Mona Eltahawy reports on the harassment and persecution of atheists in Egypt.

Because atheism itself is not illegal in Egypt, charges are laid under laws against blasphemy or contempt for religion. In 2012, a 27-year-old blogger, Alber Saber, received a three-year sentence on charges of blasphemy for creating a web page called “Egyptian Atheists.” In 2013, the writer and human rights activist Karam Saber (no relation) was convicted of defaming religion in his short story collection “Where Is God?”

Cool trick. No law against atheism – but you can’t defame religion!

It is no surprise that Mr. Banna’s conviction occurred on the watch of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who led the ouster of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to become president. Regardless of which way the seesaw of power in Egypt tips — toward the Islamists or toward the military — it is always a heterosexual, conservative Muslim man who heads the moral hierarchy. The further from that identity you are, the more vulnerable you are.

Liberal feminist atheist women are miles and miles away from that identity.

If anything, Egypt’s nominally secular ruler is more Catholic than the pope, to borrow a metaphor from another religion. Assuming the role of defender of public morality is a deliberate reminder that the Islamists do not hold the copyright on piety. This is not new: The regime of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak often vaunted its religiosity to outdo its Islamists rivals.

So…you can have Islamists, or you can have non-Islamists who compete with Islamists for Who Is Most Theocratic. Fabulous – talk about moving the Overton window.

Nowhere is this morality power play exercised more vehemently than in curbing perceived religious and sex crimes. Hence Egypt’s witch hunt against gay men. Rights activists say that 2014 was the worst year in a decade for gay people in Egypt, with at least 150 men arrested or put on trial. Same-sex relationships are not illegal, but gay men are targeted under “debauchery” laws.

Because God isn’t gay. God is a heterosexual man and don’t you forget it. God fucks laydeez, God doesn’t fuck men. Everybody knows that.

In a speech this month honoring the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Mr. Sisi called on Muslim leaders in Egypt to start a “religious revolution” to counter the jihadist message of the Islamic State. He also sent his foreign minister to the solidarity march after the attacks in Paris at the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.

The contradiction in Mr. Sisi’s aim of keeping the heterosexual, conservative Muslim man at the top of Egypt’s moral hierarchy is glaring. You can’t trump the Islamists in their piety and lead a campaign against minorities like atheists and gay men even as you condemn extremist violence and show solidarity for free speech and free thinking.

Maybe the foreign minister just wanted to have a chat with the Saudi officials on the solidarity march.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Maajid Nawaz has started a video series – short video, which I applaud. Yesterday’s, the third, is about Raif and Waleed. It’s only a minute and a half.

The punchline is a doozy.

If we are more offended by mere cartoons than a man being flogged in public for the charge of blasphemy – if we take more offense to the former over the latter – then we’ve got a fucking problem.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Waleed and Raif are nominated for a Nobel.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Look who has joined this sinister group of bloggers – Jamila Bey!

In her inaugural post she tells us an atheist invented Black History Month, which I didn’t know.

Carter G. Woodson, autodidact who graduated with his Ph.D. from Harvard, was a leading thinker who came up with the idea of Negro History Month in 1926.  He hoped, (as does this writer) that the need for the commemoration would someday become obsolete.

Woodson was a staunch critic of religious institutions and wrote that they were oppressive to Blacks.  Just as he believed that the accomplishments and the global influence of Black people were unreported or at best under represented, the influence of freethinking and atheist people, particularly concerning American history, have been diminished.

Today’s Google Doodle, which celebrates the anniversary of the birth of African-American poet, and columnist, Langston Hughes, is also a great opportunity for atheists to remind folks that Hughes was also without religion.

So give Jamila a big welcome.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Here is the item I was looking for yesterday from a doctor explaining why there can’t be unvaccinated children in his waiting room.

Mike Ginsberg

In my practice you will vaccinate and you will vaccinate on time. You will not get your own “spaced-out” schedule that increases your child’s risk of illness or adverse event. I will not have measles-shedding children sitting in my waiting room. I will answer all your questions about vaccine and present you with facts, but if you will not vaccinate then you will leave my practice. I will file a CPS report (not that they will do anything) for medical neglect, too.

I have patients who are premature infants with weak lungs and hearts. I have kids with complex congenital heart disease. I have kids who are on chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia who cannot get all of their vaccines. In short, I have patients who have true special needs and true health issues who could suffer severe injury or death because of your magical belief that your kid is somehow more special than other children and that what’s good for other children is not good for yours.

