Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Wendy Doniger on the real roots of yoga

    Yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing interdisciplinary construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim for it.

  • BHA census campaign ads deemed too “offensive”

    For railway stations, on the grounds that they could “cause widespread and serious offence.”

  • Desk chair tourism

    Do you play with Google Earth enough? I’m not sure it’s possible to play with Google Earth enough. I’d forgotten to install it until fairly recently, so I’m still excited about it…Then again I doubt that I’ll get less excited about it as time goes on.

    Check out the Amalfi coast some time. Or Capri. Or Norway and those notorious fjords. Or Vancouver. Or Stockholm. Or Paris. Or Edinburgh. Or Cornwall.

    At the moment I’m working on the Yorkshire Dales. I took a little break there about an hour ago. I went to Gunnerside, in Swaledale; found a very local but blue-lined road partway up a moor to the west of Gunnerside, and just traveled along it pausing to do a 360 every few yards. Staggering!

  • 12,000-year-old fishing tackle found off California

    “This pushes back the chronology of New World seafaring to 12,000, maybe 13,000 years ago.”

  • Maryam Namazie on International Women’s Day

    Women in Iran and in many other countries today continue to be deprived of many very basic human rights.

  • International Women’s Day

    We need to understand and tackle social institutions, such as discriminatory family codes, son bias, and limited resource rights and entitlements.

  • Jesus and Mo apply for a Templeton Prize

    They have a winna.

  • Liars don’t know when they’re lying to themselves

    This tells us a little about the mindset of people who fake their research, who build careers on plagiarised work or who wave around spurious credentials.

  • Building bridges

    Wally Smith wrote an article on a forthcoming book in October 2009. In fact it’s dated October 26, 2009, which happens to be the date of Chris Mooney’s “My Thanks to ‘Tom Johnson’” post. The opening paragraph of Mooney’s article, given all that we know now, is so richly ironic that one feels dizzy reading it.

    Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym). In the comment, Johnson had related  how some of his New Atheist-inspired scientist colleagues had behaved toward religious folks at bridge-building conservation events.

    You see what I mean, I’m sure. Mooney insults us for being skeptical about a post that smelled like dead fish at the time and is known to be certified, thrice-rotten, hypertoxic dead fish now, a post by a dedicated liar and trash-talker and one-man “comment machine.”

    Let’s take a look at the fragrant work of the trash-talking comment-machine writing (for once) under his own name.

    He says he hasn’t read the book yet, which is fine, because he’s not reviewing it, he’s discussing the collaboration of the co-authors, a pastor and a scientist (who are also married), and the general collaboration of what he calls “the faith-based community” and science. He’s in favor of the collaboration. He’s against what he sees as obstacles to the collaboration. He spots one in particular…

    …engaging the religious seems to be low on the list of scientists’ priorities. Instead, some leading scientists are running (quickly) in the opposite direction, holding contests to come up with the most mocking labels for scientists and others willing to engage the faithful. Blog exchanges on the topic by respected scholars have reached zero consensus and read like they belong more on an elementary school playground than in any serious, forward-looking public forum. As a scientist speaking about his own field, there’s little more to call this than a disgrace – especially so if we ever expect to apply science effectively beyond peer-reviewed journals.

    Oh what do you know – it’s all about Jerry Coyne. As it was in the beginning, so it was at the end – it was all about that pesky Jerry Coyne. (If it hadn’t been, I might not have sniffed him out. Think about that, Wally. Your obsessions give you away.) Jerry Coyne, unlike our author, belongs on an elementary school playground…far away from the scatological fantasies Wally engaged in as the YNH bloggers.

    His conclusion is stirring:

    Hopefully Hayhoe and Farley’s book will be a welcome change of pace in terms of building bridges – not breaking them down – and will help us realize that, if we spend all our time fighting “enemies” in a culture war, all of us are going to lose.

    Wally has invested quite a lot of time in fighting his perceived enemies over the past year and a half, but it’s nice to have his advice anyway.

  • The difference between journalism and churnalism

    Publishing other people’s press releases is not journalism.

  • Hitchens on 60 Minutes

    “But don’t let the word ‘intellectual’ scare you off.” I wasn’t going to.

  • Mohammed Hanif on Pakistan’s celebrity maulanas

    They are there on prime time TV, they thunder on FM radios between adverts for Pepsi and hair removing cream.

  • Alberta: parents fight for secular education

    They say they want what other Canadians have: freedom of religion, or, in this case, freedom from religion.

  • Aikin and Talisse on atheism and accommodationism 2

    The aim of determining the truth of a statement is distinct from that of assigning epistemic blame or praise to a cognitive agent.

  • Yoga is not as old as you think

    Nor very Hindu, either. Meera Nanda takes on some nationalist myths.

  • Orlando

    Remember Orlando Figes? Remember what he got up to?

    The future of one of Britain’s leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as “fascinating” and “uplifting” while rubbishing that of his rivals.

    Oh that. He used a pseudonym to trash people. This was considered a bad thing. Not an excusable little lapse in manners, but a seriously bad thing.

    John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London, suggested Figes’s position at Birkbeck could be under threat. “On the whole academics are pretty tolerant,” he said. “Clearly in the present climate he’s a star, and Birkbeck needs stars because of the upcoming research assessment exercise. They’ll find it easy to prove that he provides impact. On the other hand, he’s done something that’s dishonest and possibly actionable.”

    It’s not the kind of thing an academic ought to do, you see. It could be seen as antipathetic to the values academics ought to support and live by.

  • Pakistan becomes a country at war with its minorities

    It is becoming a country at war with its individuals, with itself, with you and with me, with the human desire to be allowed to believe what we believe.

  • “Pro-life” Republicans cut funding for poison control

    Poison control centers actually save far more money than they cost.

  • Jahanshah Rashidian on International Women’s Day

    The world practically ignores the fate of hundreds of millions of Muslim women, who are victims of Islamic states or dominant Islamic traditions of misogyny.

  • Iran appointed to UN commission for status of women

    A nation where we can be arrested for getting a suntan, or wearing too much makeup, will opine on ways to safeguard our rights.