There are actual flat earthers – people who believe the earth really is flat, and the only reason we don’t all realize this is because of the Giant Conspiracy.

Flat Earthers have a wide range of convictions. Some come to the movement from a religious place, others from a scientific one. But most believe in one simple principle: that NASA and everyone involved in space exploration are liars and that there is a massive conspiracy to hide the fact that the Earth is flat.

That would have to be such a massive conspiracy.

We can’t all be astronomers or physicists, of course. (I know I certainly can’t.) But I know a thing we can do: we can look at Google Earth, and see for ourselves how minutely accurate it is about everything we can see for ourselves – and that its earth is not flat. You can rotate the Google Earth for yourself. How could it be so accurate about everything and yet be lying about the rotation?

“Most of us believe that Antarctica is not a continent, but rather, the Earth is a disk, the North Pole is at the center and Antarctica is an ice wall around the perimeter,” Patrice explained. “There is no solar system. I mean, there’s a sun, obviously, and a moon and stars, because we can see them. You can also observe the flat Earth with your eyes.”

Actually no. What you can observe is ships disappearing over the horizon. Why do they do that? Because the Earth isn’t flat. If you can’t see the ocean from where you are, you can see planes disappearing over the horizon. Not a conspiracy, just reality.

One of the first people to assert that the Earth is round was Eratosthenes in 240 BCE, an Egyptian librarian who made measurements of shadows in two spots — hundreds of miles apart — at the same exact time. He found that the pillars in one city cast no shadow at noon and the pillars in the other city cast a significant shadow.

“I’m not religious, but I do believe in creation,” Long said. “If you’re coming from a point where you know the Earth is flat, you also know that Earth was created. The two are connected. You can’t be a flat Earther and be an atheist. I’ve never met one; I don’t think there are any out there.”

How are the two connected? Why couldn’t a zany madcap creator create a not-flat Earth? Why assume this creator wants a big table instead of a ball?

I think there should be some people who think the Earth is shaped like a sock, and some who think it’s shaped like a corkscrew, and some who think it’s shaped like an ear of corn.

The AP reports:

The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.

“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.

She didn’t really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.

So that’s what you get for being an aid worker.

On July 11, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle in the capital, Juba, over opposition forces, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in South Sudan’s three-year civil war.

They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions, several witnesses told The Associated Press.

For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help. Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

War doesn’t make people nicer.

The Independent has found a horror in London: Haredi Jews are trying to fundraise a million quid to try to stop divorcing parents taking their children with them out of the reactionary religion. The money is to pay the legal bills.

The Independent has seen flyers for a fundraising event in the Stamford Hill area of London that call for the community to back the bid, saying: “Rescue The Children Convention: We now need one million pounds and therefore the community is requested to join in with a minimum sum of £500.”

The flyers were accompanied by a letter of support from a local rabbi stating they wish to fight cases involving 17 children: “To our great pain, and our misfortune, our community finds itself in a terrible situation – 17 of our pure and holy children where one of the parents, God rescue them, have gone out into an evil culture, and want to drag their children after them.

“This is a decree of apostasy and this situation has motivated our rabbis who are in Israel… to come here in a personal capacity to increase prayer and to gather money for legal fees, and to achieve this a convention has been organised of prayer and also to collect money.”

Theocratic bullying and coercion at its most intrusive.

Campaigners and former community members have told The Independent the tactical funding of legal fees tears families apart by denying those wishing to leave the religion access to their children as a punishment for no longer believing in ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

They say the practice unfairly skews child custody battles in favour of the funded parent who remains in the faith groups, rather than enabling custody to be decided on the basis of the best interests of children.

Because it’s religion, which is about what’s good for the greedy god, not the struggling impaled humans.

An investigation by The Independent earlier this year found more than a 1,000 children in Charedi communities are attending illegal schools where secular knowledge is banned and they learn only religious texts, meaning they leave school with no qualifications and often unable to speak any English.

So it’s not “school” at all then. What they get is not education.

Imtiaz Shams, co-founder of Faith To Faithless an advocacy group for ex-religious people, told The Independent: “Faith to Faithless has come across many parents for whom leaving their faith has had huge consequences for their relationship with their children. Many have had to “go back into the closet” in terms of their lack of faith, even from their own children, simply to protect this bond.

