Apparently the big fuss happened after all, even though we were told that the organizers had agreed that there would be no segregated seating. Apparently Krauss had to make a fuss to make that concession a reality.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
There’s an event this weekend, called SXSW, at which there was a panel on Reddit. It was somewhat fraught, apparently.
By the end of the first hot-ticket panel at SXSWi, things had gotten tense. The panel was made up of Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo, Gawker‘s Adrian Chen and Rebecca Watson of Skepchick. It was about Reddit.
The discussion of the site was largely critical — over the past year, the site has wrestled with its first real identity crisis, induced in large part by Chen’s outing of ViolentAcrez, who moderated, among other subreddits, a section called “jailbait.”
The concerns raised by the Violentacrez controversy were real and worthwhile: the value and pitfalls of anonymity, the overbearing abundance of white male voices on the site, the limits of free speech on the internet. The panel, perhaps predictably, tracked along those lines. Attendees — many avid Reddit users — were not happy.
That sounds familiar.
A guy voiced some unhappy from the floor. Check him out.
He reads some droning unhappy from his phone and Rebecca breaks in to ask a question, and he lets her ask a question for a few seconds but then resumes his droning unhappy from his phone while Rebecca is still talking, so they compete for a few seconds and then she gives up, and he drones and drones – and Rebecca breaks in to say, “I’m sorry, I’m actually finding this really weird and a little rude.”
Yes.
Look, questions to speakers and panels are supposed to be questions, not speeches. This is well known. If a questioner makes too much of a speech people in the audience start calling “what’s your question?!” Using a question opportunity to give a speech is really bad manners. The guy with the phone was giving a damn speech. Rebecca interrupted him, but he was giving a damn speech; she attempted to make it a more interesting dialogue, and he decided to simply talk over her and ignore her. But she was on the panel. Yes, his droning was both weird and rude.
That sounds familiar.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops covers itself with glory again by finding stupid pettifogging reactionary reasons to refuse (officially, publicly, in a statemently) to support the Violence Against Women Act. Anything to be conspicuous, eh guys?
The chairmen of four committees and one subcommittee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a joint statement to voice their concerns on the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. These concerns, as the bishops state, prevented the USCCB from supporting this version of the act.
Aw. Concerned, are you? Poor things. Tell us all about it.
“All persons must be protected from violence, but codifying the classifications ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ as contained in in S. 47 is problematic,” they wrote. “These two classifications are unnecessary to establish the just protections due to all persons. They undermine the meaning and importance of sexual difference. They are unjustly exploited for purposes of marriage redefinition, and marriage is the only institution that unites a man and a woman with each other and with any children born from their union.”
Oh get over it. Meanings change, importance changes, definitions change, institutions change. Get over it. A woman and a man can still marry, still unite, still have children. You don’t need to issue statements and draw attention to yourselves just because other kinds of couples can also do that. You don’t need to police sexual difference, either. You’re not in charge of everything. Just get over it.
The bishops also expressed their concerns about the exclusion of conscience protections from the bill as passed, which would protect the conscience rights of faith-based service providers that assist victims of human trafficking.
Meaning, the “conscience rights” of theocratic pests who want to stop people using contraception and abortion. They want a protected right to interfere with the rights of other people.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
What’s new in Pakistan? Oh, the usual – a mob enraged over some alleged “blasphemy” torches dozens of houses in a neighborhood of Lahore. Rageboys just wanna have fun.
The mob attacked the houses in Joseph Colony in Badami Bagh police precincts in the provincial capital following allegations of blasphemy against a Christian man. The man was booked under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).
It appeared that the man had been falsely accused of blasphemy but the police was forced to register a case to placate the mob, a local police official said.
Allah is wise, merciful.
Police officer Multan Khan said the incident started Friday when a young Muslim man accused the Christian man of committing blasphemy.
A large crowd from a nearby mosque went to the Christian man’s home on Friday night and Khan said police took the man into custody to try to pacify the crowd.
Fearing for their safety, hundreds of Christian families fled the area overnight.
Khan said the mob returned on Saturday and began ransacking Christian homes and setting them on fire.
Fridays are a scary time in Islamist countries. It doesn’t even do any good to stay home, because the ragemob will just torch it with you in it.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Good thinking, South Dakota – pass a law allowing teachers to carry guns. That will for sure prevent the extremely rare phenomenons of a mass school shooting, and will for sure never lead to any commonplace oops situation in which a teacher flips out or fires the gun by accident. Uh huh.
Under the Republican-sponsored bill, school staff given permission to carry firearms on campus will be known as “school sentinels”. The state has given a law enforcement commission the task of establishing a training programme for the sentinels.
Several representatives of school boards, teachers and other staff spoke against the bill in legislative hearings, arguing guns would make schools more dangerous.
But sponsor Representative Scott Craig said this week had heard from a number of school officials who back it.
Mr Craig said rural districts do not have the money to hire full-time police officers.
Plus it’s like a love letter to the second amendment.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
I actually did an email interview with Rebecca Goldstein once. Yes really! You didn’t know that, did you. I’m not just some shlub with a blog. [struts] I did an interview with Rebecca Goldstein once.
Here.
Rebecca Goldstein has a new book out: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel.
Readers at Science Daily call Incompleteness ’Outstanding’ and ‘Superb’.
Butterflies and Wheels: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont call chapter 11 of their book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science: ‘Gödel’s Theorem and Set Theory: Some Examples of Abuse.’ They give a quotation from Régis Debray as an epigraph: ‘Ever since Gödel showed that there does not exist a proof of the consistency of Peano’s arithmetic that is formalizable within this theory (1931), political scientists had the means for understanding why it was necessary to mummify Lenin…’ The chapter’s first sentence starts, ‘Gödel’s theorem is an inexhaustible source of intellectual abuses…’
Sokal and Bricmont go on to quote more such abuses, from Debray, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres, who wrote, ‘Régis Debray applies or discovers as applicable to social groups the incompleteness theorem valid for formal systems…’
Paul Gross and Norman Levitt examine literary critic (or ‘theorist’) Katherine Hayles’ musings on Gödel in Higher Superstition: ‘Hayles then cites the Gödel incompleteness result as the deathblow to the Russell-Whitehead program…This is intended to figure the movement away from post-Enlightenment ideals of “universal” knowledge to postmodern skepticism…’
Is this a widespread view of Gödel? Is it a view held solely by people who don’t actually understand Gödel’s work? Are there any mathematicians or logicians who think Gödel is a social theorist or a postmodernist?
