Hadley Freeman in the Guardian on the fun new trend of stealing photos of women to publish on the internet.

I think we know that the biggest fashion trend, really, for women – now and always – is no clothes at all: it’s having stolen naked photos of yourself leaked all over the internet. It’s like the story of the emperor’s new clothes all over again, if the emperor was harassed by sex pests and thieves and humiliated on an international level.

How strange it is to be a woman, in a world where everyone seems to be obsessed with what you do with your vagina: who are you letting into it, what children are you expelling from it, whether you’re trying to stop having children come out of it, who are you offering it up to. The older I get, the more I marvel at this vaginal obsession.

For example, no matter what achievements you notch up, the most important thing about you is your childbearing history. This weekend the very accomplished Rona Fairhead, former FT chief executive and now the government’s choice to be the new chair of the BBC Trust, was described namelessly in a Telegraph headline as “mother of three.”

That would never happen here in the US.

Here she would be called a “mom” of three.

It was decidedly reminiscent of that Sunday Times front page headline in April, “Grandmother, 71, tackles slave traffickers for the Pope”, sparking condescending mental images of a sweet little ol’ granny pummelling evil-doers with her cane. In fact this “grandmother, 71” was Margaret Archer, distinguished sociologist and the most senior woman in the Vatican. Surely, you might think, the headline should have read “Grandmother, 71, tackles slave traffickers, for childless old man, 77.” You might think that, but you would be wrong, because the Pope is a man, and therefore more than the sum of his age and his childbearing history.

It’s relentless, that kind of thing. “Grandmother robbed / killed / given the Nobel Peace Prize” – as if “grandmother” actually told you something, and as if it were deeply weird for a “grandmother” to do anything at all, even be murdered – as if women all seal themselves into boxes the instant their first grandchild pops out.

The only time naked photos of men get leaked onto the internet is when they ham-fistedly leak them themselves, as happens with various priapic male politicians like Anthony Weiner, and the general response is laughter and mockery. With women, that leaking happens when others steal the images from their phones, and the response here is darker, sexual, triumphal. Neither response is good, but the one in regards to women is definitely more threatening.There is no difference between the leaking of stolen naked photos from a female celebrity’s phone and so-called “revenge porn”, when a man leaks photos of an ex-partner. It’s a means of exuding power over someone who thought they were, if not powerful, at least independent. This narrative is now so well known that even Richard Curtis can see how pathetic it is, as proven by the plotline in Notting Hill, when naked photos of Julia Roberts’ character are leaked to the tabloids. And this is Richard Curtis, the man who also wrote some of the most reductive portrayals of women in film of all time in his following film, Love Actually.

Right? God that movie is shit. Remember the bit where Hugh Grant – oh ugh I can’t even type it. [shudder]

There will always be saddo hackers out there and there will, for some reason, always be people out there who marvel that famous women have naked bodies, just like everyone else. But when I am queen of the world, I will make it the law that every time a naked photo of a woman is leaked onto the internet, I will project into the sky an image of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (look it up, it’s amazing.) Because that’s all you’re looking at people: bodies, with biological functions. Jesus, grow up, world.

I wish.

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

The Mirror has an appropriately angry piece about how women can avoid what happened to Jennifer Lawrence. (It’s by someone who goes by “Fleet Street Fox”…)

A total of 101 female celebrities are thought to have been targeted by someone who hacked the Apple photo storage service iCloud and published them in return for money.

In an extra layer of creepy weirdness, actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead said the photos taken with her husband years earlier had been deleted – so iCloud had kept a copy, and the hacker had to hunt for it.

There are no leaked photos of naked male celebrities.

It’s more fun to do it to people who won’t enjoy it, FSF says.

So here’s what you should do: don’t be like Jennifer Lawrence. Tell your daughters, FSF says.

Tell them not to be beautiful, because then it’s inevitable that strangers will think of you as nothing but a meatsack.

Tell them not to be intelligent. Maths, sciences, arts, humanities – being clever is useless if you’re still female underneath.

Tell your daughters there is no point in being an Oscar winner. To achieve success in your chosen trade or profession, and to be recognised for it, cannot cure the disability of your sex.

Just ask Rona Fairhead, the new chairman of the BBC Trust. A man nominated for the job would have his qualifications discussed; but the headlines about Rona have concentrated on her gender, because a womb cancels out achievement.

(A woman at the BBC! Imagine!)

Don’t do anything someone else might not like. Anything.

