THE AMAZING ATHEIST! @amazingatheist 14 hours ago
Hey @CHSommers I would love to have you on my podcast, The Drunken Peasants.Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers
@amazingatheist Any time. Huge fan.
If you’ve forgotten who the amazing atheist is and what he’s like, just take a squiz at his feed.… Read the rest
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The Independent has a nice big (translated) excerpt from Charb’s book.
… Read the restStéphane Charbonnier was a cartoonist and writer. He was a supporter of the French Communist Party. And while, under his editorship, Charlie Hebdo aggressively poked fun at Catholicism and Judaism as well as radical Islam, his book – published in France last week – is a passionate rejection of the allegations that, under his editorship, Charlie Hebdo was “racist” or “Islamophobic”.
In the book, Charb, as he was always known, defends his publication of cartoons mocking radical Islam and caricaturing (but never mocking) the Prophet Mohamed. He argues – from a left-wing, anti-racist, militantly secular viewpoint – that the word “Islamophobia” is a trap, set by an unholy
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Originally a comment by Morgan on Psychiatry is an important skeptical and social justice issue.
… Read the restMaking demands about alternatives before you’ll bother to learn the truth about it seems callous, in addition to incurious.
Look, here’s the thing: you sound like a crank.
That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but from what you’re saying, it’s more likely that you’re a crank than not. So before giving what you have to say much time or attention, it’s worth running a simple filter of asking what your views are, in case they’re “people need to regulate their orgone energy via crystals” or something else that would clearly indicate you’re not worth the effort. What you’re saying may seem obviously reasonable to you,
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Via Twitter – Charlie Hebdo satirizes apathy of European leaders to migrants.
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The producer of the movie that got the Sikh “campaigners” in Wolverhampton so riled up today withdrew the movie so the riled up campaigners could have just bided their time. The Indian Express has the ridiculous details.
… Read the restHarinder Singh Sikka, the producer of controversial movie “Nanak Shah Fakir”, on Tuesday announced to withdraw the movie from cinema halls across the country and globe. Sikka made the announcement after meeting Akal Takht chief Giani Gurbachan Singh in Delhi.
Akal Takht chief was in Delhi on Tuesday after his return from Muscat and was scheduled to go to Bidar for a religious function. Sikka in a statement said the decision was taken while bowing before the supremacy of Akal Takht. He
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Hundreds of people had to be evacuated from Cineworld Wolverhampton after 50 protestors turned up and staged a sit-in over the screening of a controversial film.
Police had to be called and the cinema cleared and closed after the protestors surged through the main entrance and headed for the screen showing Bollywood blockbuster, Nanak Shah Fakir.
Once inside, the Sikh campaigners sat down on the floor and began to shout, refusing to move until cinema bosses met their demands and stopped the screening.
Well that’s that then. We can’t have anything if religious protesters decide they don’t want us to have it. All they have to go is sit down and shout, and that will be … Read the rest
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Jason Walsh is disgusted with Queen’s University Belfast for canceling an academic symposium for bad self-regarding reasons.
… Read the restAmong the participants at this conference was to be yours truly, the Ireland correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, the world’s most measured, careful and, critics (with whom I would disagree) would say, stiff newspaper. Other participants included, well, academics. It was an academic symposium, after all. As I was a putative participant there is an ethical conflict in me reporting on the matter. There is no such impediment, however, on me complaining about it, so buckle-up while I take you for a spin around the insanity that is the modern university.
…
I had planned to give a paper entitled “Back to
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I stopped in at that chain drug store that I mentioned yesterday – Bartells – to see if they still carry OTC homeopathic asthma “treatments.” I could find only one thing (and didn’t feel like asking anyone). There’s only one and it’s not right next to other asthma meds; I couldn’t find any other asthma meds. They have everything with pseudoephedrine behind the counter now (because meth, ya know), and maybe all the asthma meds have pseudoephedrine so that’s why I didn’t see any. If that’s the explanation that’s an improvement on the last time I looked at this.
But still there is one item: safecare AsthmaCare for temporary relief of minor asthma symptoms.
In big letters in the middle:… Read the rest
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Padraig Reidy reports at Little Atoms that Queens University Belfast has canceled a scheduled symposium on
can you guess what?
The irony is so multiple and reflexive that I think it may be about to suck the entire universe into itself and then disappear.
… Read the restThe symposium: Understanding Charlie: New perspectives on contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo, was due to be hosted in June by QUB’s Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities. But delegates, including Oxford University philosophy professor Brian Klug, were informed via email on Monday (20 April) that the event would not go ahead.
The email informed speakers: “The Vice Chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast has made the decision just this morning that
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A Facebook friend posted a link to my Freethinker column (published yesterday), and got some…lively comments.
Paul McEnery “Of course the idea behind the cartoons was to challenge authority: to challenge religious authority, clerical authority, theocratic authority, the authority of public opinion and taboo.”
Total motherfucking hypocritical shit-mouthed arsemongering.
The idea was to be cunts to Muslims on the grounds of they were subhuman mongrels who should get the fuck out of Denmark.
… Read the restPaul McEnery Nobody’s using cartoonists for scapegoats. YOU personally are pretending that the Danish cartoons weren’t full on racialist hate speech intended to provoke violence. So is Benson.