Rebecca Goldstein: I’m not sure that there is a “widespread view of Gödel.” While I was writing “Incompleteness” and people asked me what I was working on these days, I usually drew a blank stare when I said his name. Sometimes mentioning the title of Douglas Hofstadter’s popular book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” brought on a faint gleam of recognition. So, by and large, Gödel – unlike his soul-mate, Einstein – is strangely unknown, and this anonymity is in itself something I wanted to address. I say in the book that Gödel is the most famous person that you probably haven’t heard of, and that if you’ve heard of him you probably have, through no fault of your own, an entirely false impression of what it was he did to the foundations of mathematics.
Which brings me to the crux of your question. Among “humanist” intellectuals who do invoke Gödel’s name, he is often associated with the general assault on objectivity and rationality that gained such popularity in the last century. I’d often find myself pondering which would be the preferable state of affairs regarding Gödel, anonymity or misinterpretation. Which would Gödel have preferred? I’m going to indulge in “the privileged position of the biographer” to presume I know the answer to the latter question, at least: Gödel, who was so passionately committed to the truth, would have far preferred utter oblivion to the falsifications of his theorems that have given him whatever fame he has in the non-mathematical world.
And what falsifications! He had meant his incompleteness theorems to prove the philosophical position to which he was, heart and soul, committed: mathematical Platonism, which is, in short, the belief that there is a human-independent mathematical reality that grounds our mathematical truths; mathematicians are in the business of discovering, rather than inventing, mathematics. His incompleteness theorems concerned the incompleteness of our man-made formal systems, not of mathematical truth, or our knowledge of it. He believed that mathematical reality and our knowledge of mathematical reality exceed the formal rules of formal systems. So unlike the view that says there is no truth apart from the truths we create for ourselves, so that the entire concept of truth disintegrates into a plurality of points of view, Gödel believed that truth – most paradigmatically, mathematical truth – subsists independently of any human point of view. If ever there was a man committed to the objectivity of truth, and to objective standards of rationality, it was Gödel. And so the usurpation of his theorems by postmodernists is ironic. Jean Cocteau wrote in 1926 that “The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.” For a logician, especially one with Gödel’s delicate psychology, the tragedy is perhaps even greater.
I’ll give you just one example of misinterpretation, not only because it’s quite typical, but also because it had a personal effect on me. The summer before entering college I was told I would have to read, in preparation for honors English, the then-influential book, by William Barrett, called “Irrational Man” published in 1964. Gödel’s name is linked by Barrett with thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, destroyers of our illusion of objectivity. After correctly stating the first incompleteness theorem (there are in fact two theorems, the second a consequence of the first, so long as one presumes that arithmetic is free of contradictions) Barrett draws this conclusion: “Mathematicians now know they can never reach rock bottom; in fact, there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-subsistent reality independent of the human activity that mathematicians carry on.” If you negate the conclusion that Barrett draws from Gödel’s work, you end up with precisely the conclusion that Gödel himself drew! How often does that happen? A man sets out to prove a philosophical position mathematically, so that there can be no doubt. And he does prove it, but people draw precisely the wrong conclusion from it.
So, returning to your question as to whether “it [the rejection of objective knowledge] is a view held solely by people who don’t actually understand Gödel’s work?” I would answer, unequivocally: yes.
B and W: Are there any mathematicians or logicians who think Gödel is a social theorist or a postmodernist?
Rebecca Goldstein: I don’t personally know of any, and it’s hard to imagine any either. Since mathematical logic is not the most central part of mathematics, there are mathematicians who don’t pay all that much attention to Gödel’s work and may not be terribly familiar with its details. But it’s hard to imagine – even for me, with my overworked novelist’s imagination – a mathematician who would draw the sloppy conclusions that others have regarding the incompleteness theorems.
The same, by the way, can be said about Einstein’s relativity. These very names – “incompleteness,” relativity” – have encouraged very fanciful extrapolations that stand in direct opposition to the views of the scientists connected with these important results. Einstein was as little committed to the “relativity of truth” as his good friend Gödel was committed to the view that mathematics is the result of “the human activity that mathematicians carry on.”
The two of them had, by the way, a legendary friendship. Einstein was an old man and Gödel was relatively young when they became friends in Princeton, both of them refugees from Nazified Europe. (Gödel, by the way, was not Jewish, though even Bertrand Russell made the mistake of assuming that he was.) The two of them would regularly walk home from the Institute together. In fact, toward the end of his life, Einstein confided that his own work meant little to him now, and that he went to his office primarily to “have the privilege of walking home with Gödel.” They were very different in terms of their personalities – Einstein sagacious and worldly, Gödel quite hopelessly unworldly and seriously neurotic. I interviewed people at the Institute who used to watch them making the trek home each day, wondering what it was that they spoke to one another about. In my book I speculate about this deep bond, speaking of the philosophical commitments that both men shared, commitments which were so often either dismissed or misunderstood. It’s yet another irony – the story I write is full of somewhat sad ironies – that the two intellectual titans of their age should have felt marginalized, their own work often cited as the most persuasive of reasons for making the subjectivist turn. After Einstein died, Gödel really had no one else to speak with. This isolation certainly contributed to the psychological troubles that deepened and darkened over the years.
B and W: Is your book partly intended to correct the misinterpretation of Gödel’s work?
