I saw it on Facebook this morning and the thought of it has been making me smile all day so it would just be wrong not to post it here.

Do admit.

[click on it to see the larger version]

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

The inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar ended on Friday and Praveen Halappanavar still doesn’t have answers. He told us what he thinks of the whole thing.

The medical care she received was in no way different to staying home. Medicine is all about preventing the natural history of the disease, and improving patients’ lives and health. And look what they did. She was just left there to die. We were never – we were always kept in the dark. If Savita had known her life was at risk she would have jumped off the bed and seeked a different hospital. She was, we were never told, and it’s horrendous, it’s barbaric and inhuman the way Savita was treated in that hospital.

It’s very striking. She might as well have stayed home. They went to the hospital, naturally thinking that they would find there what you’re supposed to get at hospitals – treatment. They didn’t get that, and they weren’t even told they weren’t getting that. She was just left there to die. The medical staff went through insulting mocking motions of treating her – they stuck her in a bed, they took her vital signs, there were medical people around – but they didn’t do what they needed to do to prevent her from dying. They refused to interfere with the natural course of the disease. They decided, without telling much less asking the patient and her husband, that the risk wasn’t big enough for them to do anything about it. It is, indeed, horrendous and barbaric and inhuman.

The Independent reports:

The inquest had heard evidence from an expert witness that the only thing that could have saved Savita was a termination within a day or two of being admitted to hospital, and by the time it was lawful to perform a termination, she was beyond saving.

“An extremely rare condition had been dealt with as best as possible by hospital staff on duty,” he said, referring to the blood poisoning caused by E.coli that ravaged through her with frightening speed, causing her death by multi-organ failure.

Barrister Eileen Barrington said there was “no basis in fact or law” to call for the accountability of her client, Dr Katherine Astbury, the consultant responsible for Savita’s care while in hospital.

Everyone had done their best. No one could be reproached, as was frequently pointed out an inquest is not allowed to point fingers; that is for the civil and criminal courts.

The disturbing (to put it feebly) thing about that is that outside Ireland the risk is considered real and substantial. That’s why the standard of care with PRM is prompt termination: because of the risk of infection. The Irish law is deeply, disturbingly fucked up.

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

The Ada Initiative did an interview with Rebecca; she says a number of amusing and/or insightful things. (No not “inciteful” – that’s not a word. Insightful.)

On why she stipulates a minimum of 35% women speakers as a condition of speaking.

I’ve also seen that the more women who speak on stage, the more women show up in the audience. People feel more at home when they see people like them in prominent positions. Because the conferences I attend are usually heavily male-dominated, having a minimum of 1/3 female speakers is another easy way that conference organizers can show they place a high value on diversity. 35% is actually ridiculously low considering women are 51% of the population, but then, I’ve always been pretty easy-going. Despite the rumors. Next year I may up it to 40% and add a “non-white” percentage for fun.

And the year after that, total world domination.

She was asked what her dream speaking engagement would be.

I like speaking in pubs, because everyone is relaxed and there’s beer. So I suppose my dream speaking engagement would be on a panel with Hillary Clinton, Lucy Lawless, and Amy Poehler, in a pub full of sloths, and also we’re on a spaceship.

A pub full of sloths does sound ideal.

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

Repeating things 50,000 times has to rank high. It could always be worse though. It could be repeating things 100,000 times. Or 500,000 times. Or a million.

It’s a real thing in Turkey though.

A teacher in Istanbul has allegedly ordered his students to say God’s name 50,000 times and “prove it” for homework.

The teacher of a Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge class at Sancaktar Hayrettin Primary School in Istanbul’s Fatih district set fifth grade students the task of repeating “salawat,” meaning “peace be upon him” in Arabic, a phrase often used after the name of the prophet of Islam. The task was to be completed as homework during Islam’s holy week.

And “prove” it? How the hell would you do that?

Students told reporters that the most difficult part of the homework was “proving” that they had completed it. Some parents bought “a salawat-counting machine” called Zikirmatik, which is sold for 2 Turkish Liras (around 1 euro). Zikirmatik is a counter for people who have difficulties counting beads.

One parent said he had gathered his whole family and tried to reach the 50,000 prayers. “I calculated that every salawat lasted three seconds. This means is would take around 40 hours to reach the limit,” he said.

Some students found another solution by marking their notebooks once for each salawat.

Hello? That doesn’t “prove” anything except that you hit click 50 thousand times or that you made a mark 50 thousand times (which would be bad and stupid and tedious enough).

