Zoe Williams writes on the privatization of state schools in Britain.

Many of the problems associated with free schools are related to the fact that they’re run by faith organisations. But faith schools have been around for decades without letting in the kind of injustice parents complain of now.

In Derby, a headteacher at a Muslim free school left, complaining, among other things, that girls were being asked to sit at the back of the class. Elsewhere there is talk of discrimination on the basis of caste; documented faith provision that doesn’t reflect the local demographic (a Jewish primary school in Wandsworth, a borough that only has 1,600 Jewish constituents in total)…

Girls were being asked to sit … Read the rest

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When the silliness of David Gilmour hit the newspapers, Hazlitt magazine posted the full transcript of the interview. It changes nothing.

Keeler: So do you teach mostly, I guess classic lit, or Russian?

Gilmour: I teach modern short fiction to third-years and first. So I teach mostly Russian and American authors. Not much on the Canadian front.

Keeler: That’s too bad.

Gilmour: I know, it is, but I can only teach stuff I love. I can’t teach stuff that’s on that curriculum, and I just haven’t encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach.

Gilmour: Come in!

[A student or colleague of Gilmour’s comes in. They speak to each other in French.]

Keeler: I notice

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Josh Spokesgay has a new blog which covers food and sarcasm.

In this one he has just a little fun with Guido Barilla, the heterosexual-pasta guy.

The comments are good, too.… Read the rest

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Now David Gilmour is in the hot seat for saying such stupid things in that interview. He explains to the National Post why he didn’t really say it and he said it wrong and it was jokes and it’s the young woman’s fault. (Everything always is.)

This was an interview I gave sort of over the shoulder. I was having a conversation, in French, with a colleague while this young woman was doing this interview. So these were very much tossed-off remarks. They weren’t written down. It wasn’t a formal sit-down interview or anything like that.

Eh? So, what happened? He was having a conversation with a colleague, in a coffee shop or his office or the colleague’s office, and … Read the rest

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Usually it’s the other way around. Usually the high school football team gets to do whatever it wants to, and everyone else has to put up with it. A coach at a high school in Utah decided not to have that.

Faced with reports that members of his team were cyber-bullying a fellow student, a Roosevelt, Utah high school football coach suspended the entire squad, not letting them reform until they agreed to an extensive set of conditions.

Good move.

The Deseret News reported on Tuesday that Labrum also met with the student who was targeted by the online harassment to apologize. Because the bullying took place on the chat website ask.fm, which allows for anonymous usernames, the offending

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Then via PZ a brilliantly transgressive and original Canadian guy who writes novels and got a gig teaching novels at the University of Toronto despite no PhD. He talked to Emily M Keeler for a series she does for a website at Random House, nicely titled Hazlitt.

I’ve just moved, so my library at home is unfortunately in storage. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred books are in storage. The books here, this tends to be what I teach. These are, of course, the treasured Proust, one of my great joys is not only having read Proust but having read him twice, and having listened to the audio CD twice. There’s two versions, one’s 50 hours and one’s 150 hours. They’re

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Creepy mail. Very, very creepy mail.

Twitter pic:

Stalker baby Jesus.

But also – the usual “I made all the good things” crap which ignores all the bad things. “Today I gave someone cancer for you. In fact I gave thousands of people cancer. I caused thousands of spontaneous abortions. I broke backs, I watched while cars crashed into each other, I killed hundreds with that earthquake in Pakistan, I did nothing to stop those suicide bombers in Peshawar on Sunday or the shooters in Nairobi on Saturday, I give people malaria, and food poisoning, and Crohn’s disease, and mental illnesses. All because I luuuuuuuuuuuv you. Please call. Dad says hi.”

… Read the rest

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Remember the Christian couple who run a bed and breakfast in Cornwall and refused accommodation to a gay couple because their religion? They’re going out of business, but not because everything fell apart after they lost their case – no, it’s because their b&b is shit. It sounds like Fawlty Towers except dirtier and with extra added piety. Barry Duke at the Freethinker gives us the insalubrious details.

One Christian reviewer on Trip Advisor had this to say of Peter and Hazelmary Bull’s Chymorvah Hotel:

Awful! Simply Awful.