Rebecca Goldstein:Today I got an email from a professor of English at a prestigious university saying, among other things: “By the way, I too was assigned to read William Barrett’s The Irrational Man, but in my Freshman year at Saint Joseph’s College (now University), and from that and other references to Godel’s work over the years, I came to assume that it was a sort of proto- deconstruction of the edifice of modern math and science.”
B and W: Edward Rothstein said in the New York Times: “It is difficult to overstate the impact of his theorem and the possibilities that opened up from Gödel’s extraordinary methods, in which he discovered a way for mathematics to talk about itself. (Ms. Goldstein compares it to a painting that could also explain the principles of aesthetics.)”.
Can you tell us a little about that impact?
Rebecca Goldstein:Before Gödel, logic was considered more a branch of philosophy than of mathematics, the discipline associated with Aristotle rather than, say, with Gauss. Gödel developed extraordinarily powerful tools in the course of proving his theorems which both opened up new areas of mathematical research (recursion theory, for example) and also provided the means for solving more standard problems in mathematics. Mathematical logic now, as a result, has far more mathematical respectability. As Simon Kochen, a Princeton mathematical logician, told me, “Gödel put logic on the mathematical map.” But there are many other ways in which the impact of his famous proof is felt. In the course of proving the limitations of formal systems, Gödel sharpens the very concept of a formal system, as well as a whole interrelated family of concepts: The concepts of a mechanical or an effective procedure, of recursive and computable functions, of combinatorial processes and of an algorithm: this family of concepts all pretty much come down to the same thing, centering around the idea of rules that are applied to the results of prior applications of rules, with no regard to any meanings or interpretations except for what can be captured in the rules themselves. In other words, these concepts all have to do with procedures that can be programmed into computers. There’s a sense in which Gödel’s proof, especially as it was filtered through the work of Turing, helped to invent the computer.
And then there’s the more philosophical fallout from his theorems, the light they shed not only on the nature of mathematical knowledge – the fact that it can’t be captured in a formal system – but also on the nature of the mathematical knower herself. If computers run according to formal systems and our minds provably don’t, not even in knowing arithmetic, then does this mean that our minds are provably not computers? Gödel himself, rigorous logician that he was, was reluctant to draw so conclusive a conclusion; he hedged it in logically important ways. Other important thinkers, however, have drawn precisely this conclusion. Just such an argument served as the basis, for example, of Roger Penrose’s two celebrated books, “The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind.” He used Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to argue that our minds’ activities exceed what can be programmed into computers.
B and W: We’re in something of a Golden Age of intellectual biographies of philosophers. Wittgenstein, Russell, Ayer, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza and others have had rich biographies in the past decade. What sort of work do you think biography can do? Were you inspired by any biographies in particular?
Rebecca Goldstein:I didn’t think of “Incompleteness” as a biography. The aim of the book – the aim of the entire Norton series of which this book is a part – is to fit the scientific results into a “narrative framework.” I could have chosen the biographical story as my narrative arc. That strategy was the one that my editor kept encouraging me to take. He kept urging me to begin the book with Gödel’s birth in 1906 and go on from there. But I resisted him. I wanted the intellectual passions of Gödel to supply the narrative framework. Here’s the story I wanted to tell: Gödel, like many of us, first fell in love when he was an undergraduate, and that love forever changed him. Only it wasn’t a person that Gödel fell in love with but rather an idea, a grand philosophical vision that has attracted thinkers, and most especially the mathematically inclined, since the very first Platonist in the fifth century B.C.E.. Gödel met this great love of his in a philosophy class. (So much for the claim that philosophy can have no practical results: from Plato to – by way of Gödel and then Turing – google. ) He had been a physics major until his introductory course in philosophy, but he changed his major to mathematics under the influence of his impassioned Platonism. Devoted lover that he was, he resolved to find a way of proving – mathematically proving – mathematical Platonism. This was a daunting ambition. (The dichotomy between the outward timidity of this man, prey to terrible paranoid worries, and the inner vaulting intellectual confidence is one of the most fascinating things about his personality.) And then the amazing thing was that he actually went and did it, he actually produced mathematical theorems that had the philosophical consequences he was after; and then he lived to see his ideas twisted around so that they served the very viewpoint that he had hoped to conclusively refute. The drama I wanted to create, the story I wanted to tell, was all contained in this love story, a tragic love story (as almost all gripping love stories are).
B and W: Philosophers are sometimes drawn to fiction because fiction is a kind of thought-experiment. Does this aspect of fiction interest you?
Rebecca Goldstein:Well, of course, fiction is, in a certain sense, a kind of thought-experiment, but unlike the thought-experiments we use in, say, analytic philosophy in order to tease out implications or make conceptual distinctions or provide counterexamples to theses, the thought-experiments of fiction are not deliberately put forth in order to figure something out. Sure, there’s plenty of figuring out going out, for both the reader and, even more so, for the writer, but figuring out is not the paramount aspect of the deep experience of participating in fiction. I resist the view that the pleasures of fiction derive from its purely thought-experimental aspects. And yet I do think of the narrative imagination as a cognitive faculty; but its cognitive aspects are far more complicated than “thought-experiment” suggests. I’m fascinated by the unique phenomenology of reading and, of course, writing fiction, the fact that we’re drawn into a world that we know isn’t real but that we participate in almost as if it were. I think fiction manages to tamper temporarily with the boundaries of our own personal identity – we inhabit identities not our own – and also with our sense of time – narrative time is measured out in units of significance, unlike regular time which is generally just one damned insignificant thing after another – and that this tampering puts us in the way of deep insights to which we’re not usually privy. How else to explain the fact that novelists are so much smarter when they’re writing novels than at any other time, which is why it’s often such a profound disappointment to meet a revered writer in person!
B and W: Do you agree with for instance Martha Nussbaum that fiction is one of the best ways for people to learn empathy? Do you think such a view of fiction can be in tension with aesthetic judgments? If a novel has its heart in the right place but is badly written, which do you think matters more?
