I wrote my column for the Freethinker about a couple of ethicists who recommend “compromising” over FGM.

There’s much discussion on social media of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Kavita Shah Arora and Allan J Jacobs that urges ‘compromise’ on the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Just cut off a little bit of girls’ genitals, as opposed to shaving everything off and sewing the hole closed.

By the same token we could throw just a little bit of acid in women’s faces, and throw just a few stones at women accused of sex outside marriage, and rape just a few altar boys when no one is looking.

Read on.

At the Bristol Festival of Ideas next month –

The End of Free Speech?

With Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Maryam Namazie and Sian Norris

Sat 19 March 2016
18:00-19:30

Watershed
Price: £9/£8

An interesting point made by Les Green at Semper Viridis:

Of course gender is not fixed at birth. Simone de Beauvoir was right that no one is born a woman. Possibly, no one is even born female. Sex is cluster-concept, a bundle of attributes, some of which do not develop until puberty or later. And gender is another cluster-concept.  Gender is constituted by norms and values that are conventionally considered appropriate for people of a given sex. Gender is a lot more vague than sex, and a lot more historically and geographically variable.

But gender has another interesting feature.  It is path dependent.  To be a woman is for the pertinent norms and values to apply a result of a certain life history. Being a woman is not only ‘socially constructed’, as they say, it is also constructed by the path from one’s past to one’s present.   In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways.   That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who used to have one and then cut it off.

And those things, and many others, are important; they make a difference; they shape how one experiences being a girl and then a woman. They’re not nothing.

More on path dependence, by Stephen E. Margolis and S. J. Liebowitz.

Path dependence is a term that has come into common use in both economics and law. In all instances that path dependence is asserted, the assertion amounts to some version of “history matters.” Path dependence can mean just that: Where we are today is a result of what has happened in the past.

Being a woman is path dependent because it’s a result of years of being a girl. Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl. We are what our pasts make us.

That’s one reason, probably the main reason, I don’t think people can just become something radically different by uttering the words (except in cases where uttering the words does the work – “I am abandoning my religion” for example). That’s why I refused to answer that stupid “yes or no” question the way I was ordered to. That’s why I made the distinction between the ontological and the political meaning of the words, which some people found so very over-intellectual and shameful of me.

History does matter.

Guest post by Anonymous

I have an angle on people throwing around threats of violence, and directing menacing fantasies at people online; an angle on the way people excuse, enable, and dismiss such violent ideations; an angle on the virtue-signalling, and other pathological responses you get in communities addressing these issues.

To begin with, for the sake of context, I’m going to have to get a few things out in the open, although my default state with regards to autobiographical writing is basically this; I don’t like it.

The fuzzy, cuddly, intended-as-supportive bromides that some people issue in response to the kinds of detail I’m about to give don’t really do it for me either. I’ll probably read the comments, without participating in discussion. Please don’t take this as an opportunity to tell me how sorry you are.

I won’t be disclosing my name any time soon. A few people reading this may be able to tell who I am and I’d appreciate if they didn’t identify me. The possibility of anything even remotely close to a Dr Phil experience is just too cloying to embrace, and this is hardly the kind of writing I’d like to be known for anyway.

Needless to say, with violence mentioned in the title, people may find the following unsettling. Now, I’ll try to be brief with the personal stuff.

Violent autobiography in brief

When I was a child of about five-to-six years old, my mother would threaten to kill herself, before driving off, leaving a crying pre-school brother in my care. This particular behavior returned around a decade later, with my mother then threatening another, younger, pre-school brother with auto-vehicular murder-suicide. For a brief few years in the interim, my mother became physically violent, on a number of occasions going as far as biting my next-youngest brother, all up until the point we grew large enough to protect ourselves. At that point, after the loss of physical violence as an option, the gas-lighting began, wherein we’d be told we were the ones victimizing her.

I did what I could to protect my brothers, but I wasn’t perfect, the system was largely unavailable, and willfully or not, our community was blind regarding this kind of thing. Or at least, that’s what I believed, and going by other people’s experiences, I was probably right.

While a minor, I was punched in the face by my father. Oddly enough, even after accounting for Masculine Bullshit, I still can’t see this as a particularly great transgression. Perhaps this is because I’m confident my then-warm-but-largely-absent-and-entirely-parentally-incompetent father actually loved me, or maybe it’s just because it’s lower on my list of things to give a shit about.

