Author: Ophelia Benson

Another one. Another medical coughcoughcoughcough threatens to sue Simon Singh to make him stop saying the medical coughcoughcoughcough is full of coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough. Josephine Jones collects all the links again, and many links there are.

The medical coughcoughcoughcough is a new “alternative health” magazine jauntily called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Jones has a picture, so you can see what it’s like:

 

See? Every item looks like coughcoughcoughcough. Doctors don’t know shit but listen to us and we will fix whatever it is, because it’s that simple.

Singh dared to suggest that it could be irresponsible of high street retailers to stock the title and shared his concerns with the distributor, Comag.

They apparently (essentially) told him to shove off and when he suggested he might blog the email exchange, things really went to pieces.

Comag wrote in an email to Singh:

I should inform you that we have sought legal advice in respect of this matter. We would take any attempts to damage our reputation on social media or elsewhere very seriously.

And in a subsequent email, they confirmed that they had instructed legal counsel.

This is somewhat ironic considering that the magazine’s owner, Lynne McTaggart had argued in favour of free speech, even referring to critics such as Singh and Hayley Stevens as ‘bully boys’ and ‘trolls’.

It seems it’s fine to suggest women should lock up their daughters to spare them from the HPV vaccine (page 3 of the October edition) and to assert that researchers say popular sunscreens cause skin cancer (page 9), but wrong to suggest that it might be irresponsible to allow this misleading, alarmist nonsense a high street presence.

If Comag are concerned about their reputation then threatening to sue was perhaps not a wise move.

The British Chiropractic Association may be inclined to agree, as might the Burzynski Clinic.

Can you say Streisand? I thought you could. Can you say Rhys Morgan? Can you say Marc Stephens? Can you say Popehat? I thought you could.

The Nightingale Collaboration sent 26 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority about ads in the magazine, which they think is a record.

The Jerusalem bus company Egged has decided to stop carrying any advertising on its buses – not because it dislikes advertising but because of “Haredi violence and vandalism.”

“This matter has something important to say to Israeli society,” says [the religious freedom movement] Yerushalmim CEO Uri Ayalon. “We can’t abandon the capital city.  Today, there are no pictures of men or women in Jerusalem. Tomorrow,  there won’t be any in Tel Aviv. It’s inconceivable.”

“Egged’s  decision is absurd,” says [Rachel] Azaria, the [Jerusalem] councilwoman [and Yerushalmim activist who successfully petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice to stop Egged’s and Cnaan’s censorship of women’s faces and bodies]. “If Egged buses are  vandalized, then instead of going to the police and demanding  enforcement, they’re making men and women invisible. It’s like not  letting the kids go out to recess if there’s a bully in school, instead  of dealing with the bully.”

Disappearing all women is the new normal.

At ur-B&W. Here is a big excerpt.

In the time it takes you to read this article, over 50 young girls will have their clitoris hacked out. What are you going to do about it?

Each girl will be pinned down, with no anaesthetic, whilst 8,000 nerve endings cringe at the touch of an unclean scalpel. Each girl will scream and writhe and howl – but you won’t hear any of them. Each girl will be irreversibly, unbearably, agonisingly mutilated.

“I heard it,” described Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs”. Skin rips, blood pours, cries screech. But it wasn’t over for her just yet: next “came the sewing… the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia,” thread weaving through thread to leave behind only a miniscule opening for urination and menstruation.

The scars of this torture, butchery on a factory-line scale – and that is the only way to describe it – will never fade. Premenstrual cramps, traumatic periods, an interminable stench of soured blood (caused by menstrual difficulties), problems with pregnancy and childbirth, pain during sexual intercourse, psychological damage and the risk of fistula are but a few of the long, long list of health complications that will haunt every girl’s adulthood. That’s if they survive the immediate blood loss, infection and severe trauma. It’s an experience from which a child may never fully recover.

Conservative estimates suggest that over 100 million women worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Article Five of the UN Declaration of Human Rights decrees that no one “shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. And surely such human rights are universal; or else they are nothing.

Read on.

Since Vacula used his resignation as an opportunity to do more hissing and finger-pointing, I’ll give it a bit more attention. Apart from anything else the editor in me is refusing to be silent. He writes really badly, which is another drawback in a director.

