One of those times when one just stares in helpless gobsmacked fury. Al Jazeera reports via AFP:

A Somali court has sentenced to jail a woman who said she was raped and two journalists who reported her story.

The court passed the verdict on Monday in the capital Mogadishu, saying the journalists were guilty of defamation and insulting state institutions.

The 19-year old woman, who is also a journalist, was handed a suspended six-month jail sentence for defamation and lying, during which time she will be confined to her home, said Judge Hashi Elmi Nur.

The journalists are to serve out their sentences, of one year and six months respectively, or pay a fine in order to win early release.

It is the second time this year Somalia has jailed a woman for speaking out about rape and journalists for interviewing her.

Somalia is a failed state, yet it manages to find time and effort to jail people for “insulting state institutions.”

In February, a Somali journalist and a rape victim he interviewed were both sentenced to a year in prison after being found guilty of “offending state institutions”.

In that case, the court found the woman had lied after a midwife conducted a “finger test” to see if she had been raped, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) said was an “unscientific and degrading practice that has long been discredited”.

A “finger test”!!? That’s not a test, it’s more rape.

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

Now I’m reading the relevant section of the full report [pdf]. That does mention abortion, though not (so far) under that name. It has a detailed timeline of events. She was admitted Sunday afternoon, and

Spontaneous rupture of membranes occurred at 00:30hrs.

At 8:30 that morning, she was reviewed by the consultant obstetrician in charge of her care.

Savita Halappanavar’s plan of care, following this consultant ward round, was that a fetal ultrasound scan would be taken with instructions to – ‘Await events’✝

That ✝goes to a footnote:

Await events refers to the conservative (expectant) management of miscarriage as opposed to the surgical or medical management of miscarriage.

So there it is. It’s somewhat obscured and secretive, but it’s there. They opted for expectant management instead of surgical or medical management – a surgical abortion or medical induction of labor.

Updated to add:

Then on the Wednesday morning, two days later, when her condition had deteriorated badly, a junior consulting doctor ordered IV antibiotics, but

however, at this time the evidence shows that her treatment plan was not changed.

Which, given what has gone before, means it was not changed from expectant to surgical or medical management. They went on watching instead of terminating the pregnancy.

At 13:00 that day

Diagnosis of septic shock, most likely secondary to chorioamnionitis was made.

A couple of hours later she delivered, but it was far too late.

It’s interesting – and disturbing – that the summary of the report omits the part about surgical or medical management as the alternative to expectant management.

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

Charlotte Church on women in the music business, in this year’s BBC Radio 6 Music John Peel Lecture at the Radio Academy Radio Festival in Salford in October. (Salford! I’ve been to Salford. Kind of. I crossed a bridge into it, then crossed back.) She pulls no punches.

- I’d like you to imagine a world in which male musicians are routinely expected to act as submissive sex objects.

Picture Beyonce’s husband Jay Z stripped down to a T-back bikini thong, sex-kittening his way through a boulevard of suited and booted women for their pleasure.

Or Britney Spears’s Ex Justin Timberlake, in buttock-clenching denim hot pants, writhing on the bonnet of a pink chevy, explaining to his audience how he’d like to be their teenage dream.

Before we all get a little too hot beneath the gusset, of course, these scenarios are not likely to become reality, unless for comedy’s sake.

- The reason for this is that these are roles that the music industry has carved out specifically for women.

It is a male dominated industry, with a juvenile perspective on gender and sexuality.

Like so many other industries…TV and movies for example. Oh look, that’s all of pop culture accounted for.

When I was 19 or 20, I found myself in this position, being pressured into wearing more and more revealing outfits and the lines that I had spun at me again and again (generally by middle aged men) were

“you look great you’ve got a great body why not show it off?”

or

“Don’t worry it’ll look classy.  It’ll look artistic.”

I felt deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing, but was often reminded by record label executives just whose money was being spent.

Whilst I can’t defer all blame away from myself, I was barely out of my teenage years, and the consequence of this portrayal of me is that now I am frequently abused on social media, being called ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and a catalogue of other indignities that I’m sure you’re also sadly very familiar with.

I am, though for the opposite reasons; but both “reasons” are fundamentally the same despite the opposition.