In the same year as the final punch to the face, a young fellow attempted to cut my throat with a hunting knife, thankfully failing. We both survived, but I did what I had to do to prevent him from cutting me. This was not pleasant. I can still recall the physical sensation of my injuring the guy, and could relate it graphically if I chose. I’ll spare you the experience. Being drug related, Young Fellow pretended, upon reaching hospital, to have fallen down the stairs outside his home, thereby sparing me an awkward conversation with parents and police I didn’t trust. This, incidentally, wasn’t the first attempt on my life I had to deal with.

Also in the same year, I was tortured to see if I could keep secrets. Think hot glass, punching, and so forth. The year after, an acquaintance from the same circle of violent folk murdered one of my father’s pot-smoking buddies, and put another into hospital with severe brain damage owing to shrapnel wounds. Further down the track, another guy from the same crowd, one who started out soft, even likable if pathetic, went bad, abused small animals, and eventually wound up murdered, a screwdriver to the neck being the method of his offing.

The guy who I fell in with this company to help in the first place (on account of my being asked by his parents), is currently serving his nth prison sentence for violent crime. He’s a diagnosed psychopath. He once tried gouging out my eyes when I was fourteen. I’m a little less naive about psychopaths these days.

This is probably enough information for people to get a feel for the necessary details of where I’m coming from, loosely speaking. There’s more, but really, it’d be gratuitous.

Urges and fallacies

This urge some people have, to compete with or dismiss other people’s suffering, is something I think I can sympathize with, even if ultimately it’s an urge worthy of resistance and rejection. Even in the best of possible worlds, we have only so much stage time, with enough suffering to report as to be able to use all the limelight several times over. As frustrating as this is, we don’t even live in the best of possible worlds; people can be altogether too selfish at times. Narcissists, opportunists and even full blown predators reside within the many of the very structures purposed for dealing with all this suffering.

I’ve caught myself on a few occasions before I’ve actually become dismissive, when people have talked about being creeped out by skeezy guys. Most of us, in atheist-skeptic-humanist-whatever circles over the past few years, have seen more than a few instances of online death and rape threats, and abuse hurled at feminists, being dismissed out of hand by people often in relative positions of power.

Sure, being creeped on in an elevator at 4am, or told by a Twitter misogynist that he’s going to rape you, isn’t the same as having a hot, incandescent lamp globe drawn briefly over your junk – but why compare such things in the first place? What is the purpose of a given comparison?

There are two concepts some people need to better familiarize themselves with in these debates. The first is the fallacy of relative privation, and the other is opportunity cost.

The fallacy of relative privation is where because something worse exists, it is argued or assumed that a given concern automatically isn’t worthy of consideration.

“Computer broken down before its warranty? So what! Think of The Starving Kids in Africa!”

“Stubbed your toe? What about conflict diamonds you whining piss-baby?”

Something’s always worse somewhere in the world, so you ought not complain about what’s right in front of you.

The fallacy falls on its face though, because it assumes right out of the box that addressing the “lesser” concern necessarily detracts from addressing the “greater”. It’s a line of reasoning that doesn’t entertain the possibility that two concerns may not be in competition for resources, or that the effect of addressing the “lesser” may actually help address the “greater”, even when the causes for both concerns are similar or even possibly the very same thing.

In a sense, the fallacy of relative privation can be seen as a misapplication of the concept of opportunity cost – the other concept I want more people to appreciate.

Opportunity costs occur when resources are restricted in such a way as to not be able to be spent on an entire array of options. For example, if you have ten dollars and you walk into a shop where there are only two items, A and B, each costing ten dollars, then the opportunity cost of purchasing A, is not being able to purchase B, and vice versa.

Constraints on resources in real world ethical quandaries however, are rarely as clear-cut as this, and often there’s just plain guesswork involved. Moreover, resources can be bottle-necked, and spending can attract diminishing returns. If increased resource allocation to a given concern won’t improve outcomes, then no matter how serious the concern you have resources that can be either accumulated or re-allocated. Spending on a relief effort that is maxed-out or bottle-necked only accrues opportunity cost at the expense of other causes.

At other times, concerns that your values tell you to address are practically beyond your limits – when you simply cannot allocate resources to a given cause. There’s no opportunity cost if there’s no opportunity.