Following a lengthy period of self-reflection and deliberation, I am freely resigning from my position…

Bad right out of the gate. Tin ear. “A lengthy period”? “Of self-reflection and deliberation”? Who talks like that? Dude, just say you’ve thought about it carefully. Talk normal. This impulse to inflate the vocabulary is fatal.

Unfortunately, some persons in this community who have been quite vocal in objecting to my appointment – and many who were quick to dismiss me — do not seem to be interested in that.

Same again. “Some persons”?

…a ‘you are with us or against us’ attitude is coupled with personal vendettas and whispering campaigns taking the stage regardless of concerns about the cohesion of the secular movement.

How did the stage get in there? It doesn’t fit. But never mind that. What a joke: Vacula has been relentlessly pursuing personal vendettas himself, and he’s been right in there with the whispering. The pious above-it-all act is just that: an act. (Oh maybe that’s how the stage got in.)

Organizations are attacked, leaders of major organizations are condemned, prominent authors are boycotted, and ‘real-life’ careers are targeted as a result of disagreements or misunderstandings which likely could have been resolved by a simple telephone call…or ignored.

Passive voice, passive voice, passive voice – with no agents. One reason the passive voice is often a bad choice is because it evades the need to provide a subject of the verb.

And then the substance again applies to him at least as much as to anyone else. Vacula targeted me, for one, and I’m not alone in that. He too attacks and condemns and targets.

Almost immediately following my appointment with the Secular Coalition for America, I was the target of a campaign of lies, character attacks, and distortions.

Sounds like your podcast about me, which you never corrected. On the contrary, you did a blogpost complaining about my pointing out that you’d misrepresented me in your podcast. That takes a lot of gall – and very little in the way of “self-reflection and deliberation.”

My detractors did not only brand me as an ‘enemy of the people’ in a similar fashion to the eponymous play written by Henrik Ibsen…

Oh good god. Avoid the self-important note! Plus avoid using big words if you don’t know what they mean.

I have indeed made some mistakes and handled some situations poorly in past months. These mistakes were errors of judgment and were not, by any means, coupled with malicious intent. My detractors have blown these mistakes out of proportion almost never bothering to mention my concessions, never to personally contact me in a constructive manner to address grievances, or correct their own mistakes — and treated me unfairly.

Bullshit. Just outright bullshit. I did “personally contact” him – but maybe by “in a constructive manner” means not actually pointing out a substantive misrepresentation. Maybe treating him unfairly is criticizing him for doing something bad. Heads he wins tails everyone else loses, eh?

I am thus putting my personal wants aside and resigning from my position as co-chair of the Secular Coalition for America’s Pennsylvania chapter in order to end this toxic controversy. I do not wish to see the organization and its staff which I will continue to support – and many individuals who support me — buttressed with attacks.

Ha! Mustn’t rub it in. That wouldn’t be constructive, or fair.

Anyway there you have it. Spiteful, self-regarding, self-important, incapable of recognizing error. That’s Justin the Martyr.

 

 

And blames his critics.

Arvind Iyer has a wonderful post at Nirmukta arguing that tales of shared ancestry or the threat of a common enemy are not the only way to unite people around a cause. Popular culture can also do that.

There was this Japanese tv series in the early ’90s, Oshin, which is affectionately remembered by people all over Asia.

What makes people even of warring nations forget their differences while watching this show, is not just a single dialogue like the impassioned imploring of the conscientious army deserter Shunsaku Anchan^2a that “War is not the answer” to resolve differences. The forgetting of differences is thanks to some reminders which suffuse this show’s every episode in both their everyday settings and their unsettling moments, reminders of the essential sameness of the human condition regardless of borders.  This cultural product which people of a divided world together recall with fondness, is an unsung triumph of secular humanism in its own right. This series can be thought of as a resource for the secular humanist project of cultivating ‘educated feeling’³ and complementing Reason with Compassion.

Like the last book of The Iliad, or The Winter’s Tale. The example that occurred to me when Arvind alerted me to the post was Northern Exposure. There are more. You got any?

The Washington Post blog The Root has an African-American atheist, Mark Hatcher, saying what that’s like.