“Leaving faith can put the financial and social weight of the whole religious community against the parent: it is part of the systematic prejudice faced by non-religious people from religious communities. Leaving the Ultra-Orthodox community can be particularly difficult as these parents can be isolated, may not know what their rights are or have the financial and emotional support required to fight these custody battles.”

All to feed a greedy god who sees us as snacks.

The New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi was on Fresh Air the other day. One of the things they talked about was the sex slavery of Yazidi girls and women.

GROSS: So the ISIS men who raped these women and used them as sex slaves, they believed that the Quran gave them justification to do it as long as the women didn’t get pregnant?

CALLIMACHI: Yes, yes. The Quran has about more than a dozen references to the phrase those your right hand possesses. And what scholars of Islam have explained to me is that phrase means a slave. And that phrase comes up in sections that deal with what are the licit forms of sexual intercourse that a man can have? So you can have sex with your wife. You can’t have sex with anybody else except those your right hand possesses, right? Now, what scholars explain to me is that even though the Quran lays out slavery as one of the licit forms of sex with a woman, what ISIS has done is, of course, taken it to a different level.

They’re not just saying that it’s licit. They’re saying that it’s holy. They’re saying that because it was, in their eyes, practiced by the Prophet, Muhammad it is, therefore, a sacred duty to rape these poor women. And some of the most heartbreaking interviews I did were with women who described how the fighters would pray before they raped them. They would then rape them. They would go and take a shower, and then they’d come back and pray again because, to them, the act of the rape was – I don’t know how else to put it – but almost like an act of communion.

GROSS: Leaves me speechless. And the women who you interviewed who were used as sex slaves…

CALLIMACHI: Yeah.

GROSS: …They were mostly Yazidi women, members of a religious minority who…

CALLIMACHI: Right.

GROSS: …ISIS basically practiced genocide on. I mean, they…

CALLIMACHI: Yes.

GROSS: Yeah.

CALLIMACHI: Yes.

GROSS: So these were women who were taken while other Yazidis were being just, like, wiped out.

CALLIMACHI: Right. The only women I’ve spoken to are Yazidi women. And it seems that ISIS singled out this particular ethnic group for this very crime. There have been a few anecdotal cases of Christian women being taken as sex slaves and a few anecdotal cases of Shia women being taken. And, of course, we know the terrible story of the American aid worker, Kayla Mueller, who was also taken in this manner. But those accounts are very much at the anecdotal level. There’s very few of them, whereas with the Yazidis, it was a systematic, planned-out orchestrated thing that they did. They showed up on Sinjar Mountain on August 3 and 4 of 2014 with empty trucks, specifically to fill them with women and to take them back to use them in this underground sex trade.

GROSS: And they’re still doing this? I mean, they’re still practicing…

CALLIMACHI: They’re still…

GROSS: They’re still, like, raping women and…

CALLIMACHI: Absolutely, absolutely. There’s about…

GROSS: …And holding them hostage…

CALLIMACHI: Yeah. There were…

GROSS: …And in slavery.

CALLIMACHI: Right. There were 5,000 – more than 5,000 Yazidi people that were taken by ISIS starting in August of 2014. And Yazidi community leaders and the U.N. say that there’s around 3,000 that are still in captivity. That includes women, children and a handful of men who were allowed to live.

But yes – and they – a lot of them have had, at some level, contact with their families because when you go to the camps in northern Iraq, a lot of the families are spending every ounce of their strength right now trying to come up with the ransoms to essentially pay the smugglers to get their girls out.

So they know that they’re alive. The girls will take the fighter’s cell phone and run off to the bathroom and make a quick phone call or hide his phone and wait for him to leave the house and then call. And so there’s contact. We know that they’re – we know that many of them are still alive. And it’s just absolutely gutting to think what’s happening to them.