My point here, is that rebukes against domestic Western social justice concerns on the basis of alleged lack of perspective, aren’t always well-founded, or rational, at best being innocent mistakes, but too often being motivated by malice. Even when such dismissive rubbish is motivated by real, personal suffering, it’s still wrong. A degree of restraint in this respect may not always be possible, but should be aspired to, even by people who have been wronged, if they hope to cooperate ethically and effectively in social justice projects. This can be hard if you’ve suffered, I know.

It’s when this goes wrong, though, and people are motivated by urges to enable and indulge the abusiveness of some people, even when these people happen to be oppressed, that I really get shirty.

Menace and character

I’ve noticed over the years, a number of instances of Ophelia and company ending up on the receiving end of menacing fantasies. In 2008, Marxist pseud Louis Proyect ideated wildly about what would happen to the folks at Butterflies and Wheels once the revolution came, rhetorically praying that “God protect the souls of those who fed at the trough of the big corporations and the intelligence agencies since an aroused people will have properly earned the right to extract justice.” If you were wondering what puts Ophelia in the frame for such retributive justice, it’s the pro-science position of Butterflies and Wheels, Proyect being credulous towards the prospect of it attracting “…funding from Huntington and other such animal torturers”.

You won’t see Proyect, or anyone else perhaps male enough, getting too much in the way of obstacles in far left circles for such violent ideating in the name of the revolution.

Repeated menacing ideations from misogynists in the years following ElevatorGate, not that infrequently depicting violence against their targets, have done little to attract censure by atheist organizations, celebrities and public intellectuals, even when such celebrities and public intellectuals are under no illusions about the textbook arguments concerning free speech, incitement and intimidation. There have been notable exceptions, and there has even been mainstream media attention, but on the whole, institutional comprehension and will on the matter seems rather piss-weak.

The noise of the more recent “clusterfuck” of 2015, wherein amongst other abuse, hyperbole describing the pegging of dead ferrets and an injunction to “fuck off so hard that you unbirth your own grandparents…” was posted in a semi-notorious Facebook post re-dedicated to “Lady Benson”, saw pretty much zero objection to such behavior from people who’d previously positioned themselves in opposition to online abuse, who were also in social proximity to the event. Indeed, it was argued, despite the already – and still at the time of writing - public nature of the post, that Ophelia’s drawing attention to this was the true act of harassment, and with-it wannabe leftists swallowed this hook, line and sinker.

We’ve seen the resurgence of the fallacy of relative privation; forget your concerns, cis-women, you’re arguing with people more oppressed than you. It’s Dear Muslima all over again, albeit without the prior appearance of solidarity in response. That Ophelia may have unintentionally mis-gendered someone, and failed to be rude to Cathy Brennan, whatever you make of these transgressions, isn’t mitigating because that’s not how relative privation works. Correcting a mis-gendering, if need be, isn’t contingent on permitting menace against the person doing the mis-gendering; there’s no opportunity cost involved between allowing correction and barring vengeance.

People aren’t permitting this menacing because of some ethical up-shot, they’re simply permitting it because they’re permissive. Either these people don’t care, never cared, or they’re just incompetent.

It’s this apathy that bugs me the most. I thought it was clear we needed space within atheism-Humanism-etc that was inclusive of people who’ve had to put up with a past of shitty, even traumatic treatment.

I don’t expect people to like Ophelia, I don’t expect trans-women to automatically agree with gender skepticism, and I certainly don’t expect them to like being mis-gendered. What I do have a hard time swallowing, though, is the notion that trans people, as well as anyone else in need of a welcoming space, are going to feel safe and/or welcome in a community capable of enabling abusive ideating about ferret fucking and retroactive unbirthing. (And don’t get me started on the ageism or the feeble levels of opposition amongst this lot to the “cotton ceiling” ideations – Jesus McFuck that shit’s a whole other story).

Sure, some people are going to feel right at home amidst this SlymePit-esque culture. I’m not discounting that. But folks with broken pasts or histories of oppression, having healthy experiences in this climate? Please.

With the benefit of decades to do so, I’ve more or less recovered from incidents such as having my scrotum singed by homicidal drug dealers, but Christ, I can’t bear to be around this other crap. I don’t know if this means I’m a bit frail, or if this community is just that sick.

So Lands End – it’s a clothing company, I think – had a feature on Gloria Steinem in its spring catalogue, and then…it said it was very sorry, and it scrubbed all mention of her from its website. As one does.

“We understand that some of our customers were offended by the inclusion of an interview in a recent catalog with Gloria Steinem on her quest for women’s equality,” the company said in a statement. “We thought it was a good idea and we heard from our customers that, for different reasons, it wasn’t. For that, we sincerely apologize.”