Rebecca Goldstein:Yes, I do think that storytelling is the basic way that we make our way into others’ psychology, which is of course central in regarding them as people just like oneself, in all the morally relevant aspects, an observation that ushers one into the moral point of view. The narrative imaginative is not only a cognitively significant faculty but a morally significant one as well. I don’t, however, think that the moral benefits of storytelling provide us with aesthetic standards. What makes art great has little to do with its uplifting tendencies – aside from the fact that great art is intrinsically uplifting.
B and W: Did you find in writing the biography that you missed the novelist’s license to assume inside knowledge of the protagonist’s thoughts? Did you find yourself wanting to bridge gaps in the evidence with Perhapses and conditionals, or were you more interested in making clear where there was evidence and where there wasn’t?
Rebecca Goldstein:In some ways Kurt Gödel was like some of the fictional characters I’ve created. I’m thinking of, say, Noam Himmel, in my first book, “The Mind-Body Problem,” or Samuel Mallach, in my last novel, “Properties of Light.” I’ve always been interested in geniuses, especially of the mathematical or scientific sort. Even within this small sub-set there’s a particular type of personality that fascinates me, one that’s characterized by both the intellectual heroism of thinking one’s way where no man or woman has thought before coupled together with a marked lack of heroism in any matters removed from the intellectual high ground. It’s easy to make fun of helpless and/or lunatic geniuses; but I find the dichotomy between intellectual grandeur (and in mathematics the grandeur can seem almost superhuman) and “human-all-too-human” smallness to be touching and very telling of our uneasy human position.
I came to feel extremely close to my subject while I wrote “Incompleteness.” Of course it wasn’t that all-penetrating closeness that a writer feels with her characters, but there was something sometimes approximating it. Again, this was not a biography in the usual sense of the word; I was interested in Gödel’s life only insofar as it related to his theorems: what they meant to him as well as to others, and how the latter facts affected him. (Ludwig Wittgenstein’s hostility to Gödel’s theorems is of particular importance here.) But you can see that, given what I came to believe about the man and his most famous results, there was a great deal of pathos that I saw in his story, and – the payoff of the narrative imagination – a great deal of empathetic participation in it that then helped to further along my understanding. So I did feel quite often that I’d penetrated into the soul of the man. He was an unusually reticent person in life. Aside from those animated walks to and from the Institute with Einstein, that others watched in wonderment, he eschewed social intercourse as much as possible. He mistrusted, more and more, our ability to communicate with one another. Even when he was very young, before the historical result, and its historical misinterpretations, he remarked to one of his acquaintances that the more he considered language, the less likely it seemed to him that we ever understood one another. This is the statement of a profoundly lonely person, someone in some sense constitutionally lonely, and this, too, touched me and made me all the more eager to hear what he’d wanted to say. He had wanted to communicate through his proofs, to let his deep mathematics do the speaking for him; so again, the fact that the mathematics was heard to say the very opposite of what he’d meant by it is poignant. He did write some letters protesting others’ misinterpretations of his works, particularly Wittgenstein’s. Wittgenstein had been an enormously influential figure in the Vienna that Gödel inhabited before his move to Princeton; part of the story I reconstruct is that Gödel resented Wittgenstein’s influence, especially after Wittgenstein dismissed Gödel’s theorems as ”logische Kunststücken,” logical conjuring tricks. Gödel, being the outwardly timorous man he was, never sent these letters off, but they’re there in his literary remains, in the basement of Princeton’s Firestone Library. Those unsent resentful missives – both their content and the very fact that they were unsent – played a role in my constructing a partial model of Gödel’s psychology. But about his more terrifying demons – and unfortunately it’s very clear that he had them in abundance and, in the end, they did him and his intellectual grandeur in – I would never dare to speculate. I never deluded myself into thinking I’d arrived at the sort of access a novelist has toward her fictional characters (who, strangely, also develop something of an independent life).
B and W: Does writing a biography bring up interesting epistemological issues? Do you think people with philosophical training are more aware of such issues than, for instance, historians and journalists? Or, perhaps, aware of them in different ways? As interesting issues in themselves rather than as methodological problems?
Rebecca Goldstein:I think that anyone who tries to write a biography, even a modified biography such as mine, comes smack up against the “interesting epistemological issues.” It’s a good exercise for a biographer to consider the question of how much of her own life’s narrative, at least as she tells it to herself, could even her very best friends reproduce. I was able to read the memoirs of those who had known Gödel and to make use of their observations and speculations; and I was fortunate to have met him once, though only very briefly, during a small window of his life when he was somewhat more outgoing than usual. But in the end what I was trying to do was come up with a story that would make sense of the rather small number of external facts about his life that he left us. It was a story that made much sense to me, as I hope it will to my readers. But in the end, no story about a person can be true. We are all of us, not to speak of mathematical/philosophical geniuses, far too complicated and self-contradictory to be contained in a “narrative framework.” The biographer, as much as the mathematical logician, is keenly aware of the incompleteness necessarily inherent in her project.
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel .
Rebecca Goldstein’s web page is here.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Via Secular Medical Ethics on Twitter I see a dreary item from Ed Milliband reported by The Jewish Chronicle Online.
Ed Miliband has pledged to protect Jewish customs including brit milah and shechita if he becomes Prime Minister.
Speaking at a Board of Deputies event the Labour leader said he was opposed to boycotts of Israel and warned of the need to be “ever-vigilant”against antisemitism.
Asked whether he would work to ensure religious slaughter and circumcision practices could continue in Britain, Mr Miliband said: “Yes, these are important traditions. The kosher issue has recently been brought to my attention. Ways of life must be preserved.”
That’s a terrible thing to say. It depends on the ways of life! Not all ways of life must be preserved, and not all aspects of ways of life must be preserved. It depends.
