A Turkish woman has been arrested on suspicion of “blasphemy and inciting religious hatred” for posting a photo of a pair of feet stepping on a Koran.

Via Twitter

The arrest came after Melih Gokcek, Ankara’s controversial mayor from the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), launched a criminal complaint against the 38-year-old-woman, who uses the Twitter handle @kedibiti (cat lice).

The woman, who has over 5,000 followers and describes herself as “an atheist who respects only humans”, allegedly shared a picture showing a pair of red high heels on a copy of the Koran, Dogan news agency reported.

It’s a nice choice, the Koran being so hostile to women.

Dogan said the woman was later released but Gokcek said he was suing “the infidel” for insulting religion, inciting religious hatred and threatening public peace.

“It is time for justice now. No one has a right to insult our religion. We will never allow this to happen,” Gokcek wrote on Twitter.

No one? I beg to differ. Your religion is a big poopyhead. I have the right to say that.

Gokcek, who has held the top municipal job in the Turkish capital for 20 years, is a colourful but controversial figure known for his fiery comments on Twitter and derogatory remarks about women.

He once famously said a mother who considered abortion “should kill her herself instead and not let the child bear the brunt of her mistake”.

Ah but Mr Gokcek, what if “the child” is female?

A source in Turkey tells me that @kedibiti says she’s not the one who has been arrested. So the cops couldn’t find her so they grabbed some random woman instead? Nice.

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

Yemisi comments on a case of child abuse in the UK and views on child “discipline” in Nigeria.

Yes, it hurts me personally and in every humane way possible when children undergoing abuse are not believed when they finally find the courage to speak out. It also hurts me to no end that in the part of the continent I come from, people define ‘child abuse’ in a different way and conveniently brush it aside by calling it discipline!

It is indeed sad that some Nigerians consider this case as ‘culture clash’ and even racial discrimination!

To many Nigerians, it is considered normal for pastors to accuse children of witchcraft and slap them in churches. It is considered OK  for prophets to take children to beach sides and beat them mercilessly while their parents shout “Hallelujah”, under the ‘acceptable disguise’ of casting out evil spirits from the children.

And it’s much the same in the US, thanks to people like Michael and Debi Pearl in books like To Train Up a Child. Libby Anne summarizes some of their teachings on “discipline.”

The Pearls recommend whipping infants only a few months old on their bare skin. They describe whipping their own 4 month old daughter (p.9). They recommend whipping the bare skin of “every child” (p.2) for “Christians and non-Christians” (p.5) and for “every transgression” (p.1). Parents who don’t whip their babies into complete submission are portrayed as indifferent, lazy, careless and neglectful (p.19) and are “creating a Nazi” (p.45).

On p.60 they recommend whipping babies who cannot sleep and are crying, and to never allow them “to get up.” On p.61 they recommend whipping a 12 month old girl for crying. On p.79 they recommend whipping a 7 month old for screaming.

On p.65 co-author Debi Pearl whips the bare leg of a 15 month old she is babysitting, 10 separate times, for not playing with something she tells him to play with. On p.56 Debi Pearl hits a 2 year old so hard “a karate chop like wheeze came from somewhere deep inside.”

On p.44 they say not to let the child’s crying while being hit to “cause you to lighten up on the intensity or duration of the spanking.” On p.59 they recommend whipping a 3 year old until he is “totally broken.”

On p.55 the Pearls say a mother should hit her child if he cries for her.

On p.46 the Pearls say that if a child does obey before being whipped, whip them anyway. And “if you have to sit on him to spank him, then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher.” “Defeat him totally.”  On p.80 they recommend giving a child having a tantrum “a swift forceful spanking.” On the same page they say to whip small children on their bare skin until they stop screaming. “Don’t be bullied. Give him more of the same.” They say to continue whipping until their crying turns into a “wounded, submissive whimper.”

They’re religious, so that gives their advice that extra respectability. If they weren’t religious, who would see them as anything other than sadists?

Back to Yemisi:

In the case of this couple, I would ask, were there injury marks on the bodies of the children? The article said there were, to quote the article-

 Revealing scars the eldest said her mother had hit her with a cable, a broom, and a hoover and her father had dangled her by her feet down the stairwell of the house, tied her hands behind her back and her legs together ‘to get the devilish spirits out’, prosecutor Emma Smith said.
Her sister, who was seven at the time, had a stick shaped bruise of her thigh and after a few months in care, she drew a series of pictures showing her dad beating her and her being left home alone and including a speech bubble saying “I’m hungry”.