Because…? Women are not equal, but are stupid lazy weak deceitful sluts? Yes, pretty much. Here’s one such:

“This family will not buy one single thing from Lands End ever again unless this drive highlighted by Gloria Steinem is fully retracted. You’ve had great customer service for book bags for us in the past … never again!!! Lauding Gloria Steinem is beyond what I can understand from a company that ‘appears’ to celebrate family.” (Posted to the company’s Facebook page.)

Because “celebrating family” means disparaging women and keeping them down.

But the people who celebrate anti-family stuff like treating women and girls as just as complicated and important as men and boys – those people did their own shouting at Lands End.

“Well, now that you’ve pulled it, I won’t be placing my order,” another (former?) customer wrote on the company Facebook page, echoing hundreds of other angry comments. “I don’t intend to teach my children that anyone should do business with a company that is ashamed to even talk about feminism. You see equal rights as a divisive issue? Thanks for letting me know not to give you my money.”

Hostility to feminism is a deal-breaker around here, too. Just fuck right off with that.

At the New Statesman, Glosswitch takes a look at paid surrogacy and finds it wanting.

She starts with a recent newspaper story about the lack of human kidneys for sale in the UK and the horror that people in more distant, poorer countries who agree to sell you a kidney can change their minds.

A lawyer specialising in cases such as these confirmed that this was a problem:

“The UK has a long way to go in catching up with other nations, some of which have even built dedicated hostels to prevent donors – or living incubators, as we call them – from departing in possession of body parts which are reserved for those with more money.”

There was no such newspaper story.

Wealthy people in this country are not permitted to harvest the bodies of poor people elsewhere. While a shortage of organ donors is a recognised problem, it is widely understood that the exploitation of extreme wealth inequalities is not the solution.

We cannot allow ourselves to reach a point where certain people, born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, have the same status as the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Unless we are talking about international surrogacy. While no one may be publicly complaining of the difficulties of purchasing organs from abroad, the Guardian recently published a highly sympathetic piece on “childless UK couples forced abroad to find surrogates”.

I read that piece, and was revolted by it, and wanted to post about it, but didn’t have the strength.

The piece focused on two barriers to finding surrogates: the cost (“attempts to keep costs down have seen the creation of ‘hybrids’, where an egg is fertilised in one country, often where the commissioning parents reside, and then implanted in a woman in a developing country”) and the risk of a surrogate changing her mind (celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi, whose own child was born to a surrogate in the US, claims it is “definitely time the laws were adjusted to allow people to sign legally binding contracts here”).

No. No, no, no, no, it’s not.

Remember the Baby M case? I disagreed with most of the feminists I was aware of at the time (it was long before blogs and Facebook) in thinking that Mary Beth White had every right to change her mind.

Throughout the piece, the difficulties are portrayed almost entirely from the perspective of those wanting easier access to rentable wombs. That surrogates are people too, not property on an unstable market, would be an easy thing to miss.

We shouldn’t miss it, though. There is something horrendously dystopian about the growing acceptability of trans-national surrogacy, involving an industry which places poor women of colour in closely monitored residences and treats them as potting soil for the planting and growing of children for wealthier, usually white clients.

I didn’t know the women were put in closely monitored residences. That’s hideous.

While radical feminists have long been critical of the practice, mainstream liberal feminism, which claims to be more aware of intersections of race, class and gender, has remained surprisingly silent on the topic. This is the most literal example we have of women being treated as walking wombs, yet it appears that it would be bad manners to point it out.

It’s liberal feminism for a reason – liberal not as in universalist or rights-respecting but as in libertarian. Those women choose to sign binding contracts and be put in closely monitored residences. They have agency. How dare you not respect their agency?

Liberal feminism has painted itself into a corner from which it is very hard to launch a coherent critique of surrogacy. Two effective but dangerously simplistic slogans, “work is work” and “my body, my choice”, make it almost impossible to claim that what is happening is wrong.

A woman can, it is suggested, rent out any part of herself. To question this would be a denial of her agency. The logical conclusion of such a line of thought is that nothing that is mutually agreed and paid for can be deemed abusive or exploitative, regardless of the gendered, class-based and/or racial conditions under which the agreement is made (which seems to me the antithesis of an intersectional approach).

