Look: here is Independent World Report. It’s a new bimonthly reader-supported magazine covering the forgotten and untold stories of the world. It just launched. Subscribe to it if you can!

The editor is Tasneem Khalil. You know Tasneem – he used to report on corruption and police misconduct in Bangladesh, until one midnight he was arrested and his computer was seized and he was beaten up. He’s in Sweden now and he’s started this terrific magazine. I’m proud to say I have an article in the first issue. There’s one on the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. There’s a lot.… Read the rest

Once again I’m startled at the casual malice of Andrew Brown. No charge is too unsupported to make, it seems. No inhibition causes him to pause and ask himself, ‘Wait, do I really know any of this? Am I just blackguarding a whole category of people on the basis of nothing in particular? Should I perhaps rephrase things by adding a ‘some’ or a ‘may sometimes’ in places just to be fair?’ – no sense of shame prompts him to stop making things up about a group of people he dislikes. Why is that?

Oh well, the pope does it, Kevin Padian does it, so why should a journalist hesitate?

At any rate, he doesn’t.

It’s obvious

The Catholic church is so brilliant at PR!

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was “busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger. In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

Great! Brilliant! We’re busy, don’t bother us. Everybody else does it even more than we do, don’t bother us. It’s mostly queers who do it, don’t bother … Read the rest

I’ve been wondering about something, and thinking I was the only one who was wondering, and then just now I did a bit of googling and found that I was not the only one who was wondering. Our friend Parrhesia wondered about it last July and then our other friend Salty Current also wondered and went on wondering (scroll down if you’re interested). Wondering what?

Why there are so many men on the speakers’ list at the Atheist Alliance International and so few women.

Yes quite: why is that? Seventeen men and four women – why is that?

Because there are no atheist women, of course.

No, perhaps it’s not that. Because……uhhhhhhh…they forgot?

Who knows. But it’s irritating. And it’s … Read the rest

The pope is humbly issuing everyone instructions again.

Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday that all of Europe – and not only this former communist country – must acknowledge its Christian heritage as it copes with rising immigration from other cultures and religions.

Must it? Why? That way communalism lies – my religion is bigger than your religion so ha! A secular public square is a much better way to ‘cope with’ immigration from other cultures and religions. (What else would immigration be from? Identical cultures and religions?)

“History has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions,’’ Benedict said.

Well, history has also demonstrated the savage cruelty to … Read the rest

It goes on, the relentless othering of atheism.

“The anti-evolutionist fearmongers have to link Darwin to every perceived evil from mankind,” says Kevin Padian, professor of paleontology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists. Everyone else doesn’t really have a problem. [A majority] of Americans believe that a belief in god is compatible with evolution.”

Got that? Atheists who think religion is not epistemically compatible with science (which of course is the view that Padian strawmanned by substituting ‘who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist,’ which no one thinks) are extreme, and furthermore, they … Read the rest