Via Stewart, a fantastic (in both senses) video “inspired by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Richard Dawkins.” It needs to go viral.

“Not to ask questions is to live life asleep.”

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

At least people are making a stink about the “work programme” that makes people travel for four hours in the middle of the night then throws them out at 3 a.m. to stand waiting for 20 minutes and then be ordered to sleep under London Bridge, in order to wake up refreshed a few hours later, change their clothes outside in public, then work for 14 hours in pouring rain with no toilet access, and then take the tube to camp out in a swamp in Essex. No food provided. Oh and for all this? No pay, either. I know you already know, but it’s worth reciting it all over again. Such a deal. Bus, night, sleep outside, dress outside, work double shift, no toilets, no food, tube to Essex, camp in swamp, no pay.

Ministers are being urged to look into reports that unemployed people hired as unpaid stewards for the Diamond Jubilee ended up having to sleep outside.

Volunteers from the government’s work programme spent part of the night under London Bridge before Sunday’s Thames pageant, the Guardian said.

Is “volunteers” the right word? It doesn’t sound like the right word, given the part about “if you refuse this gig you don’t get the Olympics gig, which actually pays a wage.”

In a statement, managing director Molly Prince offered her “sincere apologies”, but accused the newspaper of trying “to sensationalise an unfortunate logistics planning problem”.

Again – I would like to know how much time Molly Prince has spent lying down under a bridge at 4 a.m. to prepare for working a double shift in the rain with no food or toilet access or pay.

She added: “There was no intention to exploit anyone or indeed supply cheap labour.”

No? What was the intention then? Since the labour was not paid at all, what else could one call it, and what else could the intention possibly be?

But Lord Prescott has written to Home Secretary Theresa May calling on her to urgently investigate what happened.

“If the allegations are true, it is totally unacceptable that young unemployed people were bussed in to London from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth and forced to sleep out in the cold overnight before stewarding a major event with no payment,” he wrote.

“I am deeply concerned that a private security firm is not only providing policing on the cheap but failing to show a duty of care to its staff and threatening to withdraw an opportunity to work at the Olympics as a means to coerce them to work unpaid.”

Quite so. Not “volunteers” and not so much “cheap labour” as free labour.

Close Protection said the unpaid roles were a trial for paid positions at the 2012 Games, for which it also has a contract to provide stewarding.

That’s fascinating; since when is that legal? Since when do companies get to demand that people do a job unpaid as “a trial” before doing it for real?

Oh no wait, I know, these were “internships.” Yeah that’s it – these lucky young people had “internships” being stewards for Big Events in London. That puts the whole thing in a completely new light.

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

Adam Lee asks a question.

All these data points show that, while there’s no necessary connection between atheism and progressive political views, in practice it usually does work out that way. I leave it up to you, readers, to weigh in on why that is.

That’s an interesting question, and one that I think about sometimes. Maybe I should make that my talk at TAM. Or maybe I should make my talk at TAM be about sexism in the skeptic/secularist/atheist community. Or is there something even more guaranteed to be annoying that I could talk about? Locker rooms, gossip, naming names, evidence, slut-blaming, feminist-blaming, women-blaming, the economy and its relationship to registration for skeptic cons?

It’s between talking about the most guaranteed to be annoying thing I can think of, and just not going. I can’t make up my mind. Given that the head of the organization that invited me has recently gone out of his way to make me feel (to use the technical language) “unwelcome,” it has to be one of those.

Here’s what I think is one answer to Adam’s question: atheism is the rejection of god, and god stands for hierarchy and obedience. Atheism is inherently opposed to arbitrary hierarchy and demands for obedience. That by itself makes atheism tend progressive.

You can say “but libertarianism.” True. But then libertarianism is partly progressive.

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

Check your wallets, by which I mean various rights and freedoms and capabilities. North Dakota might pass an amendment to its constitution called the Religious Liberty Restoration amendment, and you know what that means. Religious liberty to deny children medical treatment, to hit them with sticks, to say that HoMoSeckShuals are evil, to refuse to provide women with abortions or contraception even when that is your job, to teach children that genocide is good and total obedience to “God” meaning to whatever is in the bible is mandatory. It means a lot of horrible fundamentalist shit dressed up as Religious Liberty and allowed to proceed, no matter how illegal it would be in any other context.

…opponents argue the measure is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous — and could raise new ways for people to define their own extreme religious views.

