Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

Knowing you can

Jul 10th, 2012 2:24 pm | By

I’ve just thought of something – well, a few minutes ago, while walking up the street.

Remember the opening of The God Delusion? “I didn’t know I could”? Remember the way the argument turns on that idea – not knowing you can get out, and consciousness raising as the first step to getting out?

Well that’s feminism, you know. Knowing you can. That’s where consciousness raising came from, remember?

The two rebellions have a great deal in common, you know. Both rebel against the principle of male authority and arbitrary hierarchy. Both are about humans standing up straight instead of squirming on the ground. Both are fundamentally about a break with monarchy.

So it’s odd that a segment of … Read the rest

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Suck up the pain of unjust suffering

Jul 10th, 2012 12:25 pm | By

You know how Dan Savage likes to say that conservative Christians should ignore what the Bible says about homosexuality just as they ignore what the Bible says about slavery? Peter Montgomery at Religion Dispatches points out that actually they don’t always ignore what the Bible says about slavery. Sometimes they use it to tell the workers to submit. Ralph Reed, in 1990:

Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God.

Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of anything.… Read the rest

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Here’s something for skeptics to debate

Jul 10th, 2012 9:53 am | By

What’s wrong with torturing animals for fun? Why not, after all?

Nothing should be off the table when skeptics get together for a chin-wag, right? So recreational animal torture should be on the table. It shouldn’t be a given that that’s not ok, just the way “treat people as equals” shouldn’t be a given, because skepticism. Right? We can’t just assume that torturing animals for shits&giggles is a crap idea; we have to demonstrate that it is, with evidence.

Why, for instance, is there anything wrong with the fact that someone encased a live kitten in concrete up to the front legs on the property of FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) patriarch Isaac Wyler? Why is it stomach-turning to … Read the rest

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The unapproved chorus

Jul 9th, 2012 4:58 pm | By

Jadehawk does a great fisking of Paula Kirby’s recent declaration of war. I’ve been half-wanting to address the substance but half not wanting to, because there is such a thing as boredom and too much of one subject and let’s move on already. But now Jadehawk has done a thorough one, so that’s that off my mind.

(What I would have said, if I’d said it, is that the whole idea that the answer to systemic injustice is to redouble one’s own efforts is just fatuous, and also strikingly illiberal. Why should anyone have to redouble her efforts in order to overcome systemic injustice? What the hell is wrong with trying to get rid of the systemic injustice? Why … Read the rest

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We need educated feeling

Jul 9th, 2012 3:35 pm | By

My copies of Thinking towards humanity: themes from Norman Geras arrived a couple of hours ago. (It took me about half an hour to open the package – you’d think it was plumbing or a box of plutionium, the way it was wrapped up. It was soldered, welded, wrapped around with chains – it was hard to open.) I get copies because I’m a contributor, as are David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Michael Walzer, Damien Counsell, Shalom Lappin and other swell people.

My piece is about morality and caring, and blogging. It’s about blogging as a good and useful new genre, and how at its best (exemplified by Norm Geras, for one) it can help educate the feelings in … Read the rest

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How something can be a given

Jul 9th, 2012 11:06 am | By

So Leeds Skeptics in the Pub has uninvited Steve Moxon. Now they’re discussing the matter. There’s one crux that I think is interesting, and I think more clarity on it would help a lot of people who are disputing about it. It’s a crux we’ve discussed here at FTB, too, especially in last week’s hangout.

This is the crux:

Amy: There are some things that should be a given in any skeptical society, and the equality of its members in terms of gender, sexuality, race etc should be one of those things. Having Moxon speak just gives credibility to the idea that his wacky, bigoted views on women are worthy of debate.

Norman: Not sure how anything can be

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One way to think of the children

Jul 8th, 2012 5:00 pm | By

Taslima and I have been thinking along the same lines today.

Mine

Not only no thinking. Worse than that. No thinking because no challenging of beliefs. Thus no learning, no changing of mind, no change, no progress, no education.

The Texas Republican party has come out in favor of stagnation and ignorance and dogmatic, fixed beliefs.