Even worse, we seem to have reached a situation whereby the more physically or sexually intrusive gendered work is, the more it is seen as anti-establishment and therefore beyond criticism. Thus one woman employing another to clean her house is seen as more abusive than a man employing a woman to gestate, bear and relinquish a child. I can see how we got here but it does not look much like feminism to me.

Glosswitch is brilliant.

What a clusterfuck.

‘Girls in tech’ competition won by boy

EDF Energy has been criticised after a 13-year-old-boy won a competition that was part of a campaign to attract teenage girls to the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths.

…

EDF said that while its Pretty Curious programme is still aimed at girls, the UK competition was later opened up to all 11 to 16-year-olds.

“Pretty Curious” as the name for a program aimed at girls – see what they did there?

Siiiiiiiiigh

They paused just long enough to insult female people by implying their appearance is what matters about them, and then opened the competition to everyone.

“Congratulations to the winner – but I’d love to hear from EDF how the winning solution meets their stated aim for the competition,” said computer scientist Dr Sue Black OBE.

“It is taking me a bit of time to work out how this result will change girls’ perceptions of Stem.”

It might repel them even more?

Suw Charman-Anderson, who founded the annual celebration of women in Stem, Ada Lovelace Day, told the BBC she had had reservations about the Pretty Curious campaign from the beginning.

“EDF Energy chose to link appearance and interest in Stem through the title of their campaign, despite many people pointing out that it was demeaning to girls,” she said.

“Rather than challenging stereotypes, the focus on girls’ looks rather than their intelligence reinforces them.

“EDF Energy have failed to understand both the nature of the problem [of women in Stem] and the negative impacts that their publicity stunt may well have on girls who took part with genuine enthusiasm and excitement.”

Oh well, they’re only girls.

Eric Adriaans, the Executive Director of CFI Canada, wrote an open letter to the mayor and council of Ottawa about their “Celebrate Hijab” day.

To the Mayor and Council of the City of Ottawa

It has come to the attention of Centre For Inquiry Canada (CFIC) that the City of Ottawa is hosting a celebration of the hijab on February 25, 2016.  As an organization which represents views of the non-religious and secularists members of the community, CFIC – including our Ottawa Branch members – opposes this initiative.

Centre For Inquiry Canada (CFIC) supports and promotes the human right to freedom of religion which includes freedom from religion.  CFIC does not denigrate those who wish to express their personal freedom by wearing of articles of clothing; we do however, assert that there are others who are forced, coerced, pressured and otherwise manipulated into submission to religious oppression – that their freedom of thought, expression of their individual agency is daily violated. For these people, the hijab is not a symbol of choice, but a symbol of victimization.

CFIC is an advocate of secular human rights as well as secularism.  From  the perspective of a modern secular democracy,

• government should not endorse or favour the religious rites or practices of any religion
• government should never celebrate practices which are clearly connected to human rights violations
• government should not favour one religious practice or perspective over other practices and perspectives

In celebrating the hijab, the City of Ottawa is demonstrating a favouring of one religious perspective over other perspectives.  The  perspective of those atheists, humanists, ex-Muslims, Christians, Muslims and others who object to the hijab have effectively been rejected by the City of Ottawa.  Just as the City of Ottawa should not host “anti-hijab” demonstrations, neither should it host “pro-hijab” activities.  By sponsoring Hijab Day, the City of Ottawa has  advanced religious privilege over human rights.  That is not acceptable.

From the perspective of human rights, the hijab is recognized as a symbol and practical tool for the oppression and victimization of women.  Consider the following comments from Muslims, Ex-Muslims, atheists, secularists and humanists that have been submitted to CFIC in response to this activity (names withheld to respect confidentiality):

• And just as the hijab, Female Genital Mutilation is defined by policing female sexuality. As an immigrant, I can’t even begin to understand ”why” Canada is endorsing such blatant sexism and misogyny in the name of “tolerance”. It’s a step back in the fight for universal human rights.

There are a bunch more comments; read on.

H/t Theo Bromine

Tom Banse reports on KUOW:

Republican Congressmen from several Western states are running with a theme that emerged during the recent armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

A panel of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Thursday discussed two measures that would let states take over management of large swaths of federal land. The Subcommittee on Federal Lands heard Alaska GOP Congressman Don Young pitch his idea to let states buy national forest land from the federal government to increase timber production.

I saw this via Peter Walker on Facebook, who called them Bundy bills.

The Obama administration sent a deputy chief of the U.S. Forest Service to Thursday’s Congressional hearing to register its opposition.