We know what the idea is though. Drill. Self-hypnosis. Self-conditioning. Believers use prettier language for it, naturally, but that’s what it is.

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

Avicenna has a horrific post about rape in India.

His conclusion:

The anger is rising again in India. It doesn’t matter what laws you make. In order to stop rape you need to change the culture of India and empower women. You need to teach men to not rape women, not blame everything else. The real fault here lies in the rapist and a culture of harassment, denigration of women and rape. The protests will keep happening and they SHOULD. Society cannot afford complacency on this.

There are no excuses here. Culture Must Change. You aren’t going to protect girls by keeping them away from boys. You are going to protect them by teaching boys and girls responsible behaviour and how to treat each other properly. Teach boys to respect women and not rape them. Teach girls and boys that No Means No, not No Means Try Harder. These young kids think like that because they have no adult role models to sit them down and tell them that. What they have instead are movies which are made by people who themselves think “No means Try Harder” and who have never had to date either. It’s like taking sex advice from the Pope.

But if people are taught that No Means No then no one will ever have sex again ever ever ever.

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

CNN keeps telling us it feels like a decisive moment, it feels like the end of the story. We don’t care what CNN thinks it feels like. Just tell us what you know.

I want him not to be killed. I want to know why.

I once lived in Boston, for a short time.

“We are getting the feeling that this is it.” Oh shut up.

I also once lived in a house with an old boat of the landlord’s in the yard.

They don’t want him to deploy the suicide vest. Well clearly he doesn’t want to deploy it either.

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

From Dave Muscato of American Atheists:

As part of a joint effort amongst national groups, and in partnership with Boston Atheists and the Humanist Community at Harvard, we want to educate public officials about the diversity of their communities in times of tragedy and atheists’ desire and need to be included.

Atheists are hurting from this news as much as anyone else, and part of the grieving process for atheists affected includes things such as representation at the official memorial service and in the community response. When memorial services include exclusively religious language, and especially when public officials use terms such as “godless” as a slur to describe these attacks, atheists who are affected are excluded and shut out from the community.

We are asking you to assist us by writing a short paragraph that includes the following three things:

1) Who you are and whom you represent or speak on behalf of (e.g. Matt Dillahunty is President of Atheist Community of Austin)

2) Why you’re hurt by the exclusion from the memorial and/or use of “godless” as a pejorative

3) What’s you would like to see happen as a solution

Greg Epstein from the Humanist Community at Harvard is meeting with public officials to discuss this issue and would like to pass on responses from our community’s leaders. We also encourage you to solicit responses from members of your communities (if you run a blog, your readers; if you have a TV show, your viewers, etc) that he can include as well.

Please send your responses to me by early next week so we can make sure he gets them in time.

IMPORTANT: Please send your responses to BostonResponse@gmail.com and encourage your fans/listeners to do the same. Please DO NOT send your responses to dmuscato@atheists.org. Thank you.

—————————

So, get those responses written and send them to BostonResponse@gmail.com. Let’s do this.

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

Jerome Taylor of the Independent seems to be remarkably under-informed on the subject he reports on.

They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion.

But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam.

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

The weirdnesses of modern life, you know? Texting. Cupcakes. Wheely bags. Granite counter tops.

One such weirdness is the recurrence of photographs of young men on their way to kill and maim a lot of random people.

There are some of Timothy McVeigh, I think – renting the truck was it? Getting gas? Or maybe there aren’t.

But there certainly are of some of the 9/11 young men. There are of the July 2005 London bombers. And now there are of the Tsarnaev brothers.

Walking along the street, dapper and casual, with their pressure cookers packed full of shrapnel in the backpacks they carry.

So we can see them. We can see how people look in the process of killing some random people and maiming a lot more. They don’t look like anything. They look normal. They fit right in. They’re as banal as the rest of us.

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

Ottawa

On April 25, an international coalition of atheist and humanist organizations led by the Center for Inquiry, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and American Atheists will protest the arrest and persecution of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh with demonstrations scheduled in London, New York, Washington, Ottawa and Calgary.

Bangladesh has recently been at the centre of a human rights crisis as authorities have detained several prominent bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments” and have arrested two more young people for making “derogatory remarks” about Islam on Facebook. Tens of thousands of protestors, led by the Islamist group Islami Andolan Bangladesh, have rallied in Dhaka, the country’s capital, to demand more arrests.

Centre for Inquiry is leading protests in Canada and has made appeals to the newly founded Office of Religious Freedom to urge the government to issue a public statement condemning the arrests and reaffirming its commitment to freedom of expression.

