The IHEU has an Amsterdam Declaration that is a statement of the fundamental principles of modern Humanism. The first one was in 1952, and it was updated in 2002. They tweeted about it, so I had a look.

Humanism is the outcome of a long tradition of free thought that has inspired many of the world’s great thinkers and creative artists and gave rise to science itself.

The fundamentals of modern Humanism are as follows:

1. Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others. Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations. Humanists believe that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others, needing no external sanction.

If it were mine I would tweak that to add something to “the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom.” Freedom is a great good but it’s not enough. Maybe “equality” is the word that needs adding.

2. Humanism is rational. It seeks to use science creatively, not destructively. Humanists believe that the solutions to the world’s problems lie in human thought and action rather than divine intervention. Humanism advocates the application of the methods of science and free inquiry to the problems of human welfare. But Humanists also believe that the application of science and technology must be tempered by human values. Science gives us the means but human values must propose the ends.

3. Humanism supports democracy and human rights. Humanism aims at the fullest possible development of every human being. It holds that democracy and human development are matters of right. The principles of democracy and human rights can be applied to many human relationships and are not restricted to methods of government.

There, that gets at what I would have added – human development. Freedom and opportunity for development, perhaps. Freedom by itself isn’t enough because so many people have no opportunity for development at all, no matter how free they are. Freedom is pretty worthless if you’re starving and overworked and in constant danger.

4. Humanism insists that personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility. Humanism ventures to build a world on the idea of the free person responsible to society, and recognises our dependence on and responsibility for the natural world. Humanism is undogmatic, imposing no creed upon its adherents. It is thus committed to education free from indoctrination.

5. Humanism is a response to the widespread demand for an alternative to dogmatic religion. The world’s major religions claim to be based on revelations fixed for all time, and many seek to impose their world-views on all of humanity. Humanism recognises that reliable knowledge of the world and ourselves arises through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision.

And if observation, evaluation, and revision are prohibited, you have a rigid anti-human system, which is what most religions are.

6. Humanism values artistic creativity and imagination and recognises the transforming power of art. Humanism affirms the importance of literature, music, and the visual and performing arts for personal development and fulfilment.

7. Humanism is a lifestance aiming at the maximum possible fulfilment through the cultivation of ethical and creative living and offers an ethical and rational means of addressing the challenges of our times. Humanism can be a way of life for everyone everywhere.
Our primary task is to make human beings aware in the simplest terms of what Humanism can mean to them and what it commits them to. By utilising free inquiry, the power of science and creative imagination for the furtherance of peace and in the service of compassion, we have confidence that we have the means to solve the problems that confront us all. We call upon all who share this conviction to associate themselves with us in this endeavour.

You got it.

Waiting for a bus. A truck went by – a St Pauli Beer truck. There was a slogan on the side, under the logo of the “St Pauli girl” and her armful of beers.

You never forget your first girl.

Hmmm.

The ACLU tweeted a graphic:

Steven Shapin reviews the second installment of Richard Dawkins’s memoirs in the Guardian.

I get a sense that he’s not wholly admiring.

The enemies Dawkins has made are, in the main, the enemies he anticipated. As an atheist, he is a vigorous critic of the creationists, their religious fellow-travellers, the postmodernists, relativists and assorted “enemies of reason”. And as a participant in the scientific cage-fighting that is modern evolutionary theory, Dawkins has one of the sharpest tongues in modern culture.

Yes, but also as a participant in various other kinds of cage-fighting, especially the kind conducted via Twitter. In that avocation he’s made some enemies he didn’t anticipate, such as fellow atheists, scientists, humanists and the like who think he should stop bringing out the heavy artillery for every minor exchange. I also doubt that he anticipated having quite so many feminist women who think he’s a mean bully.

As has been said of the traditional English gentleman, Dawkins has never been unintentionally rude; and his snarling is unremitting. Writing in the Observer some years ago, Robin McKie described him as “the Dirty Harry of science”, and a Spectator review defined what it means to be “Dawkinised”: “Not just to be dressed down or duffed up, it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste.”

Which, after awhile, loses its charm.