A sportsmen’s group blasted the proposed bills as misguided and “an affront” that would result in the loss of public access to recreational lands.

“This is the most overt discussion of seizing or selling off public lands to take place on Capitol Hill,” said Whit Fosbergh, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “At what point will lawmakers see that this is a non-starter with hunters, anglers, and American families who enjoy public access to outdoor recreation?”

People, just plain people. Not just Americans and not just people traveling as families – people in general, very much including people from outside the US.

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Niki Tsongas accused the Republican majority on the committee of attempting to “betray” an inter-generational commitment to preservation and multi-use by “ceding authority over federal land” and waiving national environmental laws “to elevate timber production over all other uses.”

“They aim to abandon federal oversight of public lands and allow private interest to determine the future of our national forests,” Tsongas charged.

She also questioned the timing of the Congressional hearing.

“It is particularly troubling that we are considering these bills just two weeks after the end of the armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon,” Tsongas said. “At a time like this, we should be working together on bipartisan proposals.”

As opposed to putting forward Bundy bills.

It’s being reported that Scalia’s final hunting trip was with a secret group of secret elite special secret best hunter guys.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.

Hubertus – I’m not familiar with the name. I wonder what his sainthood was based on. Eating more venison than anyone else?

Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website.

Cooooool! They honor God by honoring God’s critters, and they honor God’s critters by killing and eating them. How holy!

Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.

It just sounds so…childish. It’s probably also sinister, because of all the secret wheeling and dealing such groups of powerful rich men can do, but the childish aspect is kind of interesting. It’s like The Big Bang Theory except that the nerds are rich and powerful.

The International Order of St. Hubertus, according to its website, is a “true knightly order in the historical tradition.” In 1695, Count Franz Anton von Sporck founded the society in Bohemia, which is in modern-day Czech Republic.

The group’s Grand Master is “His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria,” according to the Order’s website. The next gathering for “Ordensbrothers” and guests is an “investiture” March 10 in Charleston, S.C.

The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.

Elite men doing what elite men do, starting with keeping women out.

Bang.

Fran Cowles has written a piece explaining that she did not no-platform Peter Tatchell.

In an email to the event organiser, I personally declined an invitation to attend the ‘Re-Radicalising Queers’ event held at Canterbury Christ Church University on 15 February, where Peter would be giving the keynote address and sitting on the panel. I stated that I would not be comfortable, as I believe that Peter has not always acted in the best interests of trans, Muslim and Black communities, who experience disproportionate levels of discrimination and marginalisation within the LGBT movement and wider society. In addition, I provided the evidence which informed my opinion.

She doesn’t make clear why she felt it necessary to explain at all, rather than just declining or saying she couldn’t. But let’s assume she was right to feel it necessary, and look at what she said. Her explanation for not attending the event was that she believes that Peter has not always acted in the best interests of trans, Muslim and Black communities.

But who does always act in the best interests of anyone? How can we even know what that is? Why is failure to act in the best interests of various groups (they’re not “communities”) a reason to shun someone? Maybe she just thought that would be the most professional-seeming way of wording it, but to me it just exposes the extreme flimsiness and pettiness of her putative reason. I think what she means is that she’s heard that Tatchell isn’t a perfect “ally” to everyone in the universe, coupled with the fact that she thinks it’s the job of the left to shun everyone found to be not perfect.

It’s pathetic, childish stuff, and a very weak excuse for trashing Peter.

She goes on to do more of that.

Peter has arguably used questionable tactics in the past to achieve his aims, and, at times, used his public profile to advocate political positions which are not in the best interests of those he claims to represent. In my case, he has used his platform – which is considerably larger than mine – to denounce me as an LGBT activist purely because I do not wish to engage with him and do not agree with some of his views and tactics.

I don’t think Fran Cowling knows for sure what political positions are in the best interests of the people Peter advocates for (as opposed to claiming to represent, as Cowling snidely puts it). I don’t think her apparent certainty on the subject is a good reason for her to trash people who have risked a lot in advocating for a despised minority.

And that last bit is dishonest, because Peter has said very clearly that he went public because she trashed him to other people, not at all because he she doesn’t wish to engage with her him. She’s a bit of a coward as well as dim.

And then there’s a lot of paint-by-numbers garbage, all to justify demonizing him yet again for signing that letter last year defending freedom of speech. If that’s the left of tomorrow, it’s sad.

Edited to correct absent-minded transposition.