H/t Jen Phillips

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

David Robert Grimes wrote a piece in the Irish Times a few days ago saying why marriage equality is a good idea, starting with why homosexuality shouldn’t rumple anyone’s mind.

From the perspective of traditional Catholic doctrine, homosexuality is “ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil”, and is considered a deeply unnatural state of being –peccatum contra naturam.

Not only is this a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy, it also spectacularly fails to stand up if one takes even a cursory glance at the natural world; homosexual behaviour is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and has been documented in more than 1,500 species, from giraffes to elephants to dolphins and our primate cousins.

Peccatum contra naturam is such a worthless category. I’ve said it before but what the hell…it never fails to entertain me, noting all the ways bishops and posts sin against nature. They wear clothes! And not only that, they wear clothes that are dyed different colors. You don’t see tigers wearing purple robes and jewel-encrusted tall hats; peccatum contra naturam. They eat cooked food! Peccatum contra naturam. When they get sick they take medicine. They travel in cars. They travel in airplanes. They use electric light. They are on the internet. They tweet. Peccatum contra naturam.

The comments are interesting.

This one:

Please.
For the sake of dignity, would the gay lobby desist from hijacking Nelson Mandela’s sad death in their campaign for same sex marriage?
He hasn’t even been interred yet for goodness sake.
It’s not that long ago since we had the unsavoury spectacle of the hijacking of a woman’s death for another ideological campaign here in Ireland.
Show some respect.
Have some class.
For once in your lives.

What an extraordinary thing to say, as if the death of Savita Halappanavar had nothing to do with the unavailability of abortion even in emergencies in Ireland. It’s not “hijacking” someone’s to death to point out that her death was preventable and would have been prevented under a slightly more humane law.

And as for Mandela: why not invoke him in a conversation about rights and equality and fairness?

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

Originally a comment on The book that continues to inspire college sophomores.

The functional difference between glibertarianism and nihilism is close to zero.

I was just speaking with a fellow attorney who is a big Ron/Rand Paul supporter and a self-professed libertarian.  The funny thing is that we agree on Step 1 of many issues:

-government spying is an absurd violation of our rights -bank bailouts just served to enable the unethical and likely criminal behavior that played a huge role in the collapse -we shouldn’t be engaged in silly foreign wars -the drug war is stupid…etc.

On all of those issues, we’re basically in agreement that our government handled and continues to handle those issue poorly.  The difficulty comes immediately when he tried to explain how to correct these things.

His solution to the problem of bank bailouts was…to just let them go under.  Fine, I say, but then something has to take it’s place.  We just had a fiscal collapse, how will the country keep running?

He refused to admit that this was a problem until I asked him how farmers would continue to exist.  They buy seed on credit and pay back the loan when the crop comes in.  If there is no entity in existence that can offer that first loan, how are people going to plat crops.

His answer, stunningly, was that the government should have loaned it directly.  Yes, indeed, I say, welcome to the wonderful world of progressivism.

He was infuriated with his own answer, but literally could not come up with another explanation.  He was smart to understand what a non-starter private lending would be, given the recent, you know, Apocalypse in the financial sector.

They’re like pissy high schoolers who are too cool for everything: this sucks, that sucks, this is gay, that’s lame…yet they never actually explain how anything could possibly work in their world, save for some nonsense about the gold standard.

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

From last month, an article by Julia Joffe in the New Republic about the joys of having whooping cough, with thanks to Jenny McCarthy. Non-sincere thanks to Jenny McCarthy.

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

There’s more, a lot more. About all that while at work, all that while eating at a restaurant, all that while going on tv to discuss world events, all that while interviewing a subject. And about children with all that.

There’s a reason that we associate the whooping cough with the Dickensian: It is. The illness has, since the introduction of a pertussis vaccine in 1940, has been conquered in the developed world. For two or three generations, we’ve come to think of it as an ailment suffered in sub-Saharan Africa or in Brontë novels. And for two or three generations, it was.

Until, that is, the anti-vaccination movement really got going in the last few years. Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

I would add to that: it’s a “consumer choice” with extra added smug virtue, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school. The people do it think it’s right-on and meritorious and thoughtfully nonconformist.