Gladys Cairns, the former administrator of North Dakota Child Protective Services, says she worries that criminals will hide behind a religious cloak.

“If I were a defense attorney, I’d be making sure that my client would be doing that,” she says.

It’s not as if this never happens.

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

The last one sounded like a joke but wasn’t, this one sounds like a nightmare and is. You know the Good News Club, the after-school program run by evangelical whack-jobs? They’re teaching children the glories of genocide.

This fall, more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, are scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly “Bible study” course, will come from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and recruit their peers to the club.

There are now over 3,200 clubs in public elementary schools, up more than sevenfold since the 2001 supreme court decision, Good News Club v Milford Central School, effectively required schools to include such clubs in their after-school programing.

Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in that horrific decision.

In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”

And now we get children being inspired by stories of genocide.

The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that “the Amalekites were completely defeated.” In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:

“You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left.”

“That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.

Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

“The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.”

The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.

And this is an after-school program – which means it’s done on school property, in the school building – which means children are going to think of it as part of school, and true.

The CEF and the legal advocacy groups that have been responsible for its tremendous success over the past ten years are determined to “Knock down all doors, all the barriers, to all 65,000 public elementary schools in America and take the Gospel to this open mission field now! Not later, now!” in the words of a keynote speaker at the CEF’s national convention in 2010. The CEF wants to operate in the public schools, rather than in churches, because they know that young children associate the public schools with authority and are unable to distinguish between activities that take place in a school and those that are sponsored by the school.

In the majority opinion that opened the door to Good News Clubs, supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas reasoned that the activities of the CEF were not really religious, after all. He said that they could be characterized, for legal purposes, “as the teaching of morals and character development from a particular viewpoint”.

As Justices Souter and Stevens pointed out in their dissents, however, the claim is preposterous: the CEF plainly aims to teach religious doctrines and conduct services of worship. Thomas’s claim is particularly ironic in view of the fact that the CEF makes quite clear its intent to teach that no amount of moral or ethical behavior (pdf) can spare a nonbeliever from an eternity in hell.

It makes me so sick and so furious I can’t even deal with it. You fix it; I’m going to go smell the flowers.

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

This sounds like a joke, but apparently isn’t.

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Are you kidding me? Not just no pay but told to sleep outside under a bridge? 

Well happy jubilee to you too.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government’s Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

Happy Big Society.

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The firm said it had spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep and that the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.

[One of the workers] said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. “We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them,” she said. “We followed them under London Bridge and that’s where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing.”

I suppose they should be grateful they weren’t made to sleep actually in the Thames.

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

Molly Prince, managing director of Close Protection UK, said in a statement: “We take the welfare of our staff and apprentices very seriously indeed.”

No you don’t.

“The staff travelling to the jubilee are completing their training and being assessed on the job for NVQ Level 2 in spectator safety after having completed all the knowledge requirements in the classroom and some previous work experience. It is essential that they are assessed in a live work environment in order to complete their chosen qualifications.”

Hey you know what? Workers should be paid for training. That’s one of the expenses for the employer. Period.

“The nature of festival and event work is such that we often travel sleeping on coaches through the night with an early morning pre-event start – it is the nature of the business … It’s hard work and not for the faint-hearted.”

And the pay is zero, so only the truly dedicated and strong need apply!

One wonders how much time Molly Prince spends sleeping in a swamp and working a 14 hour shift for bupkis.

The charity Tomorrow’s People, which set up the placements at Close Protection under the work programme, said it would review the situation, but stressed that unpaid work was valuable and made people more employable…

“Tomorrow’s People believes strongly in the value of work experience in helping people to build the skills, confidence and CV they need to get and keep a job and we have an exemplary record going back nearly 30 years for our work with the long-term unemployed.”

Oh shut up. Work experience is one thing, dumping people out to sleep under London Bridge at 3 a.m. is another.

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

It’s good to see the Catholic church and all its offshoots and helper organizations and enablers finally learning some humility and even remorse.

Just kidding.

No, they’re not doing that, they’re doing the same old thing only more so. In Spain it’s another one of those reactionary legal associations named after Thomas More (fan of torture for heretics), prosecuting an artist for a film he made…34 years ago. Prosecuting him for what? For “offending religious feelings” – the stupidest “crime” on anyone’s books.

One of Spain’s leading underground artists is due to appear in court today facing up to a year in prison over a film short he made in 1978 on “how to cook Jesus Christ”.

