Sep 26th, 2015 11:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Warwick ASH president Benjamin David’s post yesterday:
As President of WASH, I feel that it is important that I comment about the recent controversy regarding the decision taken by The University of Warwick’s Student Union to prohibit Maryam Namazie from speaking on campus. For those unfamiliar with Maryam, she is a secularist, a human-rights campaigner, and leader of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain – as well as being a friend of mine.
After submitting a guest-speaker application to the SU, I received the following response explaining their decision to bar Maryam:
“…after researching both her and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for
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Tags: Maryam Namazie, Warwick Student Union
Sep 26th, 2015 10:33 am |
By Ophelia Benson
There’s also a petition, organized by Benjamin David of Warwick ASH, petitioning the Student Union to Allow Maryam Namazie to speak at The University of Warwick.
Signatures are rolling in fast, so join the fun.
Warwick Students Union have made the appalling decision to bar Maryam Namazie from giving a talk on campus to Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists. For those unfamiliar with Maryam, she is a secularist, a human-rights campaigner, and leader of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
A student union official said the decision had been taken “because after researching both her [Namazie] and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised”.
It went on: “We have a duty of care to conduct a
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Tags: Maryam Namazie, Warwick Student Union
Sep 26th, 2015 9:19 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Isaac Leigh, the president of the Warwick University Student Union, posted a statement on the WSU Facebook page a little over an hour ago.
*** WARWICK SU STATEMENT ON MARYAM NAMAZIE SPEAKER REQUEST ***
“In reference to the external speaker request the SU has received regarding Maryam Namazie visiting Warwick SU, I feel I must clarify both mine and the SU’s position given the rather premature discussion alive on social media and in the press.
As previously stated, the SU has a process for assessing the risks associated with any external speaker in accordance with our legal responsibilities. Our policy aims to provide an environment where freedom of expression and speech are protected, balanced with the need to ensure
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Tags: Maryam Namazie, Warwick Student Union
Sep 26th, 2015 8:44 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Independent on Warwick University’s Student Union’s cancellation of Maryam’s talk.
Maryam Namazie had been booked by the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists (WASH) group to speak about secularism to Warwick University’s Student Union on 28 October.
However, the group was notified last month that Ms Namazie’s speech had been cancelled. The decision has led campaigners to raise concerns about student bodies across the UK thwarting freedom of speech on their campuses.
The union said that “after researching both [Ms Namazie] and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus”.
Articles written by Ms Namazie indicated she was
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Tags: Maryam Namazie
Sep 25th, 2015 3:49 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
This is a horrible story that Sarah Beamish tells:
Tonight I got into a confrontation with an apparently famous (I didn’t know this) local man named David Zancai. He was very large and strong. He got onto the subway and started storming around, yelling, doing pushups and roaring, and ranting about how “ladies” and “girls” need to “keep their knees together” and “stop showing their monkey” to men on the subway. He went on for about five minutes about why men shouldn’t let their girls out of the house dressed in spandex, and the male pedophiles and rapists and voyeurs wandering among us and how women and girls are responsible for such men’s reactions to them and “know what they
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Sep 25th, 2015 2:54 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Student Rights has more on Warwick University Student Union’s cancellation of its Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society’s invitation to Maryam Namazie to speak October 28.
In an email published by Namazie, the union has claimed: “a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others…indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus”.
But you could say that about anyone, or almost anyone. People who give talks on how to make cookies or how to plant a garden are unlikely to incite hatred on campus…but frankly they’re unlikely to be invited to give talks, too, because why bother? It’s pretty dishonest, not to mention prejudicial and even somewhat threatening to call Maryam … Read the rest
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Tags: Maryam Namazie
Sep 25th, 2015 12:47 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
This stinks. Maryam reports:
I was invited to speak at Warwick University by the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society on 28 October 2015. The University Student Union has declined the request for me to speak saying the following:
This is because after researching both her and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus.
There a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker that indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus. This is in contravention of our external speaker policy:
The President (or equivalent) of
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Sep 25th, 2015 11:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Lauren Rankin wrote about abortion rights as a “not just women” issue at Truthout in July 2013.
The subhead, by Rankin or an editor, puts it this way:
The “War on Women” isn’t just a war on women. Trans men and gender-non-conforming people are losing their rights too, and we need to rework how we frame these “women’s issues.”
The war on women is in fact just a war on women; that’s merely tautological. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on anyone else. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on trans men and gender-nonconforming people. I think when people start telling us we should rework how we … Read the rest
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Sep 25th, 2015 10:48 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This is from two years ago but it’s amazing enough to point and exclaim at now – naturally occurring mechanical gears. Phys.org had the story (the beginning of the sentence is missing for some reason):
a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure“.
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University
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Sep 24th, 2015 5:37 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
At least 717 people have died in a stampede near Mecca; 863 were injured.
During the Hajj, pilgrims travel to Mina, a large valley about 5km (3 miles) from Mecca, to throw seven stones at pillars called Jamarat, which represent the devil.
The pillars stand where Satan is believed to have tempted the Prophet Abraham.
That sounds like a harmless game, except that it involves huge crowds of people.
