Another item for blasphemy week – except of course it’s blasphemy week every minute, every second.

A self-proclaimed atheist youth was arrested in Indian city of Kolkata for ‘hurting religious feelings’ after he re-posted a critique of Islam on Facebook.

Tarak Biswas, 32, reportedly routinely criticised several religions on the social media, evoking strong reactions and sparking debate. The youth, however, was held after he re-posted the material relating to Islam from another website.

People ought to be free to criticize religion. Religion claims huge power over people, so we have to be able to dissent from it. But of course part of the huge power religion claims over us is the power to prevent us from dissenting from it, including killing us if we try.

Police arrested Biswas on September 16 under various clauses of the Information Technology, saying he had hurt the religious feelings and offended people with various messages online.

“Not only has he [Biswas] written offensive comments, he has also tagged and posted materials from a dubious website,” said the complainant Wasim Akthar’s lawyer Mohammad Arif.

Wasim Akthar and Mohammad Arif should mind their own business. The judicial system should ignore their “complaint.”

Biswas’ family, however, disagreed with these views, “Tarak is an atheist. He has his own belief. He has routinely criticised all religions. Why should a post on Islam – which was mostly a repost and not original – be considered so offensive,” elder brother Moloy Biswas told NDTV.

Because the Allah of Akthar and Arif is an angry, hostile, vindictive god.

The BBC:

A petition signed by more than 14,000 Saudi women calling for an end to the country’s male guardianship system is being handed to the government.

Women must have the consent of a male guardian to travel abroad, and often need permission to work or study.

Support for the first large-scale campaign on the issue grew online in response to a trending Twitter hashtag.

I’m sure the government will be very conscientious about exactly how it cuts the petition into strips.

Many workplaces and universities also demand a guardian’s consent for female employees and students, although it is not legally required.

Renting a flat, undergoing hospital treatment or filing a legal claim often also require a male guardian’s permission, and there is very little recourse for women whose guardians abuse them or severely limit their freedom.

No recourse, really, but the BBC is being cautious in case there’s one woman somewhere who managed to get her brother to persuade her husband to let her get hospital treatment.

In July, an Arabic Twitter hashtag which translates as “Saudi women want to abolish the guardianship system” went viral after a Human Rights Watch report was published on the issue. Saudi women tweeted comments, videos and artwork calling for change. Bracelets saying “I Am My Own Guardian” appeared.

Human Rights Watch researcher Kristine Beckerle, who worked on the report, described the response as “incredible and unprecedented”.

“I was flabbergasted – not only by the scale, but the creativity with which they’ve been doing it,” she said. “They’ve made undeniably clear they won’t stand to be treated as second-class citizens any longer, and it’s high time their government listened.”

It’s been high time for a long time, but will the government listen? My bet is no.

However, there has been opposition from some Saudi women, with an alternative Arabic hashtag, which translates as #TheGuardianshipIsForHerNotAgainstHer, gaining some traction, and opinion articles, like this one on the Gulf News website, arguing that the system should be reformed and applied better.

The government will just point to them – or it will just ignore the whole thing.

She and other activists first raised the issue five years ago. “We never had a problem with campaigning, but the problem is there is no answer. But we always hope – without hope, you cannot work,” she said.

There has been no official response to the petition yet.

Nor will there be.

Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but this is Saudi Arabia we’re talking about. The oil has to dry up before anything will move there.

Seen on Twitter:

.@newtgingrich A former professor of history, reduced to sneering at knowledge of facts. How dignified.

—1) (@Popehat) September 25, 2016

Newt Gingrich: Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check. Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change

Popehat: A former professor of history, reduced to sneering at knowledge of facts. How dignified.

Furthermore, this “one big thing: we need change” item – come on. We always “need change.” There are always countless things large and small that need alteration, so saying that is empty. Of course we need change; that’s not one big thing, it’s just a pointless truism.

