A little more on that BBC article about attitudes to ‘honour’ killing and its evasiveness about who exactly gets killed in such killings.

Sometimes it is men; Dsquared provided the link to this nightmare.

A university student was murdered to “vindicate a family’s honour” after he fell in love with their daughter and made her pregnant, a court was told yesterday.

Student was Iranian, daughter and family were Bangladeshi, father disapproved of student, said there was already a marriage arranged for daughter; she was forbidden to see student, confined to house, phone taken away; they met anyway, she got pregnant, they planned to marry.

On November 20 Mr Ghorbani-Zarin was found dead in his car, a green Renault, in

More Bruce Hood.

Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive — despite the lack of evidence and advance of science — because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational, said Bruce Hood…This evolved credulity suggests that it would be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been countered by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone.

No, it doesn’t suggest that. It may suggest it would be difficult, but it doesn’t suggest it would be impossible. Just for one thing, if it suggested that, then the existence of any skeptics would be ruled out.

People ultimately believe in

About this survey that says 1 in 10 Asians think ‘honour’ killings can be justified. Did you notice something peculiar? The article left something out. It left a few things out, but there was one huge thing. And it so obviously matters that you’d think it wouldn’t have, but it did.

It just says ‘young Asians’ and ‘the 16 to 34-year-old age group interviewed.’ See it? It doesn’t say what the gender breakdown was! Duh. It doesn’t even say whether or not it was all one gender. Now, you might think that surely the BBC wouldn’t be as silly as that, it wouldn’t say ‘young Muslims’ if the interviewees were absolutely all male. But it would. Just the other … Read the rest

And besides (she went on), what’s really irrational is to think that sentiment is irrational. It’s irrational because unrealistic, unobservant, extraterrestrial. It’s not irrational to have feelings of attachment or repugnance to things or places or people because of certain associations and memories, even if there is no possibility of material physical benefit or harm. It’s bizarrely literal-minded to think it is. The wedding ring example for instance: if it made any sense to think it’s irrational to want to keep the same one in preference to a duplicate, then nobody would ever want a wedding ring at all; the custom would never have gotten started. If it made sense to think that, then wedding rings wouldn’t mean anything, they’d … Read the rest

Wait. Something wrong here

The battle by scientists against “irrational” beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today. The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force.

He told a science conference in Norwich that it’s simplistic to divide people into those who believe in the supernatural and those who don’t, and adds “But almost everyone entertains some form of irrational beliefs even if they are not religious.” That seems fair enough. But then he backs up the point in what I think is an odd way: “For example, many … Read the rest

This is rather inspiring. There’s audio and also a full transcript.

MAATHAI: I realized part of the problems that we have in the rural areas or in the country generally is that a lot of our people are not free to think, they are not free to create, and, therefore, they become very unproductive. They may have knowledge. They may have gone to school but they are trained to be directed. They are trained to be told what to do. And that is some of the unmasking that the Green Belt Movement tries to do, is to empower people, to encourage them, to tell them it’s okay to dream, it’s okay to think, it’s okay to change your minds,

Richard Wolin on Foucault’s shift.

In American academe, that’s the gist of the Foucault story. He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism’s covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the “death of man.”…Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value.

And triumphantly reinvented the wheel. Okay, I know, cheap shot, but still – bobbing about as we are these days on a … Read the rest