A chimpanzee is returned to a better life. On the way there she gives Jane Goodall an embrace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzC7MfCtkzo

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A story I missed a couple of weeks ago – that Whole Foods fired a worker because she stayed home with her kid during a snow emergency.

Rhiannon Broschat, a single mother in Chicago, decided to stay home from work on the freezing cold day of Jan. 28 because school was canceled. Broschat says she looked for someone to take care of her special-needs son, couldn’t find help, and decided not to leave him alone. That is a good thing, the kind of decision employers and all of us should move over to make room for. But Whole Foods fired Broschat. It’s not quite that simple, since, according to ThinkProgress, Whole Foods in the Midwest gives workers five unexcused absences over six months, and this was the one that put Broschat over the line. (She says she had documentation for her other absences.) But still: If she’d gone to work that day, Broschat would still have her job.

School was canceled, ffs. That doesn’t happen all the time. I know employees can’t just stay home whenever they feel like it, but surely the above situation is rare enough and exigent enough that a decent company could make allowances.

The Whole Foods spokesperson told ThinkProgress that its stores were open across Chicago, city transportation was running, and fewer than 10 employees didn’t come to work that day because of unexcused absences.

What’s that got to do with anything? Broschat’s son’s school was canceled, so the fact that city transportation was running is beside the point. It’s unfortunate that she doesn’t have a better support system, but guess what, good support systems don’t just fall out of the sky. People who have them can probably work at places that are better to them than Whole Foods was to Rhiannon Broschat. The person it’s really unfortunate for that Rhiannon Broschat doesn’t have a better support system is Rhiannon Broschat, not Whole Foods. Whole Foods can get along fine, but Rhiannon Broschat can’t.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Blanche Quizno on Differences.

This is fascinating research, and it reminds me of a parallel I became aware of a few years ago. Some in the West insist there is a “god gene” and that believing in supernatural deities is instinctual among human beings, essentially.

Daniel Everett went into Brazil as an Evangelical Christian missionary, intent on converting the Pirahã people, a “stone age” tribe that had thus far proven immune to Christian missionary efforts. Everett was certain that HE could, with the help of God, succeed. He ended up becoming an atheist just like they were, because he realized, in a nutshell, that they were so content and so happy and such good people that he couldn’t offer them any promise of improvement through Christianity – they were already better off. And he felt wrong about attempting to coerce them into religious faith, realizing in the end that Christianity is all about coercion.

Here is the first article from which I learned about his adventure, in the New Yorker.

This is another good article – an interview at Freethought Today.

This tribe is absolutely, utterly atheist. They have no concept of “god”, and they have no interest in that subject. They are pretty much the most absolute pragmatists and literalists you’ll find (no, I’m not explaining well nor exactly) in that they demand personal experience. If not their own, then yours – and it must be actual and direct (beliefs need not apply). If not your direct experience, they’ll accept your father’s direct experience, but unless that direct experience is there (YOU *saw* it or *heard* it for yourself), they dismiss whatever it is.

It’s quite hilarious – I hope you’ll read it. So much for a “god gene” – that’s entirely a cultural construction just like what’s being described in this post. In fact, it might well be that there are other isolated tribes that are equally atheist – if we could only protect them from the predatory Christian missionaries long enough to learn about their belief systems before they’re destroyed forever!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A fascinating article with many implications to explore: We Aren’t the World.

In 1995 a young anthropologist tried to do a popular social science experiment with the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin.

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American.

…

The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

And so it came about, and that’s what’s fascinating and implication-full.

Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Hmmyes but what if what you think is hardwiring is actually culture but culture so buried that it looks like hardwiring? That seems to be the issue here, if I’ve understood it correctly.

As Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich furthered their search, they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies. When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way (with a lawsuit, a call to the Better Business Bureau, or a bad Yelp review) when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had a different history, their gut feeling about what was fair was distinctly their own.

That’s the part I’m not sure I understand. Maybe they’re not sure they do either; maybe it’s a process. I’m not sure how psychological tendencies can be handed down (i.e. taught) such that they are universal in a particular culture (and not in others). Also thousands of generations isn’t right; market economies haven’t existed for thousands of generations.

Ethan Watters, the author, meets Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich for dinner to talk about their work.

I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group.

That’s the part that makes me wonder too. The next thought is always the familiar worry about human rights – “Western” innovation, individualist, groups are happy, all that. Is it just my weird (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) Americanness that makes me think human rights matter and everyone should have them? Many people outside the “West” also think that but then maybe they’ve been contaminated by the “West.”

I don’t know. But psychology or no psychology, it is a fact that systems that don’t take a human rights approach allow some groups to flourish at the expense of others.

But if those others are fine with that, because of their non-weird psychology, maybe it doesn’t matter that they get the shaft?