Tell them not to be athletes, or their bodies will be derided by men. Tell them not to be actresses, ballet dancers or models, or their bodies will be derided by men. Tell them not to walk down the street, or their bodies will be derided by men.

Tell them not to work, not to try, and not to hope that they will only ever meet those men who treat them better than that.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful, moral, bright, pleasant or useful you are. If you are female, you will have trouble every day of your life.

Have a nice day.

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

Helen Ukpabio is suing the British Humanist Association and the Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network for £500,000,000.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) and Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network (WHRIN) are being sued by the wealthy evangelical preacher and ‘witch hunter’ Helen Ukpabio who has dubbed herself a ‘Lady Apostle’. Mrs Ukpabio claims to have expertise in identifying children and adults who are possessed with witchcraft spirits and in how they can be ‘delivered’ from those spirits. Her lawyers have informed the BHA and WHRIN that she is launching a legal case against them due to their criticism of her teachings and methods.

Claiming to be a former witch herself, the Nigerian founder of the Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries has been accused of exploiting superstitious beliefs around demonic possession, which can and often does result in the endangering of vulnerable children. The BHA has called for Ukpabio and others like her to be banned from coming to the UK on the grounds that they are a threat to child welfare and their practices are not conducive to the public good.

It’s a SLAPP suit.

Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, commented, ‘Given her baseless identification of features of “possessed children” and her dangerous and irresponsible teachings we feel a strong moral duty to point this out and will not be deflected by libel suits from wealthy “witch-finders”.

‘The fact that she is threatening to launch a legal claim for half a billion pounds over an alleged distinction between being accused of exorcising “Satan” or “Vampires” tells you all you need to know about Mrs Ukpabio. Threats of legal action like this are blatant attempts to silence critics of the harms done by these religious and superstitious beliefs and rituals. Rather than entertaining her vexatious claims in the courts, we believe the UK should be ensuring that Mrs Ukpabio and her ilk are denied entry to our country to protect children from their degrading practices.’

Gary Foxcroft, Executive Director of WHRIN, commented, ‘This court case is the latest in a long line of unsuccessful legal actions that Helen Ukpabio has pursued against me and other human rights activists. Previous cases were thrown out of court in Nigeria but this time she is looking to take action in a UK court. I have no doubt that a judge in the UK will reach the same conclusion as those in Nigeria. Of course, the real question here is whether our Government should allow hate preachers such as Helen Ukpabio to enter the UK. Since her teachings have been scrutinised by the UN and various other bodies it would appear that this may not be in the public interest. This case also therefore provides the Home Secretary and the National Working Group to Tackle Child Abuse linked to Faith and Belief with a great opportunity to condemn the practices of such pastors, take concrete action and ensure that justice is served.’

Let’s hope the suit is thrown out quickly, before the BHA and WHRIN have to spend a ton of money defending against it.

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

Well this is huge.

In a ruling that advocates described as a historic victory for Central American refugees, a federal immigration board said Tuesday that a married woman fleeing domestic violence in Guatemala, where authorities could not or would not protect her, can seek political asylum in the United States.

A woman who has been brutally beaten by her husband, who tried to prevent her from leaving, has suffered “harm rising to the level of persecution,” said the Board of Immigration Appeals, which oversees the Justice Department‘s immigration courts.

Observing that Guatemala “has a culture of machismo and family violence,” the board said a married woman there who flees an abusive relationship can be considered a member of a “particular social group” – a crucial qualification for asylum eligibility.

Huge.

Monday’s case, from an unidentified Midwestern state, involved a mother and three children who entered the United States in 2005. The immigration board said the woman’s husband beat her weekly, burned her with paint thinner and raped her. Police told her they would not interfere in a marital relationship, and her husband then threatened to kill her if she contacted authorities again, the board said.

After she and her children applied for asylum, an immigration judge ruled she had been the victim of criminal acts, not persecution. But the board said a woman’s inability to leave a violent marriage, or get help from her government, can be evidence of persecution that is grounds for asylum.

The board ordered the immigration judge to review the case and determine whether the woman would face renewed persecution if deported to Guatemala. If so, she and her children would be eligible for asylum.

Well unless her husband has gone to join the choir invisible, it seems a pretty safe bet she would be.

Another win for Emma Lazarus.

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

Another nice thing – a bunch of women have had naked pictures of themselves stolen and posted online. Punishing women for existing just never gets old, does it.

A hacker has reportedly obtained nude photos of a slew of female celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence.

The anonymous source, according to The Hollywood Gossip, has 60 images of the 24-year-old The Hunger Games star in various states of undress and has posted them on an online bulletin board. The photos of Lawrence, some of which are topless, have since appeared on photo sharing site Imgur.

