Tag: CFI

  • CFI gets the job done

    Here is the big news I’ve been sitting on for

    1. weeks
    2. the past several days

    It’s a press release from CFI:

    Amid Death Threats from Islamists, CFI Brings Secular Activist Taslima Nasrin to Safety in U.S.

    Center for Inquiry Establishes New Emergency Fund for Freethought Writers Threatened by Radical Islamists

    The Center for Inquiry has established an emergency fund to assist freethought activists whose lives are under threat by Islamic radicals linked to Al Qaeda in countries such as Bangladesh, where three secularist bloggers have been murdered since February. Outspoken human rights activist Taslima Nasrin, specifically named as an imminent target by the same extremists responsible for the murders of Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman, and Ananta Bijoy Das, arrived in the United States last week under the assistance of CFI.

    Taslima Nasrin

    Nasrin was recently named as one of the next targets for murder by Al Qaeda-linked extremists, prompting CFI to assist in transporting her safely to the U.S., alleviating the immediate threat to her life. Her safety is only temporary if she cannot remain in the U.S., however, which is why CFI has established an emergency fund to help with food, housing, and the means for her to be safely settled. An appeal will be sent out today to CFI’s supporters asking them to donate to this cause. Dr. Nasrin arrived in Buffalo, N.Y. on Wednesday, and was met by CFI staff.

    CFI has also heard from several other writers and activists in Bangladesh who are in similarly perilous situations, many of whom have also been specifically named as targets for murder for their secular advocacy. The decision was made by CFI that any money raised in excess of what is necessary for Dr. Nasrin will go toward a general freethought emergency fund to assist with the rescue of other atheist, humanist, and secular activists under threat.

    Donate now.

    Dr. Taslima Nasrin is a world-renowned secular activist and author, whose uncompromising advocacy of human rights and criticism of religion forced her into exile from her native Bangladesh in 1994. A physician by training, she has written innumerable books, articles, and poems, and been at the forefront of political activism for secularism, free expression, and equality. Since 2004 she has lived in India, but even there she has faced persecution and threats. She is now an associate editor and frequent contributor for CFI’s magazine Free Inquiry, and has been a repeat speaker at CFI events, as well as a longtime ally in CFI’s fight for free expression around the world.

    “Taslima is a truly international role model, as her work and her courage inspire people of all ages to question tradition, challenge dogma, and fight for human rights,” said Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry. “We could not stand by while her life was in danger, nor will we turn our backs on the other brave freethinkers in fear for their lives. I know our community will make a strong show of solidarity and give generously to this emergency fund.”

    “I lost a valued friend and ally when Islamic extremists murdered Avijit Roy, and since then, two more secular writers have been taken from us,” said Michael De Dora, CFI’s representative to the United Nations. “While it is truly up to the authorities of countries like Bangladesh and others to rein in this threat, we’re going to do our part to keep these people safe. We’ll need the secular movement’s help to do it, and I know we can count on this community’s support.”

    * * * Media Alert: CFI and allied groups will host congressional briefings on the threats to religious dissidents around the world on June 9, and on the specific situation in Bangladesh on June 10. Details here. 

    Additional recourses:

    First of all – if you have donation money to give, pour it out for this.

    Second – all the thanks in the world to CFI, and especially Ron Lindsay and Debbie Goddard and Michael De Dora, who made this their project.

  • Nobody likes a surprise

    Stonewalling is bad management. It’s unprofessional. It’s not what a good boss or CEO does. It’s sometimes what a good military officer or emergency services chief does, when orders have to be obeyed promptly, but apart from emergencies, it’s not the way to supervise.

    Another thing that’s bad management is springing things on people. It’s doing things in a high-handed manner when it would have been perfectly possible to do them with consultation and discussion and agreement. I talked about this some yesterday.

    The problem here, if I understand it correctly, is that feminism is a big tent, and there are some woo branches of feminism. I don’t think the woo part is a very big fraction of feminism, but that could be because I don’t know enough about feminism as a whole, I know only the kind I like. Well we could have talked about that. We could have had a panel on it. It could have been interesting.