Commentators disagree about whether there is a mismatch between the public rage and what Dawkins is like when he is not, so to speak, “miked up”. But he tells us a bit about himself here and elsewhere, and what he sees when he looks in the mirror is the face of a man who is considerate, pleasant and even tolerant: “I’ve never been the sort of firebrand that I’ve been made out to be. I’m actually quite a mild person.”

Pause to laugh. Pause to laugh some more. That’s truly funny. He does seem to believe it, but he’s just wrong. A guy who is constantly calling people idiots is not actually quite a mild person.

Maybe he’s confused by his own voice. His voice seems mild…but the content does not. Maybe he thinks that if you’re not screaming and purple in the face, then you’re actually quite a mild person – but if he does, he’s very naïve.  Verbal aggression in a mild voice is nothing new.

He thinks of himself as driven not by fulminating hostility to religion – that’s actually incidental, he insists – but by enchantment with scientific rationality and the beauty of knowledge. He wants us all to share in the certainty that scientific reason offers. Why would anyone choose religious hocus-pocus over that? Of course, spades ought to be called spades, and opponents of evolution must be either “ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked”. But there has never been anything personal in his opposition to religion or to scientific error. It’s no crime to be stupid; you’re just in need of Dawkinsian correction: read the books; see the light.

That might have worked if he had never discovered Twitter. But he did discover Twitter, and on Twitter his rudeness is very personal, and it’s there for all the world to see.

It’s to Dawkins’s credit here that he gives a little space to a fellow science populariser, the American physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, making an impromptu suggestion that Dawkins might be more effective in selling his scientific wares if he did some market research. “You are professor of the public understanding of science,” Tyson said, “not professor of delivering truth to the public, and these are two different exercises. Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here’s the facts, you are either an idiot or you’re not.’ It’s ‘Here’s the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.’ And I worry that your methods, and how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective.” Dawkins reports that he “gratefully accepted the rebuke”, but there’s no evidence here that he recognised its wisdom.

And there’s a great deal of evidence elsewhere that he did not recognize its wisdom at all.

A teenager gets space in the Washington Post to explain why he refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home because it has drawings of naked laydeez.

Brian Grasso is a freshman.

As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke.

My first challenge came well before I arrived on campus, when I learned that all first years were assigned “Fun Home,” a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. The book includes cartoon drawings of a woman masturbating and multiple women engaging in oral sex.

After researching the book’s content and reading a portion of it, I chose to opt out of the assignment. My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. I’m not even opposed to reading Freud, Marx or Darwin. I know that I’ll have to grapple with ideas I don’t agree with, even ideas that I find immoral.

But in the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29.

So? It’s a sentence in a book. There are many sentences in many books. Just pointing to a sentence doesn’t tell us much. Maybe Jesus was wrong.

If the book explored the same themes without sexual images or erotic language, I would have read it. But viewing pictures of sexual acts, regardless of the genders of the people involved, conflict with the inherent sacredness of sex. My beliefs extend to pop culture and even Renaissance art depicting sex.

Sacred shmacred.

He’s so proud of his dull little “beliefs.” They’ve been making people narrow and censorious for 20 centuries, but he’s bursting with pride in them. He’s eighteen and he doesn’t know much yet, but he has his important serious beliefs. And the Washington Post thinks it’s worth publishing them.

I decided to post about my decision on the Duke Class of 2019 Facebook page to comfort those with similar beliefs. I knew that my decision wouldn’t be well-received. How could it in a country where, according to one study, more than three-quarters of American men between 18 and 24 years old have viewed pornography within the past month.

But though many students denounced my decision publicly, almost 20 people privately messaged me, thanking me for my post. I received many messages from Christians, but a message from a Muslim man stood out. The man, currently a sophomore at Duke, wrote, “I’ve seen a lot of people who just throw away their identity in college in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism.” Is this really what Duke wants?

Ah there it is again, the ever-present worship of “identity.” If your “identity” is being closed-minded and incurious and and narrow, then yes, that is what any good university wants – it wants you to expand and enrich that small pinched identity. It’s doing you a favor.

Granted, you can do that without watching people fuck in class, but you can’t very well do it while treating your “beliefs” as off-limits.

