The Independent comments on Gove’s tantrum and Evans’s response.

Today, one of Britain’s most eminent historians hit back at what he described as an “ignorant attack” by Education Secretary Michael Gove on his analysis of the conflict.

Writing in the Daily Mail yesterday Mr Gove accused Professor Sir Richard Evans of failing to acknowledge the debt owed to the soldiers that were killed in the Great War claiming he had previously dismissed attempts to honour their sacrifice as “narrow tub-thumping jingoism”.

Sir Richard, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College Cambridge, suggested the criticism stemmed from his vocal opposition to the Education Secretary’s ill-fated attempts to reform the way history is taught in schools.

Professor Evans told The Independent: “I never said that at all. I said his proposals for the National Curriculum were narrow tub-thumping jingoism and there is some relationship between that.”

History according to the Tory party. Sounds about right.

Professor Evans accused Mr Gove of oversimplification.  “How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.”

He said that unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal – 40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote until 1918. “The Kaiser was not like Hitler, he was not a dictator. He could never make his mind up and changed his mind every five minutes. The largest political party in Germany in 1914 were the Social Democrats,” he said. “Germany was a very divided country in 1914 and becomes more so as time goes on. It is not Nazi Germany,” he added.

Don’t pester the Education Secretary with pedantic details like that. He’s a busy man.

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

Once again, I find myself surprised. I didn’t know anyone bothered to defend the First World War these days; I didn’t know anyone had bothered to do that since about 1930. I was under the impression that the defenders started falling silent at a pretty sharp clip in 1915. (That last one is hyperbole. There was a lot of oppression and repression of opponents of the war as long as it was going on. Bertrand Russell did a stint in the slammer for it.)

But once again, I was wrong. Michael Gove is bothering to defend it, and talk smack about people he dislikes in the process. The Daily Mail (yes) is on the case.

Left-wing myths about the First World War peddled by Blackadder belittle Britain and clear Germany of blame, Michael Gove says today.

The Education Secretary criticises historians and TV programmes that denigrate patriotism and courage by depicting the war as a ‘misbegotten shambles’.

As Britain prepares to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the war, Mr Gove claims only undergraduate cynics would say the soldiers were foolish to fight.

Oy. Lots of people at all levels of education (well ok not kindergarten) have been saying that for many decades. For almost all ten of the decades in the centenary.

Has Michael Gove not been informed of what the war in question led to over the following two decades? And then the nasty incident that took place over the six years between 1939 and 1945?

Mr Gove turns his fire on ‘Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths by attacking Britain’s role in the conflict’.

He singles out Richard Evans, regius professor of history at Cambridge University, who has said those who enlisted in 1914 were wrong to think they were fighting to defend freedom.

Mr Gove writes: ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship, but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate.’ 

While writing anti-intellectual bullshit for the Daily Mail is soberness itself.

What an ignorant hack.

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

The Times Higher reports on…well it’s too complicated to paraphrase.

Headline: Students’ unions hit back at group monitoring campus extremism

Subhead: Student Rights’ agenda questioned by LSE, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths unions

The article starts:

Three students’ unions have condemned a group that monitors extremist speakers on campus for “targeting Muslim students”.

Student Rights, which refutes* the students’ unions’ claims, released a report in May 2013 on events organised by Islamic societies that found that a quarter of those it monitored had enforced gender segregation.

That’s what the Times Higher reports on.

And we’re in the weeds right at the outset. I disagree that monitoring for instance Islamist speakers equals “targeting Muslim students.” Equating the two implies that all Muslim students are fans of Islamist speakers, and they’re not.

Isn’t it one of the claims of people who talk about “Islamophobia” that “Islamophobes” equate all Muslims with the most fanatical of Islamists? Yes, it is, so what can be the point of framing things as if monitoring Islamist speakers meant “targeting Muslim students”? Islamists aren’t the friends of liberal Muslims, they’re their deadly enemies.

Last month, unions at the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, University of London and Birkbeck, University of London all passed motions claiming that the group indulges in “sensationalism” around Muslim students.

These motions have been coordinated by a group called Real Student Rights.

One of its supporters, Hilary Aked, a doctoral student at the University of Bath, argued that the Student Rights report, Unequal Opportunity – Gender Segregation on UK University Campuses, had exaggerated the proportion of events that are segregated because it monitored only Islamic events where the speaker had a history of extreme views, or where gender segregation was explicitly promoted.