Nice deflect by pointlessly objecting to “cunts” as if it matters, btw. We’ve been through that before, and you
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Originally a comment by karmacat on Psychiatry is an important skeptical and social justice issue.
My anger comes from working as a psychiatrist and watching my patients suffer and scared that maybe there is nothing I can do for some patients. SC does have valid criticisms because the brain is so complicated that we have a limited understanding of it.
Mental illnesses do exist but we still don’t really understand the pathophysiology of the brain. We can see how patients with schizophrenia have different brains from “normal.” but one patient with schizophrenia can be different from another patient with schizophrenia even though they have the same diagnosis.
The problem with the DSM is that it is just a description … Read the rest
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Aron Ra is giving a talk in Dublin an hour from now.
Should be interesting.… Read the rest
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McGuffey High School in Claysville, Pennsylvania made headlines over the weekend when a group of students organized an “Anti-Gay Day’ in direct retaliation to the LGBT youth-supportive National Day of Silence (NDOS) on Friday.
So it’s necessary to “retaliate” against the LGBT youth-supportive National Day of Silence? So a group of high school students want to go on record as saying LGBT youth should be bullied and harassed at school?
… Read the restGLSENs Day of Silence is a national day of action in which students across the country vow to take a form of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools.
History
Founded
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John Tozzi at Bloomberg is also on the homeopathy story.
On a recent afternoon in midtown Manhattan, I popped into a chain drug store and picked up some $12 sleep tablets whose label promises both “courage and peace of mind” and “focus when ungrounded.” I also got a $17 tube of cream offering “rapid, soothing relief of pain” from conditions as varied as arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and bug bites. Both products sat on shelves alongside familiar drugs such as Tylenol and Claritin, which regulators have carefully scrutinized for safety and effectiveness. The half- dozen products I bought—labelled as “homeopathic”—aren’t vetted for either.
Tablets that give you courage and peace of mind – that’s funny. I suppose it wouldn’t … Read the rest
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NPR covers the homeopathy issue in its usual insouciant way. It starts with a human interest story about a practitioner named Anthony Aurigemma in Bethesda (handy for NPR).
… Read the restAurigemma went to medical school and practiced as a regular doctor before switching to homeopathy more than 30 years ago. He says he got disillusioned by mainstream medicine because of the side effects caused by many drugs. “I don’t reject conventional medicine. I use it when I have to,” Aurigemma says.
Throughout his career, homeopathy has been regulated differently from mainstream medicine.
In 1988, the Food and Drug Administration decided not to require homeopathic remedies to go through the same drug-approval process as standard medical treatments. Now the FDA isrevisiting
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Salty Current has an updated psychiatry-skepticism-social justice reading list on her eponymous blog. That’s a subject I know little about, so I appreciate having the list.
… Read the restBack in 2012, I wrote about why psychiatry is an important skeptical and social justice issue and created a short list of reading suggestions for approaching psychiatry from these perspectives. The impending release later this week of Psychiatry Under the Influence has nudged me to update it.
Much has changed since 2012, and all of the developments point to the urgency of critically examining and speaking out about psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals. Just prior to the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, the NIMH announced that it would no longer use psychiatric diagnoses, acknowledging
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Hillary Clinton said something very startling in an interview for the New York Times last June.
If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?
At the risk of appearing predictable, the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking. I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by it. I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement.
At the risk of appearing predictable, that’s an astonishingly fatuous thing to say. She must be pandering, but it’s fatuous anyway. Mind you it’s also a fatuous question, so maybe it’s forgivable to give a fatuous answer…but honestly.… Read the rest
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Denise Balkissoon at the Globe and Mail talks to Mona Eltahawy.
In Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, she dismantles what she calls the “trifecta of oppression” working against Arab women: the state, the street and the home, which “work together for their own benefit by keeping girls and women down.”
She takes the reader to Jordan, where a man can escape a rape charge by marrying his victim; to Egypt, where unending street harassment leads families to impose curfews on their daughters; and to Lebanon, which recently decriminalized marital rape.
It’s a must-read.
… Read the restYou say many people are “all too happy to hear how badly Muslim men treat their women,” even when their
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Kate Mayberry at Al Jazeera talks to the Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar.
Zulkiflee Sm Anwar Ulhaque, better known by his pen name of Zunar, is one of Malaysia’s most acerbic and controversial cartoonists, picking apart the government in a country where deference to those in power has long been the norm.
Well let’s get real – deference to those in power has long been the norm everywhere, or almost everywhere. What’s the point of power if you can’t use it to make underlings deferential?! It’s not some quaint eccentricity of Malaysia to make deference to those in power a norm. But over the past couple of centuries that norm has had a rival norm of egalitarianism to deal … Read the rest
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Via A Mighty Girl –
… Read the restAt the Paris Marathon last Sunday, Siabatou Sanneh of Gambia stood out from the other racers — in addition to her race number, she wore traditional Gambian garb and carried 45 pounds of water on her head. Sanneh, who had never left her home country before, participated in the marathon as part of an effort to raise awareness of the difficulties African women face in accessing clean water. While she walked the race, she also wore a sign that read: “In Africa, women travel this distance everyday to get potable water. Help us shorten the distance.”
Sanneh, a mother of four, lives in a small village of 300 people and started carrying water when she
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