This pediatrician is not putting up with it. Never have, never will.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by iknklast on Anxious love.

Where I live, they not only bully you if you don’t like football, but they are currently bullying a woman who moved here from somewhere else (Michigan), didn’t care about football, and had no desire to root for Michigan, but now because of the abuse (and yes, it is abuse!) is rooting for her football team hard and strong. Everyone acts like she has done something evil by maintaining a lifetime loyalty to where she grew up instead of being a convert to “our” state team (who will remain unnamed for now). To live and work in this state is to be required to bow down to the dominant football culture.

The sad part is that they do not think people leaving this state for somewhere else are required to adopt that local football team, but to remain loyal to “our” team. Loyalty for life if you are a “******”; drop the loyalty of any other team, and become a “******” if you move here.

(The reason I do not name the team is that I am not only personally not a fan but actively loathe them, and it is not safe for me to be seen hating on the team…I kid you not!)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I was going to mumble about Jonathan Chait’s much-discussed lament about “political correctness” but then I got caught up in my own laments about football mania. Now that I’ve got most of that off my chest, I want to say a little about what I think is both banal and wrong about Chait’s piece.

Here’s one banal and wrong place.

The recent mass murder of the staff members of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was met with immediate and unreserved fury and grief across the full range of the American political system. But while outrage at the violent act briefly united our generally quarrelsome political culture, the quarreling quickly resumed over deeper fissures. Were the slain satirists martyrs at the hands of religious fanaticism, or bullying spokesmen of privilege? Can the offensiveness of an idea be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense?

You can tell you’re supposed to curl a lip in disdain at the last clause, and that’s why I think it’s wrong, indeed fatuous. Of course “identity” can make a difference to whether one finds a particular “idea” offensive or not. What a damn silly question. The “idea” that women are kind of stupid is particularly “offensive” (except that’s the wrong word) to women. The idea that black people should be stopped and frisked as often as possible is particularly “offensive” to black people. If that’s “political correctness”…then deal with it. He wants us to say no; he wants us to say all ideas can be evaluated independently of thoughts about the identity of the evaluater. Well guess what: that’s easy for him.

Another fatuity:

After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned.

Oh please. What he means is, he wasn’t noticing it so much after the early 90s, and now he is again. He doesn’t know it was in remission all that time. What Jonathan Chait notices isn’t necessarily the same as what is.

There’s a flat-out mistake:

At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma.

That’s not the point about microaggressions at all. Nobody thinks they cause “searing trauma” – that’s what the “micro” means. The point is that they add up; the point is drip drip drip; the point is hostile environment. He doesn’t even know what it is that he’s lamenting.

And then there’s his mindless certainty that this is just a lefty thing.

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.

As if the right never does that? As if the right doesn’t do everything it can to redefine terms to its liking? Death tax, right to life, pre-born child, family values, sanctity of marriage, tax and spend?

And then there’s the way he ignores huge swathes of reality.

…the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity.

Here’s a news flash – stories about race and gender bias can come from people who think race and gender bias is good, and from people who think concerns about race and gender bias are bad. They can come from racists and anti-feminists. They can and they do. If he thinks “p.c.” is riding some huge wave of success – again, that may be because he doesn’t know, because he’s insulated. He’s not a target of racists or anti-feminists. He can afford to worry about the onslaught of “p.c.”

There’s a good deal more dreck, but frankly I’m getting bored. He’s not an interesting writer. But there’s one place where he contradicts himself from one paragraph to the next, and I can’t tell what he wants to say. See if you can parse it.

Political correctness appeals to liberals because it claims to represent a more authentic and strident opposition to their shared enemy of race and gender bias. And of course liberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

See what I mean? Race and gender biases need to be fought, but political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal of a free political marketplace. Ok, so…what? Fight the biases, or don’t fight them? I can’t tell what he thinks he means.

Maybe it’s my gender biases playing up.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Some US doctors are dropping patients who refuse to get their children vaccinated. Good.

With California gripped by a measles outbreak, Dr. Charles Goodman posted a clear notice in his waiting room and on Facebook: His practice will no longer see children whose parents won’t get them vaccinated.

“Parents who choose not to give measles shots, they’re not just putting their kids at risk, but they’re also putting other kids at risk — especially kids in my waiting room,” the Los Angeles pediatrician said.