1. (Popehat [↩]

In August the Clarion Project (a contentious source) published the cartoon that Nahed Hattar posted on Facebook, with a translation of the dialogue:

The cartoon is translated below by Clarion Project Arabic Affairs Analyst Anwar el-Iraqi.

 

In Green: In paradise…

Allah: “May your evening be joyous, Abu Saleh, do you need anything?”

Jihadist: “Yes Lord, bring me the glass of wine from other there and tell Jibril [the Angel Gabriel] to bring me some cashews. After that send me an eternal servant to clean the floor and take the empty plates with you.”

Jihadist continues: “Don’t forget to put a door on the tent so that you knock before you enter next time, your gloriousness.”

He was being prosecuted for that. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Paul blogs Katha Pollitt’s conversation with Annie Laurie Gaylor:

“We have to start talking about abortion as a normal part of women’s lives,” Pollitt told us. “It always has been.” And in fact, even religions have not been, and are not always, tied to the notion that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a full person. She talked about the “wiggle room” that Southern Baptists allow for abortion, and how in Judaism, the woman is the “first person” of priority when there is a question of primacy.

A major stumbling block when it comes to abortion is the ingrained perception of women’s bodies as somehow being community property. Part of this is exacerbated by what Pollitt called the “baby-fication” of the fetus, treating a glob of cells like it’s a cute little infant in a onesie. But more to the point, the problem is that much of society views the woman’s body as violable.

Violable, judgeable, open to criticism and grading – just plain public in every way. The whole woman, at the same time, is profoundly unimportant and negligible. She’s the “and his wife” in newspaper headlines about awards she won along with her husband. She plays the bit part, often with no dialogue. She does not count – therefore her wishes about what happens to her body are entirely beside the point.

She brought up the fact that Christopher Hitchens had expressed his opposition to abortion, saying that to end a pregnancy must be a societal decision. Exasperated, Pollitt said, “Is society going to die in childbirth?”

Is society going to be flattened by exhaustion for the first trimester? Is it going to nurse the baby? Is it going to raise the child?

Also at the conference was Kristine Kruszelnicki, an anti-abortion activist who had a table there.

I'm a #prolife #atheist at #WIS4 but enjoying hearing @KathaPollitt author of Pro: Reclaiming #Abortion Rights. #OpenMinds always important!

— KristineKruszelnicki (@kruszer) September 25, 2016

She’s an anti-abortion atheist. “Prolife” is an obnoxious and dishonest label for opposition to abortion. People who support abortion rights are not “antilife” so “prolife” is a dishonest way of framing the opposition.

Terrible news:

A prominent Jordanian writer, who was on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam, has been shot dead outside a court in Amman where he was due to appear.

Nahed Hattar, 56, was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam after posting the cartoon on Facebook this year.

The cartoon, entitled The God of Daesh (Isis), depicted an Isis militant sitting next to two women and asking God to bring him a drink.

Hattar was arrested in August and released on bail early this month. On Sunday, he was shot in the head three times as he arrived for a hearing.

Because he shared a cartoon deemed “offensive” to Islam – to Islam, which is not a person and so cannot be offended. For sharing a cartoon on Facebook he was prosecuted and also murdered.

Saad Hattar, a cousin of the victim, said: “Nahed was accompanied with two brothers and a friend when he was shot. The brothers and the friend chased the killer and caught him and handed him over to the police.”

He said the family held Jordan’s prime minister, Hani al-Mulki, responsible for Hattar’s death. “The prime minister was the first one who incited against Nahed when he ordered his arrest and put him on trial for sharing the cartoon, and that ignited the public against him and led to his killing.”

Much like the way the government of Bangladesh keeps saying how terrible atheists are, thus igniting the public against them and encouraging all these murders.

In a statement, the family called on the government to hold accountable all those who had incited violence against Hattar. “Many fanatics wrote on social media calling for his killing and lynching, and the government did nothing against them,” they said.

