had Jyoti and her friend not tried to fight back, the gang would not have not have inflicted the savage beating, which led her to die from her injuries two weeks later.

Describing the killing as an “accident”, he said: “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy.”

You can’t get misogyny much purer than that.

while the judge said that the case had “shocked the collective conscience” of India, Singh appears to show little remorse.

“You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands,” he says in the interview. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good.”

…

The lawyers who defended the gang in court express similarly extreme views about women who venture out at night. In a previous televised interview, lawyer AP Singh said: “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”

Pre-marital activities like going to a movie? He would set his daughter or sister on fire for going to a movie with a man?

I don’t think very much of the human species right now.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Ben Finney on Maajid Nawaz takes this moment to salute Gita Sahgal.

zubanel, #4:

I’m saying disregard the religious element as essential and focus on murderers.

So, we focus on those who have already killed? We are to direct our attention away from the ideas that strongly compel them to premeditated murder of strangers?

That doesn’t do it for me. I want to detect potential murderers before they do murder, and obligate them to not murder.

For that, we need to focus on the ideas which compel some people to murder — and that inevitably requires that we spend a lot of attention on combating Islam, which is a set of ideas that explicitly and actively compels people to do murder.

There is no need to invoke “monster” for these people because they are all too human. They are simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized.

Again, I can only point out to you that there are many people – the person named in this piece being a prime example – who were devoted to religious ideas compelling premeditated murder of strangers, and yet they were cured and civilised to the point of not holding those ideas any more.

To write off such people as “simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized” and to advocate killing them, is to kill people like Maajid Nawaz before they have a chance to change.

That would be an unacceptable loss. Killing is only going to lead to more motivation for killing. Whereas counter-jihadi propaganda from organisations like Quilliam – which can only exist because we don’t apply your hopeless ideas – will prevent killing. I know which I would prefer.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Amnesty UK is probably going to cut ties with Cage, the Standard reports.

Human rights organisation Amnesty International is likely to cut ties with controversial advocacy group Cage because of “Jihadi John”, its deputy director said today.

Cage has come under fire after suggesting that MI5 “harassment” was responsible for turning Londoner Mohammed Emwazi into a bloodthirsty terrorist seen beheading civilians in horrific Islamic State propaganda videos.