Author: Ophelia Benson

  • An atheist talks cloying dreck about god

    “We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day.” The hell we do.

  • Hitchens on Nietzsche on what makes us stronger

    And what doesn’t. One thing that doesn’t is debilitating illness.

  • Please confirm, please note, please stand, please sit

    One of the beneficial side effects of the Burzynski uproar was finding Popehat (via Rhys Morgan, finding whom was another beneficial side effect). Popehat is funny.

    A few days ago he got a “friendly note” from Marc Stephens.

    The note contained what I would characterize as a decent effort, given his apparent abilities, to intimidate me. He sent it to my Popehat address and to my real-world big-boy-pants Ken’s-sekrit-identity law firm address.

    The note is classic Marc Stephens. (Which is odd, because the Observer reported a week ago, on December 3, that Stephens was no longer working for the Burzynski clinic, but Popehat says Stephens sent him this note on December 6.) Very very bossy, as if he were a cop or The Boss of Everyone.

    Please confirm your information below. Please note that the case of Skeptics Society/JREF is under federal investigation for identity theft. I suggest you remove all articles on your website in relation to this email address and/or individuals immediately. Please confirm, at this email address, when you have removed the articles.

    Please jump when I say jump. This is why it’s a good thing Popehat is so funny. He says the right things back.

    I suggest you remove all articles on your website in relation to this email address and/or individuals immediately. Please confirm, at this email address, when you have removed the articles.

    Marc, kindly take this post — the link to which I will email to you — as a formal, legally binding, 100% certified style invitation to snort my taint.

    I’m told that “snort my taint” is already a new “bite me.”

    If we do not hear from you, your information will be forwarded for further investigation, and a associate will contact you.

    There’s “we” again. Honestly, Marc, you’re starting to freak me out. How many of you are there? Is this the same “we” as above, or a different “we”? Also, is the associate part of the “we” or not? Are you talking about, like, a law firm associate? Because if you have a lawyer, Marc, I’d be totes happy to call him right now. Or do you mean an “associate” in the sense of “Wayne, who lets me sleep on his futon when I can’t pick up enough shifts at Arby’s?” Or is it more malevolent, like in mob movies: “my associate, [name with ‘the’ in the middle], will discuss this with you”? Or . . . wait a minute, Marc. Can . . . can anyone other than you see and hear this associate? Because if this associate is a giant goddam invisible rabbit, Marc, that’s a deal-breaker. I hate rabbits, and a six-foot invisible rabbit would freak me right the fuck out. Are you siccing your invisible rabbit on me, Marc? Because if that’s what you’re saying, I think we have a problem here and there SHOULD be a federal investigation. Threatening people with giant rabbits through the electronic mails is almost certain a violation of several federal statutes, possibly including wire fraud depending on the existence or non-existence of the rabbit. But a sharp legal guy like you already knew that, right Marc? My God. You’re already, like, three steps ahead of me.

    Life is good.

     

     

  • Popehat replies to Marc Stephens

    “Marc, kindly take this post — the link to which I will email to you — as a formal, legally binding, 100% certified style invitation to snort my taint.”

  • Tenets of Islam are not subject to change

    UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay went to the Maldives, and there she said some things. She said some things relevant to human rights.

    In an address delivered in parliament last Thursday, Pillay said the practice of flogging women found guilty of extra-marital sex “constitutes one of the most inhumane and degrading forms of violence against women, and should have no place in the legal framework of a democratic country.”

    The UN human rights chief called for a public debate “on this issue of major concern.” In a press conference later in the day, Pillay called on the judiciary and the executive to issue a moratorium on flogging.

    Well yes. Commissioners for human rights can be expected to say things like that, unless they are merely window-dressing commissioners for human rights. Flogging women for extra-marital sex does strike contemporary supporters of human rights as incompatible with respect for human rights. Flogging itself, flogging as such, is seen by people like that as incompatible with respect for human rights, and extra-marital sex is seen as a private concern as opposed to a state concern.

    On article 9(d) of the constitution, which states “a non-Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives,” Pillay said the provision was “discriminatory and does not comply with international standards.”

    There again – mandatory religion is widely considered incompatible with respect for human rights. So far so unsurprising. But the top people in the Maldives didn’t see it that way.

    Statements by visiting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay calling for a moratorium on flogging as a punishment for fornication and criticising the Muslim-only clause for citizenship in the Maldivian constitution have been widely condemned by religious NGOs, public officials and political parties.

