Year: 2010

  • How many little girls are slaughtered unnoticed?

    Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow and the implications for morality and universalism.

  • The Regime in Iran has silenced the voice of five more activists!

    The Islamic state of Iran today, May 9th, 2010, hanged five more activists to further their goal of terrorizing the people in Iran. We are well aware that the regime’s crimes will not end until people in Iran, along with concerned citizens globally, put these murderers and all those who have helped this regime on trial in an international court.

    We demand an immediate expulsion of the Islamic Republic of Iran from all international agencies, and prosecution of the regime’s leaders for their daily heinous state crimes.

    Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign to Close Down Iranian Embassies, is calling a press conference where she and other activists will demand that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all members of the Canadian parliament support the people of Iran and break all diplomatic relations with the Iranian Regime.

    “We declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the head of state terrorism and controls the state terrorism machinery in Iran. He is responsible for summary trials, Islamic retribution, execution and torture.

    “We further declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the principal sponsor of the Political Islamic Movement, not only in the region but also globally,” said Homa Arjomand.

    The protestors claim the entire regime of Iran is responsible for terrorizing people globally and sustaining terrorism in every way Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government can. They further declare the recent hanging of five activists and defenders of human rights is an expansion of the 150,000 executions done by this regime.

    Human Rights Activists will gather at the following locations:

    Location: Mel Lastman Square, 5100 Yonge Street
    Date: Sunday, May 9,2010, at 5:00 pm

    Location: Queen’s Park, Toronto
    Date: Monday, May 10, 2010, at 12:00 Noon

    An open microphone will also be available for other concerned individuals attending the protest. They will be able to expose the crimes and human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and the leading terrorist – President Ahmadinejad.

    About the Campaign

    Media Contact: Ms. Homa Arjomand 416-737-9500.

    For more info visit :

    www.closedowniranianembassies.com

    www.nosharia.com

    About the Author

    Homa Arjomand is the Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada. She started the campaign against Sharia courts in Toronto in October 2003 with a handful of supporters, and today it has grown to a coalition of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists. In February 2006, the Ontario Government passed legislation which ended the use of religious laws for family arbitration. Since then, the Campaign has focused its efforts on stopping political Islam globally. Homa is now Coordinator of a campaign called “The International Campaign to CIose Down Iranian Embassies” and spokesperson of “Wanted by People”.

  • As though

    A more central part of Harris’s argument:

    …it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people.

    Ah but they don’t. One big social institution doesn’t, at least not necessarily: the family. Some parents believe in equality, but some don’t; sometimes it’s a matter of what the male head of household believes, because that determines the rules for everyone else.

    This is why the claim that maximizing well-being for all can be scientifically shown to be moral or good does not (as far as I can see) get off the ground. It’s because some people’s well-being partly depends on the subordination of other people, and people like that do not consider the de-subordination of “their” subordinates a source of well-being for themselves. Over time that can change, but it doesn’t happen overnight. So the question arises, how would you show such people scientifically that they are mistaken? It can’t be done. You may be able to show them evidence that the subordinates will have more well-being, but that won’t trump their sense of the fitness of things. The issue isn’t factual (though facts can help, or hinder; it depends), it’s emotional.

  • PZ on Sam Harris v Sean Carroll

    Can we use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals? No.

  • Is there anyone who would?

    Sam Harris has a new article on a science of morality at the Huffington Post. There’s a lot there, but one observation in particular snagged my attention.

    I wonder if there is anyone on earth who would be tempted to attack the philosophical underpinnings of medicine with questions like: “What about all the people who don’t share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is ‘healthy’?

    Wonder no more! There is indeed. There is the anthropologist Frederique Apffel Marglin, who once wrote* that

    In absolutely negativizing disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.

    And she meant it. She wasn’t writing a parody of postmodernist science-skepticism, she was writing the thing itself. I observed in 2003

    There is something a little breathtaking in a level of science-phobia that can see ‘negativizing’ disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s retort to a character’s reproach, in ‘The Front’, that he really wanted success: ‘So what should I want, a disease?’ Does Marglin seriously think that disease, suffering and death (the death of other people, remember, as well as one’s own) would be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren’t for the ’scientific medical system of knowledge’? Has the postmodern left become so tone deaf that it can hear no echo of the complacent droning of landowners and priests (and colonialists, surely) about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate?