Maryam Namazie went on Sam Harris’s podcast yesterday.

https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/throw-open-the-gates

I gather from Maryam’s Twitter that feathers flew.

I’m listening now; I’m 18 minutes in. As you can see, it’s two hours.

The Twitter dudebros are furious at Maryam for disagreeing with their hero. She doesn’t care.

Next week she debates Tariq Ramadan in Oxford. Now that should be awesome!

A petition to Zuckerberg, which is apparently getting through to Facebook and improving the situation, so worth signing.

This week only, more then 9 of the biggest Facebook groups of atheists and secular Arabs were closed after reports campaigns led by Islamist groups containing hundreds of thousands of members. They are abusing the Facebook report facility to remove all pages that oppose their ideology.

While Arab atheists, with absolutely no exaggeration, already face all kinds of oppression, torture, restriction of speech and even sentences to death in their countries (we mention Raif Badawi, Mohamed Cheikh, Achraf Fayad as examples ), Arab atheists are facing a huge risk of losing the remaining freedoms that are practiced secretly or online, wich are , including the freedom and the right of thinking and discussing freely, a basic right of a human being, hence being alive!

Social media is the only space we can freely speak through, But with Facebook’s policy that signifies reports by the number of reporters, Facebook is allowing Islamists to create groups with the sole purpose of closing our atheist and secular pages, and unfortunately Facebook facebook have being at their side !

We, as secular and Arab atheists, are asking Facebook’s administration to change its policy, to revise it’s Reporting system in order to prevent this from happening again , and to restore all our groups and pages !

There’s an update:

Facebook is Reacting ! Keep your support , you are great !

The petition.

Well that’s awkward.

“Be careful discussing sensitive topics,” professors at the University of Houston were warned in a faculty meeting about the new “campus carry” gun policy.

An unofficial forum of professors suggested that teachers may want to “drop certain topics from your curriculum,” and “not ‘go there’ if you sense anger,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

A new Texas law will allow people to carry concealed handguns on university campuses.

So the academics should draw up a list of topics that could make a student angry, and avoid those topics in favor of other topics that have zero potential to make a student – any student – angry.

Um.

Jeffrey Villines, a Ph.D. student in the university’s English department, shared a photo of what he said is a slide from a “recent campus carry dialogue at UH, in response to faculty concerns about dangers from armed students.”

Jeff

The Houston Chronicle notes that advice given at the faculty forum “echoes concerns voiced by professors across the state that allowing guns into the classroom will limit academic freedoms and inhibit discussion of sometimes touchy subjects.”

Jeff Villines argued that campus carry policies may have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression, silencing “discourse through fear of violence.”

“To be clear,” he wrote, “Step 1 of 3: Terrorism involves the silencing of discourse through fear of violence. Step 2 of 3: Open carry is advertised as a means of resisting or preventing terrorism. Step 3 of 3: Teachers advised that any problems with Open Carry can be resolved by silencing discourse.”

This has worked to destroy access to abortion in much of the US, by the way. Doctors are afraid to provide abortions, and reasonably so. If I were a doctor I would be far too cowardly to provide them.

Texas is a scary place.

The Ex-Muslims of Britain send a message to the NUS:

NUS: Revise Safe Space and No Platform Policies to Facilitate not Restrict Free Expression and Thought

We are deeply concerned by the increasing attempts by the National Union of Students (NUS) and its affiliated Student Unions to silence dissenters – including feminists, apostates, LGBTI rights campaigners, anti-racists, anti-fascists and anti-Islamists – through its use of No-Platform and Safe Space policies.

We stand against all prejudice and discrimination. We agree that free speech does not mean giving bigots a free pass. A defence of free speech includes the right and moral imperative to challenge, oppose and protest bigoted views.

Educational institutions must be a place for the exchange and criticism of all ideas – even those deemed unpalatable by some – providing they don’t incite violence against peoples or communities. Bigoted ideas are most effectively defeated by open debate, backed up by ethics, reason and evidence.

The proviso about inciting violence is of course where the arguments over particulars bite the deepest. I disagree with people who draw the line only at direct orders to go right now and kill specific people…and I also disagree with people who make overwrought claims about violence and genocide. That’s probably the plight of most people. I wish it were the case that relentless demonization never does motivate physical violence against people, but I don’t think it is the case. On the other hand any harsh words could motivate violence, and it won’t do to try to rule out the very possibility by ruling out the harsh words, because that would be the end of free inquiry and discussion.