You know…kids who are there because they are ill, and don’t need to be exposed to measles or mumps on top of that.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says doctors should bring up the importance of vaccinations during visits but should respect a parent’s wishes unless there’s a significant risk to the child.

“In general, pediatricians should avoid discharging patients from their practices solely because a parent refuses to immunize his or her child,” according to guidelines issued by the group.

So they should put all their other patients at risk. Bad advice, if you ask me. Unethical advice. Better to respect the other parents and their children than to “respect” the no-vaxxers.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

While we’re kvetching about football…I wrote a column for the previous-to-current Free Inquiry about my dislike of the sport and its cult. (US football this is, not association football aka soccer.)

What’s so annoying about it is the crackpot assumption that everyone is wildly excited about football when after all sport is only one branch of human activity, and football is only one branch of sport. I, for one, like the other football, a.k.a. soccer, and then there is lacrosse, jai alai, bowls, darts, bocce. . . . There are many sports, and I dislike the assumption that in America we’re all supposed to share the enthusiasm for American football. I dislike the social bullying aspect of it, just as I dislike the social bullying of public religiosity or nationalism or mass mourning when a movie star dies suddenly.

If that were all, though, it would just be one among my rich assortment of peeves. But it’s not all. Football is not treated as just an enthusiasm or an entertainment. It’s taken very seriously, as a shaper of character and a source of values: not just workplace skills like discipline and teamwork, but Character. This is assumed more than argued for, in much the same way it’s assumed that religion is a key source of values and character. But what reason is there to think that football fosters good character?

Then I say a lot about what reason there is to think that it does the opposite. I say a lot about it, but I could have said more. I focused on Ray Rice and on Jerry Sandusky and Steubenville and other examples of football’s rape culture. Then I point out a pattern.

Football isn’t alone in showing this pattern. Many institutions have chronic long-running problems of sexual abuse that is concealed or dismissed—the Catholic Church, the military, universities. They all deal with it in-house instead of via law enforcement, and they are all now dealing with exposure of the festering results. Institutions have power and status, and important people within institutions have power and status. Both institutions, and the people within them, use that power and status to protect themselves at the expense of underlings and outsiders.

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. It’s all obvious and predictable enough:of course high status tends to confer immunity from the social pressure and sanctions that keep the rest of us in line. Of course people who have high status exploit that fact. Of course humans have always thought that important people should have extra freedom of action, so that they can exercise their importance. Homer starts The Iliad with aristocrats behaving badly, and not much has changed. We set up institutions to try to organize and channel some of these forces, but then the institutions themselves develop some of the arrogance and refusal to be accountable that the top people have always had. Football and the cult that surrounds it are an unpleasantly strong example of the process.

Given all that, and more—such as the concussion issue and the NFL’s attempts to minimize and deny it—I refuse to treat football as any kind of sacred cow. I hope the Seattle Seahawks lose every game and all the “12” flags disappear.

I look forward to your letters.

The last line should be read in the voice of Craig Ferguson.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Kate Smurthwaite gig tomorrow at Goldsmiths College –

Kate Smurthwaite will be performing her stand up show Leftie Cockwomble for all to enjoy! The show is about free speech, language and the media with some very interesting views on the Daily Mail and Frankie Boyle…
Doors 7pm for 8pm start!

The show is FREE for Goldsmiths Comedy Society members and the Feminist Society*

£4 OTD for general public

*This is only valid if you have paid your membership and you will be asked for your student number OTD

Monday 02 February 2015

7pm – 11pm

Oh wait. It’s off.

What? Why??

Because of bullshit, that’s why. Kate posted the “explanation” publicly on Facebook.

Comedian Kate Smurthwaite has had her scheduled performance at Goldsmiths College cancelled after security officials said they “could not guarantee the safety of students”.

The issue arose from a group of students who objected to Kate’s widely-recognised support for the Nordic Model on prostitution. This arrangement, currently in place in Sweden and Norway, decriminalises those who sell sex and criminalises the purchase of sex. The students from the college’s Feminist Society (FemSoc) support legalisation of the sex industry and for this reason threatened to picket the event causing security to pull the plug.

