Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Taliban Destroying Education in Swat

    Destroying the education infrastructure is part of the Taleban’s campaign to uproot the existing system.

  • Johann Hari on ‘Respect’ for Oppressive Religions

    The right to think and speak freely failed to ‘respect’ the ‘unique sensitivities’ of the religious.

  • Trial for Parents Who Chose ‘Faith’ Over Medicine

    Parents of child dying of diabetes prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor.

  • Natalie Angier on Geek Chic, Obama, Women

    Now that ‘smart is the new cool’ how about seeking out starry women in science?

  • Hindutva Bullies Attack Women in Mangalore

    SRS mob assaulted women at a bar because they are ‘the custodians of Indian culture.’

  • India: Congress Attacks BJP Ideology

    ‘Whether you call it BJP, RSS or Ram Sena…it is the same thing. Wherever this philosophy has travelled, it has manifested in such incidents.’

  • Alma mater

    A commenter has been telling us lately (but with no actual checkable references) that Obama is not all that intelligent because he got only Bs at Harvard. Since all the commenter has offered in response to a request for references is that somebody said that on a (nameless) BBC documentary last week, there’s no need to pay any attention, but in looking for something else I happened on an interesting piece about Obama’s student days from last February. There’s not much about having an average mind (there’s nothing, actually) and there is a fair amount of the other thing. Of course the reporter could be a raving fan and have simply thrown all the ‘average mind’ stuff into the trash can – but for what it’s worth, some people remember Obama as being quite clever.

    Mr. Obama wrote that he learned of a transfer program that Occidental had with Columbia and applied. “He was so bright and wanted a wider urban experience,” recalled Anne Howells, a former English professor at Occidental who taught Mr. Obama and wrote him a recommendation for Columbia…Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out the negatives of a policy and its consequences and illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others could not.”…The professor, Roger Boesche, has memories of him at a popular burger joint on campus. “He was always sitting there with students who were some of the most articulate and those concerned with issues like violence in Central America and having businesses divest from South Africa,” he said. “These were the kids most concerned with issues of social justice and who took classes and books seriously.”

    No mention of B grades, or of mediocrity. The memories could be fallible, they could be shaded by the present, but for what they’re worth, there they are. And at least that’s a checkable reference, which ‘a BBC 4 documentary last week’ is not.

  • Kara lost the strength to speak the day before she died

    Responsible, careful, sensible, loving parenthood.

    Kara Neumann, 11, had grown so weak that she could not walk or speak. Her parents, who believe that God alone has the ability to heal the sick, prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor. After an aunt from California called the sheriff’s department here, frantically pleading that the sick child be rescued, an ambulance arrived at the Neumann’s rural home on the outskirts of Wausau and rushed Kara to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival. The county coroner ruled that she had died from diabetic ketoacidosis resulting from undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes. The condition occurs when the body fails to produce insulin, which leads to severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function.

    Severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function – meaning that was one sick kid, one very visibly, obviously, unmistakably sick kid, one suffering sick kid. And all her parents did for her was to pray, despite of course knowing perfectly well that there are such things as telephones and ambulances and doctors and medicines. For days and days they hung around with a sick, wasted, feeble child, and did nothing about it (prayer doesn’t count).

    About a month after Kara’s death last March, the Marathon County state attorney, Jill Falstad, brought charges of reckless endangerment against her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. Despite the Neumanns’ claim that the charges violated their constitutional right to religious freedom, Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Ms. Neumann to stand trial on May 14, and Mr. Neumann on June 23.

    So they killed their child, by refusing to get her medical help which would have saved her life, and they’re defending themselves by talking about their ‘religious freedom.’ They’re not lying on the ground banging their heads and wailing, they’re not crying aloud ‘How could we have been so stupid and callous?’, they’re not sobbing and telling their dead daughter how sorry they are – they’re insisting on ‘religious freedom.’ Freedom to what? Freedom to watch your 11-year-old child become unable to walk or breathe or move or speak and do nothing to help her because you have the freedom to believe that ‘god’ will rescue her even though you refuse to avail yourself of the actual tools to help her? That’s a pretty strange sort of freedom to defend, especially after such an outcome.

    “The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “but not necessarily conduct.” Wisconsin law, he noted, exempts a parent or guardian who treats a child with only prayer from being criminally charged with neglecting child welfare laws, but only “as long as a condition is not life threatening.” Kara’s parents, Judge Howard wrote, “were very well aware of her deteriorating medical condition.”

    Well that’s great! Wisconsin law allows parents to treat a sick child with only prayer as long as the sickness is not life threatening! So mere suffering or pain is not reason enough to make medical treatment mandatory. How disgusting. The ‘religious freedom’ of parents is more important than the relief from suffering of their children? Brilliant.