These are PHYSICAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL indications of child abuse.

Should the geographical location, race or skin colour of children determine whether the children have been abused? No, every child matters! If such abuses would never be tolerated from white parents, why should it be tolerated because the parents of the children concerned are black?

No children should be abused, not in London or Lagos or Memphis or Sedro-Woolley.

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

The attack in Ottawa resulted in the cancellation of a ceremony to honor Malala. I won’t bother to point out the ironies.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office says two scheduled events today in Toronto with Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have been cancelled.

The last-minute announcement comes amid an ongoing emergency in Ottawa, where several shootings have occurred on or near Parliament Hill.

Harper was to moderate an afternoon question-and-answer session with Yousafzai at a Toronto high school.

He was then scheduled to head to a downtown hotel, where the 17-year-old from Pakistan was to receive honorary Canadian citizenship.

Instead he’s been zipped away to a safe place.

I wonder if that’s why the attack took place today rather than some other day.

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

Anna Merlan at Jezebel doesn’t like Christina Hoff Sommers and “The Factual Feminist” any more than I do.

A conservative think tank has embarked upon a quest to convince us all that women worry way too much about getting drugged and raped. This is an interesting hill to die on.

According to a new video from Caroline Kitchens at the American Enterprise Institute, we foolishly live in “constant fear” of being roofied by strangers in bars, when in fact women should just… the alternative here isn’t quite clear. Not watch our drinks at bar? Assume that nobody’s going to mess with our beverage, so maybe wander off for a little bit and do some other things?

Oh, go ahead and watch your drinks at the bar, but shut up about it. That’s what women should just. To talk about it is to be a “professional victim” and let down the side, while to shut up about it is to be a strong take-charge woman who punches her way through all the obstacles while never talking about them.

But how does that make her strong, you may ask? And how does it not make her self-centered and indifferent to the broader good? And why should women have to punch their way through obstacles that don’t need to be there in the first place?

Ask the libertarians, because I don’t know.

This inspiring message, which resonates with precisely nobody, is the latest in a series called The Factual Feminist, a weekly dose of bummer usually hosted by Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the think tank. (Sommers is one of a small army of Gamergate defenders who have decided to back the Gamergaters in a fight with some writers over at our brother site Gawker. The Gamergaters call Sommers “mom,” a Freudian field day we’ll have to leave for another time.)

I wish she hadn’t put it off. I too think that’s gross, though not primarily for reasons to do with Freud. I hate the whole half-jokey custom of nicknaming people granny or uncle or Mom merely because they’re older than the people doing the nicknaming. It’s stupid and usually condescending. Imagine the fanboiz calling Dawkins “Grandpa” and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Mardan transcribes some of what Kitchens said:

“A reality check is in order,” Kitchens intones. “Our fear of being drugged and sexually assaulted by a predatory stranger in a bar is not grounded in reality.” She suggests that the whole “process” of being drugged and raped sounds just ridiculous to her: “Just think about it: it requires a stranger to find the drugs, slip them into a woman’s drink undetected, manage to take the victim away from her friends without anyone noticing and then reliably erase her memory of the experience.”

Oh they don’t need to bother with the last part; the rapist can rely on everyone to ignore her if she reports it. But the first three? Yes, and? Those are all too difficult to be real? No.

Kitchens veers solidly into awfulness when she suggests that the real problem is Dumb Bitches Getting Too Drunk. Or, as she puts it, “Most commonly, victims of drug-facilitated sexual assault are severely intoxicated, often of their own volition.”

To start, the presence of alcohol and other drugs in rape cases is trickier than Kitchens makes it out to be. She doesn’t mention this very large 2007 study by the U.S. Department of Justice, which estimated that nearly three million women in the U.S. have been victims of drug-facilitated rape at some point in their lifetime. As with the study that Kitchens looked at, Rohypnol (roofies) were very, very uncommon: the DOJ researchers estimate they’re only used in about two percent of drug-faciliated rape. In the vast majority of cases, they found, alcohol was the primary drug. (When a second drug was present, it was usually marijuana.) But there are also over 100 other benzodiazepines, and it’s not at all clear that they’re all tested for in incidents of suspected drug-facilitated rape.