    But we didn’t get that. Instead we got Ron springing his talk on everyone, clumsily lecturing us about something he doesn’t know much about, and sounding as if he thought we were going to crap on the furniture.

    As many people have patiently (and not so patiently) pointed out, that’s just a very odd way to start a conference. Of course conferences deal with controversy and disagreement; many conferences are about nothing else. But that’s part of the planning; it’s not a bomb dropped as a surprise at the start of the conference. It’s on the schedule, it’s not a gotcha.

    It’s very odd. Why was there no discussion beforehand? Why did he keep his talk a secret? How is that a reasonable thing for the boss to do at an organization that bills itself as for and about inquiry? I feel like Doctor Strangelove shouting at the ambassador, “But the whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret; WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL THE WORLD?!”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCKJi3CKGE

    Why didn’t you tell the world, Ron?! Explain your worries, suggest a panel on the subject, invite people familiar with the issues to discuss them.

    Keeping it a secret is a very bizarre, paranoid, anti-inquiry, espionage-like thing to do. Do you think of us as the Soviet Union? Is it that bad? We’re not the Soviet Union. We’re not scary. (Well now we are. But whose fault is that, eh? I kid, I kid.)

    It’s autocratic, is what it is, and it’s not good management to be autocratic unless you absolutely have to. I see no reason to think Ron absolutely had to be autocratic about this. The attendees and the speakers aren’t even his employees! He’s not the CEO of us, but he was autocratic to us as well as to the people who work for his organization. That’s hyper-autocratic.

    And it didn’t turn out well. That’s why it’s not good management – it doesn’t work well. I’m sure schools of management teach this – don’t coerce people if you can persuade them instead. Don’t pick fights if you don’t have to.

    A couple of simple changes, and it all could have gone better. Openness and discussion beforehand, discussion and availability afterwards. No autocracy and no stonewalling. We could all still be friends, and WiS2 would have gotten the discussion of its dazzlingness it deserved.

  • A failure to communicate

    There are lots of people who think the reaction to CFI and the statement and Ron’s activities is excessive. Some of those people even see flaws in Ron’s activities but still think the reaction is excessive. Maybe it is, but I think there are reasons for that, reasons we can figure out and look at and maybe learn something from.

    Or to put it another way – I think I know what it was about the whole thing that got my irritation cranked up past a simmer, and I don’t think I’m particularly special, so maybe the same applies to other people.

    It was the stonewalling.

    If we’d been able to talk to him – we attendees and speakers at the conference – Friday afternoon and evening and Saturday during breaks in the talks, then maybe he could have explained what he was worried about and we could have explained that his worries were unfounded. Perhaps we would still have disagreed, but with a better sense of each other’s thinking.

    His worries, we now all know (right?), were about a small and (I think) minor or academic branch of feminism called “standpoint theory” and how it might taint CFI because it’s postmodernist woo.

    That’s good news, because you know what? Nobody cares. That conference had nothing to do with “standpoint theory.” Maybe that bit of arcana is the parent of the idea of “privilege,” but the child left home long ago and is living its own life. It’s possible the child was adopted in the first place. I don’t think the notion of privilege and how it works is so remote or bizarre or counter-intuitive that it has to have postmodernist antecedents. It seems to me it’s just ordinary seat of the pants reasoning about self and other, and other minds, and empathy; folk epistemology if you like. Folk things can be wrong; maybe folk epistemology is wrong; nevertheless I have a very hard time seeing how it can be controversial to say that if you have no experience of X you may have an impoverished understanding of it.

    If we’d had that conversation from Friday afternoon on, even a heated one, I think things would have gone better. Ron stonewalled us. I don’t know why.

    It wasn’t like that at the first one. His opening remarks for that one were very welcoming (and the welcome didn’t take up too much time, either, not as much time as it took him to say why he wasn’t welcoming us this time) and optimistic and cheerful. He seemed happy to be presiding over the conference. Then at the end, in his closing remarks, he said…

    I thought this was going to be a good conference. I was wrong.

    Pause for effect.

    It was a great conference.

    Laughter and applause.