So…Student Rights monitors only the reactionary Islamist groups, yet somehow doing that is “targeting Muslim students.” Isn’t it, rather, the opposite of that? Isn’t it not targeting Muslim students, but instead, targeting reactionary Islamist speakers and groups?

She also argued that Student Rights’ focus was disproportionately on Muslim groups, rather than on far Right extremists.

What?

Islamist groups are far Right extremists.

*sic. Should be “rejects”.

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

Wow – libertarianism in all its glory.

Amy Alkon @amyalkon

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar Again, we have people CLUELESS about def of harassment – “severe, pervasive”

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar Would you expect a man offended by convo to speak up or to go fetal position & tattle

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar My suspicion: These ladies & others have it in for men & Bora was conven located.

Jesus. She accuses the women of lying, even though Bora never denied their accounts.

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

From 2012 – how advertising today really is not all that much more “advanced” than it was in the 50s.

Man standing on a woman then? Man with a heavily shod foot on her throat now. The contemporary one is “advanced” in the usual sense that it makes her look as if violence=hawt sex.

Check them out. The Dolce & Gabbana gang rape one is especially…contemporary.

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

Apparently in Australia they do prosecute FGM, or at least attempt to, or at least have made one such attempt. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

A Sydney father has been charged by police over the alleged genital mutilation of his infant daughter while they were holidaying overseas.

Police said the man and his family were on a holiday in February 2012 when the father allegedly organised for his nine-month-old daughter to undergo a procedure known as female circumcision.

About six months later, the child’s mother took her daughter to a doctor for treatment, and the NSW Police Child Abuse Squad was alerted.

That sounds like a hidden story. One imagines the mother’s reaction after the genital mutilation which she apparently had not agreed to. One imagines what condition she sought treatment for six months later. One shudders.

Police would not say in which country the family was holidaying at the time of the alleged incident.

How tactful.

H/t Ian.

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

Guest post by Reese Matthews.

Some in the US military’s chain of command are upset with the judicial system which has convicted at least one soldier of rape and harassment.

In their minds, any convictions amounts to an unfair trial system.

Dustup Over Military Appeals Judge Delaying Cases

Dozens of military criminal cases have been thrown into limbo because of a legal challenge over whether Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel improperly appointed a judge to the Air Force’s highest court, with attorneys raising questions about the judge’s independence amid increasing pressure over the military’s handling of sexual assault cases.

[...]

“The Secretary of Defense has been making a lot of statements related to sexual assaults, and here he is appointing Judge Soybel at will,” defense attorney Philip Cave, whose client was convicted in a sexual assault case now on appeal, told The Associated Press. “That creates not just an appointment problem, but a perception problem of whether or not Judge Soybel will be fair.”

The Air Force insists Soybel, who left the court in October, was unbiased and properly appointed. No hearings have been scheduled in the dispute.

Really? So sayeth the republicans and the defenders of the status quo. A memo that Hagel wrote on August 14th, 2013 was leaked, in which Hagel explicitly directed the courts to be impartial.

And by impartial, that means capable of rendering guilty verdicts when proven, not sweeping crimes under the rug.

Hagel aims to blunt Obama remarks on military sexual assault

[...]

“There are no expected or required dispositions, outcomes or sentences in any military justice case, other than what result from the individual facts and merits of a case and the application to the case of the fundamentals of due process of law,” Hagel wrote in the Aug. 6 memo, first reported by the New York Times.

In a directive dated Aug. 14, Hagel laid out those measures which include routine, independent reviews of sexual assault investigations, improving victim legal support, notification of top military leaders immediately after cases are reported, and prohibitions on inappropriate relations between trainers and trainees.

“Preventing the crime of sexual assault remains our focus,” Hagel wrote.

“When a crime does occur, we must ensure that victims’ rights are respected, they are provided responsive and timely support, and related investigations and judicial proceedings, if appropriate, are conducted in a thorough, professional, and fair manner.”

How unsurprising it is that the people who now complain about “impartiality” after legal convictions were the same people who supported George Bush’s kangaroo courts back in 2005. Bush and his gang of four (Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Cheney) blathered about “the worst of the worst”, creating a sham court system to guarantee convictions. Instead, of more than a thousand held captive at Guantanamo, barely a handful have been convicted despite a weighted court.

And now that barely a handful of soldiers have been tried or convicted of rape, the same people are crying foul.

