Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Highlands Presbyterians furious at Dawkins invitation

    The Wee Frees challenged him to a debate; he replied with the usual quip: ‘That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine.’

  • Meeting Libya’s Ansar al-Sharia

    The group made it clear they would not speak to female members of our team.

  • Religion versus Atheism in Nigeria

    According to a recent worldwide poll called The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, Africa is the world’s most devout region. Even with a global decline in religiosity, the black continent has the smallest number of self-proclaimed atheists in the world. I think this poll clearly mirrors the state of religion and atheism in the region. Nigeria trails behind Ghana in terms of religiosity with 93 percent of the respondents saying they were religious. I guess fewer Nigerians would identify themselves as religious if there were assurances of safety and no victimization if they proclaimed and declared themselves atheists. In Nigeria, people who do not profess any religion or belief in god find themselves in a perilous predicament. They are ostracized, maltreated and discriminated against. But the situation of atheists is not the same across the country. How one is treated as an atheist depends on so many factors, such as the part of the country where one is living – is it in the Christian dominated South or in the muslim dominated North? Is it in the rural or urban areas? It also depends on one’s family background, gender, level of education, employment and income. Male atheists who are highly educated and are financially independent face less risk than their female counterparts.

    In Nigeria, atheism is a taboo. It is abominable for anyone to proclaim openly that god does not exist. It is not safe and normal for persons to admit being atheist. The reactions include sardonic incredulity, shock, anger, and hatred. Atheism goes with huge costs – social and political consequences – which many people cannot afford. Generally atheists are not accorded respect. They are not treated as human beings with equal rights and dignity. In fact in Nigeria it is better and more socially acceptable to profess a belief in any god or any religion than to profess no religion and lack of belief in god. Many people will not welcome an atheist to their homes. The general misconception is that atheists are horrible human beings, the agents of the devil who lack common moral decencies. Many people are made to believe that atheists can corrupt their minds or ‘souls’, cause them to derail from the path of truth and righteousness, and lead them to hell fire and eternal damnation. In fact the whole idea of atheism is scary to many Nigerians. Most people would want not to be associated with that label or perspective. Most Nigerians believe all initiatives should be founded on god, no matter how absurd or vaguely conceived such an idea is.

    Again, most Nigerians socialize and marry along religious and theistic lines. The issue of the religion or belief in god plays prominent role when marriages are contracted. So atheists – self proclaimed atheists – may find it difficult to get partners unless they are ready to convert or to renounce atheism or to conceal their atheism. Unfortunately the dream of most young Nigerians is to marry in churches or mosques or to have their marriages blessed by a clergy even when such marriages are contracted in a court or registry. There are no indications that ‘blessed marriages’ succeed better than those contracted without such theistic theatrics.

    In Nigeria, anyone who goes open and public with his or her atheism risks losing family support, care and solidarity. In 2003, a Muslim woman from the North who is acclaimed nationwide as liberal and progressive in her views visited our humanist stand during an event in Abuja. After a short brief on what humanism was all about, she said she would have nothing to do with any of her children who renounced Islam. Many children are not ready to go against what is often perceived as the divine will of their parents particularly when it comes to religious or theistic matters. They prefer to pretend and to present themselves as religious and theistic. In Nigeria, family and community links are very strong and important. The Nigerian state is not as developed as states in the western world, and many people rely on their families and community members for care and support. So, families often tyrannize over the lives and choices of members. For example , most people who are born in Christian families are brought up in a christian way, attend christian schools and marry christian partners. Parents regard it as a duty to bring their children up in a  religious and theistic way. For a child to profess atheism is generally seen as a mark of parental, family and societal failure. Atheism goes with a stigma which most families abhor and do not want to associate with.

    Furthermore, there is massive unemployment in the country and atheists find it difficult getting jobs. Very often, employers demand to know people’s religious affiliation during the recruitment process. Many people are forced to profess theism or a certain religion in order to secure a job. Many atheists prefer not go open with their atheistic identity due to fear of being victimized. They do not want to jeopardize their chances of getting a job (earning a living) or keeping the jobs they have already secured. Indeed atheists who go open with their godless outlook risk remaining unemployed, or being sacked or demoted. Most businesses including state functions open with prayers which everybody is expected to say at least as a demonstration of goodwill. As an atheist, refusing to pray could easily be interpreted as a mark of ill will.