In the cases where alcohol alone is suspected, how did said alcohol get consumed by the victim? Again, here, Kitchens isn’t entirely wrong: in a lot of cases, yes, the assaulted people drank alcohol voluntarily; in some, they were plied with alcohol by their assailants, given drinks that were stronger than they realized, or a host of other scenarios. The end result is the same: a person was raped or sexually assaulted after they became too impaired to consent to sex or fight off their attackers. Rape doesn’t become less of a crime if the victim is voluntarily drunk.

You’d think that would be obvious, wouldn’t you.

But Kitchens’ conclusion isn’t even that it’s not a bad idea to watch your drink; she allows that’s still probably a reasonable thing to do. But, the implication here is simple, and it’s nasty: if you think you got roofied, you probably didn’t. So why bother mentioning that suspicion to the police, right? Why even report your rape at all? It’s probably somehow, at some level, your fault. It’s the same vicious old argument, in other words — don’t get too drunk, girls, if you don’t want to wind up raped! — buried under a new, laughably thin layer of purported “feminism.”

“Feminists should be concerned that women are modifying their behavior on their girls night’s out in order to protect themselves from some vague improbable threat,” Kitchens tells us, somewhere near the end of this exhausting slog. But what she doesn’t acknowledge — or even seem aware of — is that women feel forced to modify their behavior in ways large and small to stay safe all the time. It sucks, and we hate it, but we still do it. Watching your drink at a bar is what we might call harm reduction, a strategy to mitigate, in some small way, the effects of living in a toxic culture where rape is pervasive. Awareness of date rape drugs is one of the things in the shitty, depressing bag of tools we’ve all developed to try to stay safe. It’s not “constant fear,” as Kitchens suggests. It’s just reasonable caution and concern.

And when that bag of tools fails and someone is raped or sexually assaulted, whose fault is it? Oh, right: the person committing the rape. Always. Every single time. Whether the victim was drunk, high, stone-sober or any combination thereof. And the more we argue over Rohypnol or idiotic roofie-detecting nail polish or just how often someone might be spiking our drinks, the more we veer further and further away from the real issue: the people who think it’s fine and acceptable to commit rape, very often against someone they know, someone who trusts them. Any other discussion at this point it starting to feel deliberately evasive, a way to avoid shining the light where it truly belongs.

Because that’s exactly what it is.

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

There’s been an attack inside the Parliament building in Ottawa, the CBC reports.

Parliament Hill came under attack today after a man with a rifle shot a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial in downtown Ottawa,before seizing a car and driving to the doors of Parliament Hill’s Centre Block nearby.

MPs and other witnesses reported several shots fired inside Parliament, and a gunman has been confirmed dead inside the building, shot by the House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms, according to MPs’ eyewitness accounts.

There’s perhaps another shooter at large in downtown Ottawa.

Ottawa police confirmed shots were also fired in three locations: the war memorial, inside Centre Block and near the Rideau Centre east of Parliament Hill, although earlier reports of shots inside the shopping mall have been denied by police. The downtown area remains in police lockdown.

Yikes. I’ve been there. I have friends in Ottawa.

The soldier shot at the War Memorial has died.

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

Kaveh Mousavi alerted me to a news item that he discusses at Margin of Error:

It’s always good to see good news after a week of horrifying news. Last week we saw serial acid attacks against four women in the Iranian province of Isfahan. Today people have poured into streets in both Tehran and Isfahan to protest these heinous crimes.

I’m not sure I think that quite amounts to good news.* There are some kinds of good news that are so dependent on previous terrible news that it’s hard to see them as really good. “People protest the random torture of women” – well good, but better if people just didn’t randomly torture women.

Still. I know what he means, of course, and I point out that kind of “good news” all the time.

Via Al-Monitor:

Four individuals have been arrested in connection with a number of gruesome acid attacks on women that shocked and terrified the residents of Esfahan. [...] The first incident was reported Oct. 16. Men on motorcycles allegedly attacked women in their cars. Rumors immediately began to circulate that religious vigilante groups were targeting women with improper hijab. But as the acid attacks, which left the faces of their victims disfigured, increased, some Iranian media outlets reported that some of the victims were from religious families and were not improperly covered.

So for real just throwing acid on women because they are women. Yeah. Sometimes I wish we could have a complete species-overhaul.

Today Iranians took to the streets to protests. These photos are taken by the readers of BBC Persian and submitted to that website:

Their report doesn’t indicate how many people were there, but since Iran’s climate is very sensitive these days, the very fact that these protests were allowed to happen with no resistance from the regime is enough cause for celebration.