Just breezily agreeing that parents must continue to be allowed to cut bits off their infant sons’ penises is a slap in the face to human rights. Breezily agreeing to to ensure religious slaughter is not so hot for animal rights.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Because woohoo it’s starting an hour earlier because a speaker has been added and that speaker is Rebecca Goldstein!
[dances happy dance]
[ignores resemblance to parodic clumsy dancer while dancing happy dance]
Anybody read The Mind-body Problem? Great novel. I will now re-read it for approximately the tenth time.
[resumes happy dance as the music fades]
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
A thought occurs to me about this gender segregated seating caper. The Equalities Adviser told Chris Moos that
All attendees are free to sit wherever they feel comfortable. If some female and male attendees choose to sit in separate areas, that is of course fine, however it is expected that there will be a large mixed area where anyone can sit.
Hm. Suppose some female and male attendees choose to sit in separate areas, and then someone from the “wrong” gender sits there. Then what?
What are the UCL people visualizing? That the voluntary self-segregators will very politely ask the interloper to go away?
That seems like the least coercive likely reaction, but really, think about it. Is it possible to ask someone that in a public place politely? No, not really. That’s why we don’t have segregation in public places. The whole idea is rude.
As usual that becomes obvious if you switch the category from gender to race. “Excuse me, but we want to sit together by ourselves – could I possibly ask you to sit somewhere else so that we can sit together by ourselves?” Not cool.
You can do that kind of exclusion and selection at home, but you can’t do it (decently) in public. It’s a bad idea. It shouldn’t be attempted.
Modernity means mixing. It means being a mongrel and living with other mongrels, and being content with that. It means letting go of archaic notions of purity, and getting used to sloppy mixing of all kinds.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Leo Igwe has a piece on humanist funerals in Nigeria in The Guardian (Nigeria).
ON February 9, 2013, the former Chairman of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, Eze Ebisike died after a brief illness. On March 2, he was buried in his hometown, Okpokume, Mpam, Ekwerazu Ahiazu Mbiase in Imo State. Ebisike was an ex-Catholic priest and an atheist. He was buried after a short humanist funeral ceremony in the compound. The ceremony was a historic event because it was the first time, in that part of the country that someone who was an atheist was given a non-religious funeral.
Another cleric turned atheist and executive Humanist.
For humanists, a funeral ceremony is not a rite of passage for the deceased. A funeral is a celebration of a life lived, a life which has ended. A funeral is an opportunity for family and friends to pay tribute to the memory of someone who has died.
For humanists, when people die, they live on in the minds and memories of their loved ones, not in a heaven or a hell. They live on in the legacies they leave behind, in the good (and also the bad) which they did. They live on in their children, their descendants. Funerals are special times to remember and to relive those sweet memories, and pay our last respects to a person whom we are lucky to have shared this short life with.
That’s a beautiful way of putting it.
Some non-religious people are indifferent to what kind of funeral they have, but Leo is not.
Religious as well as humanist funeral ceremonies are for the living. And there are non-religious persons who would not want their memories to be insulted or corrupted by a religious funeral service. It is important that people respect the wish of their humanist friends and family members and accord them a funeral that is in line with their beliefs and outlook. For me, like Eze Ebisike, when I die, if there is a funeral, I would like to be given a secular/humanist funeral service. I would like my family members and friends to respect this wish. That I be accorded a funeral ceremony that is in line with the humanist ideas, values and beliefs that I professed and lived by during my lifetime.
That seems only fair.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Update 2: Good news for once. Chris heard back from the equalities adviser, and UCL will not allow gender segregated seating, although people will be allowed to sort themselves if they want to – “however it is expected that there will be a large mixed area where anyone can sit.”
Chris Moos of the LSE* Atheist Secularist and Humanist group alerted me to an event at UCL** tomorrow: The BIG Debates: Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense? The two proponents are Lawrence Krauss and Hamza Tzortzis. Chris reports:
Although the event was supposedly organised through “The Big Debates”, which describes itself as an independent organisation, the account used to set up the event with eventbrite.com is actually that of iERA, Hamza’s outfit.
And guess what else – seating is gender segregated.
Gender segregated. At a grown up, secular, urban, 21st century university in London – seating is gender segregated.
Imagine if it were racially segregated. Imagine the uproar. Yet UCL is apparently turning a blind eye to gender segregation.
Student Rights has some background on Hamza Tzortzis.
On 10th January Student Rights published an info-graphic which provided figures detailing the number of events featuring extremist or intolerant speakers that were promoted to students throughout 2012.
Leading the way with 48 events was the former Hizb ut-Tahrir member Hamza Tzortzis, most famous for declaring that “we as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even the idea of freedom”.
Since then, Tzortzis has announced a new speaking tour of universities that began last night and continues until the 18th March, with 24 dates on 21 different campuses.
What will all those lucky universities be getting?
He has argued in the past that “Some people object to Islam making the public expression of homosexuality a criminal act. This is subjective and only strikes a chord amongst those who cannot escape the social constructs in their own societies” and that “those who claim that making homosexuality a criminal act is wrong are totally inconsistent”.
In a university debate on Sharia Law in 2009 he also expressed his support for barbaric punishments including amputation, refusing to condemn the cutting off of people’s hands.
This support for religious jurisprudence was also evident when he wrote that that society must turn to “cohesive values that will bring us out of this social decay. It can be argued these cohesive values must be the Islamic values and the workable solution is the Islamic Social Model”.
Chris provided some contact addresses at UCL:
Head of Equalities and Diversity Sarah Guise
For staff and student queries related to age, disability, gender, race, religion & belief and sexual orientation.
Email s.guise@ucl.ac.uk
Ext. 53989Equalities and Diversity Adviser
Fiona McClement
For staff and student queries related to age, disability, gender, race, religion & belief and sexual orientation.Email: f.mcClement@ucl.ac.uk
Ext 53988
Policy Advisor – Athena SWAN and women in SET
Harriet JonesFor queries related to the Athena SWAN Charter.
Email: harriet.jones@ucl.ac.uk
Equalities and Policy Administrator Sonal Bharadva
For general enquiries.