    *F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

  • Sean Carroll on Sam Harris and a science of morality

    There’s no simple way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.

  • Sam Harris: Toward a science of morality

    His goal is to start a conversation. “Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher.”

  • Metamagician: tone does matter

    Many readers don’t get tone, but the cure for that isn’t less discussion of tone; it’s more intelligent discussion of tone.

  • Evan Harris is no stranger to principle

    Harris was a rare voice in Parliament for reason and evidence and against quackery and nonsense.

  • Gloating for Britain

    George Pitcher, Anglican vicar and Telegraph columnist, is just beside himself with glee that Evan Harris lost his seat in the election. Why is Pitcher so delighted? Because Harris is a secularist, and because he thinks terminally ill people should be able to choose when their suffering ends. That’s not exactly how Pitcher puts it though.

    For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

    Stupid, stupid man, and dishonest besides. (And he can’t even write. “For a doctor, he supported the strange idea” – sheesh!) Harris did not support the idea that “terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves” nor was his idea of care for the elderly and infirm a one-way ticket to Switzerland (i.e. euthanasia). Stupid malicious man – as if he can’t tell the difference between having the option of euthanasia and having euthanasia imposed!

    I wish I could gloat that George Pitcher had lost his seat on the Telegraph.

  • Heidegger as Nazi philosopher

    The seminars of 1933-5 show the outright transformation of Heidegger’s thought into a tool of Nazi indoctrination.

  • Worldwide trends in honor killings

    Honor killings are based on codes of morality often reinforced by fundamentalist religious dictates.

  • Underpinnings

    The Sydney Anglican diocese is pissed off because students who have the option are ditching classes in “scripture” to take ethics classes instead. The Sydney Anglican diocese seems to consider this some kind of violation of nature and of its property rights in the children of New South Wales.

    The controversial trial of secular ethics classes has ”decimated” Protestant scripture classes in the 10 NSW schools where it has been introduced as an alternative for non-religious children, with the classes losing about 47 per cent of enrolled students.

    The figure was calculated by the Sydney Anglican diocese, which is so concerned about the trial that it has created a fund-raising website to ”protect SRE” (special religious education). The website says the values underpinning ”Australia’s moral framework” are under threat…

    ”If we lose religious education, we risk losing true, fundamental ‘ethics’ that have underpinned Australia’s moral framework for hundreds of years,” the website says.

    Well, no; more likely, you “risk” losing false, misleading, often bad underpinnings and replacing them with better thinking. Australia’s moral framework for hundreds of years, by the way, has been as limited and often ruthless as anyone else’s; it stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in its not altogether praiseworthy treatment of its indigenous population. The Anglican church didn’t prevent that, after all, so why should anyone believe it has some pipeline to better “underpinnings”?

  • Palin thinks US law should be based on bible

    Cites 10 commandments, which mandate monotheism, sabbath, methods of swearing, iconoclasm.

  • Prayers and god ruled ok at inaugurations

    Because they’re longstanding traditions therefore they are constitutional, federal appeals court rules.

  • Scripture classes “lose” half of students to ethics

    Because of course the scripture classes owned the students to begin with.

  • Your petrodollars at work

    A group of lawyers in Egypt who call themselves (with horrible sarcasm) “the Association of Lawyers Without Restrictions” have sued a bunch of people for publishing or just somehow vaguely having something or maybe nothing to do with publishing The Thousand and One Nights,

    claiming that the book “offends public decency.” Hisba cases allow citizens to prosecute individuals who they deem to have insulted Islam…

    They are demanding those responsible for the publication be brought to trial under Article 178 of the Penal Code, which if convicted is punishable by imprisonment for a term of two years and a fine for everyone that publishes any prints or pictures that “offends the public decency.”

    I heard an Egyptian guy talking to the World Service about this a couple of days ago, disgustedly saying that this is just Wahhabism and nothing to do with Egypt or the way Islam is understood there.

    Wahhabism sucks.

  • Hesba law lets fanatics sue intellectuals

    There are many in Egypt who regard this type of legal vigilantism as ludicrous.

  • Egypt: call to ban Thousand and One Nights

    A direct result of opening Egypt to the fundamentalist winds of Wahhabi Salafism.

  • Saudi photo of women with naked faces shock

    Titanic struggle between reactionaries and lunatics plays out in Wahhabi kingdom.