    Even in the area of education atheists face so many challenges.  Schools in Nigeria were originally started and are still managed mainly by religious – Christian and Islamic – bodies. Religious indoctrination is quite dominant in the school system. There is a mixture of the schooling and faith traditions. Teaching and preaching, instruction and brainwashing go together. In fact the classrooms and lecture halls are extensions of churches and mosques. Atheists in Nigeria have no choice but to receive faith-based ‘godly’education or no education at all.

    In the area of politics, atheism could be a hindering factor. Some years ago, a former Nigerian president said that nobody who opposed Islam could succeed politically in Northern Nigeria. And in the same vein, I submit that no self-proclaimed atheist can succeed politically in contemporary Nigeria. Atheists stand little or no chance of being elected to an office. Nigerians vote and ‘politik’ along religious lines. Nigeria has never had an atheist president or governor and may not have in the foreseeable future. Political Islam is very strong in the North while political Christianity is strong in most parts of the south. Religious affiliations play a key role in the choice, election and appointment of political candidates. Going open and public with one’s atheism is like making oneself politically unelectable. In fact it is like committing political suicide.

    But I must state that the situation is worse in Muslim-dominated communities in Northern Nigeria. Muslim majority states in this part of the country are implementing sharia law. And under sharia law, apostasy is a crime punishable by death. To be an atheist is more or less to be an apostate – or an infidel or a criminal. There is really no space for atheists to be and to operate. Being an atheist is a matter of life and death. In fact in Muslim sharia-implementing communities in Nigeria, there are two places an atheist can be – in the closet or in the grave. Proclaiming oneself an atheist is like passing a death sentence on oneself. Being an atheist is like handing oneself over to be executed.

    In addition, atheistic expressions are often regarded as blasphemy, and blasphemy is another offence punishable by death or long prison sentences. Any expressive atheist could be branded a blasphemer. Such a person risks being imprisoned or murdered in cold blood by Allah’s self proclaimed foot soldiers. In 2007, a Christian teacher in Gombe state was murdered by a Muslim mob for defiling the Koran. In a region charged with Islamic fanaticism and bigotry, atheists are an endangered species and cannot survive in the open and public space. So in Muslim communities, atheists live in constant fear of their lives. They are socially and politically invisible. Atheists are treated as third class citizens who should be neither seen nor heard.

    But I still maintain that there are some positive signs out there that the situation of atheists in Nigeria is improving, though slowly. For instance, the poll on religiosity and atheism recorded a reduction in the number of Nigerians who identified themselves as religious. That means more people identified themselves as atheists or as non-religious than in an earlier poll. And this development could be attributed to three factors: 1) The advent of the internet which has provided an alternative ‘safe’ space for atheists to ‘come out’, to meet, organize and express themselves in a way that has never been the case. 2) The destructive wave of religious extremism ravaging the country has caused many Nigerians to begin questioning religious and theistic claims and pretensions.3) The growing visibility of the new atheist movement driven by the bestselling publications of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens has emboldened many atheists to leave the closet.

    Still atheists in Nigeria have a long way to go before they can be treated with full dignity and respect. Atheism is the most commonsensical of all commonsense notions. But like any progressive development against the backdrop of religious opposition, improving the situation of atheists will not be an easy feat to achieve. It requires – and will require – a lot of courage, sacrifice and struggle.

  • Has it already been repudiated?

    Ron Lindsay has a post on divisiveness in the secular community, which is attracting a hailstorm of comments.

    I don’t altogether agree with it. I agree with the normative part but not entirely with the descriptive part. For instance…

    …if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.

    But that doesn’t do it. It has not already been repudiated, even implicitly, by some prominent individuals in the movement. To put it another way, there are some prominent individuals in the movement who promote it or even engage in it themselves. Not many, I think, but some. Yes that makes a difference. Imagine if there were several prominent individuals in the movement who were promoting or even engaging in openly racist discourse. That would be divisive, pretty clearly. For most of us, it works the same way when the discourse is about women (or feminists).