Is it only my weirdness that makes me say no, it does matter?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kausik Datta wrote a post on the Philadelphia parents who let not one but two of their children die while they prayed over them instead of seeking medical care.

Not one, but two, of the sons (aged 2 years and 8 months at death) of this über-religious Pennsylvania couple died, in 2009 and in 2013 respectively, of entirely preventable and treatable bacterial pneumonia, because they would not vaccinate or seek medical help when required, instead choosing to pray over the sick child. After the first child’s death, they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, receiving probation and a mandate to seek proper professional medical help in case of illness of their children. They did not.

I find it hard to comprehend this level of intellectual blindness. They are adults by age, but they are not responsible parents; despite all their beliefs, they haven’t a clue about sanctity of life. I fault their fundamentalist church for brainwashing them into mindless, unthinking myrmidons, robbing them of empathy, rationality, and human values. I sure as hell am glad that their six surviving children have been placed in foster care and are receiving necessary medical, dental and vision care.

What is even more bone-chilling in this context is the fact that several US states allow religious exemptions from healthcare of children, including preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic measures. Do read the link for the whole list.

It’s appalling. See what I mean about the Free Exercise clause?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There are these parents, Catherine and Herbert Schaible. Their two-year-old son died of treatable pneumonia in 2009 after they “treated” him with prayer instead of medical care. They were under a court order not to do that again (which seems a good deal too generous, frankly). They did do it again, and another child died of pneumonia.

The Schaibles are third-generation members of an insular Pentecostal community, the First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia, where they also taught at the church school. They have seven surviving children.

Judge Benjamin Lerner rejected defense claims that their religious beliefs “clashed” with the 2011 court order to get annual checkups and call a doctor if a child became ill. The order came after a jury convicted them of involuntary manslaughter in Kent’s death, and they were sentenced to 10 years of probation.

“April of 2013 wasn’t Brandon’s time to die,” Lerner said, noting the violence committed throughout human history in the name of religion. “You’ve killed two of your children. … Not God. Not your church. Not religious devotion. You.”

And that court order that didn’t work, and the decision to let them go on being parents to those eight children, who are now seven.

“It was so foreseeable to me that this was going to happen,” said Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore, who prosecuted both cases. “Everybody in the system failed these children.”

After the first death, she and public defender Mythri Jayaraman agreed that the couple’s beliefs were so ingrained that their children remained at risk. They asked the earlier judge to have the family supervised by a Department of Human Services caseworker. Instead, the judge assigned them to probation officers, who are not trained to monitor children’s welfare.

Jeez. The prosecutor and the defender agreed that the children were at risk, and on what should be done about it? Yet the judge didn’t take their advice. Well that’s a pity.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An Ethiopian woman says she was gang-raped in Sudan, so naturally she was arrested. There is video of her being sexually assaulted, so naturally she’s been convicted of “indecent acts.”

The woman of 18 was three months’ pregnant at the time of the alleged attack.

She was arrested after video of her allegedly being sexually abused was circulated on social media.

Three men who admitted having sex with the woman and two who distributed the video were reportedly sentenced to being whipped.

The three were each sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery, while two got 40 lashes for distributing indecent material, according to women’s rights group Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA).

Nothing about the rape.

The woman was sentenced to a one-month jail term but this was suspended because she is pregnant, her lawyer, Samia al-Hashmi, told the AFP news agency.

She was also fined 5,000 Sudanese pounds ($880; £530).

She had also faced charges of adultery and prostitution, which could have led to a penalty of death by stoning, but these were dropped after she convinced the court she was divorced, reports SIHA.

The campaign group says the woman was house-hunting when she was lured to an empty property and attacked in Omdurman, just across the River Nile from Khartoum.

Obviously all her fault.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh the boredom of it. The pointless, stultifying, door-closing boredom of it.

taslima nasreen @taslimanasreen

New study: Ants can lift up to 5,000 times their own body weight.

Defender of Islam @doi1999

@taslimanasreen All praise to Allah. He made them that way.

Don’t think, don’t marvel, don’t wonder. Just praise a cipher, and let it go at that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

When you disagree with something, don’t ever say “I happen to believe that…[the opposite of whatever it is you're disagreeing with].” Just say “I think” instead. Saying you “happen to” doesn’t add anything (what would it add?) and it sounds pompous. It sounds pompous because it doesn’t add anything. We know you “happen to” believe whatever it is; how else would you believe it, destiny? We all “happen to” believe what we believe; there’s no need to announce it.

It’s just affectation. Avoid affectation. By the same token avoid affectations like “well played, sir” as if you were Samuel Johnson at a game of rounders. (And speaking of Johnson, don’t call him “Doctor” Johnson.) (And speaking of not calling people “Doctor” for no good reason, don’t call Martin Luther King “Doctor” either.) Avoid pseudo-archaic epithets and courtesies, avoid labored jokes, avoid strained metaphors. Unless you’re really good at them, which is unlikely. Don’t try to sound like Christopher Hitchens, or P G Wodehouse, or Lord Chesterfield, or (above all) Julian Fellowes. Don’t try to sound as if you got a gentleman’s C at Harvard in 1922. Just skip all that; leave it right out.