Kate says “The strangest thing is that my show is not about prostitution. I don’t even mention it. In a massively ironic coincidence my show is about free speech, it’s power and uses and abuses. It is also about Saudi prisoner of conscience Raif Badawi who is now being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“I find it very strange that anyone would feel they couldn’t enjoy a comedy show unless they agreed with 100% of the political views of the person performing. Goldsmiths have recently hosted Phil Kay and Rob Beckett – did anyone ask them what they think about fox hunting or all-female shortlists?”

Goldsmiths Feminist Society initially held a vote on whether they should support Kate’s appearance with 70% voting in favour of the show going ahead. However the losing minority announced they were going to form a picket line anyway and used Twitter to invite others from around the UK to join.

In a message from the organiser at Goldsmiths Comedy Society, who arranged the show, Kate was told “I asked you because I obviously admire you and enjoy your politics and comedy, but I have already had aggressive messages from the FemSoc and meeting with their ‘leader’ about it all.”

The show, a final London performance of Kate’s one woman Edinburgh Fringe political show Leftie Cock Womble, had been scheduled for Monday (2nd Feb) night and tickets had been on sale for several weeks.

That’s some bullshit there.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More celebration of Super Bowl Day by attacking the sacred institution of Murkan Football. Josh Spokes is on a tear on the subject, thanks to people treating football fandom as some sort of marginalized minority identity. Friends are making informative comments on his on-a-tear posts, and I sought and got permission to quote a couple.

Hope Stansfield:

Here’s the thing: I grew up in a rural and impoverished town in the Midwest. Football was a cultural juggernaut. It was a tool the privileged and powerful in that town used to demonstrate and exact their dominance, while also paying lip service to the idea that they weren’t viciously racist and bigoted – after all, if you could play football and not call them out, they’d treat you like a person.

I’m capable of seeing and appreciating the beauty of raw athleticism and tactics. But the culture of football is toxic.

I’m disturbed by the sexism, racism, and homophobia of football culture. I’m also disturbed by the way in which injured players – including those with devastating brain injuries – are discarded like trash.

Mai Dao:

When I was in high school, you were ostracized, and in some cases even bullied if you didn’t support football culture 100%. The jocks and the cheerleaders were notorious for picking on the nerds, the Drama club people, and the rest of us misfits. The only nerdy ones who escaped this bullying were anyone who was into band, because of course they were integral to the games.

Josh:

Nothing was more effective at allowing boys to terrorize sissies like me as the enforced football games as part of gym. It was a walking HORROR.

I can only imagine. There was a good deal of subtle but real ostracism around sports at my school, and it was a tiny private academic girls’ school. I would have to multiply my experience by 100 to come close to the normal experience at a public high school.

I wonder if some fandom is unconscious appeasement. “Don’t beat me up – I love your game! I’m not a jock, but I love love love your game, I swear it!”

Give me ballet any day.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s Super Bowl day. Normally I get to ignore this, which is how I like it, but ignoring it is not possible this year as it was not possible last year, because the team based in the city where I live is in it, as it was last year. In the god damn Super Bowl. The Seattle team is in it, for the second year in a row, and “the fans” won’t let anyone forget it. There are footballteam-patriotism decals EVERYWHERE – literally. You can’t go anywhere on foot or by bus or car without seeing them constantly. They’re hung in windows, on the external walls of buildings, on car antennas; they’re on gigantic flags flown from the Space Needle, downtown buildings, houses. Even the god damn buses have their electronic destination signs programmed to flash the name and logo of the team in between the destination names.

This pisses me off.

It’s bossy and intrusive and coercive. I don’t share the enthusiasm for football, and they shouldn’t be forcing it on me. This is partly just that it bores me and I don’t personally like it, yes, but it’s not only that. There’s a lot wrong with football itself or/and with the passion for it. It’s violent, for a start; not incidentally violent but violent as part of the game itself. It causes head injuries, which the NFL has concealed and lied about for years. It has a rape problem. It sucks up money and resources and attention that would be better used elsewhere. It’s exceptionally male and macho, and thus hostile to women. It’s used to make boys who don’t like it and/or aren’t physically built to play it feel inferior…and weak and girly, which, again, is hostile to women. It’s not some harmless neutral Fun Thing; it’s way more than that, and most of the more is bad stuff.

So, this xkcd is crap.

No.

If it were some weirdo sport I could see the point. But football? Give me a break. It’s not the case that people who don’t care about football have power over people who do care about football. I wish – if I did have power I would make everyone take those stinking flags down. No. Football is power; it’s all about power; it shouts power the second the players run onto the field looking like tanks with legs.