    …the haters are not threatening to divide the movement.  No matter how frequently the haters pollute our blogs, they are outside the movement already.  No one in a position of responsibility wants them in the movement.  Whatever differences may exist among the various movement organizations, we are united on this issue.

    I wish, but no. Not all of the haters are really outside the movement.

    There’s Paula Kirby for example. She’s not exactly in a position of responsibility, but she seems to be because of her connection to the RDF, so what she says has some influence. She called me and Skepchicks and “FTB” generally Feminazis and Femistasi, and she circulated that caricature. That’s hater stuff.

    (A lot of people think she is the Executive Director of RDF UK. I thought so myself, and referred to her as such more than once. She’s not. Look on the RDF website or where you will, you can’t find her listed as ED or any other kind of officer. It’s not fair to blame Dawkins for things that Kirby has said.)

    Ron doesn’t mention Paula, but he does mention Russell Blackford.

    …the label “misogynist”  is sometimes thrown about carelessly. For example, Russell Blackford, the Australian philosopher (and Free Inquiry columnist) has been called a misogynist shitbag. Yet, as far as I know, Blackford has never made any hateful comments or threats to women; indeed, he has condemned them. He has expressed doubts about the wisdom of harassment policies adopted by some organizations and, if I recall correctly, he has taken exception to some of the criticism directed against TAM (the JREF’s annual meeting). But although Blackford’s views on these issues may be misguided, that hardly qualifies him as a misogynist.

    I don’t think Russell is a misogynist. I’m not sure if I’ve called him one or not, but since I don’t think he is one, I’ll guess that I haven’t. But I disagree that he has, as Ron says, condemned them (“them” being hateful comments to women). He hasn’t. That’s the issue I’ve had with him all along, ever since the summer last year: he hasn’t. He hasn’t condemned them and he has at times joined in with them. He regularly praises Abbie Smith, who is a hater-enabler as well as a hater herself. (Remember “smelly skepchick snatch”?) For many weeks he has been ranting about “FTB” many times every day on Twitter, and he’s never that I’ve seen said a word to condemn the haters. He has been all but climbing into Paula’s lap; he retweeted her deeply unpleasant “Sisterhood of the Oppressed” article more than once; he said not a word to condemn that nasty crucifixion caricature. All that does qualify him as at least a fan of misogynists.

    So…I think Ron is being a little over-generous to that faction.

    …the movement is divided, but it’s not divided for any good reason. It’s divided because too many in the movement are not willing to recognize that their fellow secularists can be mistaken without thereby being bigots; that their fellow secularists can have different understandings of the implications of feminism without being misogynists or “sister-punishers”; and that their fellow secularists can have can have different perceptions of the problem of harassment without being feminazis.

    Yes but. Yes but sometimes it really isn’t just different perceptions of the problem of harassment, it’s labels like “Approved Male Chorus” and “Femistasi” and “FTBullies” and “smelly skepchick snatch.”

    I agree with Ron’s overall point though. And I’m not without hope that things will improve.

  • Rioters in Libya and Egypt rage at anti-Islam movie

    The US ambassador to Libya is killed in the rioting.

  • Ron Lindsay on divisiveness in the secular movement

    We’ve divided the movement because we’re not talking to each other; we’re just insulting each other.

  • Salman Rushdie on the fatwa

    He did not feel that his book was especially critical of Islam, but a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably use a little criticism.

  • Dawkins disses Mormonism shock-horror

    The Telegraph is outraged because Richard Dawkins had the temerity to say that Mormonism has ridiculous stuff in it. It uses loaded language to convey its outrage.

    Richard Dawkins on Sunday accused Mitt Romney of being a “massively gullible fool” as he launched into a furious tirade against the Republican’s Mormon faith.

    Britain’s most prominent atheist attacked the core tenets of Mr Romney’s religion, saying that the Church of Latter Day Saints’ founding prophet was “a fraud” and that the presidential contender was “too stupid to see it”.

    “No matter how much you agree with Romney’s economic policy, can you really vote for such a massively gullible fool?” asked Prof Dawkins during an outburst on Twitter that lasted several hours. [emphasis added]

    So? Mormonism does have ridiculous stuff in it. We need to know if candidates for public office believe ridiculous stuff. (In the US they almost all do, but that’s no reason not to point it out when they do.)