    …

    Shortly after Pillay’s speech in parliament, Islamic Minister Dr Abdul Majeed Abdul Bari told local media that “a tenet of Islam cannot be changed” and flogging was a hudud punishment prescribed in the Quran (24:2) and “revealed down to us from seven heavens.”

    Bari noted that article 10 of the constitution established Islam as “the basis of all the laws of the Maldives” and prohibited the enactment of any law “contrary to any tenet of Islam,” adding that the Maldives has acceded to international conventions with reservations on religious matters such as marriage equality.

    In his Friday prayer sermon the following day, Bari asserted that “no international institution or foreign nation” had the right to challenge the practice of Islam and adherence to its tenets in the Maldives.

    And there you go – as usual. It’s in the Quran; it can’t be changed; it was revealed. Islam is the basis of all the laws; any law contrary to any tenet of Islam is prohibited; the end. Allah said we can flog women if we want to (and that we, meaning men, are the only ones who count), so we’re going to, so shut up and go back to UNistan where you belong. By the way if you were a Maldivian we could flog you, so ha.

    Meanwhile, the religious conservative Adhaalath Party issued a statement on Thursday contending that tenets of Islam and the principles of Shariah were not subject to modification or change through public debate or democratic processes.

    Adhaalath Party suggested that senior government officials invited a foreign dignitary to make statements that they supported but were “hesitant to say in public.”

    The party called on President Mohamed Nasheed to condemn Pillay’s statements “at least to show to the people that there is no irreligious agenda of President Nasheed and senior government officials behind this.”

    The Adhaalath statement also criticised Speaker Abdulla Shahid and MPs in attendance on Thursday for neither informing Pillay that she “could not make such statements” nor making any attempt to stop her or object to the remarks.

    Funny that the Adhaalath Party doesn’t seem to have read the memo about religion not being literal and being all about compassion.

  • Outrage at Pillay was a “missed opportunity”

    To show the noblity of sharia, says President Mohamed Nasheed. “That the punishments and rulings of Islamic Sharia are not inhumane is very clear to us.”

  • Maldives: officials condemn call to end flogging

    UN HR High Commissioner Navi Pillay called for a moratorium on flogging as a punishment for fornication; outrage ensued.

  • On religious grounds

    Human Rights Watch on child (meaning girl) marriage in Yemen.

    Fourteen-year-old Reem, from Sanaa, was 11 years old when her father married her to her cousin, a man almost 21 years her senior. One day, Reem’s father dressed her in a niqab (the Islamic veil that covers the face, exposing only the eyes), and took her by car to Radda,150 kilometers southeast of Sanaa, to meet her soon-to-be husband. Against Reem’s will, a quick religious marriage ensued. Three days after she was married, her husband raped her. Reem attempted suicide by cutting her wrists with a razor. Her husband took her back to her father in Sanaa, and Reem then ran away to her mother (her parents are divorced). Reem’s mother escorted her to court in an attempt to get a divorce. The judge told her, “We don’t divorce little girls.” Reem replied, “But how come you allow little girls to get married?”

    Because Aisha, that’s why.

    In 1999 Yemen’s parliament, citing religious grounds, abolished article 15 of Yemen’s Personal Status Law, which set the minimum age for marriage for boys and girls at 15. Yemen currently has no minimum age for marriage.

    On religious grounds. The grounds are: Mo married Aisha when she was a child, therefore it is anti-religious to make laws saying no one can marry a child that young. Laws that say that are implicitly saying that Mo did a wrong thing, and that would be anti-religious. Therefore little girls have to have their bodies and lives ruined, so that no one will ever think Mo did a wrong thing.

    Amen.

  • BioLogos snares an MIT physicist

    Via Sigmund at WEIT, an MIT physicist offers part 1 of a series on “scientism.” Yes really, an MIT physicist. I know, I know.

    He (Ian Hutchinson) gives the gist in the first para.

    One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between  “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims (or at least assumes) that it must therefore be inferior. However, there are many other important beliefs, secular as well as religious, which are justified and rational, but not scientific, and therefore marginalized by scientism. And if that is so, then scientism is a ghastly intellectual mistake.

    Notice that he carefully leaves out the “true” in “justified true beliefs” – the standard philosophical definition of knowledge. Notice also, of course, that he simply assumes there is such a thing as “religious knowledge.” I hope he plans to back that up in future installments, because it certainly isn’t self-evident.

    He goes in for the kill in the third para.