Nothing ever changes. And that’s exactly what some people want.

***

To my surprise, Ms. Benson asked me to write this item. My thanks to her for the opportunity.

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

There was a lot of news coverage of LSE’s apology to Chris and Abhishek on December 20, which I somehow missed because I was looking at something else.

The BBC for example.

Prof Paul Kelly of the LSE told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “The law in this case was complex and given the complaint, with the backing of solicitors, looking for judicial review, we had to take legal advice.

“This was always a grey area. So yes, I got the judgement wrong but it was a complex decision and it’s important to make that clear.”

Prof Kelly added that in the UK there was no US-style First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech “without qualification”.

He said the university had to weigh up the Human Rights Act, the 2010 Equality act and the 1986 Universities Extension Act.

“Each one of those laws is perhaps clear, but when they all come together we have to make judgements.

“In general our attitude is very tough on promoting free speech at public events, lectures and student societies.

“This was a complex event because it was a welcome event. It’s when students from 130 countries arrive in the UK all together.

“Yes, freedom of speech still applies there, but it wasn’t the same as us objecting to a student society event or a public lecture, or as Christian, as he did later, host an event where students wore the T-shirts. That’s fine”.

Chris saw it differently.

Mr Moos said the university had not provided any evidence of complaints from students and the comments they had themselves received on the day had all been positive.

“You are judging us on something for which there is not evidence,” he said.

He argued that in fact the decision should have been straightforward. “It was simply two students exercising their right to freedom of expression that they have as much as any other student who might wear religious symbols or T-shirts expressing their faith.

“It was extremely shocking that the LSE still tries to justify their decisions.

“If somebody is wearing a racist or violent or gory T-shirt, that would be a totally different situation.”

He said their T-shirts did not offend or harass anyone, not even by the most stringent standards.

“What I would ask Paul is, ‘Will you actually apologise for the actual harassment we have suffered?’ That’s the issue at stake. You have apologised for the decisions made but not for harassing, humiliating and intimidating us.”

Prof Kelly said he was sticking with the apologies already issued to the two students concerned.

The Washington Post reported. It’s the AP story, so nothing new, but it’s good to see that it got to the US.

Also the Telegraph.

Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis were threatened with being thrown out of the university’s Freshers Fair if they didn’t cover up the images, as they manned an Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society stall at the event.

Prof Kelly, pro-director at LSE, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It was a difficult judgment and I quite accept I called it wrong.”

The T-shirts featured a picture of Mohammed prohibited under Islamic law.

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

Another New Statesman piece on “Islamophobia” – as usual not defined or specified, as usual functioning to conflate dislike of Islam with hatred of Muslims and thus make the former taboo along with the latter.

Last week I was asked to think of an issue on which I’ve changed my mind. I said the Iraq war, but if I’d been asked this week I might have said something else: Islamophobia. I used to think it wasn’t a problem.

Before I explain why, let’s look at one particular news story, by which I mean embarrassingly trivial non-story. Marks and Spencer is allowing its Muslim employees not to serve alcohol or pork products. A privately owned company has a policy that if its employees want to opt out of doing things to which they have a religious objection, they can.

I mean, it’s not the craziest idea I’ve ever heard.

Oh come on. If the thing the employees want to opt out of doing is just a routine part of the job, and their not doing it is a nuisance for other people, then it’s not just a slam dunk that it’s not a problem for employers to say go right ahead. If people get jobs as cashiers in supermarkets and then want to refuse to sell some of the products…it’s not just obvious that that’s fine.

We here in the US have extra opportunities to be aware of that because of pharmacists who refuse to sell the morning after pill, and some even birth control. You see what I mean? It’s making their religion an inconvenience to other people; it’s refusing to do bits of their job because god.

But of course it’s not a real issue, and neither is there any principle at stake here beyond queue management. The desire to be served quickly in a shop seems to have got tangled up with weighty concepts like “free society”. Listen, if you think you’re queuing too long at M&S, go to Sainsbury’s – that’s the beauty of a free society. Shops can sell pretty much what and how they want, and we can buy from where we want. M&S is not a school nor the Church of England nor the BBC. It’s a commercial retailer acting within the law.

On Twitter, Jenni Russell put it to me like this: “Just as Christians can’t refuse to have gays in B&Bs, so Muslims shouldn’t refuse to serve people buying legal goods.” Let’s see: one of them involves denying adults the right to love one another. The other involves denying the basic human right to buy a bottle of Merlot from the first sales assistant available.