Taslima’s

If we want to make the world a better place, we have to stop the system that forces our children to read the books of barbarism and lies and believe everything without asking questions. If we do not inspire our children to study science and have a thinking mind, we will see the crowds of ignorant people everywhere. If we do not encourage

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Lone star state v thinking

Jul 8th, 2012 2:51 pm | By

No thinking please we’re Texas, says the Republican Party of Texas. It says it in its party platform.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Not only no thinking. Worse than that. No thinking because no challenging of beliefs. Thus no learning, no changing of mind, no change, no progress, no education.

The Texas Republican party has come out in favor of stagnation and ignorance and dogmatic, fixed beliefs.

Boy, there’s a program. Less curiosity and progress and … Read the rest

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How can we trust any of the claims enough to debate them?

Jul 8th, 2012 9:37 am | By

Stephanie Zvan made a crucial point yesterday about inviting a certain kind of (contrarian or “controversial” or anti-consensus) speaker to give a talk. She started from something LeftSidePositive said in a previous comment.

(or indeed if the audience should be expected to have the tools to critique it thoroughly if it is not in their field)

QFT. If you have a speaker who is willing to misrepresent the conclusions of a paper, how does an audience who’ve never seen the paper properly question the speaker?

Charlotte and Amy amplified the point today on the Leeds SITP Facebook page. In response to a suggestion that

The only way SITP can come out on top is if the members take

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Another illustration of how privileged women are

Jul 8th, 2012 8:48 am | By

And how they dominate and exploit men.

A man Afghan officials say is a member of the Taliban shot dead a woman accused of adultery in front of a crowd near Kabul, a video obtained by Reuters showed…

In the three-minute video, a turban-clad man approaches a woman kneeling in the dirt and shoots her five times at close range with an automatic rifle, to cheers of jubilation from the 150 or so men watching in a village in Parwan province.

“Allah warns us not to get close to adultery because it’s the wrong way,” another man says as the shooter gets closer to the woman. “It is the order of Allah that she be executed.”

Actually it turns … Read the rest

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When Steve met Tom

Jul 7th, 2012 5:24 pm | By

It was at a UCL debate on the question: Is Feminism Sexist and does the MRM even exist?

They went to dinner together. Isn’t that convivial? They totally know each other. More surprising, they’re not the same person. They sure sound like the same person.

The debate ran as I would have expected and there were no surprises. Tom Martin gave a good account of himself; Steve Moxon attempted the impossible and tried to explain the complexity of evolutionary psychology in under 1 minute (please read his book); there were a number of “can’t we all just get along?” types; a couple of male-feminists who were disappointed in the comments from men (hell, let’s be more honest;

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Drilling down through all the layers

Jul 7th, 2012 4:42 pm | By

More Steve Moxon.

The Guardian’s Northern Blog on why even UKIP didn’t want him.

Moxon’s opinions have now cost him his place as UKIP’s candidate in Sheffield‘s local elections, where he is standing for the Dore and Totley ward, a Liberal Democrat stronghold in Nick Clegg’s constituency. The party has dropped him after attention was drawn to a post he wrote on his blog last August which endorsed the reasoning in the testament of the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik.

He wrote, inter alia:

That pretty well everyone – myself not excluded – recoiled at his actions, does not belie the accuracy of Breivik’s research and analysis in his ‘manifesto’, which is in line with most scholarship

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Unthinking capitulation to the hegemonic oppressive politics of PC-fascism

Jul 7th, 2012 10:13 am | By

Steve Moxon took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union in January. The motion is quite funny, because it would do nicely as a summary of The Paula Kirby Thesis:

This House Believes the Only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition

So pull your socks up and get on with it! No whingeing, and by “wingeing” I mean “reporting on social factors that impede women.”

Moxon didn’t altogether wow the reviewer.

Steve Moxon, on the other hand gave an appalling performance, his odd choice of showing a powerpoint presentation giving him the air of an enthusiastic but often inaudible lecturer and his offensive thesis that women should aspire to the traditional female role of being young, beautiful

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Meet Steve Moxon

Jul 7th, 2012 7:57 am | By

I understated the awfulness of Steve Moxon. Google turns up more.

Like the fact that he was dropped by UKIP because he said nice things about Anders Breivik.

Steve Moxon, author of the classic anti-feminist book ‘The Woman Racket‘, was dropped as a candidate for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in this week’s local elections over comments he made on his blog previously regarding Anders Breivik. Whilst stressing how appalling and insupportable Breivik’s actions were, Moxon had noted that his manifesto presented an accurate account of the spread of political correctness in Europe. This was picked up by a local paper in the city that Moxon was standing in (Sheffield), forcing UKIP to drop him as a

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Leeds Skeptics in the Pub reach out to women

Jul 7th, 2012 7:26 am | By

and punch them in the mouth.