Because obviously women have no right to be left alone, because they’re women – they’re public property.

Reports in the US suggest the phones and computers of celebrities were hacked over the weekend as a form of extortion as the photos are available for sale in exchange for Bitcoins.

Authorities have been cracking down on hacking and phone tapping, especially in Hollywood. A man in Florida was arrested recently after he released nude images of Scarlett Johannson and Mila Kunis after hacking a number of celebrity email accounts for more than a year.

International Business Times seems to think it’s the women in the photos who did something wrong, not the hackers who stole them and made them public. Wtf? How could it possibly be the women in the photos who did a bad thing?! If they were photos of women murdering people, then yes, but being naked?

It’s not the first time Justice has fallen victim to a nude photo scandal. Semi-nude pictures of the star were leaked in April 2013 and she issued a statement, saying stealing and hacking is “not cool.”

“Hacking & stealing is NOT COOL. #RespectPeoplesPersonalProperty #Karma,” the “Victorious” star tweeted after the risqué images were released in 2013.

Scandal-risqué nothing. Mind your own business. The scandal is that some bullying thief stole the pictures.

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

I’m reading a piece by Paul Bloom in the Boston Review arguing that empathy is a bad thing. I say it in the present tense because I haven’t finished yet; I stopped to argue with something he said, before finishing the whole thing, because I feel like it. If I were reading it offline I would do the same thing in a notebook. (So it will probably turn out that he answers the question, but I want to say anyway.)

Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.

As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction.

No I don’t think so; I think without empathy we don’t care for the one death or the hundred deaths; we don’t care about any. Empathy is the building block for caring about any. It’s not enough by itself; you do need more; but if you have zero you just don’t give a rat’s ass. You extrapolate from close up and personal empathy to a kind of (admittedly attenuated) empathy for the distant millions.

Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences.

That’s just not very convincing. The future benefits aren’t really abstract; they are about the suffering or rescue from suffering of future people. Remember those videos about pertussis? Remember watching that poor infant gasping and choking for breath? Made us all feel super-passionate about vaccination, didn’t it? Because without it you risk people gasping and choking. A whole bunch of people who had had a bout with pertussis told their stories of it right here. And I think a rethink of humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system that’s completely stripped of empathy would be a dud of a rethink. Here in the US we’ve already got a criminal justice system that’s damn short on empathy, and it’s a fucking disgrace.

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

Uh oh.

Source

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

Will Self says Orwell was a talented mediocrity.

The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we’ve had many political leaders, we’ve got by with just a single Supreme Mediocrity – George Orwell.

I don’t doubt characterising Orwell as a talented mediocrity will put noses out of joint. Not Orwell, surely! Orwell the tireless campaigner for social justice and economic equality; Orwell the prophetic voice, crying out in the wartime wilderness against the dangers of totalitarianism and the rise of the surveillance state; Orwell, who nobly took up arms in the cause of Spanish democracy, then, equally nobly, exposed the cause’s subversion by Soviet realpolitik; Orwell, who lived in saintly penury and preached the solid virtues of homespun Englishness; Orwell, who died prematurely, his last gift to the people he so admired being a list of suspected Soviet agents he sent to MI5.

Orwell who wrote decent, readable, but far from brilliant prose. Yes, that Orwell.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Orwell’s writing as much as the next talented mediocrity. I’ve read the great bulk of his output – at least that which originally appeared in hard covers, and some of his books I’ve read many times over – in particular The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, the long pieces of quasi-reportage that made his name in the 1930s.

Same here, but I have also realized that his writing is not as good as I used to think it.

As for the essays, they can be returned to again and again, if not for their substance alone, certainly for their unadorned Anglo-Saxon style.

It’s this prose style that has made Orwell the Supreme Mediocrity – and like all long-lasting leaders, he has an ideology to justify his rule. Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language, is frequently cited as a manifesto of plainspoken common sense – a principled assault upon all the jargon, obfuscation, and pretentiously Frenchified folderol that deforms our noble tongue. Orwell – it’s said by these disciples – established once and for all in this essay that anything worth saying in English can be set down with perfect clarity such that it’s comprehensible to all averagely intelligent English readers.

And that’s bullshit. It’s not true. Much of what he says in “Politics and the English Language” is not true, and is anti-intellectual and anti-a good many other things that matter.

The Beeb helpfully provides Orwell’s List O’Rules, so that we can see how wrong some of them are.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Two, three and five in particular are terrible “rules” – and he didn’t even obey them himself. (Never use a long word where a short one will do? You’ve got to be kidding. A short one will always “do”; but good writers want words that more than just “do”.)

