The Times Higher reports on…well it’s too complicated to paraphrase.

Headline: Students’ unions hit back at group monitoring campus extremism

Subhead: Student Rights’ agenda questioned by LSE, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths unions

The article starts:

Three students’ unions have condemned a group that monitors extremist speakers on campus for “targeting Muslim students”.

Student Rights, which refutes* the students’ unions’ claims, released a report in May 2013 on events organised by Islamic societies that found that a quarter of those it monitored had enforced gender segregation.

That’s what the Times Higher reports on.

And we’re in the weeds right at the outset. I disagree that monitoring for instance Islamist speakers equals “targeting Muslim students.” Equating the two implies that all Muslim … Read the rest

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Wow – libertarianism in all its glory.

Amy Alkon @amyalkon

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar Again, we have people CLUELESS about def of harassment – “severe, pervasive”

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar Would you expect a man offended by convo to speak up or to go fetal position & tattle

@kilianhekhuis @hypnotosov @OpheliaBenson @mistersugar My suspicion: These ladies & others have it in for men & Bora was conven located.

Jesus. She accuses the women of lying, even though Bora never denied their accounts.… Read the rest

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From 2012 – how advertising today really is not all that much more “advanced” than it was in the 50s.

Man standing on a woman then? Man with a heavily shod foot on her throat now. The contemporary one is “advanced” in the usual sense that it makes her look as if violence=hawt sex.

Check them out. The Dolce & Gabbana gang rape one is especially…contemporary.… Read the rest

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Apparently in Australia they do prosecute FGM, or at least attempt to, or at least have made one such attempt. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

A Sydney father has been charged by police over the alleged genital mutilation of his infant daughter while they were holidaying overseas.

Police said the man and his family were on a holiday in February 2012 when the father allegedly organised for his nine-month-old daughter to undergo a procedure known as female circumcision.

About six months later, the child’s mother took her daughter to a doctor for treatment, and the NSW Police Child Abuse Squad was alerted.

That sounds like a hidden story. One imagines the mother’s reaction after the genital mutilation which she … Read the rest

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Guest post by Reese Matthews.

Some in the US military’s chain of command are upset with the judicial system which has convicted at least one soldier of rape and harassment.

In their minds, any convictions amounts to an unfair trial system.

Dustup Over Military Appeals Judge Delaying Cases

Dozens of military criminal cases have been thrown into limbo because of a legal challenge over whether Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel improperly appointed a judge to the Air Force’s highest court, with attorneys raising questions about the judge’s independence amid increasing pressure over the military’s handling of sexual assault cases.

[...]

“The Secretary of Defense has been making a lot of statements related to sexual assaults, and here he is appointing Judge

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There was a lot of news coverage of LSE’s apology to Chris and Abhishek on December 20, which I somehow missed because I was looking at something else.

The BBC for example.

Prof Paul Kelly of the LSE told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “The law in this case was complex and given the complaint, with the backing of solicitors, looking for judicial review, we had to take legal advice.

“This was always a grey area. So yes, I got the judgement wrong but it was a complex decision and it’s important to make that clear.”

Prof Kelly added that in the UK there was no US-style First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech “without qualification”.

He said the university had

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Another New Statesman piece on “Islamophobia” – as usual not defined or specified, as usual functioning to conflate dislike of Islam with hatred of Muslims and thus make the former taboo along with the latter.

Last week I was asked to think of an issue on which I’ve changed my mind. I said the Iraq war, but if I’d been asked this week I might have said something else: Islamophobia. I used to think it wasn’t a problem.

Before I explain why, let’s look at one particular news story, by which I mean embarrassingly trivial non-story. Marks and Spencer is allowing its Muslim employees not to serve alcohol or pork products. A privately owned company has a policy that

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Fortunately the pesky secularists and liberals and feminists don’t get to have it all their own way. Week before last there was a meeting of “Muslim women united against attack on gender segregation”…in other words united in favor of gender segregation. A site called 5pillarz has a carefully worded report.

Around 150 Muslim women attended a community event last Friday evening, organised after the attack by politicians and the media on the Islamic practice of gender segregation.

Not the “Islamic practice” as such, no. The “attack” was and is on attempts to impose the practice at university lectures and debates open to the general public; it was and is not on the practice in mosques and other religious and/or … Read the rest

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At 50 Million Missing, a post about the axing of Taslima’s tv serial.

Feminist author Taslima Nasreen’s scripted television series (in Bengali) titled ‘Dusahobas’ meaning ” Unbearable Cohabitation,” although ready for telecast has been “indefinitely postponed” for airing, because of pressure from Islamic clerics in the state of West Bengal.