Upcoming event July 21: a talk by a dude called Steve Moxon on Y women R so dumb.

Talk by Steve Moxon. Leeds psychologist Dr Gijsbert Stoet finds no evidence that women under-perform through internalising false stereotypes, a recent major review reveals no sex-discrimination in academia, and ground-breaking field research shows that it is actually in favour of women in recruitment; so why is it women tend not to ‘get to the top’?

It iz becoz they R so dumb.

Recent science confirms the sexes to be not just different but dichotomous, albeit that confounds with other factors often obscures this, and on many measures there is more variation within- than between-sex.

Some … Read the rest

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Real online bullying

Jul 6th, 2012 10:42 am | By

Did somebody say something about bullying?

Helen Lewis did, in a New Statesman blog post about the online harassment of Anita Sarkeesian. She displays a collection of the vicious stuff, much of it visual, so go there to see it.

The most amazing item is an interactive game inviting players to punch Sarkeesian in the face. When they comply, her face is turned to beaten pulp.

Lewis observes:

Sarkeesian is rare in sharing so much of the harassment that she has been subjected to — and it’s a brave choice for her to make. Every time I write about this subject, I get a few emails from women who’ve been through the same thing (and I’m sure there are

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WiS 2

Jul 5th, 2012 5:49 pm | By

Paul Fidalgo has a post on the next Women in Secularism, and how the last one didn’t actually eat your baby.

By now it’s clear, I’d say, that the Women in Secularism conference put on by CFI this past May was a milestone event in the secular movement’s history, as it raised consciousness for all in attendance—men and women—about all manner of issues affecting women both in and outside the secular and skeptic communities. Discussions and debates were spurred on a huge variety of subjects, from the personal to the political, and even if you had only been able to attend one session, you could not have walked away without a deeper understanding of what was being discussed.

It

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Looking on in puzzled surprise

Jul 5th, 2012 4:29 pm | By

Ken has a nice post at Popehat on the strangely hyperbolic reaction to discussion of harassment at conferences.

I am not a feminist.  By that I mean that I am completely uninterested in whether or not I deserve the label “feminist” or “anti-feminist.”  I believe in the legal, formal, and social equality of men and women, I am interested in the ways that laws and social norms interfere with that equality, and I am open to discussion of approaches to changing laws and social norms.

I gotta tell you, Ken, that means you are a feminist. A non-feminist doesn’t believe in those things and isn’t interested in those ways and isn’t open to that discussion. Arguing about definitions isn’t what … Read the rest

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The second half of the transcript, by Kate Donovan

Jul 5th, 2012 2:57 pm | By

Part 2 of the transcript of the Google hangout conversation video by the heroic Kate Donovan

Al Stefanelli: [from previous] Nothing wrong with discourse, nothing wrong with disagreeing with each other. But when it gets to the point where it becomes toxic, it doesn’t help us at all. We’re supposed to be the reasonable ones. We’re the ones who are supposed to be able to rise above particular methods of particular arguments.

[29:33]

Ian Cromwell: Based on what?

Ashley Miller: I think that’s ridiculous.

Al Stefanelli: based on my opinion.

Ian Cromwell: I got to tell you, Al, if you’re expecting any group of people to be totally rational about everything, you’re not being rational.

Al Read the rest

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Delhi police attempt to arrest Sanal Edamaruku

Jul 4th, 2012 5:46 pm | By

http://www.rationalistinternational.net/

4 July 2012.This morning, officers of the Delhi Police reached Sanal Edamaruku’s house to arrest him. They came upon directions of a Delhi court to execute an arrest warrant issued by a Mumbai Metropolitan Magistrate Court (second highest Criminal Court). If Sanal had been at home, he would be in jail now….

The officers were informed that Sanal is presently out of Delhi and traveling. They insisted on details of his whereabouts, addresses and contact numbers. Some hours later, they came again to press for information, to no avail.

What will happen next?

With this dramatic turn of events, Sanal Edamaruku’s persecution has reached a dangerous new level. Exposing the “miracle” of the water-dripping crucifix at the Velankanni … Read the rest

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