The government prosecuted him for a cartoon dissing a fundamentalist form of a religion, and did nothing about people inciting murder.

Hattar had insisted that he had not meant to insult Islam by posting the cartoon, but wanted to expose how Isis “envisions God and heaven”. He accused his Islamist opponents of using the cartoon to settle scores with him.

A controversial figure on the left of Jordanian politics, Hattar has faced charges before, including for insulting the country’s king, Abdullah II. He has also been a prominent supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and advocated depriving Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their legal and civil rights.

Those last items seem dubious, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered.

Bonya Ahmed, again.

Originally a comment by iknklast on If not at a Center for Ethics, then where?

The school where I did my masters slipped in my mind when they caved to the demand of a donor that they censor an art exhibit. Students being told their art couldn’t be hung because it offended someone who walked through the building with their nose in the air, holding a fistful of cash in one hand and the leash of the university administration in the other. What lessons do those students learn? They learn that they will need to conform to a lifeless, commercial art if they want the chance to be seen, to work in the field they love.

I watched our local community theatre rewriting a play to take out the parts they worried would offend the local population. I sometimes catch myself hesitating in writing my own plays, wondering, if I write this, will anyone ever put it on? When I catch myself doing that, I slap myself on the wrist, go get a cup of hot coffee, roll up my sleeves, and write what I think needs to be written. Someday I may find someone with guts enough to tackle my women of the Bible series, or my piece that spits in the eye of our local masters of the universe.

And when I teach my class, I say the word “evolution” loud and proud. I refuse to go through life with my head down just because some donor doesn’t think we should teach actual science in the science classes. I hope I have the guts to continue to do that if they threaten to fire me just a few years before I am eligible to retire.

Paul reports that the panel discussion on free speech and safe spaces was…lively.

Thoroughly opposing the notion of safe spaces was Maryam Namazie, forcefully declaring that the rise of safe spaces is due almost entirely to identity politics, and that they are really a form of censorship. “Universities should be unsafe spaces for ideas you might not be comfortable with,” she said, arguing that identity politics have a homogenizing effect in marginalized communities, stifling dissent from within.

Twitter featured a lot of strong feeling on this one.

More clarity about the lines of disagreement emerged when the discussion addressed the dis-invitation of certain speakers, something Namazie has had first hand experience with. Namazie and Haider advocated for protest as a way to express opposition for unwanted speakers, though Brewster wondered aloud whether students’ demands for dis-invitations are not themselves an example of free speech. And there seemed to be an agreement that students have the right to ask. (Or, as Ashley Miller the moderator put it, “Isn’t telling someone to shut up speech?”) Burkholder raised the point that protest isn’t a blanket solution, particularly when it comes to black protests on campus, which are often met with hostility.

Everyone seemed to agree that universities are places where debate needs to happen, where protest and argument and challenging ideas are vital, but the clash comes when the discussion turns to where or whether partitions can go up to contain and protect certain identities and/or ideas. At what point does speech morph into, well, something else that warrants cordoning off? And who decides?

How about Gordon Ramsay?

One more Fidalgo post for now: Wendy Kaminer on free speech.

A free-speech stalwart herself, authoring a magazine piece on atheism as “the last taboo” that was formative to this writer, Kaminer tells this conference full of the irreligious that free speech and freedom of and from religion are “inextricably linked,” and warns that there exists now there is a “progressive retreat from free speech.”

Yes about that magazine piece; same here. I’ve admired Kaminer’s writing for decades. I sometimes disagree with her, but I always see her point.

It’s an extremely touchy issue here, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Straightaway, it was clear that some folks in attendance were in full agreement with Kaminer, and others were aghast. Everyone, I think, has similar aims: a free exchange of ideas without anyone being oppressed or harmed. How we get there, well, there are some very different ideas about that, and the emotions on this topic run very high in both directions. One way to think about these differences that Kaminer posited was new to me, that those who seek social justice are results-oriented (working toward a specific, tangible end), while civil libertarians, the free-speech absolutists, are process-oriented (more concerned with the structure within which goals are pursued).