Javier Krahe has been taken to court by a Catholic legal association, the Centro Juridico Tomas Moro, for “offending religious feelings” – a little-known offence. The Catholic association says the law has never before been applied in Spanish legal history.

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

Housework. Detailing. Metadiscussion. Tweaking. Reworking an argument that wasn’t done right the first time.

I said something in the Rebecca explains post, after quoting Rebecca saying

I should apparently put on a smile and pretend it doesn’t happen, because by reporting on my treatment, I am creating “a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe.”

I said this:

As Jews in Germany circa 1936 might have created “a climate where Jews — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe.” As the Southern Poverty Law Center creates a climate where people who are the object of systematic vocal hatred end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe. That’s not to compare TAM with Nazi Germany or racist pockets of the US, of course, but then Rebecca didn’t name TAM in the item DJ quoted, either; she (or rather USA Today, indirectly quoting her) said “the freethought community.”

Orac pounced on that passage rather rudely and aggressively.

Nonsense, Ophelia. That’s exactly what you just did, compare TAM to Nazi Germany and women to Jews in Nazi Germany. Denying that you did so doesn’t change that. It just makes you sound disingenuous.

As you might (or might not) know, I very much detest the gratuitous use of argumentum ad Nazi-um. I even have a special category for it on my blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/category/history/hitler_zombie/

My taking you to task for your analogy also has nothing to do with whether I agree with you and Rebecca regarding TAM and DJ Grothe. Rather, it has everything to do with language and not sliming your opponents with the Nazi label (while saying that’s not what you’re doing). These are things that really irritate me. I expect better.

I’m debating whether your hyperbole is worthy of inclusion. I haven’t done a Hitler Zombie post in a long time. Maybe it’s time.

I was annoyed by that, frankly. I was annoyed by the claim that you can’t disavow something by disavowing it. (On the other hand I sometimes think people are making fake disavowals, and I think I sometimes say so. That being the case, I probably have no right to be annoyed at Orac for saying the same kind of thing, just because he’s saying it to precious Me. But I knew the disavowal was meant to be real – but then no doubt so do other people. That one may be a wash.) I was annoyed by the bluster, especially coming from someone who never comments here. I was annoyed by the thuggish-sounding “maybe it’s time” nonsense. I was above all annoyed by the fact that Orac is a speaker at TAM. I was very annoyed by what could be seen as an attempt to ostracize me. I still am annoyed by that aspect of it, actually.

Orac also went to the trouble of repeating his objection to my post on Chris Hallq’s post “I support DJ Grothe.”

Well, ironically enough, part of the substance of that post was Ophelia Benson likening the issue with TAM to Jews in Nazi Germany circa 1936 and then immediately trying to say that she wasn’t likening TAM to Nazi Germany. One paragraph in that post is worthy of a Hitler Zombie post. I haven’t written one in a long time. Maybe it’s time for the Undead Fuhrer to rise from his crypt again.

Also annoying, for at least the final reason.

However – he does have a point. It wasn’t a good example for the point I wanted to make. That point was just that targets of hatred and vilification should not be blamed or rebuked for saying they are targets of hatred and vilification. That does, certainly, apply to Jews in Germany circa 1936, but that’s not the best example to choose because it’s colored by what happened to Jews in Germany in 1942. I meant to avoid that by saying 1936, but I should have just chosen a different example, instead. It’s not as if I think all this verbal misogynist bile is going to result in a genocide against women. I don’t think that. I think it sucks and has bad consequences, but I don’t think it’s pre-genocidal or anything like that.

A much better example would have been LGBQ high school kids in (say) suburban Minnesota.

So, ok. Orac had a point. I still think he was rude and a bit thuggish about it, but he had a point.

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

On the other hand!

A  federal appeals court has ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional because it denies equal rights for legally married same-sex couples. Booyah!

Now it will go to the Supreme Court, which will overrule the appeals court. Or not  – I say those things out of settled pessimism about this Supreme Court, but then Rieux comes along to explain why actually the Supremes are quite unlikely to overturn.

Anyway in the meantime – DOMA has been thrown out. Very good.

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

Curtis Knapp, pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas, says the government should kill homosexuals. (Whatever happened to small government? What about governs best that governs least? Inquiring minds want to know.) He said it in a sermon.

In the sermon, Knapp cites Scripture to back up his point and said among other things: “They should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That’s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversations. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet.

“So, you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No. I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.”

And why? Oh you know – because Jesus. Or Leviticus, or Timothy, or one of those guys. Does it matter? The point is – we hates’em, precious.