Those are ok rules for a newspaper that wants the largest possible audience and thus wants to be very careful that might be over the heads of some of the potential audience, but for anyone else, they’re instructions on how to be dull.

I said some of this back in 2005 on the ur-B&W.

I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of commonplace thought in it. Phrases like ‘dirty little scoundrel’ come to mind.

But when Harry at Crooked Timber did a post about Fascinating Hitchens in which he quoted Norm quoting me there was a lot of disagreement (along with some agreement) with my relative estimation of the two – which is why I got Orwell off the shelf to check my impression again. And – I still agree with myself. He’s good, he’s interesting, he’s definitely worth reading, but he is not a great writer or stylist or thinker. He’s not as good as Dwight Macdonald, for instance.

That’s just a flat assertion, obviously. It would take extensive quotation to make my case – because he is good, so I can’t just quote a terrible sentence and leave it at that. But if you read a good chunk of him, the flatness and uninspiredness become increasingly noticeable.

I don’t like flatness in writing. “Politics and the English Language” gets way too close to telling people to write flatly.

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

The BBC News Magazine has a longish piece by Shaimaa Khalil about not wearing hijab then wearing it then not wearing it and now wearing it again – in which, bizarrely, she never mentions the actual (and obvious) gender politics of it. It’s just a religious requirement or duty that she either accepts or doesn’t accept, but the content of the requirement/duty is left out.

She talks about photos from the 50s and 60s that speak volumes about social change in Egypt.

There they are in short-sleeved dresses, impeccably cinched at the waist. The dresses of some of the younger ones actually stopped well above the knee. And the hair!

The beautiful and complicated hairdos that my aunties and their friends pulled off just to go shopping or to their universities looked like something out of a vintage glamour magazine.

But times change. In the 1980s and 90s the strict Wahhabi version of Islam was arriving in Egypt – brought back by the millions of Egyptians who’d gone to work in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Political Islamic movements were gaining ground too, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood. Soon all the adult women in my family were wearing the headscarf or the hijab.

She says it’s a long and complicated debate, whether or not hijab is “an Islamic obligation for women” – but she doesn’t ask why it should be an obligation for women alone.

I didn’t start wearing the headscarf until I was in my 20s – and I wasn’t forced to do it – despite several years of pressure from my mother.

“What are you waiting for?” she’d ask. “What if something happens to you? Will you meet God looking like this?” she would say, pointing at my trousers or T-shirt.

Sometimes I would nod, smile and walk away. On other occasions I’d fight and argue.

But deep down it was becoming ingrained in me that wearing the headscarf was the right thing to do. So, towards, the end of 2002 I decided it was finally time to “do the right thing”.

But why? “The right thing” how, and for what reasons? Why was it becoming ingrained deep down? What was the substance of those arguments? Why resist, then why give in?

She doesn’t say. She started wearing it; she moved to London and worked for the BBC.

Then, last year, I went through a very personal and private journey of questioning many things about my religion: about practice and belief, what was I doing out of conviction and what out of habit?

How much of my faith did I want to exhibit? Would I, I asked finally and crucially, be any less Muslim if I took off the headscarf?

The final answer was no.

So, after months of indecision, the day came when I’d decided to remove it. It took me hours to get dressed and when the time came when I’d normally put the headscarf on, I just didn’t.

But why? Why didn’t she? She doesn’t say. The whole thing is weirdly emptied of content and discussed solely as an external.

Now she’s going to Pakistan as the BBC’s correspondent there, so she’ll have to wear it again. But since we don’t know why she cares either way, the irony doesn’t amount to much.

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

I love this Jesus and Mo:

Author’s caption:

I’m a cultural imperialist. I believe in universal human rights.

Mo perches his steaming hot tea on the arm of the couch. Risky.

Author’s Patreon is here.

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

Oh looky here, what do you know – Phil “Thunderf00t” Mason who thinks Anita Sarkeesian is lying about getting threats for the sake of “PR” – that Phil Mason posting in October 2011 about threats he gets.

October 8 for instance.

So here I am at the Texas Freethought convention, where I’ve met for the first time Matt Dillahunty from the Atheist Experience, and been having a great time with folks such as Aronra (also met in person for the first time) and many others when I get email from the infamous ‘crying muslim’ (dawahfilms).  He STILL seems to be operating under the delusion that universities base their hiring and firing policies based on how much a v. whiney pussy complains about how someone explained to him that his religion made him both behave like an ass, and why his religion was evidently stupid.  The baffling thing is he seems to think that I will be intimidated by his delusions.