I am Christian but that’s not the reason I went there. But I felt the place had a terrible atmosphere. I am vegetarian and there was a very limited menu. I felt

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I took a glance at the stats, as I do occasionally (mostly to see if there are spikes from the slyme pit), and saw a spike from AtheismPlus. So I looked at the page.* Ima go all #FTBulies/AtheismPlus whrblgrbl now.

Kidding! But it is pretty…dense.

*New improved link.… Read the rest

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God damn it.

From the Guardian on Monday:

A renowned Ghanaian poet was among the scores of casualties of the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya.

Prof Kofi Awoonor,  a former diplomat, was killed in the attack in Nairobi. He was in the city attending the Storymoja Hay literary festival, a celebration of pan-African writing and storytelling.

His fellow Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikewei Parkes said people attending the festival had realised something was wrong when Awoonor, known affectionately by many in Ghana as “Prof”, failed to turn up for a session at which poets from west Africa and east Africa were due to perform a reading.

“Professor Awoonor and I and two other poets were representing west Africa, and

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By embertine in a comment on You say tomato I say mascarpone.

My preferred version of feminism is pretty fundamentally different from the equity flavour, and I don’t think that’s a minor squabble. The conversation generally goes something like this:

Equity Feminists (EFs): Equality of opportunity does not equal equality of outcome.

Me and Mine (Ms): Hard to say until we have equality of opportunity.

EFs: We DO have equality of opportunity!

Ms: I don’t think we do.

EFs: The law says we do.

Ms:  That’s a good start!  But the law can’t erase bias and harmful stereotypes.  Those still exist.

EFs:  No they don’t!  You see sexism everywhere because you have a victim mentality.  You’re the REAL misogynist.… Read the rest

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New from Atheist Ireland -

The Dublin Declaration on Secularism Empowering Women 2013

and the closing talk by Kate Smurthwaite, which I loved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx1MFyXhj6k

 … Read the rest

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There’s a well-known bit from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier – a bit which motivated Victor Gollancz to disown the book, if I remember correctly. It was written as a Left Book Club selection and Gollancz inserted a disclaimer because of remarks like this one:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

He prided himself on that kind of philistine “good old bluff Englishman” scorn – but at any rate it’s always struck me as significant that he lumped feminism in with sandal-wearing and fruit-juice drinking. Significant and also unpleasant. I’m not fond … Read the rest

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A follow-up to Not if but where from last week. Dave Silverman is doing a Twitter survey to find out how people define “ally.” This has nudged me into realizing that the minimal sense (at least) is working together for a specific goal or cause; in other words it doesn’t necessarily mean an ally in all things, it can mean an ally for just one thing.

And I find I choke on using it that way. It has overtones of more…and I’m wondering how legitimate that is, and whether we need another word that would avoid that problem.

I choke on thinking of [people whose views on most things I detest] as allies of any kind.

I’ve been choking on … Read the rest

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Perusing Jessica Ahlquist’s Twitter timeline, where the small-minded and nasty go for exercise.

Texas Pride @TXPride80

@jessicaahlquist typical spoiled brat. Wanted attention along with her tree hugging, Obama worshipping parents. Just another welfare junky.

That one’s impressive for touching a lot of bases in a small space.

LibTURDS r Heartless @carrietony35

jessicaahlquist  YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE HUMAN RACE…YOU AND YOUR PARENTS HAVE DEEP ROOTED ISSUES

Interesting idea of what “heartless” and its opposite might be.

Jesterfaze @Jesterfaze

.@jessicaahlquist – It’s so sad that the selfishness of atheists has led to a persecution like political atmosphere for Christians.

Uh huh.… Read the rest

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Cranston High School West has a new mural, and it had a party to celebrate.

To celebrate its 50-year reunion, the Class of 1963 gave the school the 5-by-10-foot mural on Saturday to replace the one that was taken down last year after a federal judge ruled that its references to religion made it unconstitutional.

It was the Class of ’63 that made a gift in 1959 of the original banner, which contained the words “Our Heavenly Father” and “Amen,” as well as a message to grow mentally, morally and physically.

On Saturday afternoon, before an invitation-only ceremony at the school to unveil the new mural, representatives of the class said the new gift was a way of moving on

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