It shows where religious thinking can get you – the idea that one man 14 centuries ago made a habit of enslaving Outsider women, therefore it’s a Holy Duty for Insider men now to do the same thing. There’s no need to think about what’s good or bad for the women in question, no need to think about their feelings, no need to wonder if it might be cruel to rape girls who have been kidnapped by an army of strange men. None of that. It’s just about what this one man did 14 centuries ago – all because he’s a “prophet,” and not just a prophet but the prophet – and that justifies the mass rape of Yazidi girls and women, it justifies the murder of Asad Shah, it justifies “marrying” little girls age 9.

It’s a bad bad way of thinking. If a god really does approve of that, that god is a bad bad god.

Sky News talks to Kate Smurthwaite about online abuse and harassment.

It would be nice if Sky News had not stuck the label “Thought Police” next to Kate’s name in the caption. It’s not “thought policing” to want to be free of abuse online.

https://youtu.be/ZME4L7FJ_qA

On Saturday Review yesterday they talked about a novel, The Summer That Melted Everything. One of the participants said it was quite good but there was a great deal too much of it, and added with much passion that Americans really need to learn to edit their novels and take out a lot. That resonated with me because I’m reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I found it at a Little Free Library the other day, and was surprised 1. that it was so heavy and 2. that there was a huge heavy Donna Tartt I’d never heard of before. Now, having googled it, I’m surprised all over again about 2, because there was a huge fuss about it in 2013. Lots of mass media critical acclaim, and not quite so mass media critical not-acclaim.

My view is that it’s decidedly one of those novels that need a lot taken out. It’s fairly gripping, but in my case it requires a lot of dancing ahead to keep up the gripping quality. There’s just way too much of it for what there is. There are very long novels that need to be that long because there’s a lot going on. This isn’t that. There’s way too much moment by moment detail, that doesn’t add anything and isn’t all that amusing or beautiful or explanatory or anything else that would justify its presence. Cut cut cut.

And then – I’m finding it fairly gripping but it never occurred to me to think of it as a literary work of art. It’s not. The writing is ok but it’s nothing to make your hair stand on end – and there’s way too much of it, and when there’s way too much, quality becomes hard to discern among all the padding. It’s just the protagonist telling us stuff, often in way too much detail. His voice isn’t particularly distinctive or brilliant.

So it appears there was a to and fro about it back in 2013. Vanity Fair reported on the to and fro.

Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”

Meh. No it isn’t. It’s interesting but overstuffed.

But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times—the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.

Wait. First, nobody considers the Times highbrow. Second, few people consider the New Yorker highbrow. The New Yorker and the NYRB don’t go in the same category.

But on to the backlash:

“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”

In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch,” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ”

Exactly. The writing is only adequate. Dickens too was an overstuffer, but at the same time, he was a genius with the language. Stone cold genius. At his very frequent best he’s a hair-stand-on-ender. There’s nothing at all like that in Tartt’s book.

I find these controversies interesting.

Someone I don’t know commented on a Facebook thread about a New Yorker article that asks if God is transgender. The comment expresses a very familiar, conventional, and convenient religious idea, but it’s one that makes no sense, and is the source of endless horrors. It’s an idea that should be disputed more often than it is.

Is there no end to the arrogance of humanity? We are constantly making God on our own terms instead of His, which is really nothing more than deciding that we know best and really ought to be God.

There’s so much wrong with that claim. I could go on about it for hours. The most obvious item is that if we can’t use our own terms when it comes to “God” then what are we even talking about? Human terms are all humans have, so why are we talking about a “god” that has entirely different terms?

I asked it there and got an unenlightening reply:

Me: What else can we do? What other terms do we have access to?

Commenter X: His terms. A God we could fully comprehend or explain is too small to be true or be worshiped.

Uh huh. The standard answer, but so useless. In that case, what do we have to do with such a god at all? Why do we worship it? How do we know it merits worship? How do we know anything about it? What kind of ridiculous, bullying game is this in which we’re told to worship something we’re also told we can’t possibly understand?

So I said some of that:

But how can we? How can we do anything with terms that aren’t ours? What is it we’re worshiping if it’s radically separate from our terms?

Also, the problem with saying we mustn’t “make God on our own terms instead of His” is that that means we can’t second-guess any part of God-based morality. But what if it’s the wrong morality? How can we decide which morality to follow if we’re not allowed to “make God on our own terms instead of His”?