And October 11.

YES Dawahfilms, giving away my docs to people who ask is doc dropping, and you were doing this, not only to me, but to at least one other member of my family.  What’s even more pathetic is that EVEN NOW, after you have been caught, dropping my docs, you insist on trying to use weasel words to try and define your way out of this.  Not just in your latest video (thunderfoot, lies vs truth), where you state:

“none of my VIDEOS doc dropped” -Dawahfilms

but in the email you wrote to me:

 Im also pissed still at your “Dawahfilms doc dropped me” accusation, which is bullshit. You know as well as I do this info has been around for awhile. The fact that you had to pin it on me is nonsense.  -Dawahfilms

I mean really, you expect to be this comically frugal with the truth to my face and expect me not to notice IMMEDIATELY?  All that ‘belief in god’ had addled your brain with unrealistic wishful thinking.

And October 17.

Recently I wrote a blog post highlighting the wonderful irony of dawahfilms, the notorious moderate ‘death threating/ I hunt you down and destroy your career’ Muslim claiming that everyone should be held accountable for their youtube activity.  Ironically, this man who claims that he wants to be a future public educator is also advising people to kill themselves.

Lots of screen shots.

Clearly I was not alone as evidently many others could not distinguish these options.  So I propose ‘Dawahs Law’.  When an individual is such a professional jerk, that it is impossible to distinguish them from a troll pretending to be an utter jerk merely by what they say.  Dawahs Law, the professional jerks answer to the Poe!

He talked about his threats; why is Sarkeesian supposed to shut up about hers?

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

Here’s a terrible thing you can look at.

It’s a compilation of bits from training videos by The Good News Club, so you can see what absurd frightening wrong things they tell children…on school property.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_isr_G8kJRU

?list=UUiVyaC3sQ1puw3Qj9Ccx2xw

The first one quotes Romans saying there is no one who is right with god, no not one. The instructor says no one is right with god because sin. What is sin? It’s anything you think, say, or do that does not please god. She says it twice, to make sure it sticks and frightens the children. Then she lists some of those things – disobeying your parents or teachers, lying so you don’t get caught, or taking something that doesn’t belong to you, are all things that do not please god.

You know what she doesn’t say? How she knows. How does she know disobeying the teacher does not please god? Hey what if the teacher tells the child to disobey her parents? What pleases god then?

Then she says god say sin must be punished. The punishment (breathlessly) is to be separated from god.

Sounds good to me!

It’s basic fundy bullshit, the small fraction I’ve been able to make myself watch so far. Just mindless rule-reciting and pretending it all comes from god and that the people saying this actually know it when they don’t know it at all. But it’s an outrage that they’re shoving it at children. (And much of the material, I know from Katherine Stewart, is much worse than this.)

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

A friend of Simon Davis’s commented on a Facebook post of his in Greek.

Ουφ, με τρόμαξες

Bing offered to translate and for once I accepted the offer.

Ouf, with tromaxes.

That’s my new favorite swear. Do admit.

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

Originally a comment by Brony on We’re adept at masking inconsistencies from ourselves.

percepts [the object of perception]

That word. Percept and its related concepts have been invaluable to me in getting an understanding of how brains and minds unify with respect to human behavior. When I consider that word a whirlwind of brain anatomy, journal articles, psychology and sociology stream through my thoughts. It’s so relevant to unifying how emotion, reason, logic, what is in perception, and resulting system one and two responses operate in a functional, real-world sense. The picture is not complete but so many useful pieces are already there.

The precept is the world that exists in your perception. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, position of your parts relative to each other and objects, direction of motion and gravity. All of those break down into a fascinating array of sensors that are combined in a hierarchical assembly of what you experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_receptor

I wish could easily, and conveniently describe how all of that functionally assembles reality here, but the resulting picture and how it works functionally is another matter. In this picture once you assemble an image and identify components, you start classifying and ordering pieces based on emotional tags attached to previous percepts due to past experience. Think about the emotional resonance of a swastika, a recognized logical fallacy, a “dog whistle” like the word feminism that means totally different things to different people, or a kitten.

Once you have assigned meaning to what you perceive, you prioritize what should do based on the content (in positive/negative, or good/bad terms. sometimes neutral terms). What you interact with first or interact with at all, how you choose to implicitly and explicitly portray what you see to yourself and others, what perspective you choose to apply, whether how or what you choose to attack defend or obfuscate about, or if you choose to neutrally understand and reason.