    The Oxford academic focused his criticism on the Church’s belief that its founder, Joseph Smith, was visited by an angel in 1820s New York, who guided him to a set of golden plates buried in a hill.

    Smith claimed to have translated runes engraved on the plates, and compiled them into the Book of Mormon. The text describes how Jesus Christ appeared in the United States after the Crucifixion and how Adam and Eve went to the site of present-day Missouri after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

    Well exactly – and that’s ridiculous!

    Dawkins expanded on his “outburst” in a couple of comments at RDF. He addressed the claim that Mormonism is no more absurd than the other religions.

    Christianity, even fundamentalist Christianity,  is substantially less ridiculous than Mormonism…Christian scriptures are genuinely ancient. The translations from Hebrew and Greek that Christians use are in a language contemporary with the translators. The Book of Mormon is not ancient and the language of its alleged “translation” is ludicrously anachronistic. It was dictated by Joseph Smith, a man with a track record of charlatanry, purporting to translate it from “Reformed Egyptian” with the aid of a magic stone in a magic hat (Douglas Adams’ Babel Fish is not less plausible). The English in which Smith dictated it is not the English of his own time (1830) but the English of more than two centuries earlier. As Mark Twain cuttingly observed, if you remove all occurrences of “It came to pass” the book would be reduced to a pamphlet. The language in which it is written proclaims it to be a palpable fake – as if Smith’s cock-and-bull story of golden plates hadn’t already given the game away. Smith obviously was steeped in the King James Bible, and he made up a whole new set of “scriptures” in the same style of English.

    Which is so…rube-like. It depends on not realizing that the King James language is 17th century English, not goddy or holy English. Mind you, it worked, so perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. But I do.

    Setting aside the mountebankery of Smith’s English style, many of the core beliefs of Mormonism run counter to everything we now know for certain about the colonisation of America. DNA evidence, for example, utterly refutes the claim that native Americans are “a remnant of the House of Israel”. The idea that Jesus visited America is preposterous, and the idea the Adam and Eve did too is even worse (it is at least arguable that Jesus existed). The traditional Mormon belief in the inferiority of black people (only lately renounced for reasons of political expediency) is as scientifically inaccurate as it is obnoxious.The great “prophet” Brigham Young even prescribed the death penalty for inter-racial marriage.

    Yes but it doesn’t do to say so! 

    And then there’s the no religion test retort.

    The other main retort to my Mormon tweets is an important one. It is that a candidate’s religion should be ignored unless he allows it to impinge on his policy. The principle of this was laid out by J F Kennedy, when his Catholicism was counting against him. It appears to some readers to be enshrined in Article VI of the Constitution: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Of course that is right. There should never be any law barring a person of any particular faith (or none) from holding office (as the law of England, for example, prohibits a Roman Catholic from occupying the throne). But of course that admirable constitutional clause doesn’t prohibit individual voters from taking the religion of a candidate into account when they make up their own minds in the voting booth.

    Yes and not just individual voters; also observers and commentators…and bloggers and tweeters. We all get to point out the problems and discuss them and form opinions because of them.

    Even if Romney, like Kennedy (but unlike G W Bush) scrupulously kept his religion out of his politics, a voter would still be entitled to take account of his religious beliefs in deciding whether he had the intellect and the judgment to be a good president. It is rational to say something like this: Never mind whether Romney’s taxation policy, foreign policy, education policy etc is completely free of Mormon influence, I am still entitled to say that a man sufficiently gullible to believe in Joseph Smith as a prophet, and sufficiently unscientific to believe Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel, is not qualified to be president of the world’s most powerful country.

    Yes indeed. (But never forget – it doesn’t do to say so.)

     

     

     

  • The healing of Cooper

    Today was Cooper’s last trip to the vet, to get the stitches taken out. His paw is healed! I still can’t take him out to run after the tennis ball at 90 miles an hour or to race over rocks to swim in the waves, but we can go for long walks.

    Whew. Glad that’s over.