Email: s.bharadva@ucl.ac.ukExt. 53991
50:50 Gender Equality Group
Annette Dolphin, Co-Chair,Rob de Bruin, Co-Chair
a.dolphin@ucl.ac.uk,
r.debruin@ucl.ac.uk
The event takes place 25 hours from now.
*London School of Economics
**University College London
Update: I heard from Chris after I posted: Lawrence Krauss told him he’d told the organizers no gender segregation, and he’s not going to accept it when the time comes.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Oh looky here – via Stephanie, another Callous Bastards’ Handbook, this time by “vjack” at Atheist Revolution. It’s better written and a little better thought than Vacula’s efforts in the same vein, but it’s still callous bastard bullshit.
You and you alone are responsible for how you feel. Nobody else can make you feel sad, angry, upset, or anything else without your agreement. I know we sometimes talk as if other people cause our feelings, but this is misleading.
If you insult me, I may experience feelings of sadness. My feelings are based on my understanding of our interaction and are guided by the whole of my personality and life experience. If I care what you think of me, I may feel sad; if I do not, I may not feel much of anything. It is not your insult that leads to my feelings; it is my interpretation of your insult, the meaning I assign to it, and the manner in which I put it in context. That is, how I feel following your insult is far more about me than it is about you.
You bet. Perfect for callous bastards. If I insult you, it’s just a thing that happens, like a rock falling down a slope. If you’re at the bottom of the slope, you may get a bruise, but that’s your decision.
vjack is part of the way there. He’s right (of course) that feelings about what other people say and do depend on context, and our feelings about them, and other variables that he conveniently leaves out. But we already knew that. He’s not right that because feelings about what others do and say are dependent in that way that therefore only the person who has the feelings has responsibility for them. Social life and interaction are webs, and responsibility goes in both directions. The fact that if person X is made of stone then she is able to feel nothing when vjack insults her does not mean that person Y has a responsibility to feel nothing if vjack insults her.
Some will object that taking responsibility for our feelings lets others off the hook, giving them a license to behave badly. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Just as we and we alone are responsible for our feelings, we and we alone are responsible for our behavior. Someone who behaves poorly is responsible for his or her poor behavior. The fact that we are responsible for our feelings in no way reduces the responsibility such an individual has for his or her own behavior.
If I call you a series of juvenile names on the Internet and you experience hurt feelings, you are responsible for how you feel and whether you take offense. But I am responsible for my behavior. Your responsibility for your feelings in no way gives me a pass to behave badly. It is nothing behind which I can hide. How you feel is on you, but how I have behaved is on me and nobody else.
That’s incoherent. If other people are responsible for their feelings, then in what sense is anyone behaving “poorly” aka badly by calling people names? In what does the badness reside? What is bad about calling people names?
He doesn’t explain that. He doesn’t seem to realize that it needs explaining. That’s Callous Bastards’ Handbooks for you – they achieve their callousness by ignoring obvious holes in their reasoning.
Stephanie included a screenshot of a different (yet similar) brand of callousness.
[Russell Blackford, responding on Facebook to a post by Lou Doench] Sorry, but I no have time for someone who whines about the so-called harassment of vicious bullies who vilify good people and destroy their reputations on a daily basis. The individuals this Doench person mentions as victims are exactly the ones who need to take the pledge. They and of course PZ Myers, who is the worst of all, as he’s called me a bold-faced liar and encouraged a forum where I can be called scum, a misogynist, etc., etc. Doench is part of the problem if he’s going to defend such people.
People like Doench need to understand that people like me are very angry for good reason. Every time I read something like this claptrap, I get that much angrier. Until I get an apology from Myers in particular, I will not let this drop.
Stephanie continues -
What was he responding to?
And in cases like the horrible people who harass Ophelia Benson, Stephanie Zvan, Rebecca Watson and others in the skeptical and atheist movement on a weekly basis… well I’m likely to lose my temper.
Yes, Blackford ranted about having no time for someone who would get angry at the people who harassed us because if people understood Blackford’s position, they would not lose their temper at harassers. Sorry, “so-called harassers”–because it’s all been so carefully hidden away where Blackford couldn’t possibly see it.
Feelings aren’t random, and we don’t have a responsibility to decide to have no feelings and then go on to have no feelings when people spend an astonishing amount of their time every single day harassing and taunting us.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Tasneem found a report in English on that blogger attacked in Dhaka.
Saniur Rahman, 28, was stabbed in the head and legs at around 8:30pm near Purabi Cinema Hall.
The Shahbagh uprising activist was returning to his home in Rupnagar Eastern Housing.
Residents of the neighborhood rescued Shamiur and rushed him to a local hospital, he added.
Saniur said that he used to write articles in blogs against communalism and the riotous activities run by rowdy activists of the Jamaat-e-Islam and its student wing Islami Chattra Shibir.
Asif Mohiuddin, another blogger and online activist who was also stabbed seriously in the city’s Uttara on the night of Jan 15, commented about the criminal attack on the latest assault in his Facebook status. “He (Saniur) often used to write on Facebook. I also met him once or twice, he is a very well-behaved young man.”
“He was a supporter and activist of the Shahbagh movement, and often used to harshly criticise the religion-based parties like Jamaat, Shibir and Hizb Ut-Tahrir.”
He’s out of danger, the article says, so that’s good, but not being attacked at all would be better.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
And right here in Washington state – a florist joins this fun new trend of florists refusing to supply customers they dislike or disagree with in some way. Remember that florist who refused to deliver roses to Jessica Ahlquist? And got sued by the FFRF as a result? Like that. This time it’s not freedom from religion, it’s gay marriage.
For nearly a decade, Robert Ingersoll and his partner, Curt Freed, had bought bouquets from local business Arlene’s Flower Shop, owned by Barronelle Stutzman, reports the Tri-City Herald. So it was Stutzman the men sought out when they recently decided to get married. (Same-sex weddings became legal in Washington State in December 2012.)