Another way of putting that is that free-speech absolutists can be oddly blind to the results, aka the consequences. Many of them simply assume things like “truth will always win in the end” and “the best answer to bad speech is better speech.” The trouble is, bad speech often wins, and the consequences can be horrific. For me the classic example (therefore you may have seen me say it before) is Radio Mille Collines in the days leading up to the Rwandan genocide. Radio Srbska is another. There is no “end” in which truth wins for people who are slaughtered in genocides that have been fomented by various forms of speech.

Things became even more interesting when celebrated veteran journalist Katha Pollitt, who will be speaking later herself, asked Kaminer to take into account the “constant barrage of low level harassment in public society” that women face, harmfully affecting their everyday lives in practical ways. How, Pollitt asked, are they expected to deal with this? Suck it up?

Kaminer agreed with Pollitt’s characterization of the state of things, and said she was less concerned about policing of real *macro*-aggressions as opposed to people, particularly women, being told in advance, “You will be traumatized by this, you will be intimidated by this. and if you are not, you are in denial.” And the only way out, Kaminer said, was to make this coarsened behavior less socially acceptable.

Yes, with the result that there is less of it, so that kind of behavior is less “free.”

Another talk courtesy of Paul: Gulalai Ismail, Founder and Chairperson of Aware Girls…which she established at the age of 16. I learned of her the day Malala was shot, and we’ve been social media-friendly ever since. She’s wonderful.

She particularly highlighted Pakistan’s hostility to women, which she sees as a direct product of its rejection of free expression and secularism in favor of the Islamisation of society. Dr. Ismail discussed the Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises and guides official parliamentary legislation based on fundamentalist religious beliefs. It recently pushed for the rejection of a law written protect women from domestic abuse, something that seems like an obvious good.

Not to them. Instead they offered a new version, allowing a husband to “lightly” beat his wife if she refuses to dress as he wishes, refuses his sexual advances, interacts with strangers, and the like. This is a case in point, said Ismail, that “in nonsecular countries, laws inspired by religion are against women.”

She says “free woman” is an actual pejorative in Pakistan – I guess the way “slut” and “skank” are here.

It is Pakistan’s blasphemy law, said Ismail, that serves as a kind of keystone to the entire anti-woman, pro-fundamentalist apparatus now operating in Pakistan. “Pakistan is literally governed by blasphemy laws.” This is a sobering assertion.

But it bears out. From the Islamisation of education, to the assassinations of politicians who oppose the blasphemy law, to the persecution of religious minorities and nonbelievers. “Blasphemy is being used as an easy-to-get-away-with excuse to hamper freedom of thought and expression,” she said.

And women bear the brunt. “A woman is respected only when she is a mother, or obedient wife, or obedient daughter,” she said. “Secular women are seen as a threat, and their lives are always at risk.”

But take some heart. Ismail wants us to know that as we struggle against this kind of oppression, telling us, “We have amazing secularist women who beat the shit out of patriarchy.” Clearly, she’s one of them.

God I love her.

Paul Fidalgo blogs Melanie Brewster’s talk which also sounds terrific, on the subject of why there aren’t more women in atheism. Brewster is an assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia.

She cited many older studies that asserted some kind of biological or psychological traits of women that prime them for religious belief, but then revealed that these studies were done with no actual examination of the biological components, and often they came from sociologists working from explicitly religious universities such as Baylor, Brigham Young, and Holy Cross.

But these dusty studies still serve as the foundation for popular understanding of these perceived differences, even among seculars, and she cautioned us to bring our own prized critical thinking to this question. “It’s lazy,” she said, for our own community to glom on to these incomplete studies, and we can do better.