  • Eran Segev on a few cruel individuals

    Another in Amy’s series: another guy saying yeahno, harassment and bullying and threatening aren’t funny or cute. Eran Segev, contributor to the Skeptic Zone podcast and to the Skeptic magazine (in Australia), and former President of Australian Skeptics.

    He’s had some of it himself. Way too much of it.

    When organising TAM Australia, my fellow organisers and I were the subject of some astonishingly rude and unfriendly tweets and blogs over some decisions we made. Not one of the authors had contacted us to ask for the reasons behind the decisions. All were skeptics; people who wanted to attend the conference, and most eventually did. And over the past year or so, I have had a cruel and nasty campaign of vicious defamation directed at me. Obviously I will not be repeating what was said, but I’ll say that it was directly related to my being a man, and I can assure you it was so nasty that it could easily ruin my life. No exaggeration. Let’s just say, that because of a few cruel individuals I have had a pretty tough year. These people got to me.

    We can see that he knows what it’s like.

    I have met Rebecca a few times, and exchange emails with her occasionally, but we are not close friends by any stretch, and until fairly recently I had no idea of the composition of her mailbox. However, some mutual friends gave me some of the details of the emails and other messages she has been receiving, for years. I was horrified. I was at the local police station for less than Rebecca receives in an average week.

    When I found that out, I started asking around, and discovered that not only is Rebecca not alone, it is practically the norm for women who are active online. And if they dare to be active feminists, then the level of hate becomes immense. And these are not just some gamers or kids. There are good reasons to believe that at least some of the messages come from adult members of the skeptical community; from people you might meet at Skeptics in the Pub or at TAM.

    I have no idea how Rebecca and women like her tolerate it. I don’t completely understand how they don’t crack under the pressure. Perhaps they sometimes do.

    No, we turn into Feminazis and Femistasi instead. We morph into the Oppressed Sisterhood. We become Infantilizers and Victims.

    I also don’t understand, and surely never will, what goes through the minds of the perpetrators. I try to reason: OK, so you think Skepchicks are sometimes unreasonable about sex relations, or you disagree with what Rebecca wrote about TAM. Fine. SO DO I. So what? Why does it mean that she deserves to be insulted, humiliated and threatened with physical violence? If you want to say something, say “I disagree with you and you’re being unreasonable. Here’s why.” And if that gets shot down, argue some more; or leave. But hatred and violence?

    Do you threaten a colleague you argue with that you’ll kill them? Do you wish the shop assistant that hasn’t helped you that she’ll be raped on the way home? What gives you, what gives ANYONE, the right to subject another person to such hate? And where does this hate come from? And why women? Do you not have a mother; a sister; a girlfriend? Do you hate them too? Do you insult and threaten them, too?

    I was shocked that someone could hate me enough to want to ruin my life; imagine having dozens, maybe even hundreds of people personally wishing you raped. I can’t imagine what it’s like. I hope I never find out.

    It’s what we’re supposed to expect because we say things in public. We have to develop a thick skin and then it will all be fine.

  • Tom Holland threatened over documentary on Islam

    A Channel 4 spokeswoman said: “Having taken security advice, we have reluctantly
    cancelled a planned screening of the programme.”

  • Anatomy of a bully is it

    Yeah here’s Wooly Bumblebee’s “Anatomy of a Bully” post.

    Her name is Kristina Hansen, by the way, she made it public the other day on a blog post about how evil atheism+ is. Hansen is easier to type than Bumblebee, and besides Bumblebee makes her sound cuddly. That doesn’t work for me.

    So here’s her “Anatomy of a Bully” post that all the FTB haters were so wowed by.

    What is bullying?

    Bullying is persistent unwelcome behavior, mostly using unwarranted or invalid criticism, nit-picking, fault-finding, also exclusion, shunning, being singled out and treated differently, being shouted at, humiliated, excessive monitoring, having verbal and written warnings imposed, and much more.

    Excessive monitoring! Funny she should mention it. Hansen and her friends monitor a few selected people they hate very excessively indeed – daily and hourly, via tweets and blog posts. They seem to do nothing else while online. And then there’s “humiliated”…Not to mention  unwarranted or invalid criticism, nit-picking, fault-finding, exclusion, shunning, being singled out and treated differently. Check check check check check check check.