Protest events are confirmed for the following Canadian cities on April 25, 2013:

Ottawa: High Commission for Bangladesh

Constitution Square Centre

340 Albert St, K1R 7Y6 @ 4:30 pm ET

Calgary: Consulate of Bangladesh

633 6th Avenue South West T2P 2Y6 @ 4:30 pm MT

For media inquiries:

Michael Payton, National Director, CFI Canada, Email: mpayton@cficanada.ca

Phone: (647) 244-5483 (647) 244-5483

Up-to-date information on protest events can be found at http://bit.ly/defenddissent.

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

Yes, I’m recognizing the landscape. I share Kaminer’s dislike of difference feminism. But then – if people are thinking we are difference/protectionist feminists in Kaminer’s sense, they’re batty.

More from Kaminer’s article:

The Comforts of Gilliganism

Central to the dominant strain of feminism today is the belief, articulated by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, that women share a different voice and different moral sensibilities. Gilligan’s work—notably In a Different Voice (1982)—has been effectively attacked by other feminist scholars, but criticisms of it have not been widely disseminated, and it has passed with ease into the vernacular. In a modern-day version of Victorian True Womanhood, feminists and also some anti-feminists pay tribute to women’s superior nurturing and relational skills and their general “ethic of caring.” Sometimes feminists add parenthetically that differences between men and women may well be attributable to culture, not nature. But the qualification is moot. Believers in gender difference tend not to focus on changing the cultural environment to free men and women from stereotypes, as equal-rights feminists did twenty years ago; instead they celebrate the feminine virtues.

See? In Kaminer’s version it’s the “protectionists” who have given up on changing the cultural environment to free men and women from stereotypes, and the equal-rights feminists who want to do that. That’s the precise opposite of the usual understanding of this binary, which is that equality feminists are the good sane normal ones who think the whole idea of “stereotypes” is wild-eyed Stasi nonsense, and “radfems” are the ones who want to steal all your stereotypes and cut off your penis.

Confronted with the challenge of rationalizing and accommodating profound differences among women, in both character and ideology, feminism has never been a tranquil movement, or a cheerfully anarchic one. It has always been plagued by bitter civil wars over conflicting ideas about sexuality and gender which lead to conflicting visions of law and social policy. If men and women are naturally and consistently different in terms of character, temperament, and moral sensibility, then the law should treat them differently, as it has through most of our history, with labor legislation that protects women, for example, or with laws preferring women in custody disputes: special protection for women, not equal rights, becomes a feminist goal. (Many feminists basically agree with Marilyn Quayle’s assertion that women don’t want to be liberated from their essential natures.) But if men and women do not conform to masculine and feminine character models, if sex is not a reliable predictor of behavior, then justice requires a sex-neutral approach to law which accommodates different people’s different characters and experiences (the approach championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg twenty years ago).

See? All the other way which. We’re the equality feminists, as opposed to the difference feminists who revel in the stereotypes.

Outside academia, debates about sex and justice are sometimes equally confused and confusing, given the political and ideological challenges of affirmative-action programs and the conflicting demands on women with both career aspirations and commitments to family life. Feminists often have to weigh the short-term benefits of protecting wage-earning mothers (by mommy-tracking, for example) against the long-term costs of a dual labor market. Sometimes ideological clarity is lost in complicated strategy debates. Sometimes ideological conflicts are put aside when feminists share a transcendent social goal, such as suffrage or reproductive choice. And sometimes one ideological strain of feminism dominates another. In the 1970s equal-rights feminism was ascendent. The 1980s saw a revival of protectionism.

Equal-rights feminism couldn’t last. It was profoundly disruptive for women as well as men. By questioning long-cherished notions about sex, it posed unsettling questions about selfhood. It challenged men and women to shape their own identities without resort to stereotypes.

But it’s a creative disruption. With all I said in the previous post about the lure of being well-adjusted – there’s also such a thing as boredom, and living in accordance with stereotypes is so farking boring. Do people really enjoy being that boring?

A quite different issue -

To the extent that there’s a debate between Paglia and the feminist movement, it’s not a particularly thoughtful one, partly because it’s occurring at second hand, in the media. There are thoughtful feminist debates being conducted in academia, but they’re not widely heard. Paglia is highly critical of feminist academics who don’t publish in the mainstream; but people have a right to choose their venues, and besides, access to the mainstream press is not easily won. Still, their relative isolation is a problem for feminist scholars who want to influence public policy. To reach a general audience they have to depend on journalists to draw upon and sometimes appropriate their work.