You’re welcome.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Guest post by Your name’s not Bruce? originally a comment on Mandatory prayer.

Aren’t US state legislators required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution rather than subvert it? Aren’t there people who are familiar with how laws work (you know LAWYERS) who can sit these people down and say “No, you’re not allowed to do that. It says so right here. In this document you’ve sworn to uphold, in this document which is one of the foundations upon which all our laws are built and against which all our laws are tested. It says right here that you can’t do that. We won’t even put it into the legislature for a vote. Because it says RIGHT HERE that you MAY NOT DO THIS”?

Do these people live in a vacuum wherein no news of all the other failed attempts to do exactly the same thing ever intrudes? Isn’t one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again in expectation of a different outcome? Maybe they hope to succeed through sheer bloody persistence, that at some point all the courts will just surrender and say “Screw it, go ahead?” These same would-be subverters would be the first to man the barricades if the state was enforcing mandatory prayers that were not Christian.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Americans United reports on two – not one but two – bills under discussion in the Alabama legislature proposing a government establishment of religion.

One egregious bill, HB 318, would require public school teachers to recite prayers each morning at the beginning of school. Proponents of this bill have tried to create the illusion of constitutionality by specifying that the prayers must be the same ones recited by the United States Congress.

That’s quite a massive step up – from allowing to requiring.

HB 281 claims to allow religious student expression in public school classrooms, but actually is unnecessary and potentially harmful. Students can already observe their religion as long as it isn’t coercive or disrupt the school’s educational mission and activities.

HB 281 crosses that line. If passed, it would allow students to use the classroom to proselytize to fellow students. The bill doesn’t differentiate between personal observance, which is allowable, and outward promotion and proselytization of religion, which is blatantly unconstitutional.

Again, students are a captive audience required to be in school by law.

Well yes but that’s why. It’s such a golden opportunity to force religion on people whether they want it or not.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

James Lasdun wrote a tribute to Chekhov in the Guardian in 2010.

Have a striking passage from it:

His father, Paul, ran a grocery-cum-general store where Taganrog society congregated to purchase rice, coffee, paraffin, mousetraps, ammonia, penknives and vodka, and were duly cheated by the proprietor. Family lore records an occasion where a drowned rat was found in a cask of cooking oil. Instead of throwing out the oil, Paul had it “sanctified” by a priest, and continued selling it – an ur-Chekhovian episode, complete with a climax that is at once a non-event (business going on as usual), and a pitiless illumination of the father’s character. A bullying, fanatically religious man as well as a total failure (he went bankrupt in 1876 and fled to Moscow with the rest of the family, leaving the 16-year-old Anton to fend for himself in Taganrog), the father too becomes a major generative element in his son’s imagination. His presence can be felt in Chekhov’s stories in the tyrannical father figures of “My Life” and “Three Years” as well as Jacob, the benighted zealot in “The Murder”. In a more general sense, his spirit becomes absorbed into what might be called the negative pole in Chekhov’s vision of reality: the force of oppression, petty-mindedness and outright cruelty that periodically discharges itself into the stories, sweeping over the characters as a sudden mood of melancholy or pure blackness (like the hallucinated Black Monk in the story of that title), or an impulse of vicious brutality, as in the notorious baby-killing episode of “In the Hollow”.

As a human being – a doctor who went out of his way to help the poor and needy – Chekhov was unambiguously repelled by this aspect of life, and many of his better known remarks are either denunciations of it or defences of its opposite, which he identified chiefly as culture, rationality and scientific progress. There is the famous retort to Tolstoy, whom he revered as a novelist but rejected as a teacher: “Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity or vegetarianism,” while the much-quoted lines from his letter to the poet Alexey Plescheyev are perhaps the clearest articulation of his “beliefs” such as they were: “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.”

Yes to all that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A good thing from last May – Stephen Fry chatting with Craig Ferguson about homophobia. In particular, he reports meeting with the Ugandan Minister for Ethics and Integrity. Progressive Secular Humanist has a transcript.

I actually got a Ugandan Minister to say on camera- he’s the Minister for Ethics and Integrity, it’s the only such ministry in the world. I said to him… there’s so much more to worry about in your country than the odd gay person going to bed with the other gay person. For example, you have almost an epidemic of child rape in this country, which is just frightening.

And he said “Ah, but it is the right kind of child rape.”

[Ferguson reacts.]

I said “That was on camera. Do you know that was on camera?”

He said “Yes.”

I said “Can you just explain what you meant?”

“Well, it is men raping girls. Which is natural.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDU0qz24YM

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)