    Bullying is present behind all forms of harassment, discrimination, prejudice, abuse, persecution, conflict and violence. When the bullying has a focus (e.g. race or gender) it is expressed as racial prejudice or harassment, or sexual discrimination and harassment, and so on.

    No comment necessary.

    Gang bullying is a serial bully with multiple partners. Gangs can occur anywhere, but flourish mostly in corporate, educational, and on-line arenas. If the bully is an extrovert, they are likely to be leading from the front; they may also be a shouter and screamer, and thus easily identifiable. If the bully is an introvert, that person will be in the background initiating the mayhem but probably not taking an active part, and may thus be harder to identify.

    Half the people in the gang are happy for the opportunity to behave badly; they gain gratification from the feeling of power and control, and enjoy the patronage, protection and reward from the serial bully. The other half of the gang is coerced into joining in, usually through fear of being the next target if they don’t. If anything backfires, one of them will be the scapegoat on whom enraged targets will be encouraged to vent their anger. (Sound familiar, FTB?)

    No, Kristina, not in the way you intended. It sounds like you and the other obsessives.

    Cyber bullying is the misuse of email systems or Internet forums, Social media, blogs, etc for sending/writing aggressive, abusive, or belittling messages, statements, e-mails, or articles.

    There is quite a good example of this happening recently on Greta Christina’s Blog, and on the Lousy Canuck where they thought it would be funny to take over the Twitter hashtag #FTBullies and use it to mock Paula Kirby who had written an open letter titled Sisterhood of the Oppressed, as well as any, and all those on Twitter who are speaking out against FTB and exposing their bullying for what it is.

    No, it had nothing to do with Paula Kirby, or any other individual; it was mockery of the hashtag itself. It wasn’t personal and vicious the way Hansen’s disgusting post about Mike McCreight is.

    The expert on bullies is a mind-searingly vicious bully herself.

  • There is no low too low

    Fucking hell. I keep thinking they can’t go any lower, but they always do.

    Remember when all the FTB-haters were retweeting that post on bullying by “Wooly Bumblebee” at Is God a Squirrel? She’s an expert on bullying, she said. The haters were way impressed.

    Today she has a post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post saying boo talking shit on the internet and yay Jen.

    Yes you read that correctly. Wooly Bumblebee/Is God a Squirrel wrote a longish blog post shitting on Jen McCreight’s father for writing a blog post defending his daughter.

    You could light a small city with me right now.

    Here’s some of Wooly’s shitting:

    But, some parents are abject failures, such as Jen McCreight’s father. He has written a short blog post for and about Jen. He has come to her rescue, like a parent does for their small child, only Jen is not a child… She is an adult. Well, an adult in the sense that she is over 18 and looks older than 12. But apparently she still needs daddy to come to her rescue when she gets emotional. She still needs daddy to kiss her boo-boos and frighten the monsters away. She needs this because her daddy failed as a parent and never equipped his daughter with the tools she needs to get through life. It’s quite sad, and a great example of bad parenting.

    When you coddle your kids constantly, refuse to see them as their own person, and feel the need to constantly prop up their ego, you get people like Jen. Jen should be completely embarrassed by the fact that her father wrote what he did. If she had any self-esteem she’d be furious that her daddy felt he had to come out and publicly chide everyone as if we are all 5 year olds because she got a boo-boo. She doesn’t because she is just like a child, and doesn’t see her daddy saying what he did as him actually infantilizing her.

    This has to be the most pathetic thing I have yet to see. A grown woman being rescued by her daddy. It’s a fucking joke, and speaks volumes as to why she can’t handle the slightest little bump in the road. She is completely incapable of functioning as an adult. I rather pity her, and that is not a good thing.

    Congratulations daddy dearest, and thank you for proving once and for all how completely incapable your little Jen really is.

    Unfuckingbelievable.

     

  • A hassle

    I’ve turned on comments registration for awhile. The trolls have stepped up their merry pranks, so it can’t be helped. Sorry for the inconvenience.

  • Happy to be described as a traitor

    An anti-corruption cartoonist in India has been arrested for sedition.