Well that was 1993. They don’t any more. There are ways to link academics and the public now.

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

Reading the long article on feminism by Wendy Kaminer from 1993, pointed out by hjhornbeck.

Today, three decades of feminism and one Year of the Woman later, a majority of American women agree that feminism has altered their lives for the better. In general, polls conducted over the past three years indicate strong majority support for feminist ideals. But the same polls suggest that a majority of women hesitate to associate themselves with the movement. As Karlyn Keene, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed, more than three quarters of American women support efforts to “strengthen and change women’s status in society,” yet only a minority, a third at most, identify themselves as feminists.

And that’s still true, maybe more true. Feminism is a boogey-word. Why is that?

Many feminists take comfort in these polls, inferring substantial public support for economic and political equality, and dismissing women’s wariness of the feminist label as a mere image problem (attributed to unfair media portrayals of feminists as a strident minority of frustrated women). But the polls may also adumbrate unarticulated ambivalence about feminist ideals, particularly with respect to private life. If widespread support for some measure of equality reflects the way women see, or wish to see, society, their unwillingness to identify with feminism reflects the way they see themselves, or wish to be seen by others.

To the extent that it challenges discrimination and the political exclusion of women, feminism is relatively easy for many women to embrace. It appeals to fundamental notions of fairness; it suggests that social structures must change but that individuals, particularly women, may remain the same. For many women, feminism is simply a matter of mommy-tracking, making sure that institutions accommodate women’s familial roles, which are presumed to be essentially immutable. But to the extent that feminism questions those roles and the underlying assumptions about sexuality, it requires profound individual change as well, posing an unsettling challenge that well-adjusted people instinctively avoid. Why question norms of sex and character to which you’ve more or less successfully adapted?

I think that observation about “well-adjusted people” is brilliant. I think it’s true. It takes a certain…something, a willingness to alienate oneself, a willingness to be a little bit peculiar or off-kilter or pugnacious, to be at odds with things. That doesn’t appeal to everyone. One of our biggest tasks in life is just figuring things out so that we get along, we don’t make big stupid embarrassing mistakes all the time, we’re not always wrong and clumsy. Maybe we’re all four years old at heart, helpless, lost in a sea of people, having no clue about when you’re supposed to drink your orange juice and when you’re supposed to sit down and color. We like sussing it all out and doing a good job. We like succeeding at appearing normal.

Being political and posing unsettling challenges to the most fundamental way of doing things – that’s no way to succeed at appearing normal. I think that’s one reason most people don’t want to.

And the norms of sex and character are there already, they were there before we were, and we grew up among them. They’re like water to a fish. They’re our medium, and we’re not aware of the medium as a medium. Women are like this, men are like that; it’s what we’ve always known. It’s a lot of trouble to try to re-think that, let alone to argue that it’s not optimal. Well-adjusted people don’t want to do that kind of thing, because they’re well-adjusted, and what fun would it be to throw all that away?

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

One of the inescapable tropes about feminism is that there are two kinds of feminism, the good kind and the bad kind. You know how that goes. There’s the good sensible who-could-possibly-disagree kind that’s about equal pay and maybe more daycare, and there’s the bad crazy who-could-possibly-agree kind that’s about how people actually think and talk about women. This binary gets different names depending on who’s talking. One popular pair of labels is equality feminism v gender feminism. A new one I hadn’t seen before is equal rights feminism v protectionist feminism.

Protectionist. Hmm. That’s interesting. It’s interesting because it’s so insulting – as if not wanting to be treated like shit is somehow precious and spoiled and princessy.

Anyway, I’m crowd-sourcing it. Anybody familiar with that one? Anybody know the source?

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

It’s funny how there’s Sheryl Sandberg, and there’s also Facebook. Sandberg is the COO of Facebook, and she’s a critic of sexist stereotypes, yet…Facebook is notoriously bad at doing anything about overt, vicious misogyny-mongering on Facebook. Soraya Chemaly wonders why that is.

For example, this morning, a Duracell battery ad is visible on a group page called “I kill bitches like you;” Sexy Arab Girls, “join our page for more porn videos,” was sponsored by the Wilberforce Dinner “Honoring Cardinal Timothy Dolan,” and the now-removed page, “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” populated by photos of women beaten, bruised and bleeding, was the platform for Vistaprint.

“We occasionally see people post distasteful or crude content. While it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies,” a Facebook spokesperson explained, when I asked what Facebook’s response to similar pages is.

“However, there is no place on Facebook for content that is hateful, threatening, or incites violence, and we will not tolerate material deemed to be genuinely or directly harmful.”