    Scientism is, first of all, a philosophy of knowledge. It is an opinion about the way that knowledge can be obtained and justified. However, scientism rapidly becomes much more. It becomes an all-encompassing world-view; a perspective from which all of the questions of life are examined: a grounding presupposition or set of presuppositions which provides the framework by which the world is to be understood. In other words, it is essentially a religious position.

    Oh is it? Is that the definition of “a religious position”? Is an all-encompassing world-view; a perspective from which all of the questions of life are examined: a grounding presupposition or set of presuppositions which provides the framework by which the world is to be understood, always and necessarily religious?

    No, certainly not. That’s putting the cart before the horse. “Religious” is the smaller category; “world-view” is the larger one; not the other way around. We all get to have a world-view, and there is no law that says it has to be religious, or that having one just is inherently religious. Religious people don’t get to take over our minds that way.

    It is fair to say that a certain kind of world-view – one that refuses to be modified and adapted with new knowledge or experience, one that squashes everything to fit, one that is imposed on the world as opposed to receiving it – is religious, although even then it could be other things too. But in any case that’s clearly not the sense of “religious” that Hutchinson had in mind.

     

     

  • Ian Hutchinson at BioLogos on “scientism”

    Scientism is a philosophy of knowledge which expands to an all-encompassing world-view. “In other words, it is essentially a religious position.”

  • Sigmund on BioLogos on “scientism”

    The aim seems to be to portray those committed to methodological naturalism as devoid of emotion or feeling.

  • “A war with people of faith”

    And then there are the Republican contestants battling each other to see who can be Most Evil.

    Starting point: the Secretary of State addressed delegates to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday and

    delivered what historians will one day look back upon as a monumental speech, in which she declared that the continuing oppression of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people is “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.”

    Sexual minorities, Clinton said, “are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse.” She addressed the pernicious argument — common in Uganda and many other places — that homosexuality is “a Western invention,” plainly calling it a “human reality.” And she issued a challenge to a world in which more than 70 countries criminalize homosexuality: “It should never be a crime to be gay.” On the same day as Clinton’s speech, President Obama issued a directive instructing federal agencies to “ensure that U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.”

    Well, the Republicans weren’t having that.

    But this was too much for some of the Republican presidential contenders, most notably Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Condemning the abuse of gay people overseas, he said, constitutes “a war with people of faith in this country,” a “war on traditional American values,” he specified, that “must stop.”

    I think that wins the Most Evil award, at least for today.

  • Perry and Santorum cozy up to gay-haters

    Condemning the abuse of gay people overseas, Perry said, constitutes “a war with people of faith in this country.”

  • Stiff resistance

    This is just terribly sad – Jerry Coyne gave a lecture on evolution at a public school and a lot of the students were simply “offended” in their religious beliefs.

    I am dispirited. I’ve just returned from a two-hour lecture and Q&A session at the Woodlawn Charter School, a public school run by the University of Chicago on the South Side of the city.  Some of the high-school biology students are reading Why Evolution is True, and I gave a presentation on the evidence for evolution—with a tiny bit about why religion prevents Americans from accepting evolution, for I was asked to mention that topic—followed by an hour of questions.

    Some of the questions were good, and some of the students really interested, but there was also a lot of religious pushback.  One student, I was told, sat through the entire lecture muttering about how she shouldn’t be forced to listen to this stuff since it went against her faith.  Another student’s “question” was to inform me that she was offended that I said that Adam and Eve never existed (I talked about the human bottleneck of 1200 people), and asked me how I knew that.

    And the teacher who invited me told me she encountered stiff resistance from many of her kids about evolution—resistance based solely on their religious upbringing.

    That’s just sad. It’s such a waste. So much to learn, so much to explore, and all they can do is mutter and be offended, because adults have fed them a lot of made-up crap along with the idea that they’re supposed to get indignant if anyone says anything different. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. That’s a hokey old slogan, but by god it’s the truth.

  • Steve Jones on the denial of science

    Why build a philosophy based on fixed untruths, when we have so many truths, and so many things still to find out?

  • Lads

    I’m handicapped in thinking about this by the fact that I’ve never seen, let alone read, a lads’ mag. I’ve spent the past few minutes trying to figure out what they are, which has led to my finding out what “lad culture” is, which I’m not sure I wanted to know.

    In an ironic, self-conscious fashion, “lads took up an anti-intellectual position, scorning sensitivity and caring in favour of drinking, violence, and a pre-feminist attitude to women as both sex objects and creatures from another species”.