But when Ingersoll asked Stutzman last Friday to arrange the flowers for his September nuptials, he got a shock.
“He said he decided to get married, and before he got through I grabbed his hand and said, ‘I am sorry. I can’t do your wedding because of my relationship with Jesus Christ,’” Stutzman told KEPR. This is the only wedding Stutzman has turned down in 37 years.
She has a relationship with a guy who died two thousand years ago, assuming he lived at all – and for the sake of that relationship, she spits in the eye of someone right in front of her, who has been her loyal customer for nearly a decade.
First, do no harm. If you find yourself spitting in someone’s eye, think hard about your reasons. Hint: an arbitrary belief about what some long-dead guy would think about a contemporary practice is not likely to be a good reason.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The International Humanist and Ethical Union put out a report last week on the criminalization of atheism in many parts of the world, as a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council.
States sometimes play on concerns about Islamophobia and religious intolerance to support laws which go far beyond their legitimate concerns, instead rendering any form of religious skepticism, or the expression of a positive humanist philosophy, effectively illegal. The IHEU submission relates to its report published in December, Freedom of Thought 2012, on the same subject of discrimination against the non-religious around the world.
“This discrimination comes in two forms. Firstly, discrimination against non-religious communities through a nation’s constitution and/or legal system. For example, some governments outlaw the very existence of atheists, and others prosecute people who express their religious doubts or dissent regardless of whether those dissenters identify as atheist. Secondly, and more commonly, discrimination occurs against secular people when they manifest their conscience by acting against the dictates of the religion of their family, community or country.
That happens quite a lot right here in the US. If there is a table, the US is bound to have a much worse score than the other industrialized democracies, as it does in things like maternal and infant mortality, inequality, percentage of the population in prison, to name just a few.
A new entry here is persecution of atheism on social media.
“Legal measures against blasphemy and religious criticism, particularly in the realm of social media, are an increasingly common manifestation of discrimination against nonbelievers. 2012 saw a sharp rise in prosecution for alleged atheist criticism of religion on Facebook and Twitter. Between 2007 and 2011, IHEU recorded only three social media blasphemy prosecutions – two of them in Egypt, but in 2012 there were more than a dozen people, in ten different countries, charged for “blasphemous” social media statements. The trend of prosecuting “blasphemies” shared through social media is most marked in Muslim-majority countries. For example, in addition to the tragic, but all too familiar, wave of blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan, 2012 saw prosecutions for allegedly atheist comments on Facebook and Twitter in Bangladesh, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey.
“Egypt in particular saw a pronounced increase in online blasphemy charges directed at atheists in 2012. Alber Saber is a prominent activist for secular democracy who reportedly operated the “Egyptian Atheists” page on Facebook and has been a vocal critic of fundamentalist Islam. In December 2012 he was sentenced to three years in prison. His countryman, Ayman Yusef Mansur is also in prison serving three years hard labour on charges that he offended Islam on Facebook. Likewise, 17-year-old Gamal Abdou Massoud has been imprisoned for three years for posting “blasphemous” cartoons on Facebook, whilst Bishoy Kamel was imprisoned for six years, on the same charge.”
And our friend Waleed Al-Husseini spent ten months in jail in Palestine for Facebook atheism, and is now in Paris hoping for asylum.
And Tasneem Khalil reports another atheist in Bangladesh hacked – physically hacked, not computer hacked. There are no reports in English yet.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The Times of India reports that a study by Canadian researchers catches up to what Hitchens told us years ago: “Mother” Teresa did very bad things. The study calls her
“anything but a saint”, a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering.
The controversial study, to be published this month in the journal of studies in religion/sciences called Religieuses, says that Teresa - known across the world as the apostle of the dying and the downtrodden - actually felt it was beautiful to see the poor suffer.
According to the study, the Vatican overlooked the crucial human side of Teresa - her dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.
Instead, the Vatican went ahead with her beatification followed by canonization “to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline”.
Because the Vatican doesn’t actually give a shit about suffering. It has other concerns. Particular nuns and priests care about suffering, but the Vatican doesn’t. The Vatican cares about the Vatican, and the church and its authority, and goddyness.
The article continues to summarize the report, and it’s all familiar via Hitchens. It’s too bad hardly anyone paid any attention to Hitchens’s book and that the myth flourished anyway.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
What happened to and about Chagnon is a fascinating (and appalling) example of ideological policing in anthropology. He tells a little about it in the interview.
SK: Most importantly, let’s turn to the science. What were the two heresies you proclaimed in your publications on the Yanomamö that went against the prevailing orthodoxy in anthropological community?
NC: Well, I didn’t realize until I began committing these heresies, how entrenched that orthodoxy was. The first reaction was to my having described the Yanomamö as having wars and being quite violent in the absence of provocations from outside societies or the presence of military units from organized political societies, like a nation-state, first punishing them. At that time, they didn’t have any states surrounding them that had any influence on their behavior.
So, without realizing it, I was threatening the general attitude within anthropology that all native peoples are pacific and live an angelic kind of life, gliding through the jungle with lithe, scented bodies, being altruistic, sharing their food, and willing to cooperate with the stranger that comes in and wants to learn about them and their culture, and anxious to share their knowledge and life histories with that stranger.
Well, they aren’t that way. And my descriptions apparently [so] annoyed my colleagues that some of them began to publish statements “correcting” me.
Huh. No peoples are pacific and angelic. Peoples aren’t like that, not even native ones.
NC: Now if a scientist studying yaks, bullfrogs, bats, deer, salamanders, or any non-human animal stated that they competed for opportunities to mate, no one in biology would have taken that to be anything other than an accurate observation. But if you say that about human beings, it becomes “lurid speculation.”
SK: It’s hardly “lurid speculation” to someone like me who grew up in a mob town in Jersey and spent (or misspent) a lot of time back in my military service days shooting pool in bars. I didn’t make careful anthropological observations, but I saw that behavior regularly.