    I talked to him for a few minutes after that. Lauren came up and I asked her if enough people had told her what a great job she did of keeping us on schedule without being a pain in the ass. It was fun, it was friendly, it was even exuberant.

    This year it was completely different. The only time I saw Ron on Saturday he was across the aisle from me during one of the talks, and he had his head in his phone the entire time. It was as if he had an invisible wall around him.

    If he had made himself available, instead – I think things would have gone differently, and better.

    And the point is, I think that kind of thing feeds frustration, and that’s why the reactions are strong. It’s the same with CFI’s statement yesterday. It said nothing, and that was just more stonewalling.

    Stonewalling: not the answer.

  • The exodus

    So that’s two people cutting ties. Maybe that’s what CFI wanted, but I doubt it.

    Rebecca is one.

    Do not support an organization that does not have the courage to stand up for women. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. If you are a speaker at a paid event for these organizations, cancel your appearance. If you regularly donate money to them, stop. If you work for them, look for a new job. I have a lot of friends and loved ones who currently do one, some, or all of those things, and I trust we’ll continue to be friends regardless of what happens. But I do think that continued support of CFI will send a message that it’s okay for a supposedly humanist organization to never take a stand to help the women in its community.

    I hesitate to suggest where you should redirect your energies, because the last time I did that, I convinced many people to start supporting CFI, and we can see how well that went (sorry about that). There’s always Equality Now or Planned Parenthood or the SPCA I guess. They may not be directly about skepticism or secularism or humanism, but at the very least you can be fairly certain you’re helping make the world better.

    And Greta is the other.

    Dear CFI Board of Directors:

    It pains me to do this, but I am withdrawing my support from the CFI national organization, and am cutting ties with all events, projects, and publications connected with it.

    This includes the following:

    * I am withdrawing as a speaker from the CFI Summit in Tacoma in October.

    * I am resigning my position as columnist for Free Inquiry magazine.

    * I am declining the honorarium I earned for my recent speaking engagement at CFI headquarters in Amherst, NY. Please re-direct this payment to the Secular Student Alliance. If that is not possible, please go ahead and send it to me, and I will donate it to the SSA.

    * My wife and I are cancelling our subscription to Skeptical Inquirer magazine. This last one makes me extremely sad: Skeptical Inquirer played an enormous role in my process of becoming a non-believer, and it was the first publication to publish my godless writing. But I am no longer willing to be connected with your organization.

    Can that really be what they wanted?

  • Teach the controversy

    So it’s Monday, time to do the things that hung fire over the weekend…like release any little statements that might have piled up on Friday afternoon. This one from CFI for example, stemming from the meeting of its board last week:

    The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

    The Center for Inquiry, including its CEO, is dedicated to advancing the status of women and promoting women’s issues, and this was the motivation for its sponsorship of the two Women in Secularism conferences. The CFI Board wishes to express its unhappiness with the controversy surrounding the recent Women in Secularism Conference 2.

    CFI believes in respectful debate and dialogue. We appreciate the many insights and varied opinions communicated to us. Going forward, we will endeavor to work with all elements of the secular movement to enhance our common values and strengthen our solidarity as we struggle together for full equality and respect for women around the world.

    That’s a very bizarre statement. It’s so bizarre it borders on the silly. It doesn’t say anything. Surely the first duty of any statement is to say what the statement is about. This statement entirely fails to do that. No one who didn’t already know what it was about could possibly figure it out by reading the statement.

    And then, it says the board is unhappy. Well that’s interesting, but why issue a statement about it? It’s unhappy with “the controversy” – but what is that controversy? Well it wouldn’t like to say. Why not?

    The last paragraph is just corporate bafflegab. It’s annoying bafflegab, too, because the core of the issue is that Ron’s talk at the beginning of WiS2 was not an example of respectful debate and dialogue.

    The problem here, if I understand it correctly, is that feminism is a big tent, and there are some woo branches of feminism. I don’t think the woo part is a very big fraction of feminism, but that could be because I don’t know enough about feminism as a whole, I know only the kind I like. Well we could have talked about that. We could have had a panel on it. It could have been interesting.