At any rate, the NUS has been erring way too far on that side, using peculiar and unreasonable criteria.

I’ve emailed Maryam to add me to the list of signers.

Nathan Lean is harassing Asra Nomani on Twitter. Yesterday she asked him a very pointed question at a forum, and he refused to answer. She asked him why, when he rightly speaks out against hate-speech directed at Muslims, he talks so much smack himself.

Today she tells us this:

After refusing to acknowledge my humanity as I stood before him, Nathan Lean, from Georgetown University’s Saudi Prince Waleed Bin Talal Center, is now harassing me on Twitter, posting a screenshot from my Facebook page, mocking my feminism, casting aspersions on my relationship with Maajid Nawaz, a married man, and on and on. Does Georgetown really support slut shaming?

In the FB post, I stand up for my humanity from personal attacks by a man with the name of David Fox who is also acting unscrupulously on my page. I am sharing all of this with you, my friends, because in the name of saving face, many people have resorted to violent ends, and Mr. Lean’s stability now causes me concern. I have reported my concerns to Georgetown University, which is doing nothing. I will continue to add documentation of the harassment I am receiving so that somebody — you all — know.

He’s got a nasty, ugly way of talking.

Lean is a researcher at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. The Center, as the name hints, has generous Saudi funding. That doesn’t mean Lean is bought by Saudi cash, but would he be there if he were critical of Saudi Arabia? I doubt it.

Originally a comment by iknklast on She described the situation as feminist because it is her choice.

while (some other) feminists made homemakers ashamed of that choice.

I heard this trope from my mother and sisters for years – but none of them were ever ashamed of that choice! They were proud, because they were real women. I am sure there were women out there who were ashamed of that choice, and perhaps feminists who made them so. I haven’t actually met any, but I haven’t lived in such a way that I know absolutely everyone, or even more than a tiny fraction of everyone, so I can accept that.

The problem is, this is presented as it stands. It never receives the proper response, which is that women who chose to be homemakers have for a very long time done everything they could to make working women ashamed. And since they are usually the ones getting the positive attention in the magazines, newspapers, and other venues (the Mommy wars?), and women are still expected to give birth to, clean up after, and chauffeur children, it is definitely an issue. In addition, there is still a lot of noise about how women “have” to work because of the economy and how horrible that is – usually coming from the left, who (rightly) want a better distribution of wealth and use that old trope to try to shame Washington (men) into propping up the social safety net. There are a lot more support systems for homemakers than for mothers who work outside the home, as well, and almost no support systems for childless women who work outside the home.

So, go ahead and acknowledge the fact that (some) women feel ashamed of making that choice, but please don’t leave it standing as a trope on its own without noticing that a lot of homemakers do their best to shame working women. My mother never let a day go by without throwing some crack out there about “real women”, by which she meant women that were girly women, didn’t do “man” things, did not work outside the home, and had no fewer than six children (conveniently, the number she herself gave birth to). I spent a dozen years in therapy, by the way, and a lot of it was from this sort of crap – being made to feel not just less female (I don’t give a rat’s ass about that), but also a lot less human.

The Independent reports breathlessly on the history-making excitement of more pushing women aside so that trans women can be in the center. It’s the story of Anna Lee running for NUS Women’s Officer, again.

A student at Lancaster University looks set to make history by becoming the first-ever openly trans woman to run for a top national role with the National Union of Students (NUS).

That would be great…if only it were a different top national role.

Anna Lee, who is currently vice president of welfare and community at the university’s students’ union – as well as featuring on the women’s campaign committee (trans* rep) at NUS – is aiming to become women’s officer with the national student campaigner.

But it’s that one.

Isn’t it fascinating how eager people are to shove women out of the picture?

Highlighting her determination to get to where she wants to be, Miss Lee said: “When the transphobic ‘feminists’ come and try to tear me down, I will just fight harder and, with the help of amazing activists, we will show them, together, that the NUS women’s campaign demonstrates a progressive approach to inclusive feminism, not only ensuring the campaign is proudly trans inclusive, but that our campaign is a place where feminist activists can thrive – whether they’ve been involved for five years or five minutes.”

See that’s one glaring reason she shouldn’t be the Women’s Officer – she hates feminists. Not a good fit.

Highlighting how mainstream feminism constantly forgets about trans women, she added: “Let alone a queer trans disabled lesbian woman.”

First priority: bash feminism.