No, it’s not that easy. There is a principle at stake here beyond “queue management” - the principle of treating everyone the same, as opposed to staging self-important little Religious Refusals. It’s the principle of secularism extended to the broader outside world, where we really just do not want strangers picking and choosing among us on religious grounds. We don’t want Catholics refusing to sell meat on Fridays, we don’t want Southern Baptists refusing to sell to women in jeans, we don’t want Mormons slipping little pamphlets into our reusable shopping bags along with the milk and marmalade, we don’t want Jews asking if our food is kosher, we don’t want Muslims refusing to sell us pork or alcohol.

…a year of stories like the M&S one has persuaded me that our national news agenda is distorted by a deep suspicion of Muslims. Islam animates our media like few other topics, and just as the left’s obsession with Israel overlaps, unprovably but unmistakably, with anti-Semitism, so there is something that just smells funny about the recurrent shock-horror headlines over vanishingly insignificant issues of conduct. Playground spite is being dressed up as “debate”.

Take the row over whether university societies should allow segregated debates: it’s a tiny story affecting about seven people, but because it involves Islam, national figures weigh in and commentators with virtually no knowledge or interest in the people concerned express passionate certainty.

Oh well, if it affects only about seven people (which it doesn’t), then never mind – just go ahead and allow gender segregation. Of course, Ian Leslie isn’t the one whose gender is seen as a source of pollution…

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

Fortunately the pesky secularists and liberals and feminists don’t get to have it all their own way. Week before last there was a meeting of “Muslim women united against attack on gender segregation”…in other words united in favor of gender segregation. A site called 5pillarz has a carefully worded report.

Around 150 Muslim women attended a community event last Friday evening, organised after the attack by politicians and the media on the Islamic practice of gender segregation.

Not the “Islamic practice” as such, no. The “attack” was and is on attempts to impose the practice at university lectures and debates open to the general public; it was and is not on the practice in mosques and other religious and/or private spaces.

They were addressed by a panel of notable Muslim women from across the community – prominent journalist Yvonne Ridley, Islamic female scholar Fatima Barakatullah of IERA, Zara Faris of Muslim Debate Initiative (MDI), Women’s Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir, Britain Shohana Khan and Aisha Azri, Head of a London ISOC.

Ahhhhh that’s not “across the community” – not if “the community” is meant to be Muslims as opposed to Islamists. But that’s what Islamists do, isn’t it: they pretend that the narrower and more fundamentalist “community” is actually the larger and more varied one. It benefits them, but it harms Muslims who aren’t as reactionary and theocratic as Islamists.

All the panellists addressed an attentive female audience, on the issue which has received much media attention in recent weeks. They all discussed how this attack was part of the wider agenda against Islam, as gender segregation was nothing alien to the current society in toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards.

They all iterated the need to unite as Muslim women in order to respond to the attack as there is a concerted effort to silence their voices. The responses included first and foremost having a unified voice, and then dispelling the myths the media perpetuates about the Islam’s view of women through practices like gender segregation and niqab.

Because in fact, gender segregation and the niqab are totally egalitarian and empowering. Right.

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

At 50 Million Missing, a post about the axing of Taslima’s tv serial.

Feminist author Taslima Nasreen’s scripted television series (in Bengali) titled ‘Dusahobas’ meaning ” Unbearable Cohabitation,” although ready for telecast has been “indefinitely postponed” for airing, because of pressure from Islamic clerics in the state of West Bengal.

Abdul Aziz of the religious group Milli Ittehad Parishad said their group had written to the producers of the show and told them to withdraw Taslima’s name and reference from the serial, even though Taslima has scripted the show! Aziz said, “We have been told that there are some scenes in the serial that might hurt our sentiments,” even though he does not specify as to what exactly in the show is hurtful to Muslim sentiments in India.

In fact this show is not about Islam but about issues that are effecting women of all religious and cultural communities in India, issues like dowry, dowry violence, sexual violence, and prevention of education. Issues that Indian society needs to contend with through mass media like television.

But it’s been shut down, because someone was told that there might be something that might hurt someone’s sentiments.

West Bengal which was one of the safest states for women in India, today under the leadership of a woman, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has the highest rate of crimes against women in India.  This has largely been because of Ms. Banerjee’s encouragement of a misogynistic cultural, and patriarchal trend that keeps her politically popular at the cost of women’s rights! This is shameful for the West Bengal and for India.  We must demand more of our women leaders.