    Oh I hate that “ironic” thing. Pretentious jerks in the UK are always telling you they’re doing or saying whatever it is “ironically,” which just means don’t go thinking I’m a jerk merely because I’m acting or talking like one.

    That get out of jail free card probably is why we get treated to so much misogynist name-calling, though – it’s “ironic” or “self-conscious” or “rebellion against stifling political correctness” or all of those. Having it both ways – all the fun of vomiting hatred and contempt onto women and feeling hip and witty and “ironic” at the same time.

    So, a study by a couple of psychologists finds that rapists and lads’ mags use the same language.

    Psychologists from Middlesex University and the University of Surrey found that when presented with descriptions of women taken from lads’ mags, and comments about women made by convicted rapists, most people who took part in the study could not distinguish the source of the quotes.

    The research due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology also revealed that most men who took part in the study identified themselves more with the language expressed by the convicted rapists.

    Psychologists presented men between the ages of 18 and 46 with a range of statements taken from magazines and from convicted rapists in the study, and gave the men different information about the source of the quotes. Men identified more with the comments made by rapists more   than the quotes made in lads’ mags, but men identified more with quotes said to have been drawn from lads’ mags more than those said to have been comments by convicted rapists.

    The writing is very muddled in that last para, but if you watch the video it becomes clear: when the test subjects thought the comments came from lads’ mags, they identified with the comments, whereas they didn’t when they thought the comments came from rapists. They also thought the comments they thought were from lads’ mags were “normal” (while the ones they thought were from rapists they considered extreme). That last one, though it’s not even a little bit surprising, is blood-chilling. Yes of course they fucking do – just as all these teeming shits think it’s “normal” to call women bitches and twats and cunts day in and day out. Misogyny has been normalized. That’s what we’re saying; that’s the problem.

    Dr Miranda Horvath and Dr Peter Hegarty argue that the findings are consistent with the possibility that lads’ mags normalise hostile sexism, by making it seem more acceptable when its source is a popular magazine.

    Exactly. I knew hostile sexism had been normalized, to put it mildly; I just wasn’t very aware of lads’ mags. Lads’ mags are joined by lads’ tv shows, lads’ websites, lads’ facebook pages, no doubt lads’ apps, and so on.

    Dr Horvath, lead researcher from Middlesex University, said: “We were surprised that participants identified more with the rapists’ quotes, and we are concerned that the legitimisation strategies that rapists deploy when they talk about women are more familiar to these young men than we had anticipated.”

    …

    “These magazines support the legitimisation of sexist attitudes and behaviours and need to be more responsible about their portrayal of women, both in words and images. They give the appearance that sexism is acceptable and normal – when really it should be rejected and challenged. Rapists try to justify their actions, suggesting that women lead men on, or want sex even when they say no, and there is clearly something wrong when people feel the sort of language used in a lads’ mag could have come from a convicted rapist.”

    Dr Peter Hegarty, of the University of Surrey’s Psychology Department, added: “There is a fundamental concern that the content of such magazines normalises the treatment of women as sexual objects. We are not killjoys or prudes who think that there should be no sexual information and media for young people.  But are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?”

    …

    Anna van Heeswijk, Campaigns Manager for OBJECT, a human rights campaign group which campaigns against the objectification of women, said: “This crucial and chilling piece of research lays bare the hateful messages which seep out of lads’ mags and indoctrinate young men’s attitudes towards women and girls. When the content of magazines aimed at teenage boys mirrors the attitudes of convicted rapists, alarm bells must ring.

    “If we are serious about wanting an end to discrimination and violence against women and girls, we must tackle the associated attitudes and behaviours. This means tackling the publications which peddle them. The Leveson Inquiry is currently looking into the culture and ethics of the press. These disturbing findings unequivocally demonstrate the need for the portrayal of women to be included in the remit of this inquiry. Now is the time for action.”

    Men call us things.

  • Rapists and lads’ mags use the same language

    The findings are consistent with the possibility that lads’ mags normalise hostile sexism, by making it seem more acceptable when its source is a popular magazine.

  • HRW to Yemen: set marriage age at 18

    Widespread child marriage jeopardizes Yemeni girls’ access to education, harms their health, and keeps them second-class citizens.

  • PR firm edits clients’ Wikipedia entries

    Undercover BIJ reporters, posing as agents of the Uzbek government, were told that “sorting” criticism on Wikipedia was a service the company could provide.

  • Credulous journalists and a new way to mutilate women

    PR company flogs a new genital cosmetic procedure that involves injecting collagen into the vaginal wall. Journalists go “booya!” and a fad is born.