Cuttlefish wrote a poem about self-described allies who flounce off in a huff when people don’t take their brilliant advice.

Don’t you see? I am your ally!
One you dare not risk to lose!
So my clever new idea
Is the one you ought to choose!
Okay, fine, my help’s not wanted!
Suit yourselves—it’s just as well.
If you disrespect your allies
Well, then, fuck you—go to hell!

Oh zing.

Mind you…I think attempts to think about an issue are being conflated with offers of help, so then the flouncing off in a huff is misrepresented, since it wasn’t about rejections of unwanted help in the first place. But poets get license, you know.

From the prose commentary after the … Read the rest

Lady Mondegreen alerted me to this horrific story by Martin McKenzie-Murray –

Nazanin left the Nauru refugee camp one morning on a day pass, happy to be visiting some friends who had been settled on the island – she and her family had been in detention for 26 months. “She used a bus, and I called a friend and he said she was there,” Dabal tells me. “My sister was happy to leave this camp for a day.”

She never returned. At 6 o’clock that evening, Dabal and his mother reported her absence to security guards. Something wasn’t right. In response, the guards floated theories of missed buses or an innocent loss of time, benign explanations for what the family

I’m reading an article in the NY Times about the malleability or not of gender identification, and my attention snagged on something tangential.

Is it really so surprising that gender identity might, like sexual orientation, be on a spectrum? After all, one can be exclusively straight or exclusively gay — or anything in between. But variability in a behavior shouldn’t be confused with its malleability. There is little evidence, for example, that you really can change your sexual orientation. Sure, you can change your sexual behavior, but your inner sexual fantasies endure.

What snagged my attention was the contrast between behavior and inner fantasies.

I think maybe calling it “inner sexual fantasies” is what did the snagging – that’s … Read the rest

I just found out about a thing, via Pieter Breitner – Fallacy Ref.

The one I saw is very familiar:

There was a loaded question on the play

Inquiry unfairly restricted answers to force an unjustified conclusion

Uh huh. Been there; had that.… Read the rest

This creeps me out.

[Description: it’s a drawing or cartoon at the top of the Twitter account Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse, with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens striding in line, based on the familiar image of the Beatles striding across Abbey Road.]

Why is it so creepy?

The worship, the fandom, the adulation, the drastic limitation of horizons.… Read the rest

There’s a lot to be disgusted at in Richard Carrier’s inaccurate, patronizing, mental-illness-attributing post about me, but I’ll spare us all and just address one ridiculous assertion.

No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.

That’s grotesque. This was not just “disagreement” and it was not just “criticism” – it was vehement moral condemnation and shunning, aided by much misrepresentation.

That is … Read the rest

Another piece of good news, to go with Malala’s spectacular exam results – India has renewed Taslima’s visa again. She was very worried about it.

They should make it long-term or permanent though.

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s visa was extended by a year on Friday, a home ministry official said.

“Taslima Nasreen’s visa has been extended for one more year from the very date it was due to expire,” a ministry official said.

Exiled from Bangladesh in 1994 for “hurting religious sentiments” with her novel ‘Lajja’, Nasreen took refuge in Kolkata in 2004. Since then, she has been getting Indian visa on a continuous basis.

No, not continuous – she never knows it’s going to be renewed. It’s … Read the rest

Meanwhile Dawkins is still at it, generously calling people stupid on the basis of nothing in particular. I forget if I mentioned that he did that in the onstage interview he did at CFI’s conference in June. He referred to someone or some group as an idiot or idiots. I flinched, I scowled, I wished he would stop doing that. But he hasn’t.

Today it was a girl of 16 – one who did a colossally wrong and bad thing, but stupidity isn’t the only explanation for teenagers who do colossally wrong and bad things.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 14 hours ago
If a girl as manifestly stupid as this gets good grades at school, is it time we examined

From the Telegraph:

A charity fun run that invited men to dress up as women is being investigated by police after a transgender charity claimed the dress code constituted a hate crime.

Officers were asked to look into the ‘Dames on the Run’ race – where men run dressed as women to raise funds for a children’s hospice – by a transsexual support group.

Chrysalis Transsexual Support Groups say the five kilometre run, organised by Derian House Children’s Hospice, in Chorley, Lancashire, is “dehumanising”.

Dehumanizing? It’s dehumanizing to wear clothes that are perceived as being for the “opposite” sex? So have I spent my entire life dehumanizing, because I hate skirts and never wear them?

Have we gone full … Read the rest

I signed this: IHEU Joint open letter to Prime Minister and President of Bangladesh.

To Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and President Abdul Hamid,

We, concerned members of the blogging and activist community of Bangladesh and internationally, along with representatives of human rights organisations and other civil society organisations and supporters, wish to protest in the strongest possible terms the institutional attack on Bangladeshi citizens who profess humanist, atheist or secularist views.

In the last two years, five bloggers (variously identifying as humanist, rationalist, atheist, and variously writing about science, humanist values, against Islamist extremism, or in favour of human rights and justice) have been murdered, hacked to death by assailants acting for fundamentalist militant groups (according to their own

So, this comment on Thinking as a value has been scratching at me all day, so I’m going to argue with it even though it will probably mean repeating things I’ve said about six times before.

Identifying as something in the gender and sexuality sense of the term is in reference to an innate gender identity and an innate sexuality that is immutable with regards to external force even if the experience of them can be internally fluid (see people who have fluid sexuality or are genderfluid).

I don’t believe in innate gender identity unless as a label for a way some people feel. I don’t believe in it as a universal description of how people relate to their own … Read the rest

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund –

I am Rita and I am from Adjokatsekope (Ada) in Ghana. My mother is a fishmonger and my father is a fisherman. We have five girls and two boys in my family. Only one other sister of mine has gone to school.

I study at the MGCubed program. Math is my favorite subject because I find it easy to understand through my new teachers on satellite! I also help my grandmother sell soap at her shop after school and on weekends. Because I have a better understanding of math from my lessons, I feel more comfortable when I am helping my grandmother at her shop.

She’s learning computer skills too.

After school

Now for some good news for a change – Malala rocked her GCSEs. 6A*s and 4As.

The 18-year-old, who now attends Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, did particularly well in the sciences, with top A* grades in biology, chemistry and physics – as well as in religious studies.

She also scored As in history, geography, English language and English literature.

English isn’t even her first language, yet she did all that.

Here’s an item from the Malala Fund on Twitter:

“Education doesn’t alienate you, it allows you to become a shining light for your community.”

Angeline Murimirwa

#WomanCrushWednesday

 … Read the rest

International Business Times reports:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual human rights are not guaranteed, nor will they be upheld in Malaysia.

Prime Minister Najib Razak said at an international Islamic moderation seminar 2015 in Bangi, Selangor that his administration will do its best to uphold human rights but only within the confines of Islam.

This is in line with the Islamic teaching of balance and moderation (wasatiyyah), he said, adding that Muslim Malaysia cannot defend the more “extreme aspect of human rights”, citing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual rights for example.

Of course. That’s the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. You can have human rights but only so far as they comply with sharia. I wrote … Read the rest

Aron and Lilandra are leaving Freethought Blogs.

Aron explains that it’s not an acrimonious divorce.

We had considered moving the blog a couple years ago, but I didn’t want to do it then because that’s when FtB was under attack.  I thought it would look like we were bowing, or cowering to criticism of anyone who blogs at FtB.  I also stayed because I could use myself as an example against the absurdly stupid stereotypes people tried to pin on this group back then.  I often pointed out that, if everyone on this network is required to work in lock-step with a hive mind, as so many outsiders have alleged, then why am I still tolerated whenever I publicly