And while I was in college at the same time I was learning the prevailing orthodoxy in my introductory anthropology course, I was also taking a course on the classical culture of Ancient Greece in the very next building, where we read in The Iliad about Helen, Paris, Menelaus and the Trojan War. So why was “males fighting over females” considered so heretical?
NC: It may be that a number of cultural anthropologists come from a general class of the American public that goes to private high schools and elite colleges and universities and ends up teaching in major universities. Not enough of them have spent time in pool halls and bars, as maybe you and I have, so they haven’t anything called common sense.
Don’t they even go to movies? There are pool halls and bars in movies. Or what about summer jobs? Or, as Frank Miele says, the goddam Iliad.
SK: When the final words are written on Napoleon Chagnon and his critics in academia and in the media, what do you think they will be?
NC: I have no idea! Who’s going to write them? If they’re post-modernists they’re going to say something very different from what a scientist would say.
Are you assuming that whoever writes these words about Chagnon will be a rational human being with common sense who believes in the existence of the real world independent of its observer?
Heh. Good one.
Then Miele says something I think is quite telling.
SK: As Skeptics we have a faith which, much like a religious faith, is not itself provable. It’s a faith that in the end demonstrable truth will win out, however unpleasant or unpopular. And while there will be swings to the irrational or the incorrect here and there, in the long run reason and experiment will triumph, just as they have in medicine and so many other fields.
Yes! I’m glad he puts it that way – because it’s a faith I’ve often noticed, and one that I think is often absurd. It does get invoked as if there were some kind of magic at work that guarantees that – as Miele puts it without apparently noticing – “in the end” truth will win out. What end? What is “the end”? There is no “end.” Later he says “in the long run” and that’s a figment too. Those two phrases and the idea they carry make this figment possible – the idea that now is not “in the end” nor yet “the long run” but some other moment is, so even if truth is being buried right now, somehow in that mystical far off end/long run, it will claw its way to the surface and burst out triumphantly.
That’s just magical thinking. Truth loses all the time, and there is no end and no long run, there is only a series of nows.
So if that really is a faith that skeptics (or Skeptics – do they really refer to themselves with a capital letter?) share, then that’s just more reason for me to say I’m not one. Only it’s odd. It seems to me it’s more skeptical to be skeptical of magical ideas that truth will win “in the end” than it is to take it as faith.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Guest post by Ania Bula. Ania blogs at Scribbles and Rants.
When I was 18, I was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis. The following year, I lost the ability to walk, and was ignored by doctors who looked at my age before my symptoms. I struggled with finding a treatment and getting some mobility back.
When I was 20, I started experiencing some mysterious symptoms, including rapid weight loss, pain, bleeding, and more. I desperately searched for an answer, and eventually, a treatment. What would turn out to be Crohn’s disease came very close to killing me. I was flushing my life down the toilet.
The journey itself, to diagnosis and treatment, was incredible, difficult, and enlightening. Chronic illness is an invitation for everyone to comment: either with regards to a cause, a treatment, or otherwise. Suddenly, everyone’s aunt is an expert and everyone’s fad diet a cure. You wade through a constant stream of ignorance and lies, in a desperate attempt to find peace and a stop to pain. In my years living with both disorders I have been faith healed, poked, prodded, stuffed with powders and magic potions.
When your disability isn’t written across your body for the world to see, there is a constant need to validate your need for self-care. There is also something more isolating about not being able to readily identify other people who are going through the same thing you are. When you walk down the street, you can’t know just from looking if someone else out there knows what it is like to feel your pain.
Healthy people don’t know how to react to you. Some trivialize your experiences either because they don’t believe you are sick or out of a desperate attempt to convince you that they are not judging you based on your disability. They point out that you don’t look sick, or that other people they know with the same condition don’t have nearly as much trouble. Some will try to blame other causes that have nothing to do with your condition. Others are thrown to other extremes and feel like they must keep reminding you of your weakness in order to keep you from harm. They overcompensate for their own discomfort, by making it seem that they are looking out for you. These are the people who are hyper-alert for any sign that you are not at your best so that they can lecture you about taking it easy. Since you are never really at your best, this can get grating really fast.
It is difficult to strike that happy balance of treating you like an independent human being, who sometimes needs to be more careful about what they eat and do, or perhaps cannot go out as often as everyone else. You might feel as though you constantly have to justify yourself. That no, it is not just laziness that kept you in your pyjamas all day, or that you really do like their cooking but that yogurt keeps you up in pain all night. You worry that eventually everyone around you will be sick of trying and that you will be left friendless and alone.
Throughout all the self-doubt and loneliness, you are also struggling with managing your symptoms. No matter what your condition, exhaustion is a constant. Being sick takes a toll on your body and your mind, so that some days it can be an effort just to get out of bed. For many of us, pain is another constant companion.
I am writing about my experiences in a book called Young, Sick, and Invisible: A Skeptic’s Journey with Chronic Illness and I am funding it through IndieGoGo. Your support will help me through the writing process, while also rewarding you with a copy of the finished work. In the long run, I am hoping to raise awareness about what it is like to have an invisible disability, as well as highlight the evil of the con men peddling alternative “medicine” and “miracle cures”. I need your help to make this happen. Every little bit helps, as does every share and retweet.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
There’s a pattern in the harassment that I want to point out for the sake of the record. The pattern is to harass and mock and monitor and taunt, and then to blame the target for reacting.
It’s so childish. It’s the kind of thing children do in the 3d grade, and then they grow out of it. It’s bizarre watching adults do it, as if no parent or teacher had ever sat them down and told them to stop.
Adam Lee tweeted the same thing to me earlier today:
The pitters’ MO is to say something rude and then call you too sensitive when you object. Do they think it’s not obvious?
Precisely. It’s the perennial bullies’ move: bully and then blame the bullied for objecting.
Skepticism. What a laugh, eh?
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