Reason and logic are like “apps” here. They are learned analysis tools that are compatible with the learning machinery that are applied by implicit or explicit choices and those choices are driven by emotional signatures like the puffs of gas from a spaceship’s maneuvering thrusters. They are targeting systems (I wish I remember who made that analogy). The emotion drives you down paths of actions and the amount self-awareness that you have about the whole process is a learned thing as well. We do not tend to choose to use logical fallacies (I leave room for people that do for dishonest usefulness), we are driven to use them because they work in a social sense based on past experience and like a martial artist learning a form, one has to gain an awareness of the forms of “primate chess” that drive social interaction like we see in sociopolitical conflicts.

Here is where our routines create the inconsistencies that blind us to how we treat others differently for social convenience. It’s unconscious strategy on a group level. We don’t do it on purpose, but neither do we just “do it” in a way that removes personal responsibility. One reasons many are resistant to accepting knowledge is because it ALWAYS comes with a price. One you know what you are doing you are responsible in a way that can be stark and unpleasant. Catharsis sucks, but driving another to one has it’s uses.

The logic of the system is a reality that can be used for wonderful or terrible purposes. But make no mistake we are all using it or letting it use us. However greater understanding of it can make a person an angel or a demon, so don’t think that the moral and ethical worries will all disappear with self-awareness. There are many paths to psychopathy, and empathy.

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

Dave Futrelle is getting death threats for blogging about the death threats sent to Anita Sarkeesian. Meta-death threats. Second order death threats. Death threats to punish exposure of death threats.

And if this is what my inbox looks like for merely writing about Sarkeesian, I can only imagine what her inbox looks like. I suspect she gets threats like these all the time; the reason she called the police about several of the threats she got this week is that the threateners posted her personal information as well.

But, according to some observers, it’s your own fault, and her own fault. You should both shut up about them, because.

thunderf00t ‏@thunderf00t Aug 29
the first advice the FBI gave me (which I knew already) is never respond to real death threats. @femfreq goes straight to twitter and blogs!

D.J. Grothe ‏@DJGrothe Aug 29
@thunderf00t Just like Watson. I certainly have never publicized death threats I’ve received over the years, tho it may have gotten me PR.

@thunderf00t A “Page-o-Hate” is smart marketing, good business. But bad if you want less hate (“don’t feed the trolls,” etc.).

That’s impressive, isn’t it? Phil Mason thinks Sarkeesian should keep her threats a secret – and he insinuates that they’re not “real.”

That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it. No threats are “real” until they’re carried out. But guess what – nobody knows ahead of time which ones are going to be carried out and which ones aren’t. It’s really not up to random onlookers to say “oh that’s not a real threat” about threats that are sent to other people.

But Grothe’s contribution is even more disgusting, if only because Phil Mason, fortunately, is not the head of a big skeptics’ organization, while Grothe is. It’s not becoming for Grothe to belittle threats sent to Rebecca Watson. It’s even less becoming for him to say she does it as a marketing ploy.

But hey, maybe the threats are real. Or maybe not. Who knows, who knows.

thunderf00t ‏@thunderf00t Aug 29
@DJGrothe IF they were credible threats I would have told no one but FBI. Else u just undermine any possible investigation. I think its PR!

D.J. Grothe ‏@DJGrothe Aug 29
@thunderf00t Maybe so, who knows. With things like that, I say just err on the side of caution: report to authorities, full stop.

“Maybe so, who knows.”

Nice.

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

Is morality not morality at all but just in-group solidarity? Peter DeScioli suggests it is.

Developmental evidence shows that children are nice to people before acquiring adult-like moral judgment. Moreover, when children develop moral judgment, it does not prevent them from taking actions they judge wrong such as lying or stealing. In adults, research shows that moral judgments differ from and can even oppose altruistic motives. Research on hypocrisy shows that people are mostly motivated to appear moral rather than to actually abide by their moral judgments.

Altruism can be in tension with morality – or at least with “morality”: reputation and appearance, as opposed to the real thing. Yes, that makes sense.

Here is a distinctive human problem that just might explain our distinctive moral condemnation: Humans, more than any other species, support each other in fights, whether fistfights, yelling matches, or gossip campaigns. In most animal species, fights are mano-a-mano or between fixed groups. Humans, however, face complicated conflicts in which bystanders are pressured to choose sides in other people’s fights, and it’s unclear who will take which side. Think about the intrigues of family feuds, office politics, or international relations.

Yes, because human social arrangements are so complicated.