If even women won’t…

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

The Times of India reports:

A year after the Nirbhaya horror, yet another gang-rape victim lost her battle for life at the state-run R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on New Year’s Eve.

The 16-year-old, a resident of Madhyamgram in North 24-Parganas, was gang-raped at Badu on October 25. The next day, while on her way back home from the police station after lodging a complaint, she was allegedly sexually abused all over again.

The teenager and her family were so traumatized by the sequence of events that they chose to shift to another tenement close to Kolkata Airport. But there was no respite. The miscreants continued to hound her till she finally poured kerosene on herself on December 23 and lit a match. She was admitted to the hospital with 40% burns and finally succumbed on Tuesday afternoon.

Political parties, trade unionists and social workers converged on the hospital as soon as news of the teenager’s death spread. The girl’s parents were inconsolable. Their only child had dreamt of being a teacher. The mother claimed that her daughter didn’t commit suicide but was murdered by the two men who used to hound them.

It wasn’t enough to rape her; they had to hound her afterwards too.

The family had shifted to the single-room tenement near the airport gate about six months earlier. For obvious reasons, they hadn’t told landlord Ratan Sil of what the teenager had undergone. Unfortunately, Sil’s wife had a nephew who lived in the neighbourhood where the girl had been raped. Within days, this youth named Minta turned up at his aunt’s house and started hounding the girl and her family. He was joined in by Sil.

“I suspect that they wanted to take advantage of the situation and sexually harass my daughter again. One day while returning home, I found Minta knocking on the front door. When I asked what he wanted, he made a lame excuse. Around 9 am on December 23, he and Sil came over and started abusing us. My husband had gone to Krishnanagar with a fare. I left my daughter alone and went to the main road to see if any of his friends were around. On returning, I found the door bolted from the outside and smoke billowing from the window. I rushed in to find her in flames. She called out to me and said that I should also join her as the goons wouldn’t leave me in peace either. I called out to neighbours and they doused the blaze. I suspect that Minta and Sil set my daughter ablaze,” the mother said.

Some of that gender ideology we hear so much about.

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

Thanks to a comment by Ariel, we can read this interview with a priest, Dariusz Oko from the Papal University of John Paul II, translated from Polish and titled Gender ideology destroys a cradle of humankind – a family. This is good because I was just wondering what the Vatican thinks it means by “gender ideology.” Let’s find out.

Anna Cichobłazińska: – In media there appear more and more terms: gender, ideology of gender, totalitarianism of gender, philosophy of gender. What does this term mean and why is it so dangerous?

Fr. Dariusz Oko: We should speak not so much about ‘philosophy’ but about ‘ideology’ of gender. Philosophy is a radical search for the truth and the good, whereas the ideology is a tool of a ruthless fight about one’s interests also at the cost of the truth and the good. It is to lead to the victory of opinions and satisfying of egoistic desires of a social group at the cost of even the biggest harm done to other groups. In this sense, gender is a classic example of an ideology, is a tool in a ruthless fight for benefits for the atheistic gender and homo-lobby.

Ah yes, in sharp contrast to the Vatican, which never fights ruthlessly for benefits to itself. Cue hollow laughter.

It’s a fascinating claim though. The “normal” situation in which women are subordinate is fine, it’s when women try to be equals instead of subordinates that it’s not fine and priests say they are trying to get benefits for women alone at the expense of “other groups.” (What other groups?)

Q What is at the base of these assumptions?

A Spiritual attitudes of creators of gender ideology. First of all, these are leftist atheists, the leftists. Atheism builds on the fundamental, false assumption of non-existence of God and, consequently, it understands the man and the world in a false way. It is as if a baby, living in the womb of a mother would state that his mother does not exist at all. Then the baby will go from absurd to absurd.

No. Suppose a baby magically developed enough to think in that way, the baby would have very good reasons to be aware of the existence of her mother. Atheists don’t say the world we live in doesn’t exist. We have very good reasons to be aware of the existence of the world; the same does not apply to “god.”

The priest cites the body count of “atheism” (meaning Nazism and Stalinism and Maoism), then explains how feminism will also have its body count. Any day now. No really.