The Guardian, August 16:

Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the recently closed Kids Company charity, reportedly has plans to open a food bank for up to 3,000 children and young people.

Less than two weeks after the charity’s collapse, its former chief executive is set to open Kids Dining Room beneath a railway arch in Lambeth, south London, this week, the Sunday Times reported.

Why did it collapse? Well…

Kids Company shut down at the start of August after the government pulled an annual grant of £3m following allegations of financial mismanagement at the charity, which had no funding reserves. The government has had to find alternative support for 6,000 vulnerable children as a result of its closure.

Batmanghelidjh agreed to stand aside from her position in order to secure a £3m emergency restructuring grant, part of which was spent on overdue staff wages. Immediately after the charity’s closure she blamed “rumour-mongering civil servants”, ministers and the media for having “put the nail” in its coffin.

The BBC, 45 minutes ago:

As central government, local authorities and charities pick up the pieces of Kids Company, the charity which collapsed insolvent in early August, new details are emerging of the discussions that preceded the Cabinet Office paying a controversial £3m grant to the charity in late July – just days before it closed its doors.

BBC Newsnight and BuzzFeed News have learned of a document, emailed to civil servants in the name of Alan Yentob, chair of the charity’s trustees, on 2 June. It warned that a sudden closure of the charity would mean a “high risk of arson attacks on government buildings”.

The document also warned of a high risk of “looting” and “rioting”, and cautioned that the “communities” served by Kids Company could “descend into savagery”. The document was written in language that civil servants across government described as “absurd”, “hysterical” and “extraordinary”.

Erm…Alan Yentob…that name is familiar.

Oh yes.

Today, Mr Yentob, also the BBC’s creative director, said: “It’s widely acknowledged that Kids Company has done vital work with vulnerable children and young adults. The document… was an appendix written by the Safeguarding Team, who set out all the potential risks to be taken into account in the event of closure.”

Such as arson attacks on government buildings. Is that setting out potential risks…or is it a threat?

After explaining the potential trauma for clients, the document then went on to list “risks posed to the public”, saying there was a “high risk” of looting, rioting and arson attacks on government buildings. The same section also listed “increases” in knife and gun crime, neglect, starvation and modern-day slavery as possible dangers.

The document also says: “We are… concerned that these children and families will be left without services in situations of sexual, psychological or emotional abuse, neglect and malnutrition and facing homelessness and further destitution.”

…

“Without a functioning space for hope, positivity and genuine care, these communities will descend into savagery due to sheer desperation for basic needs to be met.”

Local authority officials and councillors have expressed anger and bemusement at this claim, in particular.

I can see why.

But the charity helped a lot of people, yes?

Officials in central and local government have also told BBC Newsnight and BuzzFeed News that they have been taken aback by the difficulty in establishing how much work the charity actually did. The organisation had claimed to “intensively” help 18,000 young people and to “reach” 36,000.

The charity also said that its records showed that it supported 15,933 young people. Speaking to Radio 4’s The Report on August 5, Ms Batmanghelidjh had said that the figure of 15,933 represented “the most high-risk group of kids, that’s what’s sucking up all our money”. All of these clients, she said, had “keyworkers” allocated to them.

However, the charity has handed over records to local government relating to just 1,692 clients in London, of which the charity had designated 331 as “high-risk”. Officials in Bristol have been given details of a further 175 clients. Ms Batmanghelidjh has told The Sunday Times that she has kept back some records of clients who are at risk of deportation.

Hoo-boy.

Editing to add: It appears this is an Onion-type joke. Never mind.

Cardiff Store Apologises For Offensive Shop Banner

One reason we’re given to back up the claim that concerns about trans people should trump other concerns (such as lesbian and gay rights and feminism) is the high suicide rate among trans people. Kevin K on the Dames on the run thread for instance –

On that note, in light of a suicide rates of transgender kids being 10 to 20 times higher than their peers, I think “thinking of the children” is entirely merited.

But wait a minute. Who are “their peers”? There’s more than one way to slice and dice kinds of kids; trans kids on the one hand and their peers on the other isn’t a very careful way to compare.