She’s showing a slide of Sam Harris looking (as usual) smug, with a cartoon bubble of that ludicrous “estrogen vibe” explanation that annoyed so many of us a couple of years ago.

Also incredibly important, Brewster noted that the media only presents an extremely narrow view of atheist thinkers and leaders, almost all male, and the vast majority are white. “We need to start asking people in power to start forcing representation in the media,” she said, asserting that those who have that kind of leverage should insist that women and people of color get the air time they might have gotten themselves.

Or we could just wait a few more generations, by which time the planet will be under water.

The fourth Women in Secularism is happening this weekend, and Paul Fidalgo is blogging each session. Maryam spoke yesterday.

At a time when the wearing of burqas and their beachwear variants is an incredibly heated topic, Namazie wasted no time, and withheld no ire, lambasting the enforced veiling of women in Islamic societies.

“Many feminists,” said Namazie, as well as other progressives and secularists, “defend the right to be veiled, but never the right to be unveiled and then live to tell the tale. What a betrayal.”

Secular Coalition tweeted:

.@MaryamNamazie shows a shocking billboard in Iran promoting the hijab, translation: "No one wants to eat the leftovers of flies." #WiS4 pic.twitter.com/I0Omdq8Sj7

— Secular Coalition (@seculardotorg) September 23, 2016

Fidalgo continues:

“The veil, and the segregation that follows, are merely the most public manifestation of putting women in their place,” said Namazie, also saying, “Your refusal to disappear is an act of dissent.”

The veil is part and parcel of the larger marginalization and containment of women in Islamic societies, that emerges in countless other ways, among them being segregation, the absolute power of husbands over their wives, the rules about what size of rock is appropriate for stoning a woman, and the notion that the veil is really for the woman’s own protection.

Namazie impressed upon us that in these societies, “It is a crime to be a woman, and a woman who refuses to be disappeared.” Those women need us as allies.

Be an ally.

An item from Daily Nous:

Wednesday afternoon, Gordon Hull, associate professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and director of the school’s Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, put up a post on the Center’s webpage about the recent police shooting of an unarmed black man, Keith L. Scott (see the bottom of this post for that text).

The central message of the post was summed up in its conclusion:

I do not know exactly what happened last night, but even more than I hope that the CMPD will conduct a thorough and transparent investigation, I hope that something triggers white America to care about the deep structural racism that permeates so much of our society, and about the incalculable damage that racism does to real people, real families and real communities, every day.

The next morning Hull received an email from his dean, Nancy A. Gutierrez, ordering him to take the post off the site.

He did, and then he wrote about it at NewAPPS:

We live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

Gutierrez told him he’s free to say whatever he wants elsewhere, but not at the university’s Center for Professional and Applied Ethics.

So he can profess and apply ethics any way he likes outside the university, but inside the university, where he directs a center for doing just that, he can’t. That seems perverse. It’s not the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics Within Certain Limits to be Determined by the Administration, at least not in the title. Surely professing and applying ethics as he thinks right is what he was hired for.

Back to Jason at Daily Nous:

It is not unreasonable to think that it’s well within the responsibilities of the director of a university ethics center to comment publicly, in that professional capacity, on ethical matters of current concern. To speak in that professional capacity is not to speak on behalf of the university. Rather, it is to make use of the expertise for which one was hired to express one’s professional opinion on a subject well within the scope of concern of the institution. If a school is going to bother having an ethics center, ought it not respect the academic freedom of its employees to speak to the public about ethics?

It certainly seems so to me. In fact it seems just a tad fraudulent to have a university ethics center if you’re not going to allow its staff to apply ethics without your oversight and control. UNC isn’t a “university” like Trump “University,” that’s just a fancy name for fleecing naïve customers – it’s a real university, which should act according to the ethics of academia.

H/t David Koepsell

Wouldn’t you think editors and subs would learn to stop generating headlines like this? Especially after that conspicuous fuss about the Chicago paper that headlined “Football Player Name’s Wife Wins Medal”?