Well…maybe not quite celebration.

*Edited to add: Kaveh clarified that he meant that the fact that the demonstration was allowed to happen was the good news. Now there’s a bit of privilege-blindness for you – because I’m not up close and personal with life in a theocracy, I totally failed to think of that. [slaps self upside head]

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

Dawn reports that Chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) Maulana Mohammad Khan Sheerani has said a Muslim woman cannot object to the second or subsequent marriages of her husband.

Presiding over a meeting of the council here on Tuesday, he said a woman could not demand divorce if her husband married a second, third or fourth time.

He said Islam had given the women the right to separate from her husband, but another marriage could not be a valid ground for doing so.

So a married woman gets no choice and no say how she lives her life. If her husband decides there will be one or two or three more women living with them, she doesn’t get to say no and she doesn’t get to leave. She also, of course, doesn’t get to tell her husband there will be one or two or three more men living with them.

On March 10 this year, the council noted that the laws regarding second marriage by a man in the presence of the first wife were against Sharia.

“Sharia allows men to have more than one wife and we demanded the government to amend the relevant laws where a person has to seek prior permission from the existing wife / wives,” the CII chief had said in the meeting.

And this is Pakistan in 2014, so the government probably isn’t going to feel comfortable saying no.

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

Jessica Valenti is more optimistic than I am. She says GamerGate is the last gasp of the angry white guys. I wish.

As the cultural relevance of angry white men on the internet withers away and ends, their last words – muttered angrily at an empty room – will surely be“Gamer … gate”.

The recent uproar – said to be over ethics in journalism but focused mostly on targeting outspoken women who aren’t journalists at all – is just the last, desperate gasp of misogynists facing an unwelcoming future. But this particular bitter end, while long overdue, is loud, angry and extremely dangerous.

I wonder what gives her the idea that this is the last gasp and the bitter end. Why would it be? We’re not going to shut up, and Twitter and Facebook aren’t changing their rules and practices, and laws against campaigns of harassment don’t exist, so why would it be the last of anything? It’s a pleasant thought, but it’s nonsense.

Maybe that was just a rhetorical flourish and she didn’t notice that it’s not true, because she argues the opposite in the following paragraphs.

…despite assurances from Gamergate supporters that they have no problem with women, their de facto leaders are being outed as violent misogynists. (Sample tweets: “Fat/ugly women seek out dominant men to abuse them” and “Date rape doesn’t exist”.)

It’s tempting to believe that this online row – a toxic combination of misinformation, anger and anxious masculinity – is just about one specific technology industry’s subculture, or that it will blow over. But by labeling Gamergate a “gaming problem” and attaching a hashtag to it, we’re putting unnecessary boundaries around a broader but nebulous issue: threats and harassment are increasingly how straight white men deal with a world that no longer revolves exclusively around them.

Quite so, and they’re not about to stop.

When I spoke to her by phone in San Francisco on Sunday night, Sarkeesian saidGamergate is “absolutely” an issue that goes beyond gaming:

The harassment is becoming more intense towards women and other marginalized communities, and it seems to be happening more to women in male-dominated fields, and to women who speak out or make critiques.

Sarkeesian told me that the backlash in gaming – hardly a new problem – has gotten more vicious as the conversations about women’s representations in games and their role in the industry have gained steam. “This reaction, mostly from male gamers, is to protect the status quo,” she said. The same is true more broadly, and always has been when it comes to women’s progress: the more ground we gain, the worse men react.

So this isn’t a last gasp at all; it’s probably much closer to a first gasp than to a last one.

That’s why right now is such a dangerous time for women: we’re in the midst of an unprecedented feminist moment that not all men are pleased about. Sexual consent is being radically reframed, but feminists are accused of trying to classify all men as rapists. Television and movies created by women are at an all-time high (though still nowhere near parity), but they’re derided as“peak vagina”. And while institutional coverups of violence against women – be it rape on college campuses, domestic violence in the National Football League or the international news mediaat large – are no longer publicly tolerated, women are still being blamed for their own assaults.

I’m a lot older than Valenti, so I don’t see any of this as unprecedented or new. It’s the same as it’s been all my adult life: feminism versus the more or less enraged opposition to it.

It would be easy to assume that the current online backlash that many women face from Gamergaters and beyond is simply the domain of a handful of trolls and a few harmless kids. But we’ve seen the violence that sexist men can do when they don’t get what they want. And even after authorities found a 140-page misogynist manifesto from the California shooter who killed six people this year, women were cautioned against calling the crime one of sexism.