    Investigators said the Neumanns last took Kara to a doctor when she was 3. According to a police report, the girl had lost the strength to speak the day before she died. “Kara laid down and was unable to move her mouth,” the report said, “and merely made moaning noises and moved her eyes back and forth.”

    Yet her parents still did nothing.Like the Oregon parents who ‘were charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of their 16-year-old son, who died from complications of a urinary tract infection that was severely painful and easily treatable.’

    As Lucretius said (as I’ve quoted before), tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

  • Greater love hath no father

    Another one, from last July.

    Police in Atlanta have been investigating the death of a 25-year-old Pakistani woman, who was allegedly murdered by her father in the name of family honor. She wanted out of an arranged marriage, but her father thought a divorce would bring shame to the family.

    And he also thought that the ‘shame’ that Sandeela Kanwal would ‘bring’ to the family was more significant than her life was. He thought the ‘shame’ was so important that it justified murdering his own adult daughter. Instead of thinking of it as something regrettable and painful but as a speck of dust compared to the value of his daughter – he thought the opposite – he thought his daughter was worth much less than this comparatively trivial shame. That’s an incredibly ugly fact, which never seems to get enough attention in the coverage of these things. He thought a fundamentally social, neighbor-heeding feeling was more important than his own daughter was; he thought it was so important that it motivated him to strangle her to death with a bungee cord – all so that the neighbors wouldn’t snigger at him.

    “He admitted to actually taking the life of his daughter,” says Sgt. Stefan Schindler, a 13-year veteran of the Clayton County Police Department. “And the reason he took his daughter’s life,” says Schindler, “by his own words was that she wasn’t being true to her religion or to her husband.”…Schindler says Rashid told him that killing his daughter was a right given to him by God — and that God would protect him.

    So ‘God’ is someone who wants women to be killed for wanting to leave men they never chose for themselves in the first place. In other words, yes Virginia, God does hate women.

    Shahid Malik is a local representative of Atlanta’s Pakistani population and one of the very few willing to speak about the Rashid case. “This thing hurt the Muslim community, Pakistani community,” he says. He says that the killing has nothing to do with Islam, but that Rashid has little education and comes from a small village in Pakistan where tribal traditions are strong…”Whatever this case is or not, this is not an honor killing,” he says. “It is not based on Pakistani law. Chaudry Rashid loved his daughter.”

    No he didn’t. People need to stop saying that. People who love their daughters don’t murder them; people who murder their daughters don’t love them. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get to murder your daughter and still pretend you loved her.

    Begner hopes the state doesn’t make this about Islam or ethnicity. This death could have happened, he says, in any culture, with any family.

    Well anything could have happened, but is it likely? Is it customary ‘in any culture, with any family’ to murder an adult daughter because she wants to divorce a husband who was not her choice to begin with? I don’t think so.

  • Obama Tells Regulators to Tighten Auto Rules

    The directives make good on a campaign pledge and signal a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy.

  • New Guy Ditches 8 Years of Bad Policies

    Moves on freedom of information, presidential archives, all in direction of more transparency.

  • Islamists Take Baidoa, Promise Sharia

    ‘We shall make changes in the town and will rule by Islamic law,’ spokesman told hundreds at stadium.

  • A Step Forward in Texas Science Education

    Texas State Board of Ed elected to get rid of bogus ‘strengths and weaknesses’ claim in textbooks.

  • Islamists Kidnap Teachers in Southern Philippines

    Officials warned: the kidnapping would discourage others from teaching poor children in Muslim areas.

  • Attenborough Gets Hate Mail From God Fans

    They tell him to burn in hell for not giving God credit for hummingbirds.

  • Jerry Coyne on Seeing and Believing

    The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science.

  • John Updike 1932-2009

    David Foster Wallace consigned Updike, with Mailer and Roth, to the authorial category of Great Male Narcissists.

  • Sheer poetry

    Wo, what’s that?! Oh – it’s a blast of fresh air.

    President Barack Obama has called for the US to become energy independent, saying its reliance on foreign oil and global warming posed threats…Mr Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its refusal of a waiver which had previously allowed California to set its own – stricter – vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards. He said California had taken bold moves in implementing the standards. Mr Obama said: “The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.”

    Cue the Hallelujah chorus! And Aretha Franklin singing The Star-spangled Banner! And Springsteen doing Eyes on the Prize and Seeger doing We Shall Overcome! Cue them all, cue everyone singing at once – cue the rocks and the trees, cue the stars and the little green frogs; from every mountainside, lift up your voices and sing –

    My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them.

    Welcome back to the reality-based community, all. Enjoy your stay.

  • The Choice of Hercules

    Two attractive women approach you. Introducing themselves, one tells you that she is the personification of Duty, and invites you to follow her down the road of virtue, piety, sacrifice and hard slog. The second beauty represents Pleasure: she wants to guide you down a path of indolence, vice and hedonism. Which do you choose?