Tchima Illa Issoufou, BBC Hausa, whose aunt was killed reports:
People were going towards the direction of throwing the stones while others were coming from the opposite direction. Then it became chaotic and suddenly people started going down.
There were people from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Senegal among other nationalities.
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Sep 24th, 2015 5:14 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Feds have been looking at Martin Shkreli, the “that lifesaving pill you need is now $750 apiece” guy, for months.
Since at least in January, Shkreli has been under criminal investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, court records show. And Shkreli is not alone—some of his business associates have also received grand jury subpoenas in the case.
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The criminal investigation involves Retrophin, a public company where Shkreli served as an officer, director, and 10-percent owner of the outstanding stock before being ousted amid multiple allegations of misconduct. Retrophin focuses on the development, acquisition and commercialization of therapies for the treatment of catastrophic or rare diseases, and was founded by
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Sep 24th, 2015 4:44 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A public post on Facebook a couple of days ago:
A colleague just returned from a luncheon to benefit the National Women’s History museum, which is proposed for the Mall in Washington. Here’s what was in the bag of shwag they gave everyone who attended: lip gloss, nail polish, copy of “Glamour” magazine, candy, bracelet, dishwashing detergent.
One commenter called bullshit on the dishwashing detergent, but the poster said
No it was a bottle of some eco bullshit dishwashing detergent.
So there’s that.
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Sep 24th, 2015 1:40 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Are missionaries missionaries, part 2. The Atlantic:
From 1769 until his death in 1784, Serra was the head of the missions in the northern portion of California, helping to establish nine communities where natives lived under the supervision of priests in a life of prayer and work. “One of their major goals was to assimilate the native peoples and eventually make them productive peoples of the Spanish empire,” said Senkewicz. “The mission was to contribute to that assimilation in two ways: by making the native people Catholic, and by teaching them European-style agriculture.”
All of which applies a lot of assumptions – that the Spanish got to make California (and Mexico and all points south) part of the Spanish … Read the rest
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Sep 23rd, 2015 5:52 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
More beheading planned in Saudi Arabia.
A group of U.N. experts has joined rights groups in calling on Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a Shiite man convicted of crimes reportedly committed as a teenager during protests inspired by the Arab Spring.
Ali al-Nimr, the nephew of firebrand Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, faces execution by beheading and an additional rare punishment of “crucifixion,” which means publicly displaying the body after death as a warning to others, according to Saudi state media.
“Any judgment imposing the death penalty upon persons who were children at the time of the offense, and their execution, are incompatible with Saudi Arabia’s international obligations,” the U.N. group said in a statement Tuesday,
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Sep 23rd, 2015 5:28 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The pope went ahead and “canonized” Junipero Serra, Reuters reports.
The pope later said Mass in Spanish to about 25,000 gathered inside and outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and canonized 18th-century Spanish missionary Friar Junipero Serra. The canonization was controversial because critics say that Serra beat and imprisoned Native Americans, suppressed their cultures and facilitated the spread of diseases that heavily reduced the population.
During the first canonization on U.S. soil, Francis in a homily hailed Serra as a man who “sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it.” Some Native American activists condemned making Serra a saint, with one, Corrina
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Tags: The pope
Sep 23rd, 2015 5:06 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
In Galileo’s Middle Finger, one of Alice Dreger’s subjects is the stitch-up of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel by Patrick Tierney in his book Darkness in El Dorado and then by the American Anthropological Association which held a special session at its annual meeting with an open mic at which people were invited to trash Chagnon and they obliged. Dreger found overwhelming evidence that “the leaders of the AAA had to have known early on that Tierney’s book was riddled with errors” [p 175]. She quotes an email from one of the people in charge of the stitch-up, Jane Hill, to the primatologist Sarah Hrdy, who was invited to participate but declined:
Burn this message.
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Sep 23rd, 2015 4:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
You know how I keep saying the pope may talk a nice line about poverty and the global south and all, but what about women? Katha Pollitt says it too.
If the world consisted only of straight men, Pope Francis would be the world’s greatest voice for everything progressives believe in. He’s against inequality, racism, poverty, bigotry and, as his recent encyclical Laudato Si’ made eloquently clear, the rampant capitalism and “self-centred culture of instant gratification”—including excessive meat eating—that fuel climate change and may well destroy the planet.
Which makes a change, yes, but hello, he’s still the pope. The Catholic church is still the Catholic church, not MSF or Human Rights Watch.
I know I risk
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Tags: The pope
Sep 23rd, 2015 11:14 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Ok. Abortion rights. Women. Feminism. Abortion rights as part of feminism. Opposition to abortion rights as part of misogyny and sexism. All that.
I think it’s a huge political mistake to talk about abortion rights in terms of “pregnant people” and “people who can get pregnant.” I think it’s a huge political mistake to drop women from the discussion in order to be inclusive to trans men (and gender fluid people and yadda yadda). The struggle over abortion rights is the way it is because of misogyny and sexism. It would be a very different struggle, if it existed at all, if women were and always had been considered equals. For that reason, it’s a massive mistake to talk about … Read the rest
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