What about lesbian and gay kids? What about bullied kids? What about kids who don’t fit in? What about small kids, homely kids, fat kids, clueless kids, clumsy kids, boring kids, awkward kids?

There are so many ways for kids to piss off the herd and become targets. Kids are horrifyingly good at enforcing the local norms, I suppose because they’re deep in the process of figuring out how to Do Everything Right themselves and conformity is their chief guide. I remember being that kind of kid, and I remember ceasing to be it. In the lower grades I was desperate to be acceptable and to fit in (and I was a dismal failure at it). In the upper grades I stopped giving a fuck, and often flouted the local norms. For awhile in the 11th grade (I think) I wore little white socks when that was a gross fashion violation. I did it for my own amusement. But in the lower grades it was all sheep-like imitation, and ostracism.

Being trans is one way to piss off the herd, for sure, but so are a bunch of other variables. Do we know that trans kids have a suicide rate 10 to 20 times higher than all their peers? If we sort the kids in a different way, would we find they have a rate comparable to other kinds of kids subject to bullying and ostracism?

The Sad Puppies adventure didn’t work out well for the Sad Puppies. John Scalzi tells the story.

As most of you know, at last Saturday’s Hugo Awards ceremony, the voters, of which there were a record number, chose not to offer awards in five categories rather than to give the award to nominees who got on the ballot because of the Sad/Rabid Puppy slating campaign. In the categories in which awards were given, in nearly all cases the Puppy nominees in the category finished below “No Award.”

Why is that, do you suppose? Scalzi explains that it’s because they acted like jerks, and performed a series of jerk maneuvers.

2. They gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.

4. They spent months insulting the people they associated with their imaginary cabal. That’s a jerk maneuver.

5. They spent months crapping on the writers they dragooned into their imaginary cabal, and crapping on the work those writers created. That’s a jerk maneuver.

7. They spent months pissing on the people who love and care about the awards, and the convention that hosts both. That’s a jerk maneuver.

8. They expected the people who they’d been treating with contempt to give them the respect they would not afford them. That’s a jerk maneuver.

If it gloats like a jerk, if it craps on people like a jerk, if it pisses on people like a jerk – it’s probably a jerk.

Mind you, I don’t expect the core Puppies to recognize this; indeed I expect them to say they haven’t done a single thing that has been other than forthright and noble and correct. Well, and here’s the thing about that: acting like an jerk and then asserting that no, it’s everyone else that’s been acting like a jerk, is the biggest jerk maneuver of all.

Well, yes, but they of course would say they haven’t been acting like a jerk – oh this is where we came in, we can go home now.

Haha good old fun-loving college boy rape culture haha it’s alive and well at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, the Huffington Post tells us.

Three banners were displayed at a private, off-campus house in Norfolk, Virginia, reading “Freshman Daughter Drop Off,” with an arrow pointing at the front door, “Go Ahead And Drop Off Mom Too …” and “Rowdy And Fun, Hope Your Baby Girl Is Ready For A Good Time …” The students removed the banners after the university contacted them, school officials said.

Haha get it? “Drop Off” so that we can fuck them haha we like to fuck haha that’s what girls are for haha that’s what a university is for haha.

A Virginia man posted the photos Friday afternoon on Facebook. A screengrab captured by The Huffington Post is displayed below:

Big letters! Everyone can read them from far away!

In response, Old Dominion University started posting multiple statements on social media denouncing the banners.

“Messages like the ones displayed yesterday by a few students on the balcony of their private residence are not and will not be tolerated,” ODU said in a statement to HuffPost. “The moment University staff became aware of these banners, they worked to have them removed. At ODU, we foster a community of respect and dignity and these messages sickened us. They are not representative of our 3,000 faculty and staff, 25,000 students and our 130,000 alumni.”

Well they seem to be representative of some of their 25,000 students.

Oh well, it’s only women.

More Temple of Baal-Shamin:

Via Wikimedia Commons:

Photo by Jerzy Strzelecki

Also Wikimedia Commons:

Photo by Heretiq

Cuttlefish wrote a poem about self-described allies who flounce off in a huff when people don’t take their brilliant advice.