For moral side-taking to work, the group needs to invent and debate moral rules to cover the most common fights—rules about violence, sex, resources, etc. Humans are quite motivated to do just this. Once moral rules are established, people can use accusations of wrongdoing as coercive threats to turn the group, including your family and friends, against you.

The side-taking hypothesis fits many otherwise puzzling observations from the laboratory and the world around us. For one thing, it explains why people sometimes oppose their own family or friends if they act immorally. Of course, people are not always impartial because they must weigh the value of their relationships against the costs of opposing other bystanders. Morality makes us betray friends and family when their (alleged) wrongdoing causes us too much trouble.

Hmm. Interesting, but perhaps more interesting than convincing. Of course, I haven’t seen the relevant research…

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

Some people on Fox News – to be more precise, four women and one man on Fox News – have a conversation about catcalling women in the street. Olivia Kittel at Media Matters comments.

On the August 28 edition of Fox News’ Outnumbered, hosts highlighted a New York Post opinion article that suggested women “deal with” “flattering” catcalls. Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle defended street harassment saying, “let men be men,” and, “look, men are going to be that way. What can you do?”

She summed up with:

They mean it in a nice way, I think, like they find you attractive or they want to pay a compliment.

Which is a stupid and irresponsible thing to say. Some do, maybe, and up to a point, but not all do. You know how we know that? Because many get hostile if the women react in ways they don’t like.

But after that the one man took over, and did far more talking than any of the women had, until I got irritated and stopped watching at 2:40. But how classic is that?

Guest host and Fox contributor Arthur Aidala reenacted his personal signature “move” – aiming a slow round of applause at women on the street, which one host said she’d find flattering.

He said his slow clap – which he stood up to perform, standing over all the women, just in case we’d gotten confused somewhere along the way – gets him “a 90% success rate” – he gets a smile. Really? It looks incredibly creepy, to me. But he’s confident that he would just love the same treatment. He said “I don’t know about the ladies but” – he gets up in the morning and tries to dress nicely, he’d love it if more people would let him know. Really? Strangers in the street? I don’t believe that for a second. He’d be repulsed and outraged if men did it, and if women did it he would assume they were hookers – that’s what I think.

Strangers squawking at you in the street just isn’t that much fun. The Fox women actually mostly did admit that to some extent along with minimizing it or dismissing it or saying they’d gotten used to it.

Yes, we can get more or less used to various things, some of us more easily than others. That doesn’t mean the things we get used to are fine. We get to expect better treatment even if we are accustomed to shitty treatment.

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

Al Jazeera reports there has been a surge in beheadings in Saudi Arabia in August.

At least 19 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia this month for offences including drug smuggling and sorcery, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The dead include four Saudi men executed in Najran province on Monday for smuggling hashish, and two foreigners - a Syrian and a Pakistani, accused of the same crime.

Authorities beheaded Saudi national, Mohammed bin Bakr al-Alawi, on August 5 for allegedly practicing sorcery, the Saudi Gazette reported.

That’s a lot of beheading, for one trivial crime and one nothing. Saudi Arabia is even worse than Texas.

On Wednesday, Saudi authorities executed a Pakistani national for the murder of an Afghan man, the AFP news agency reported.

At least 34 people have been put to death in the country in 2014, including the 19 people killed in August.

Amnesty International denounced what it called a “disturbing surge” and called on the Saudi government to immediately halt all executions.

“Any execution is appalling, but executions for crimes such as drug smuggling or sorcery that result in no loss of life are particularly egregious,” said HRW’s Sarah Leah Watson.

And yet Saudi Arabia is an “ally” of both the US and the UK. I hate realpolitik.

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

In pleasanter news than most of what I’ve shared today, Rebecca Goldstein talks to The Humanist about Plato at the Googleplex.

The Humanist: Can you say more about how philosophy benefits humanity?

Goldstein: We’re adept at masking inconsistencies from ourselves, most especially moral inconsistencies, since they make it easier for us to act in ways that we want to. At its best, philosophy exposes presumptions that we’re not aware we harbor—presumptions that nonetheless influence our judgments and actions. It examines whether these presumptions are justifiable and consistent with other beliefs and attitudes we’ve committed ourselves to.

The Humanist: Unmasking moral inconsistencies: this is where your notion of “mattering” comes in, correct?