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

I went to visit Café Racer this afternoon. I felt a little self-disgust or self-doubt that I wanted to – prurience? Murder porn? What are you doing? – but that went away as soon as I got there, and I’m glad I went. I now think one should make a point of visiting murder scenes.

There were a lot of people there. There were a lot of flowers, and a lot of lit candles. There was a slightly goddy message painted on the window, but not too bad, and anyway, none of my biz. It was very, very, very quiet. It was a mourning ritual. Nothing prurient about it.

One woman knelt down on the sidewalk and put two wine glasses down in front of the flowers – in front of the small section of flowers in front of her; she was just one small segment of what was going on – and poured them full of red wine, then took a swig from the bottle. I didn’t look at her any more after that. People were carefully not looking at each other.

I got very chokey right away. It was good that I was wearing a sweatshirt, because the sleeves came in handy.

There were cop cars around, driving past slowly, circling the block slowly. I don’t know exactly what for, but it felt like part of the mourning ritual, and maybe it was. Maybe cops went there for coffee and knew the people. No reason they wouldn’t.

It was, as you can probably tell, overwhelmingly moving, and sad. That’s why I now think one should make a point of visiting murder scenes. Notice should be taken.

It’s desperately sad that it was a place like that, though. Good cafés are among my favorite institutions (along with libraries – long live Kensal Rise branch! and the one in Elephant and Castle that Anthony Grayling and Alom Shaha used to visit often, now also closed – and bookstores and parks). A further terrible detail in this particular tragedy is that the murderer liked the Café Racer too, but he couldn’t go on visiting it because his mental illness made him go off the rails at intervals.

I stood at one end for a bit, where the woman with the wine was, then I moved to the middle, then I moved toward the other end, then I crossed the street and stood there for a bit, then I left.

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

So yesterday D. J. Grothe was worried about women not registering for TAM. He said people have been emailing him with wild claims such as “JREF is purported to condone child-sex-trafficking” along with other less wild claims. He thinks the source of this is

irresponsible messaging coming from a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics who, in trying to help correct real problems of sexism in skepticism, actually and rather clumsily themselves help create a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe, and I find that unfortunate.

I think the source of at least claims like ”JREF is purported to condone child-sex-trafficking” are much more likely to come from sock puppets trying to make “a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics” look bad, but I don’t know. What I do know though is that TAM now looks vastly less fun and interesting to me than it did 24 hours ago. I’ve seen quite a few people saying the same thing since yesterday. Grothe himself seems to have created the very situation he was warning against, by his “irresponsible messaging.”

Is that irony?

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

So DJ Grothe says the women who are talking about sexism among the skeptics are scaring away women.

…this year only about 18% of TAM registrants so far are women, a significant and alarming decrease, and judging from dozens of emails we have received from women on our lists, this may be due to the messaging that some women receive from various quarters that going to TAM or other similar conferences means they will be accosted or harassed…I think this misinformation results from irresponsible messaging coming from a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics who, in trying to help correct real problems of sexism in skepticism, actually and rather clumsily themselves help create a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe, and I find that unfortunate.

Very true. I’ve noticed it myself. A woman says something – “don’t call me a cunt,” perhaps; “guys, don’t do that,” perhaps; “don’t shout at me on the street for not smiling,” perhaps. The possibilities are endless. So a woman says something like that, and by saying it, she helps create a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe, because of the torrent of raving bile that erupts all over her when she says one of those things.

And yet – and yet, DJ seems to be blaming the women who say things rather than the people who respond with torrents of raving bile.

I find that unfortunate.

Rebecca was not much pleased either, and she asked DJ for specifics. He replied that she was one.

Rebecca: Off the top of my head, your quote in USA Today might suggest that the freethought or skeptics movements are unsafe for women. This is from the article:

“I thought it was a safe space,” Watson said of the freethought community. “The biggest lesson I have learned over the years is that it is not a safe space. . . ”

(http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-09-15/atheist-sexism-women/50416454/1)

If we tell people that our events or our movements are not safe for women, some women are bound to believe that.

Yes, but then they will be believing what is true. Threats. Campaigns of vilification that have been sustained for almost a year now. Demeaning hostile contemptuous sexist language used throughout. That’s not a safe space.

Is DJ saying Rebecca shouldn’t say that? Is he saying she shouldn’t comment on the way she’s been treated?

If so, I find it unfortunate.

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