Don’t you see? I am your ally!
One you dare not risk to lose!
So my clever new idea
Is the one you ought to choose!
Okay, fine, my help’s not wanted!
Suit yourselves—it’s just as well.
If you disrespect your allies
Well, then, fuck you—go to hell!

Oh zing.

Mind you…I think attempts to think about an issue are being conflated with offers of help, so then the flouncing off in a huff is misrepresented, since it wasn’t about rejections of unwanted help in the first place. But poets get license, you know.

From the prose commentary after the poem:

I lost my old aggregator and started reading about other things instead. Stuff outside my areas of expertise, where my urge to help was tempered by the knowledge that I was an ignorant outsider.

I did note, though, that being an ignorant outsider was not stopping everybody.

And I noted (or rather, saw it pointed out over and over again, across many different populations) a subgroup of ignorant outsiders who were offended when their offers of help were not met with thanks, cookies, and glitter. This verse is for them.

Well, again, I haven’t made any offers of help. I don’t have any illusions that I can help. But oh well…poets get license.

Oh, and probably this verse, too.

That verse in its entirety:

I would write it in letters, eleven feet tall—
And how they would shine; they would glisten!—
The advice I once got, the most useful of all:
“Just shut the fuck up… and listen.”

Well…no. Not exclusively. I do listen, and I also write about what I listen to, and think about what I listen to, and write about what I think about what I listen to, and so on. I think that’s part of free inquiry and free thought.

But oh well…poets get license. I don’t, but poets do.

Lady Mondegreen alerted me to this horrific story by Martin McKenzie-Murray –

Nazanin left the Nauru refugee camp one morning on a day pass, happy to be visiting some friends who had been settled on the island – she and her family had been in detention for 26 months. “She used a bus, and I called a friend and he said she was there,” Dabal tells me. “My sister was happy to leave this camp for a day.”

She never returned. At 6 o’clock that evening, Dabal and his mother reported her absence to security guards. Something wasn’t right. In response, the guards floated theories of missed buses or an innocent loss of time, benign explanations for what the family felt was a sinister disappearance. By 7pm, several hours past Nazanin’s curfew, the camp authorities began to wonder, too. “They realise it was bigger than the things they thought,” Dabal says.

Police found her at 9 pm, beaten and disoriented.

Much of the reporting of Nauru focuses on the camps, or regional processing centres. But there is another reality lived outside it, once refugees are settled. For many months now, hostility towards refugees has grown among Nauruans. Local resentment about the 2013 riots has metastasised, mixed with anxieties about employment and culture. Many settled refugees have been assaulted, and there are frequent threats to storm the camps themselves.

In other words refugees are sitting ducks, imprisoned on a small island where the locals hate them. Women are placed in isolated locations, without proper locks on the doors. The private company the Australian government pays to house the refugees says there’s no problem.

It’s unusual that they haven’t encountered any allegations of rape or sexual assault, because there are many. Such as the story of Beth, a young refugee who was released into the Nauruan community in May. Allegedly Beth, whose name I have changed, was sitting on the beach with some other women when local men gave her a drink. Beth began to feel woozy, before being dragged into bushes by two or three men and raped. They then poured fuel on her and set her alight.

She had an abortion, then she tried to kill herself.

There are others.

McKenzie-Murray indicts the refugee camp system:

We have built camps in our name that house damaged children, yet denude privacy and employ guards without background checks. Camps that encourage abuse, intimidation and the hypersexualisation of children. Camps that cannot provide nominal release dates to its subjects, creating purgatories. Camps that repel journalists with exaggerated visa fees, and punish detainees who speak to them distantly.

On Nauru, aid workers have been traumatised, discredited, sacked without explanation and had their exoneration ignored. We have criminalised their disclosure of child abuse. Have, in fact, created a distant exclusion zone for mandatory reporting; a black site whose governing legislation is a repudiation of our own laws. “If I see child abuse in Australia and I don’t report it, I can get into enormous trouble,” David Isaacs, a paediatrician, said last week. “If I see child abuse on Nauru and I do report it, I might go to prison for two years.”

And that’s not the end of it.