The problem is that it is not an individual choice; it is a choice that acutely affects the rest of us. Vaccinations work by creating something called herd immunity: When most of a population is immunized against a disease, it protects even those in it who are not vaccinated, either because they are pregnant or babies or old or sick. For herd immunity to work, 95 percent of the population needs to be immunized. But the anti-vaccinators have done a good job undermining it. In 2010, for example, only 91 percent of California kindergarteners were up to date on their shots. Unsurprisingly, California had a massive pertussis outbreak.

There is nothing virtuous about causing that to happen. On the contrary.

It would be an understatement to say that pertussis and other formerly conquered childhood diseases like measles and mumps are making a resurgence. Pertussis, specifically, has come roaring back. From 2011 to 2012, reported pertussis incidences rose more than threefold in 21 states. (And that’s just reported cases. Since we’re not primed to be on the look-out for it, many people may simply not realize they have it.) In 2012, the CDC said that the number of pertussis cases was higher than at any point in 50 years. That year, Washington state declared an epidemic; this year, Texas did, too. Washington, D.C. has also seen a dramatic increase. This fall, Cincinnati reported a 283 percent increase in pertussis.

Another win for obscurantism and willful stupidity.

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

Here’s a useful and enjoyable item at Brian Leiter’s blog – the full version of a letter to the Guardian by Rae Langton and John Dupré.

Your headline reads ‘Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal‘ (2 December 2013). What do scans reveal? ‘Maps of neural circuitry show women’s brains are designed for social skills and memory, men’s for perception and co-ordination’. Yet another deeply confused ‘hard-wired brain’ story. It has received much comment, not least for the empirical mismatch between the data and the conclusion, given that the cited study apparently provides ‘strong evidence for behavioural similarities between the sexes’ (Cordelia Fine, https://theconversation.com/new-insights-into-gendered-brain-wiring-or-a-perfect-case-study-in-neurosexism-21083). But there is something even more basic at stake.

Please, please, will scientists, science journalists, and readers wake up to this truism: if the mind is the brain, any mental difference will be a brain difference. Suppose there are some actual mental differences between men and women, whatever their prior causes. (Hard to imagine training up half of humanity one way, half another, without creating some differences between them.) There will then be some neural differences. Suppose you have two televisions, whose images are different. You call in the technician, who trumpets the discovery that they differ in their pattern of pixels. How remarkable! Actually, no. That bit we knew already: no difference in the images without a difference in the pixels. Same for ourselves: no difference in states of mind without a difference in states of brain. That doesn’t mean it has to be that way, or is designed to be that way. Even if your mind is your brain, that doesn’t mean ‘your brain made you do it’—as if the ‘you’ were a different being, a soul puppet whose strings are pulled by your neurons. Let’s not fall for this confusion, or we’ll take what happens to be the case, and freeze it.  We’ll take differences, however they may have come about, and make them seem inevitable and appropriate.  We don’t need this deterministic fairy-tale. It’s bad for men and women, bad for science, bad for us all.

No one will listen, of course.

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

Dan pointed out in a comment on Exodus 33 that

There a famous nineteenth century cartoon of Moses seeing God’s “back parts” that was one of those citied in the prosecution of The Freethinker for blasphemy.

Which is fabulous because I write a monthly column for The Freethinker, so I feel all connected up to blasphemous history, which is a thing I like feeling all connected up to.

I hit Google and found a Wiki page all about it: Martyrdom of a Freethinker: Blasphemy, Secularism and the Trials of G. W. Foote.

The aim of this project has been to assess the trial of G. W. Foote and his associates W. J. Ramsey and Henry Kempe for blasphemy in 1883. The tr[ia]l was instigated after Foote published the Christmas 1882 number of his magazine the Freethinker, which contained a series of ‘blasphemous’ articles and cartoons.

Dave Silverman’s jokes about God’s butt are part of the Christmas festivities in the US this year. Parallels or what?!

The Secular community produced a number of publications at this time such as the Secular Chronicle, Secular Review, National Reformer and the Agnostic Annual all with varying degrees of success. G. W. Foote was one of the N.S.S’s leading figures, becoming president in 1890, and his Freethinker[3] was the most outrageous and forward of all of these publications. Foote’s witticisms, ridicule and use of cartoons to attack the core values of Christianity, combined with the very affordable price of one penny, threw his atheistic and Secular beliefs out for the masses to absorb or be repulsed by. It was the deliberately confrontational nature of the Freethinker that would arguably lead to its author’s arrest and sentence to twelve months confinement with hard labour.