People who are the most fierce enemies of God, they are also becoming the most fervent servants of satan. We should remember that it is just satan who becomes the basic source of their way of thinking. However, after this ocean of crimes and absurd, atheists find it difficult to gain the authority through classical Marxism, it is too discredited for it. Also their atheistic assumptions are like mental chains and shackles, which do not allow for going further towards the truth. They are somehow ‘doomed’ to move around in a small area of atheism, they cannot come out into more open areas, or understand more things. Moreover, like every man, they need a kind of worldview, a kind of sense, a kind of a special understanding the reality. When the simple Marxism cannot hold these functions any more, they invented its mutation, that is, gender ideology. They are also creating an illusion of mission and service. As they ‘used to help’ workers and peasants, seizing the whole authority for themselves in this way, and creating the worst and the bloodiest dictatorships known in the history, so now they want to ‘help’ people sexually different and by the way they want to gain the totalitarian authority. Because they are spiritual or even physical descendants of the worst and atheistic offenders, one should expect that they will be similarly wicked, hypocritical and ruthless in their actions.

Right. Atheism is tiny and closed, while Catholicism is big and wide-open and full of More Things.

Q Exactly, why are they talking about sex so much, and are concentrated on it?

A It is typical for atheism. If what is the supreme and the most spiritual in a man is negated, that is, his community with God and people, the human existence is getting poor anyway and a man is falling into what is lower and purely physiological. And sexuality belongs to the most powerful forces of our carnality, hence there is its overestimation, passive subordination to it and separation from love and responsibility leads easily to servitude, a search for one’s fulfilment and happiness, nearly only within its limits, also on the way of behaviours which are very distorted. For this reason atheists become sex-maniacs and sex-addicts and they want to impose these ill attitudes on the society.

Says the guy from the church with a long history of child-rape and being accomplices, accessories, aiders and abettors.

There’s a lot more. It’s creepy, creepy stuff.

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

Sunday morning at 10 a.m. UK time, BBC1 The Big Questions will be asking the ridiculous question, ”Should Human Rights always outweigh Religious Rights?”

But the good news is that Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis will be taking part, so it should be interesting.

Mind you, I can ruin the suspense right now by saying yes, of course they should. Any religious practice that violates one or more human rights should not be allowed. There is no “religious right” to enslave people or cut off their genitalia or keep them out of school or deny them medical treatment or prevent them from getting birth control.

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

It has come to my attention that I don’t have anxiety, and that a lot of people do, and that I’m damn lucky not to. Or maybe I mean I don’t have Anxiety, or an anxiety disorder. It’s not as if I never get unreasonably jittery about something. I’ve told you how absurdly jittery I get whenever I travel (and how promptly I get over it once I’m at the airport). But compared to real anxiety, that’s nothing.

Scott Stossel has a long article about his in the current Atlantic.

I’ve finally settled on a pre-talk regimen that enables me to avoid the weeks of anticipatory misery that the approach of a public-speaking engagement would otherwise produce.

Let’s say you’re sitting in an audience and I’m at the lectern. Here’s what I’ve likely done to prepare. Four hours or so ago, I took my first half milligram of Xanax. (I’ve learned that if I wait too long to take it, my fight-or-flight response kicks so far into overdrive that medication is not enough to yank it back.) Then, about an hour ago, I took my second half milligram of Xanax and perhaps 20 milligrams of Inderal. (I need the whole milligram of Xanax plus the Inderal, which is a blood-pressure medication, or beta-blocker, that dampens the response of the sympathetic nervous system, to keep my physiological responses to the anxious stimulus of standing in front of you—the sweating, trembling, nausea, burping, stomach cramps, and constriction in my throat and chest—from overwhelming me.) I likely washed those pills down with a shot of scotch or, more likely, vodka, the odor of which is less detectable on my breath. Even two Xanax and an Inderal are not enough to calm my racing thoughts and to keep my chest and throat from constricting to the point where I cannot speak; I need the alcohol to slow things down and to subdue the residual physiological eruptions that the drugs are inadequate to contain. In fact, I probably drank my second shot—yes, even though I might be speaking to you at, say, 9 in the morning—between 15 and 30 minutes ago, assuming the pre-talk proceedings allowed me a moment to sneak away for a quaff.