Goldstein: Yes. At the heart of our moral inconsistencies lie attitudes and judgments about mattering: about what matters and, even more importantly, about who matters. We are unthinkingly committed to our own lives mattering, as well as the lives of those we care about. But the egoistic privileging of “me” and the tribal privileging of “us” both lead to moral incoherence. The very notion of a person entails certain facts about mattering. Philosophy, in insisting that attitudes and beliefs be grounded, forces the recognition that any reason I can give for why I must be treated as mattering is also a reason others can give for why they must be treated as mattering. The facts about mattering apply not just to me but also to you, not just to us but also to them, not just to affluent, straight, white, adult males but also to women, children, the poor, the enslaved, the colonized, the imprisoned, the LGBT community, and so on.

I love that.

And then they get to that thing I’ve been harping on lately – the fact that we need feeling as well as reason to discuss issues in moral philosophy properly. It’s not just logic; it’s not just facts. You need both feeling and reason; both reason and feeling.

The Humanist: So philosophy imparts a kind of impartiality. But reasoning, identifying inconsistencies, revising our judgments—how does any of this touch our moral sensibilities? Aren’t our attitudes and behaviors driven by feeling rather than thinking? Both the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the contemporary psychologist Jonathan Haidt have argued that reason does little to moralize us.

Goldstein: What Hume said is that reason in itself is perfectly inert; and he was right. Without such moral emotions as empathy, sympathy, indignation, and outrage, reason couldn’t gain any purchase on us. But that doesn’t mean reason is irrelevant. This isn’t an either/or situation. Here’s an analogy: Kant famously said that concepts without percepts [the object of perception] are empty, and percepts without concepts are blind. Adapting the adage, I’d say moral reasoning without moral emotions are empty, and moral emotions without moral reasoning are blind. Moral emotions can’t make progress on their own. They aren’t self-correcting. The mere fact of moral progress reveals the hidden hand of reason. A view like Haidt’s denies the possibility of progress; it collapses into a relativism inconsistent with humanism.

Indeed, which is what I’ve always objected to about Haidt. He feels sympathy with the men in the front room eating with him, and he forgets about the women in the back.

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

Ruzwana Bashir is upset about the media focus on the abuse of white girls while under-reporting the abuse of Asian girls by Asian adult men. She shares her story in hopes of tearing down the wall of silence and encouraging others to do the same.

She was abused by a neighbor in Skipton at the age of 10; she felt too much shame to say anything. Years later she went back to testify against him.

When I first told my mother about the abuse I’d suffered, she was absolutely devastated. The root of her anger was clear: I was heaping unbound shame on to my family by trying to bring the perpetrator to justice. In trying to stop him from exploiting more children, I was ensuring my parents and my siblings would be ostracised. She begged me not to go to the police station.

How appalling is that? The shame would have been on them, so she should have kept quiet and let him go on abusing other children.

If I’d still been living in Skipton, surrounded by a community who would either blame me for the abuse or label me a liar, I’m not sure I could have rejected her demands.

Once the police began the investigation another victim came forward. Sohail described how he too had been abused almost 20 years before I was. Due to our combined testimony, the perpetrator was jailed for eight years.

So that’s some children who had time to grow up in his absence, free of abuse.

Within a few weeks another young woman in the community, emboldened by the conviction, told the police that a relative had raped her for several years. It had started before Sara was in her teens. We have supported her through the process of taking this to court.

Although Sohail and I had removed a proven paedophile from the community and helped empower another woman to end her torture, we were not celebrated. On the contrary, we were shunned.

She found out that some people had known about the neighbor all along, and done nothing. His many victims had refused to testify against him.

Much has been made about the religious background of the offenders in the Rotherham report. But this problem isn’t about religion race: it’s about a culture where notions of shame result in the blaming of victims rather than perpetrators.

Although painful to read, the Rotherham report presents an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for leaders in the British-Pakistani community to stand up and speak out about the sexual and physical abuse in their midst. The Asian community isn’t unique in having evil-doers, and the overwhelming majority of its men and women are good people who care about protecting others.

I am and always will be proud of my Pakistani heritage, but I firmly believe community leaders must take responsibility for the fact that the taboos that prevent others from identifying perpetrators and supporting victims enable further abuse. And those taboos must be challenged.

She has suggestions of things that need doing in the future.

The biggest risk of this terrible situation is that once the shock of this report dissipates, it will get swept under the rug, just like three previous reports in Rotherham. We cannot let that happen. We don’t need any further reports: we need system-wide change in the way we approach fighting sexual abuse against children of all backgrounds. This is not a problem in Rotherham or a problem in Oxford or a problem in Rochdale. This is a problem in the United Kingdom. And we need to tackle it together.

Tackle means tackle, not bury.

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