[One day] I’m walking across campus, and normally don’t have it on, but I had my Atheist t-shirt on. Somebody came up to me and said “Oh my God, I thought I was crazy, I thought I was the only one. Thank you for letting me know I’m not insane.” That’s understandable in our community. You gotta love Jesus. If you don’t love Jesus, you gotta love somebody. My mom’s first question to me was ‘What, so you don’t believe in anything?!” And that’s hard in the black community. You gotta believe in something in order to be a complete person. This person coming up to me, saying that they thought they were insane because of the type of pressure that was on them to believe in something that they just simply couldn’t, I was like, “You know what? We need a community here”…

There are other things you can believe in though. You can believe in a better future for humans. You can believe in hope, in solidarity, in compassion…you can even (though you will get a lot of people yelling at you) believe in progress. You can believe in music, in art, in love, in sex, in nature, in beauty – damn, you can believe in a lot of things. They don’t have to be a person, especially not a magical person.

Great. There was a “symposium” in Ireland at which some boffins concluded to their own satisfaction that “abortion is not necessary to save the mother’s life in any circumstance” so PersonhoodUSA naturally gives a yell of triumph. Go right ahead and force Catholic hospitals to let pregnant women die rather than provide an abortion, Catholic church!

According to the Irish organization Youth Defence, “Leading medical experts speaking at a major International Symposium on Excellence in Maternal Healthcare held in Dublin have concluded that ‘direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a mother.’”

Over 140 medical professionals attended the Symposium where new research and extensive clinical experience was presented by experts in obstetrics and gynecology, mental health, and molecular epidemiology. The symposium’s final determinations were published in a declaration titled “Dublin Declaration on Maternal Healthcare” which reads:

“As experienced practitioners and researchers in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, we affirm that direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman. We uphold that there is a fundamental difference between abortion, and necessary medical treatments that are carried out to save the life of the mother, even if such treatment results in the loss of life of her unborn child. We confirm that the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women.”

Science has spoken! Well, at least medical expertise has spoken. Or some medical expertise has spoken. Or a bit of medical expertise combined with an agenda has spoken.

Seen Half the Sky? It’s pretty good, not surprisingly. One thing I liked is that they specifically took on cultural relativism, and said no thank you. Sheryl WuDunn made a point that I often raise, because it illustrates the issue very well – but she could make it even better, because of her grandmother. Her grandmother had bound feet. She simply said that, and that said she’s delighted that that particular “cultural” item is dead and gone.

It took force to make it dead and gone, you know. The commies did it. The commies forced that cultural tradition to die out, by forcing people to stop breaking all the bones in their daughters’ feet. How cruel and coercive of them, yes?

The show was quite graphic about FGM – about how fucking horrible it is for the little girls it’s done to. There’s no anaesthetic – it’s just slice slice slice. Then their legs are tied together and they’re left to lie still for a week, with no food so that they won’t crap on themselves.

And then they die in childbirth, because the whole thing fucks up the process. Obviously. It’s all sewn tightly together with just one tiny hole to let the urine and blood out. This does not aid childbirth. It doesn’t matter, because women are expendable.

News on the Deanna De Jesus case, the woman who was being prosecuted for “letting” her husband stab their child to death.

She’s been found guilty of child neglect.

The jury in the case of Deanna DeJesus has found her guilty of child neglect  but the trial is not over yet.

They could not, however, agree on the aggravated manslaughter charge for failing to try and stop her husband from killing their son, resulting in a hung  jury. That resulted in a mistrial on that charge. She will therefore have to face another trial on that charge.

I wonder what the thinking is here. That the whole thing is actually a very late-term abortion? That wicked Deanna De Jesus forgot to get an abortion while she was pregnant and then finally realized she wanted one when the kid was nine, and was delighted when her husband wigged out, killed a random guy and stabbed her and their other kid and “aborted” the nine-year-old? Is that what they think?

Or is it that they think mothers are supposed to be magical beings who can save their children from anything, no matter what – a tornado, an explosion, a car crash, being stabbed?

Or is it that they think women just are lying bitches so they might as well prosecute Deanna De Jesus just in case something will stick?

It’s puzzling.