If the usual pattern has held, as I stand up here talking to you now, I’ve got some Xanax in one pocket (in case I felt the need to pop another one before being introduced) and a minibar-size bottle or two of vodka in the other. I have been known to take a discreet last-second swig while walking onstage—because even as I’m still experiencing the anxiety that makes me want to drink more, my inhibition has been lowered, and my judgment impaired, by the liquor and benzodiazepines I’ve already consumed. If I’ve managed to hit the sweet spot—that perfect combination of timing and dosage whereby the cognitive and psychomotor sedating effect of the drugs and alcohol balances out the physiological hyperarousal of the anxiety—then I’m probably doing okay up here: nervous but not miserable; a little fuzzy but still able to speak clearly; the anxiogenic effects of the situation (me, speaking in front of people) counteracted by the anxiolytic effects of what I’ve consumed. But if I’ve overshot on the medication—too much Xanax or liquor—I may seem to be loopy or slurring or otherwise impaired. And if I didn’t self-medicate enough? Well, then, either I’m sweating profusely, with my voice quavering weakly and my attention folding in upon itself, or, more likely, I ran offstage before I got this far. I mean that literally: I’ve frozen, mortifyingly, onstage at public lectures and presentations before, and on several occasions I have been compelled to bolt from the stage.

Yikes. I don’t have that, or anything close to it. It sounds nightmarish. I feel as if I should do something to make it up to all the people who do have it. As I mentioned, that’s a lot of people. Stossel says so.

Anxiety and its associated disorders represent the most common form of officially classified mental illness in the United States today, more common even than depression and other mood disorders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, some 40 million American adults, about one in six, are suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder at any given time; based on the most recent data from the Department of Health and Human Services, their treatment accounts for more than a quarter of all spending on mental-health care. Recent epidemiological data suggest that one in four of us can expect to be stricken by debilitating anxiety at some point in our lifetime. And it is debilitating: studies have compared the psychic and physical impairment tied to living with an anxiety disorder with the impairment tied to living with diabetes—both conditions are usually manageable, sometimes fatal, and always a pain to deal with. In 2012, Americans filled nearly 50 million prescriptions for just one antianxiety drug: alprazolam, the generic name for Xanax.

Life is harder than it ought to be.

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

The Vatican wants to let everyone know that it is against secular education and would prefer that everyone went to a Catholic school, although it will settle for some other kind of religious school, since it doesn’t like to be too pushy about these things.

The Catholic News Agency reports on this exciting new idea:

A recently released Vatican document is calling for a fresh commitment to Catholic identity within what it calls an increasingly secularized educational system.

At a press conference held Dec. 19, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said, “the Catholic identity of the school is fundamental.”

Not within a secular (or “secularized”) educational system it’s not.

Noting the many challenges facing Catholic schools, the Cardinal added, “today one of the greatest problems is when large organizations want to impose gender ideology.”

Gender ideology? Meaning what? Treating girls as equal to boys, including in math and science and sport? And as for imposing gender ideology…what does the Vatican think it does? Or does the Vatican think it’s fine for a large organization to impose gender ideology as long as it’s the Vatican imposing the Vatican’s gender ideology?

(Stupid question. Of course he does.)

“Today, due to the advanced process of secularization, Catholic schools find themselves in a missionary situation, even in countries with an ancient Christian tradition,” reads the congregation’s “Educating To Intercultural Dialogue in Catholic Schools.”

“Catholic schools’ primary responsibility is one of witness. In the various situations created by different cultures, the Christian presence must be shown and made clear, that is, it must be visible, tangible and conscious,” the document continues.

Huh. Catholic schools’ primary responsibility is one of witness. Not education, but “witness.” They’re in a missionary situation, due to the shock-horror process of secularization. So the whole “education” and “school” thing is just a Trojan horse; what they’re really doing is trying to secure more dues-paying members.

Catholic schools have in Jesus Christ the basis of their anthropological and pedagogical paradigm…

That’s not education. It’s nothing to do with education. It’s the enemy of education, because it says there is just One True Thing.

The goal of Catholic schools should be to find balance between the two cultural extremes found in the world today, advises the document.

On the one hand, “one needs the ability to witness and dialogue, without falling into the trap of that facile relativism which holds that all religions are the same and are merely manifestations of an Absolute that no-one can truly know.”

On the other, “what is important is to give answers to the many young people ‘without a religious home,’ the result of an ever more secularized society.”

No thank you. Seriously, just piss off and mind your own business. Stay in your churches. Leave schools and hospitals alone.

(I would have liked to quote from the Vatican document itself but it must not be translated yet, because it doesn’t turn up. Maybe later.)

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