Again – this is what American Atheists does and is: it’s the most deliberately “outrageous and forward” aka provocative of all the secular and humanist and atheist organizations. It throws atheistic and secular beliefs out for the masses to absorb or be repulsed by, by advertising on billboards and talking to Bill O’Reilly, among other things. It all fits, I tell you!

On the 26th of February 1883, after two separate trials, the first resulting in a hung jury, the second passing a sentence of guilty for Blasphemous Libel, Henry Kempe was sentenced to three months imprisonment, W. J. Ramsey was sentenced to nine months and G. W. Foote as editor of the Freethinker was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.

Which is really pretty horrifying.

The Freethinker began using cartoons early in 1882 with a series called “Comic Bible Sketches”[4] after Foote saw similar items in a French periodical. In his first indictment the image “Divine Illumination” alone earned three counts.<ref>Marsh, p. 141.</ref> The 1882 Christmas number of the Freethinker would use illustrations to their maximum effect when the series “New Life of Christ” was published.[5] The cartoons used in the Freethinker used real lines from the bible and accompanied them with a humorous illustration often taking the words at their most literal. Of particular note is the cartoon “Moses Getting a Back View” in which we see, emerging from the clouds, what appears to be God’s behind in patched trousers. An ambiguous protrusion from his rear – depending on how the reader perceives it – could be a loose bit of material or a classic example of early British toilet humour.

God’s bottom! 

 Source: https://wiki.leeds.ac.uk/index.php/File:Moses.jpg

Happy holidays.

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

They’re heckling Taslima again.

An FIR was registered against me last night. They do not like my tweets that I posted on November 6.

LUCKNOW/KOLKATA: An FIR has been lodged against controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen for allegedly hurting religious sentiments following a complaint by a prominent Muslim cleric of Uttar Pradesh, a charge which the author said shocked her.

The case was lodged at Kotwali police station by Hasan Raza Khan Noori Miyan, son of the “sajjadanasheen” of Dargah-e-Ala Hazrat Maulana Subhan Raza Khan Subhani Miyan, who objected to certain tweets by Nasreen against clerics on November 6, police sources said here on Thursday.

In the complaint, it was alleged that with her remarks against clerics on Twitter the writer had hurt the feelings of the Muslim community. (more…)

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

Oh sure. Of course. See a photo of people sending a message of solidarity to imprisoned atheists in majority-Muslim countries, a photo organized by Maryam Namazie, the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and inspiration for Councils of Ex-Muslims elsewhere such as Morocco, France, North America.

In that photo we’re all holding messages we composed for the purpose. Mine said “WE ARE ATHEIST. WE ARE WITH YOU.”

See that, I say, and photoshop it for a rather different purpose.

 That’s atheist solidarity for you. I’m sure the persecuted atheists in majority-Muslim countries are very grateful.

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

Sarah Moglia has a beautiful Skepchick post on Mandela.

I lived in South Africa for half a year while studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The program was entirely focused on human rights, and in every single class I took, he was talked about. My South African friends spoke about him with reverence. I mean, his nickname was “Madiba” (father) for a reason. I visited Cape Town for a few days after my exams. I was fortunate enough to visit Robben Island, where he was imprisoned for 20 years. When you arrive on the island, the entire field leading up to the first building is covered in yellow flowers. It seems odd that the scene of such terrible atrocities is now covered in such beauty. (The album of photos I took on my trip is viewable here.)

Odd, but fitting.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he was one of the best people humanity has ever seen. The South African Constitution that was created during his presidency was the first constitution in the world to include sexual orientation under its anti-discrimination policies (it is widely considered one of the most progressive constitutions in the world). I know that Nelson Mandela and my experiences in South Africa have greatly shaped who I am as a person. I can only imagine how influential he has been to millions of other people worldwide. To close, I will share one of my favorite quotes of his: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” Thank you for everything, Madiba. If you would like to send a message to Mandela’s family, you can send one here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdcWSJD2_9A

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