Tom Waits, his wife, John Prine receive songwriting awards

They just don’t even think we’re human, do they. We’re pets, or The Help.

H/t Jen Phillips

Michael De Dora writes:

Whatever you believe about police and race and racism in the United States, consider this: unarmed citizens who pose little to no danger to society or law enforcement — and, in some cases, citizens in need of help — are being killed in the streets by the very people responsible for keeping us safe. Leave aside for a moment the question of “why.” The bare fact is, this does not happen with such regularity anywhere else in the world. This should disturb as conscientious humans, frighten us as fellow citizens, and concern us very deeply as Americans. Because I can tell you from first-hand experience that in the international halls of power, in the highest human rights bodies in the world, countries from around the world use these events — as well as the ensuing crackdowns on legal protests in response to these events — to discredit the moral power of the United States. Let there be no doubt: every killing of an innocent American civilian at the hands of law enforcement needlessly leaves dead another member of our society, fosters a more dangerous situation for all members of our society, and threatens the stability of the entire world. There is no need to accept this as our destiny; in fact, we must not. For if this is our destiny, we are all doomed.

Do we want Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe pointing to our abysmal human rights record as a reason to ignore anything we can say about theirs? I don’t think so.

In a NY Times op-ed Lionel Shriver frames the moral panic over her Brisbane Writers Festival talk as a matter of conformity.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Nah. That’s not right. There was plenty of sniffing out then too. There was plenty of disagreement and orthodoxy-enforcement. And if you jump back to the previous heyday of the left, the 30s, they fought like cats in a sack.

There may be more of it now, it may be more obsessive and nitpicky, there may be more posturing, but the enforcement of conformity itself is far from new. It couldn’t be, really, because any political position needs some conformity, or else how could it be a position?

I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy.

Cue a frenzy about her ableism and demonization of the mentally unwell.

I think she’s overgeneralizing a little, but I also agree with her that for instance it should have been possible to disagree with her talk, or with parts of it, without making a big show-offy moral performance of it. Her talk was not so horrifying that it needed anyone stalking out stamping her feet noisily. It was not so horrifying that it required two angry women to accost her and call her “racist” and “a disgrace” the next day. We should be able to disagree without brawling.

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal…

Oh there’s no perhaps about it. Of course that’s their intention, and they say so loudly and often. We’re all stupid and rotted in the brain, so we need to fuck right off.

And in conclusion –

Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.

Goodness she does like to overgeneralize. It’s not the case that 40 years ago all liberals, and certainly not all lefties (she doesn’t distinguish between them enough), would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. Some would, others wouldn’t. It’s the same today. The ACLU would (and did), other organizations wouldn’t. There are arguments either way.

But all that aside – I think she’s right that the fuss about her talk was grotesquely out of proportion.

Trump doesn’t want debate moderators pointing out lies. Well he wouldn’t, would he. He lies the way the rest of us breathe, so naturally he doesn’t want reality-based people pointing out all his lies, not to mention his pig-ignorance.

Trump says it’s up to the candidates themselves to call out their rivals when they are wrong. Trump spoke Thursday in a telephone interview on “Fox and Friends.” He says the candidates should “argue it out.”

NBC’s Matt Lauer has received criticism for not pointing out factual errors by Trump at a recent forum on national security.

Errors and also lies. He tells lies. Big, glaring, shameless lies.

Trump says there’s pressure on NBC’s Holt ahead of Monday’s debate at Hofstra University. He likens it to the pressure former Indiana University basketball coach and Trump supporter Bobby Knight used to put on referees.

Trump says: “A lot of people are watching to see whether or not he succumbs to that pressure.”

This isn’t a game, Pepe. This isn’t a game or a joke or a sport or even an investment opportunity. This is a choice between a centrist insider and a fascist, and you’re the fascist.