Commenter X: All great questions to ask. I believe the Bible is the Word of God, and I believe it answers a lot of those questions, but in order to understand it correctly, we need to know its context. We need to know about the dead sea scrolls, the talmud, the old covenant and the new. And most importantly, we need to believe in Jesus as Lord and pursue a relationship with Him. If we seek Him wholeheartedly, He is faithful to make Himself known.

The familiar cop-out.

But at that rate we can’t have any kind of secular morality at all, we just have to obey words from an old book, while arguing about which words and which book and which interpretation and yadda yadda.

It’s all a cheat. We have to be able to think critically about morality, using the only terms available to us, which are of course human terms. That is not arrogance – the real arrogance is pretending to know which god is the real one and that we have to obey it.

The people of Manbij in Syria have been liberated from IS.

Ecstatic Syrian civilians have been shaving off their beards, burning their burqas, smoking and dancing in the streets after being freed from Isis.

The jubilant celebrations were seen in the Syrian city of Manbij on Friday, where militants have been driven out after months of fighting by US-backed rebel groups.

Families ran through rubble-strewn streets, past the ruins of buildings destroyed in air strikes, carrying their babies and belongings.

Men jubilantly had their beards cut off as women ripped off their veils and set them on fire in an act of rebellion after years living under Isis’ brutal interpretation of Sharia law.

https://twitter.com/todayinsyria/status/764397034979885056

They just can’t get it right, can they.

The San Jose Mercury News, this time. Headline:

Michael Phelps shares historic night with African American

Um. In other words, Simone Manuel won a gold medal in the 100m freestyle final, shared with Canadian Penny Oleksiak. (They touched the wall at the same instant.)

The headline was widely criticised on social media for omitting Manuel’s name completely – and yet at the same time including both parts of Phelps’s name.

Mercury News sportswriter Tim Kawakami wrote on Twitter: “Sorry to my tremendous co-workers, but I’ve never been as upset at a headline in my own publication as I was with that one.”

The Mercury News tweeted an apology shortly afterwards.

We get it, Phelps has name recognition and Manuel doesn’t, yet. He’s a celebrity and she isn’t. Fine, but if you’re going to mention her, then mention her.

The spirit of international hatred:

Egyptian judo fighter Islam El Shehaby was loudly booed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after his first-round loss to Israel’s fifth-ranked Or Sasson, when El Shehaby refused to shake Sasson’s hand, in a major breach of judo etiquette.

Sasson defeated El Shehaby with two throws for an automatic victory, with about a minute and a half remaining in the bout. Afterwards, El Shehaby lay flat on his back for a moment before standing to take his place before Sasson, in front of the referee.

When Sasson extended his hand, El Shehaby backed away, shaking his head. The referee then called El Shehaby back to the mat and obliged to him bow; El Shehaby gave a quick nod of his head. El Shehaby refused to comment afterward. Judo players typically bow or shake hands at the beginning and end of a match, as a sign of respect in the Japanese martial art.

Thank you, religion, for fostering this kind of hatred and anger.

El Shahaby had come under pressure from Islamist-leaning and nationalist voices in Egypt to withdraw entirely from the fight. On Thursday, Mataz Matar, a TV host in Al-Sharq Islamist-leaning network urged el-Shehaby to withdraw.

Maybe he felt forced to spurn the handshake. Goddam humans.

Let Clothes Be Clothes on Facebook:

We’re FOR choice, but not for this – why? Children’s feet are not meant to wear heels, wedges or platforms! All on sale in the F&F school range.

Heels can cause PERMANENT damage to feet, ligaments and posture… so it’s not prudish to say “I’m not ok with this.” When parents see big brands selling this it’s easy to normalise, it’s easy to think “it must be ok…”

Play shoes, occassionwear – becoming more acceptable – but school shoes? No. Tesco F&F could you imagine a boy wearing these? Yet acceptable for girls… please help END this – share if you agree, and help us raise awareness on this issue.

Well, little girls have to be trained to wear high heels, or else they might resist. And after all it’s not as if they need to run around and be active.