    Mr Trivedi was arrested on Saturday for a series of cartoons lampooning politicians. He refused to apply for bail at Monday’s hearing, and said if telling the truth made him a traitor then he was happy to be described as one.

    Cartoons lampooning politicians – if there’s anything you’re supposed to be able to do without interference from the state, it’s lampooning politicians.

    Government officials say that while they are in favour of free speech, there is a thin line between that and insulting national symbols, the BBC’s Sanjoy Majumder in Delhi reports.

    No…That’s doing it wrong. Really. You don’t want to make it a crime to “insult national symbols.”

    But Indians have condemned Mr Trivedi’s arrest, calling it a “wrongful act”. Protesters on social networking sites said it was shameful that corrupt politicians were being let off while those who highlighted corruption were being jailed.

    “From the information I have gathered, the cartoonist did nothing illegal and, in fact, arresting him was an illegal act,” the chairman of the Press Council of India, Markandey Katju, told The Hindu newspaper.

    …

    The arrest of Mr Trivedi comes after other recent controversy over cartoons in India.

    In April, police arrested a professor in the eastern city of Calcutta for allegedly posting cartoons ridiculing West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the internet. He was later released.

    A month later, a row over a cartoon showing Dalit icon BR Ambedkar in a school textbook disrupted the Indian parliament.

    Cartoonists have been taking a lot of heat lately. India: do better.

     

  • Dawkins says Mormonism is silly shock-horror

    He should have said it’s sensible?

  • Laurie Penny on…er…Naomi Wolf’s Vagina

    Vagina, as has been observed across the mainstream reviewing press this week, is a very silly book.

  • India: anti-corruption cartoonist arrested

    Aseem Trivedi was arrested on Saturday for a series of cartoons lampooning politicians. He is being charged with sedition.

  • Not reading Naomi Wolf

    The UK neuroscientist who blogs as (and at) Neuroskeptic reviewed Naomi Wolf’s new book for the New Statesman blog. I was surfing Twitter the other day at the moment when there was a deluge of tweets about Wolf and the book because everyone was watching Paxman interview her (and because I follow a great many people who watch things like that). Most were funny, all were scathing, and taken together they made for a hilarious few minutes. The review, however, just makes me cringe.

    NS starts with an extract.

    Words, when deployed in relation to the vagina, are always more than “just words”. Because of the subtlety of the mind-body connection, words about the vagina are also what philosopher John Austin, in his 1960 book How to Do Things with Words, calls “performative utterances”, often used as a means of social control. A “performative utterance” is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says “Guilty” to a defendant, or a groom says “I do”, the words alter material reality.

    Studies have shown that verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina. One suggests that a stressful environment can negatively affect vaginal tissue itself…

    Ogod make it stop. When deployed in relation to the vagina? Oh jeezis on toast does she do that throughout? Does she use “in relation to the vagina” for “to/at/around a woman”? Does she drag in seriousy-looking stuff to make it sound more seriousy ‘n’ true? Does she pretend the vagina has some kind of special receptivity to words?

    NS comments on the extract.

    True of course, but it’s nothing to do with vaginas specifically. Threats, admiration and reassurances all influence our stress levels, and stress can affect the function of the vagina. But the same could be said for any other organ: stress also affects the heart, the stomach, and even the penis.

    So apparently she does. Ogod.

    There’s a good deal more along the same lines.

    Why would anyone do that? Write about neuroscience without being a neuroscientist?

    It makes me cringe.

     

  • 15 items or fewer

    What’s the deal with people talking about sexism and someone asking “So is this only for women who experience sexism?”

    The dialogue continues.

    Someone: Women, then. I guess sexism doesn’t happen to men.

    Replier: Always “What about the menz?”

    Someone: No… always what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

    Well duh, but why does that mean we can’t talk about sexism without being jostled and chivvied and harried for talking about something that happens to women? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t include a coda saying nobody must ever talk about or resist violations of the rights of particular people.

    Shut up about racism, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about xenophobia, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about human rights in Iran, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about rape in DR Congo, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Shut up about anything particular, because what about everyone. We ALL deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

    There is sexism. We can be against it. That doesn’t mean we want to take away your rights. Singling out one form of oppression doesn’t entail approving of all the others.

    Isn’t this just a little obvious?