    This was the famous ‘choice of Hercules’, put to him while he was a farm labourer in exile: appropriated by various religions and mythologies, it can be argued that millions of people who have never read the classics still think of life in these terms of virtue versus pleasure: the good life versus the Good Life. A C Grayling’s achievement is to expose this dichotomy as false.

    Of course people can’t truly dedicate themselves either to duty or pleasure alone. The majority of lives are a combination of both, and people who walk one road – Florence Nightingale or Hunter S Thompson – tend to become legendary for their choice of mistress. Yet the convention has it that duty is always worthwhile whereas pleasure is generally worthless self-indulgence.

    But is this true? Ideas of duty animate terrorists and suicide bombers but the outcome of these drives tends to be destruction of life, including their own. Those who dedicate themselves to pleasure, by contrast, tend to be happier and therefore better disposed to those around them. Yet even those of us who dedicate ourselves to hedonism will suffer pain and loss at some time.

    And surely the purpose of duty in a society – having people who commit themselves to defending their country or pounding the streets in uniform on Friday nights – is so that others will be free to experience pleasure: i.e. not murdered, raped, assaulted or vapourised.

    Duty as an end in itself, though, is no goal at all, as Grayling, in his erudite, conversational style, effortlessly shows:

    If anything, the example of humourless, disapproving, repressive moralisers whose pointing fingers have blighted enough lives to fill armies many times over, ought to be enough to remind us that the phrase ‘the good life’ genuinely merits its double meaning: for the valuable life (the life truly worth living for the one living it) and the pleasurable life (of which affection, laughter, achievement and beauty are integral characteristics) are one and the same.

    In a series of essays on social taboos Grayling shows how the false dichotomy of Hercules has corrupted the twenty-first century. One major aspect is that longevity of life has been prioritised over quality of life. On her visit to London this year, the Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi gave her impressions of British society:

    Anything that has a relationship with pleasure we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about Aids; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It’s a very sick society that rejects pleasure… Why should we live like sick people just to give some fresh meat to the ground?

    An obvious example is the war on drugs. Governments are happy to destroy Afghan poppy crops that could be developed into morphine to help the sick. Politicians have always used the drug issue as an opportunity for macho posturing on crime policy, yet continued criminalisation leaves the power and the money in the hands, not of the Treasury (who could put it to good use) but of gangster scum that terrorise communities.

    My Shiraz Socialist
    colleague, Caroline S, is doing some sterling work in showing how the prohibitionist line on prostitution inflicts real harm. In response to the sickening murders of five Norfolk prostitutes – murders that would almost certainly not have happened had these women been working in a legal, unionised, regulated sex industry – Britain’s Home Secretary plans to introduce more of the same: proposals for more criminalisation, pushing women underground and putting them at risk. The war on the world’s oldest profession will get Jacqui Smith some nice headlines but in the long term, it is as doomed as the war on drugs: a pointless and unwinnable battle fought in quicksands of blood.

    Advocates of decriminalisation point out that illegal drugs are actually a lot less harmful that alcohol and tobacco. Government seems to have taken this advice to heart: now as well as policing use of illegal drugs it is policing the use of legal ones. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UK smoking ban: a policy of social exclusion masquerading as a public health initiative. Banner campaigns and strategy documents suggest that bevvy is going the same way.

    You can find similar intellectual writhings in contemporary attitudes to sex and relationships. Already hammered by millennia of state-sponsored virginity cults, the modern conception of romance is now driven almost entirely by social status and the fear of dying alone. Grayling points out that adultery, divorce and open marriages are better alternatives than condemning people to lonely, loveless partnerships: our puritan climate makes his common sense revolutionary.

    And yet people complain that society is too permissive, yearning for a time a hundred years back, of child labour and child prostitution, when, as Grayling says, ‘if a man’s wife were pregnant or menstruating he might turn to his eldest daughter’ – the Victorian age. Before discussing the petty morality of the twenty-first century, though, Grayling says this:

    The great moral questions – the most moral and urgent ones – are not about sex, drugs and unmarried mothers. They are, instead, about human rights, war and genocide, the arms trade, poverty in the Third World, the continuance of slavery under many guises and names, interreligious antipathies and conflicts, and inequality and injustice everywhere. These areas of concern involve truly staggering horrors and human suffering. In comparison to them, the parochial and largely misguided anxieties over sex, drugs, gay marriage and the other matters that fill newspapers and agitate the ‘Moral Majority’ in America and Britain, pale into triviality. It is itself a moral scandal that these questions preoccupy debate in comfortable corners of the world, while real atrocity and oppression exist elsewhere.

    Too true, and perhaps the real choice of Hercules should be neither duty nor pleasure but the duty of bringing as much of the world to a state where pleasure is, at least, a possible.

    The Choice of Hercules, A C Grayling, Orion 2008

  • Tom Hanks Calls Prop 8 Un-American

    ‘I do not like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper in any of the 50 states in America.’