    But we didn’t get that. Instead we got Ron springing his talk on everyone, clumsily lecturing us about something he doesn’t know much about, and sounding as if he thought we were going to crap on the furniture.

    As many people have patiently (and not so patiently) pointed out, that’s just a very odd way to start a conference. Of course conferences deal with controversy and disagreement; many conferences are about nothing else. But that’s part of the planning; it’s not a bomb dropped as a surprise at the start of the conference. It’s on the schedule, it’s not a gotcha.

    It was a bad decision, ok? It just was. That’s not feminazi crazy, it just is the case. Doubling down on it didn’t work at the time and it seems unlikely to work now. Rebecca is out, and urging a boycott, and given what Ron wrote about her, I’m not a bit surprised.

    So that’s this morning’s news.

     

  • Hostile conduct and intimidation

    CFI has announced its new policy on hostile conduct/harassment at conferences.

    This is huge. Huge. I’ll tell you why. It’s the first part. Hostile conduct.

    That’s what I’m worried about, personally as opposed to generally, I can tell you. I’m certainly, and obviously, not worried about sexual overtures, as the cyber-stalkers love to remind anyone who will listen. But I certainly am worried about hostile conduct, since I’m treated to it day in and day out. Therefore I’m very pleased that CFI put that aspect first.

    Ron Lindsay has a great post about the background and the thinking.

    Rationale for the policy: First, let’s step back a bit and ask why employers are effectively required to have policies prohibiting harassment, whether it’s sexual harassment or harassment based on protected group status. (I say “effectively” because absent such a policy, an employer has a much greater risk of legal liability.) This may shed light on why it’s also prudent for conference organizers to have such policies, especially conference organizers who try to create an atmosphere that promotes intellectual exchange.

    At least in the United States, the primary rationale for workplace policies is not that employers have an obligation to ensure that all their employees are “nice” to each other. Rather, it is that harassment interferes with an employee’s ability to work; employers can be liable for such harassment when it is so severe that it “alters the conditions of employment and creates an abusive working environment.” Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 67 (1986). Workplace harassment policies are actually intended to help both employees and employers. Properly administered, they increase workplace efficiency.

    An abusive working environment. That’s the thing. It’s not a matter of being “nice” but it is a matter of not being overtly (noisily, energetically) hostile. Think teenage boys, school bus, Karen Klein. An abusive working environment really does interfere with doing the job – and that’s all the more true when the job is talking and listening and interacting, as it is at conferences.

    CFI believes we should look at the goals of a harassment policy for conferences in an analogous light. A primary objective of our policy is to ensure that everyone at our conferences — speakers, attendees, and staff — will feel safe and at ease and be able to participate fully in all conference-related events. Intimidation and harassment prevent this objective from being achieved, so such conduct should be prohibited.

    This is why we have embedded our harassment policy within the context of an overall prohibition on hostile conduct. We seek to prohibit any abusive conduct “that has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with another person’s ability to enjoy and participate in the conference, including social events related to the conference.”

    Looked at this way, CFI’s policy supports the goals of CFI in holding conferences, just as workplace policies support the desires of rational employers for workplace efficiency. CFI’s policy promotes friendly interaction among conference participants, including the candid exchange of viewpoints, and this, in turn, helps ensure a successful conference.

    Long exhalation. Yes. Thank you.

  • CFI expresses outrage over the sentencing of Alexander Aan

    The Center for Inquiry is organizing a protest outside the Indonesian embassy in DC next week. The protest is at the prison sentence handed down to Alexander Aan for expressing an opinion about religion.

    Alexander Aan did nothing more than exercise the most basic of human rights — the liberty to express his beliefs — yet he is now in great danger. Not only has he lost his freedom, but many people in Indonesia are calling for his death. It is unconscionable that any person could be jailed or face death threats for simply stating his or her position regarding religion. Freedom of belief and expression are universal rights that should be afforded to all individuals.

    In response to today’s ruling, CFI is organizing a protest outside the Indonesian embassy in Washington, D.C. The protest will take place next week, most likely on Monday afternoon, June 18. If you can attend, please email Michael De Dora at mdedora@centerforinquiry.net

    Thank you CFI.