I hope the Patriots win. I detest football patriotism, so I hope the Patriots win.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Plain? Really? I gotta tell you, I don’t see it. Unless the standard is

1. the most gorgeous woman on earth
2. all other women

I don’t see how Colleen McCullough qualifies as “plain.”

We already know I don’t consider it necessary to announce in news items about women that they are or are not “plain” in the first place, but even putting that aside for the moment ad arguendo, I still don’t see how Colleen McCullough qualifies as “plain.”

Jezebel shares this photo:

I.don’t.see.the.plain.

The Huffington Post UK:

Seriously? Who looks at that and thinks “plain”?

She aged well, too. Check out the photo by Quentin Jones for the SMH in 2013. Take a quick look at the Google images search. The more pics I see, the less sense “plain” makes.

tigtog at Hoyden About Town shares a beauty -

THERE IS NOTHING PLAIN ABOUT THAT.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Colleen McCullough was a best-selling novelist, and more.

Before becoming a full-time author, McCullough was a researcher at Yale medical school. And in between her time in New Haven and her global literary pursuits, she established the neurophysiology department at Syndey’s Royal North Shore hospital. She published her first novel, Tim, in 1974; her last, Bittersweet, in 2013. She was still working on a sequel when she died yesterday, at age 77, in a hospital on Norfolk Island.

But who cares about all that, amirite? Was she hot?? Was she gorgeous, was she thin, did she wear clothes well, did she decorate the place? Or did she fall down on all that?

The second sentence of her obit in a rag called the Australian comes clean on her aesthetic failure:

Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.

Well now how can that be? If you’re a woman who is plain of feature and certainly overweight, then obviously you’re also witless and cold. That’s god’s plan – you have beautiful women who are also warm and clever, and you have ugly women who are hostile and boring. It’s more fair that way.

Men, of course, are allowed to look like unmade beds. That’s god’s plan too.

Think Progress is scathing, although not really scathing enough.

This is the sort of idiocy you’d think someone at the paper might catch. An editor, perhaps. Someone on the copy desk. Literally any human who saw it. But nope, here it is, and we can’t even blame the punishing publish-first-think-later evils of the internet, for as you can see from the highlighted image above, this appeared in a Traditional Legacy Print Newspaper Made From Only The Finest Trees.

Well at least Twitter is making lemonade of this, under the hashtag #myozobituary.

I love Craig Ferguson’s.

Although a shouty malodorous vulgarian he nevertheless enjoyed most episodes of house hunters international. #MyOzObituary

But there are a lot of good ones. All by the beautiful of course; the other kind can’t do funny.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on What does Silicon Valley think of women?

The Newsweek cover works for me as satire, and I’ll explain in terms of syntax or form. By syntax, I mean a claim is equally valid in the active or passive voice. By form, I mean (for example) that jazz musicians call the chord changes to I Got Rhythm “rhythm changes” and (for example) most of the Charlie Parker tunes I know off the top of my head are launching pads to improvise over “rhythm changes” being a 32-bar AABA form.

All of us can instantly parse a single-frame editorial cartoon that shows a bad person behaving badly. My analogy here is to the active voice, to show (for example) a greedy narcissistic Wall Street person gaming the system for personal gain but a net loss to society. That syntax or form says, “This person is behaving badly.”

But there’s another syntax or form that some people have trouble parsing, like (for example) The New Yorker Obama fist bump cover (with the US flag burning in the fireplace). The object of the satire is the bullshit I heard on the radio and read online in Obama’s first Presidential election that Obama is a Muslim (delivered with the implicit understanding that Muslims are anti-American). In this syntax or form, the satire mocks anybody who would think the things shown in the cartoons. In a cartoon with this this syntax or form, really:
• The Obamas are NOT Islamist militants.
• Christiane Taubira is NOT a monkey.
• Boko Haram’s rape victims are NOT demanding welfare money.
• Women in Silicon Valley are NOT faceless.

I respect Anne @6/8 for italicizing a preference for cartoons to show the subject of satire directly, like a preference to use the active voice over passive voice. The Newsweek cover says, “Women are disrespected by Silicon Valley”, and someone could wish for the same claim in the active voice, “Silicon Valley disrespects women”. I respect Anne @6/8 for italicizing a preference that stops short of saying one syntax or form is invalid or unethical, which some commenters seem to say here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)