By Jaclyn Glenn, for one.

What excuse will we use after the next inevitable act of violence? That we didn’t see the horror coming? Angry men are plainly telling us to expect it.

Even if the threats being bandied about now don’t come to real-life fruition, their chilling effect is real – Sarkeesian noted that women are already “being threatened out of the industry and out of their homes”. These are not small things.

Gamergate enthusiasts will continue to argue that the vitriol against women is coincidental – and they will likely never acknowledge their fear of irrelevance and accountability. That’s to be expected. But as the grip of angry white men on our cultural conversation arrives at its necessary end, it’s up to the rest of us to make sure that, as change comes, we take the anger from those men far more seriously. Ignoring “trolls” doesn’t work when they show up with a gun.

Hmm, back to claiming the bullying is arriving at its end. I don’t see it. It would be nice, but I don’t see it.

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

Rebecca has a post giving 10 good reasons to ban her from the Bay Area Science Festival.

Two weeks ago, PZ Myers pointed out that Dr. Eliza Sutton of the University of Washington in Seattle was the source of a rumor that PZ had contracted gonnorhea at SkepchickCon last year. Sutton posts on blogs and social media as “Skeptickle” or “Skeptixx,” where she has been open about her profession as a doctor, and has also previously declared her own name.

Obviously, a medical doctor diagnosing hated enemies with an STD is a gross breach of medical ethics, which is why a link to PZ’s post was Tweeted from the Skepchick Twitter feed, which we use occasionally for quick links that aren’t worth full posts.

I found her behavior so abhorrent that I retweeted the @Skepchicks Tweet. Obviously, this inspired someone to start a petition begging the Bay Area Science Festival to ban me from hosting my comedy science panel quiz show Quiz-o-Tron, which happens this Saturday, October 25, at the Castro Theatre. Advance tickets are only $10!

Obviously. It was fine for Dr Sutton to start a story that PZ had contracted gonnorhea at SkepchickCon last year and terrible for Rebecca to share a tweet about it. That’s all terrifically clear.

So she lists and explains the ten reasons.

9.

Devin isn’t really sure what’s going on, but he knows he doesn’t like it! And that’s why he will not be attending my comedy science quiz show with “Survivor” contestant Yau-Man Chan this Saturday.

Number 3 is especially cogent.

3.

I assume Bruno is referring to SJW’s, a new social-justice themed chain restaurant currently opening in Target shopping centers across the country. Though I do not own this chain, I am excited about their menu items, like delicious cheese-stuffed FriendZonis. This is absolutely a great reason to have me barred from hosting Quiz-o-Tron, the world’s best comedy science quiz show on October 25 in San Francisco.

And 1 is, I think, conclusive.

1.

Obo is absolutely correct. In retrospect, I should have taken the time to fully examine Dr. Sutton’s important work on e-diagnosing people she hates with gonorrhea. What were her methods? Did she get a blood sample from PZ or any of the Skepchick bloggers? Did she access our medical records? These are the questions I should have asked, instead of retweeting that tweet linking to that blog post that pointed out that she said those things. In order to make up for this oversight on my part, I hereby offer to engage Dr. Sutton in a debate over whether PZ Myers has gonorrhea. She may choose the time, the date, the format, and the moderator.

I’m available any time except for October 25, when I’ll be hosting Quiz-o-Tron at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco as part of Bay Area Science Festival.

If I were in San Francisco I would so go to that.

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

Via several thoughtful and informed comments.

By quixote:

Childhood leukemia is one of the big recent success stories of clinical medicine. The girl’s chances would definitely be better in the hospital. About 90% better.

But.

I’m a biologist. I’ve worked with scientists all my adult life. We’re human. Which means we’re only one tiny smidgen less susceptible to the Old Boy Net than your average curmudgeon in the street. Which means scientists are just as capable of ignoring the obvious in favor of dogma as anyone else.

Just one example. Plants with some kind of pharmacological activity are on the order of 1% in the Amazon rainforest. For plants in native pharamcopoeias that rises to 30%. So when Merck spent millions of dollars inventorying the Amazon for potential new drugs they started with plants used in the local ethnomedicine, right? No, because those people wear feathers. They started with a brute force inventory because that seemed more “scientific.” (An ethnobotanist at NY Botanical Garden tried to show them the more useful path, but I don’t know how that worked out.)