Ah but you do. You do tolerate it. You tolerate it all the time – while not tolerating content that is critical of religion and theocracy.

To the founders of Rapebook, a page started last fall to “tackle misogyny on Facebook by sharing and reporting pages”, content trivializing sexualized and domestic abuse is intrinsically hateful and harmful. Immediately, the page became the target of massive trolling and administrators were threatened with violent rape and death and bombarded with graphic images and porn. Posts, such as one urging people to give a donation to an anti-violence campaign at Amnesty International, generated more than 100 comments, including “fuck that. hit that hoe (sic),” and “Domestic violence is a 2 way street you hypocritical cunt.” This suggests hostility. Which might provoke anxiety. And create an environment that does not feel safe to the average woman.

The response to that is “professional victims,” “drama,” “special snowflake,” “sisterhood of the oppressed,” “they do it to drive up the blog hits” and similar.

Despite the fact that Facebook representatives may have done their best to work closely with Rapebook, the administrators closed the page after months of receiving up to 500 messages a day, including photographs of actual rapes and child pornography. Hendren’s photo was used to create rape memes. She has left Facebook. It’s important to note that people who supported Rapebook’s efforts were unwilling to publicly show their support in Facebook, for fear of similar targeting.

How is this not a loss of free speech for these users (overwhelmingly women), resulting from bullying, harassment and misogyny? The people left feeling comfortable at Facebook are rape apologists and those who create content glorifying the debasement of women.

The response to that is that it’s only the evil sisterhood of the oppressed women who leave because of misogynist harassment, and that’s fine because everybody hates them so ha.

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

Heartwarming update to the Katelyn Campbell story. Her principal threatened to call up Wellesley, where she is accepted as a student next year, to tell them what a backstabbing slut she is. After posting about it I went to find her on Twitter, and found this -

Wellesley College ‏@Wellesley19h

KatelynCampbell, #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall. http://bit.ly/13jqRet 

Ahhh. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Nicely done, Wellesley.

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

Another brave high school student stands up to religio-conservative coercion.

A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”

George Washington High School recently hosted a conservative speaker, Pam Stenzel, who travels around the country to advocate an abstinence-only approach to teen sexuality. Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire consequences for becoming sexually active. At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection.

Campbell refused to attend the assembly, which was funded by a conservative religious organization called “Believe in West Virginia” and advertised with fliers that proclaimed “God’s plan for sexual purity.” Instead, she filed a complaint with the ACLU and began to speak out about her objections to this type of school-sponsored event. Campbell called Stenzel’s presentation “slut shaming” and said that it made many students uncomfortable.

That sounds as deceptive and illegitimate as the Good News Club.

The high school senior alleges that Aulenbacher threatened to call Wellesley College, where Campbell has been accepted to study in the fall, after she spoke to the press about her objections to the assembly. According to Campbell, her principal said, “How would you feel if I called your college and told them what bad character you have and what a backstabber you are?” Campbell alleges that Aulenbacher continued to berate her in his office, eventually driving her to tears. “He threatened me and my future in order to put forth his own personal agenda and make teachers and students feel they can’t speak up because of fear of retaliation,” she said of the incident.

Because Jesus loves him.

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

Terry Glavin doesn’t approve of forced ingestion of bromides from Mr Rogers in the wake of horrible events like the Boston bombings.

The Iranians have a word for it. It’s “hambestagi.” It roughly translates as “solidarity.” It is a condition of humankind that is always present and quite ordinarily blossoms in crisis. It was everywhere in evidence Monday in Boston and well beyond.

Solidarity is a good thing. I’m very big on solidarity. The more solidarity the better, especially international solidarity.

In place of actual acts of journalism related to Monday’s barbarism, was it  really necessary for the Globe and Mail, Time Magazine, Slate and the Washington  Post to gang up on everybody with pieties out of the cardigan-wearing  Presbyterian host of a 1960s-era television babysitting service titled Mister  Rogers’ Neighbourhood?

Seriously. The Globe headline: “How to talk to kids (and especially adults)  about the Boston Marathon bombings: Try Mr. Rogers.” Time: “In the Wake of the  Boston Marathon Attacks, Mr. Rogers Quote Spreads Hope Across the Internet.” Slate: “The History of Mister Rogers’ Powerful Message.” The Washington Post: “Mr. Rogers gives hope while social media becomes virtual house of prayer for  Boston.”

No, it wasn’t necessary, but it was probably inevitable. They weren’t going to cite Arendt or Zimbardo, were they.

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