Abdul Aziz of the religious group Milli Ittehad Parishad said their group had written to the producers of the show and told them to withdraw Taslima’s name and reference from the serial, even though Taslima has scripted the show! Aziz said, “We have been told that there are some scenes in the serial that might hurt our sentiments,” even though he does not specify as to what exactly

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The Times of India reports:

A year after the Nirbhaya horror, yet another gang-rape victim lost her battle for life at the state-run R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on New Year’s Eve.

The 16-year-old, a resident of Madhyamgram in North 24-Parganas, was gang-raped at Badu on October 25. The next day, while on her way back home from the police station after lodging a complaint, she was allegedly sexually abused all over again.

The teenager and her family were so traumatized by the sequence of events that they chose to shift to another tenement close to Kolkata Airport. But there was no respite. The miscreants continued to hound her till she finally poured kerosene

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Thanks to a comment by Ariel, we can read this interview with a priest, Dariusz Oko from the Papal University of John Paul II, translated from Polish and titled Gender ideology destroys a cradle of humankind – a family. This is good because I was just wondering what the Vatican thinks it means by “gender ideology.” Let’s find out.

Anna Cichobłazińska: – In media there appear more and more terms: gender, ideology of gender, totalitarianism of gender, philosophy of gender. What does this term mean and why is it so dangerous?

Fr. Dariusz Oko: We should speak not so much about ‘philosophy’ but about ‘ideology’ of gender. Philosophy is a radical search for the truth and the good,

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Sunday morning at 10 a.m. UK time, BBC1 The Big Questions will be asking the ridiculous question, ”Should Human Rights always outweigh Religious Rights?”

But the good news is that Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis will be taking part, so it should be interesting.

Mind you, I can ruin the suspense right now by saying yes, of course they should. Any religious practice that violates one or more human rights should not be allowed. There is no “religious right” to enslave people or cut off their genitalia or keep them out of school or deny them medical treatment or prevent them from getting birth control.… Read the rest

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It has come to my attention that I don’t have anxiety, and that a lot of people do, and that I’m damn lucky not to. Or maybe I mean I don’t have Anxiety, or an anxiety disorder. It’s not as if I never get unreasonably jittery about something. I’ve told you how absurdly jittery I get whenever I travel (and how promptly I get over it once I’m at the airport). But compared to real anxiety, that’s nothing.

Scott Stossel has a long article about his in the current Atlantic.

I’ve finally settled on a pre-talk regimen that enables me to avoid the weeks of anticipatory misery that the approach of a public-speaking engagement would otherwise produce.

Let’s say

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The Vatican wants to let everyone know that it is against secular education and would prefer that everyone went to a Catholic school, although it will settle for some other kind of religious school, since it doesn’t like to be too pushy about these things.

The Catholic News Agency reports on this exciting new idea:

A recently released Vatican document is calling for a fresh commitment to Catholic identity within what it calls an increasingly secularized educational system.

At a press conference held Dec. 19, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said, “the Catholic identity of the school is fundamental.”

Not within a secular (or “secularized”) educational system it’s not.

Noting the many challenges facing

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Catching up on a slight backlog which I will blame on…let’s see…the paucity of daylight hours at this time of year. Yeah, that’s it.

Cast your mind back to December 19, when LSE apologized to Chris and Abhishek. Chris and Abhishek issued a statement in response.

The LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society welcomes the half-apology from the LSE for the misconduct of LSE and LSE Students’ Union staff during the Freshers’ Fair of 3 and 4 October, 2013.

Professor Craig Calhoun, the Director of the LSE, issued the apology today in response to our Appeal under the LSE’s Free Speech Code, adding that “the wearing of the t-shirts on this occasion did not amount to harassment or

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The Irish Independent has a story on…angels. Not a story on the oddity of belief in angels in 2013, but rather the contrary. More like a story on angels finally getting the recognition they deserve.

Time was when you wouldn’t hear about angels from one end of the year to the next — except at this time of year, of course, when they did their duty in the Christmas story, bringing messages to shepherds watching their flocks by night.

It is in this capacity, however, as messengers and guides, that these ‘spiritual beings’ have come into the greater, everyday consciousness.

On the one hand, scare quotes on “spiritual beings,” and on the other hand, they have at last emerged … Read the rest

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Tom Flynn at the CFI blog is not in favor of talk about “transcendence.”

In a Guardian blog, New Humanist commentator Suzanne Moore has — if inadvertently — defined the key difference between religious humanists and secular humanists in a very few words.

Bewailing the poverty of atheist (particularly, New Atheist) argot when it comes to offering a supporting matrix for meaningful secular ceremonies, Moore writes: “We may find the fuzziness of new age thinking with its emphasis on ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’ impure, but to dismiss the human need to express transcendence and connection with others as stupid is itself stupid.”

There’s the difference between religious and secular humanism in its essence — in a nutshell, if you will. Religious

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