In the good old days, aspirin in willow bark was used for fever by old wives. Real doctors at the time used leeches. The Europeans were ostracizing lepers when the tribes in the Burmese rainforest were using chaulmoogra to cure it. Etc., etc., etc.

I am NOT saying you’re wrong in this particular case. What I’m trying to say is that a less dogmatic (omg, skeptical?) approach would be better. Just because something does not come out of the medical establishment doesn’t mean it’s wrong. (Ack. I hope y’all can work your way through all those negatives.) Just because something comes out of aboriginal medicine doesn’t mean it’s wrong either. It’s the *evidence* that matters.

By MyaR:

‘Tradition’ and ‘culture’ trump knowledge and the value of human life.

Well, it’s what we’ve been doing to native and aboriginal peoples for centuries. Which also plays into this particular scenario — what reasons do they have to trust that the 90% is real? When they know their traditional medicine practitioners are part of their community and care about them, specifically, but the hospital medical staff don’t know them and don’t understand their culture. And there are plenty of cultural differences that don’t matter in terms of physical, emotional, mental well-being, but those have been (sometimes systematically) stomped on by OUR culture. That kind of systematic denigration skews your ability to assess evidence presented by a component of that very system.

BUT. These are arguments for treating families (whatever their cultural background) with sensitivity, finding a way to provide the information they need to make actual informed decisions, ensuring that staff have explicit training in how to treat people from non-dominant culture respectfully, providing reasonable accommodation for cultural practices, and, if necessary, bringing in child welfare authorities if it is deemed medically necessary for the child’s well-being. And no, culture shouldn’t trump life-saving medicine for children, and this justice made a terrible decision. (Adults can do as they wish, although hopefully with decent information.)

In short — I suspect the family, as people, were NOT treated respectfully, and I’m not talking about their beliefs. After all, they did start the chemo and did not immediately reject it.

Cultures and religions have no value when real human lives are at stake.

Well, no, but people (because what are cultures and religions without people?) do. And from a purely pragmatic perspective (i.e., trying to save the most lives) you have to take culture into account. When a child has a potentially fatal illness, the family if also part of the treatment, and we recognize this very well when the child is from the dominant culture. (I’ve been part of that family. The family’s beliefs and culture are often accommodated and integrated into the treatment as much as the staff can.)

My main point — treating people who make these incredibly bad decisions as if they’re just idiots is a PROBLEM. No one makes decisions for arbitrary reasons, and if you want to improve the way people analyze problems and consider their potential courses of action, you need to understand why they are making the decisions they are making. And when you’re talking about cultural practices, you have to take the cultural dynamics between the relevant cultures into consideration. I’m more interested in talking about why people may distrust what medical staff tell them than in condemning them for the decision they made.

I think we are all in agreement that the justice made a terrible decision, so what else is there to say? Quite a lot, if we want to find ways to stop these sorts of decisions from being made in the future.

Anthony K:

‘Tradition’ and ‘culture’ trump knowledge and the value of human life. And this horseshit is staggeringly common among people who THINK they’re ‘progressive.’

Yawn.

As someone who actually works with First Nations communities with health concerns, specifically cancer, it’s frustrating to deal with the resistance to what’s sometimes considered ‘white’ medicine and knowledge. Especially so because I’m government, and for reasons now completely lost to white history, First Nations people in Canada tend not to trust the government. Weird, I know. I mean, the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. Ancient history.

Nonetheless, we’ve found strange resistance to barking numbers and rates at communities (and not just First Nations ones; lay people of all backgrounds, though they are perfectly capable of reading scientific literature, tend not to do so as often as might be helpful. Again, it’s mystifying.)

So the situation is unfortunately complex, and not really amenable, in my experience, with the new atheist/skeptic tendency to yell at everyone until they become scientifically literate.

What seems to have been successful, is lowering barriers to entry in medicine and related fields for First Nations people, so that they’re able to bridge some of those cultural gaps. And let them take the lead. For instance, there’s a semi-formal policy of guidance around aboriginal data even as it’s used for epidemiological purposes, called OCAP (ownership, control, access, and possession), which is often summarized as ‘Nothing about us, without us’, where ‘us’ refers to aboriginal Canadians. That concept is developed by aboriginal people, and we respect it. In turn, they’re happy to give us data.

Because the reality is that the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians is still fraught with tension, racism, suspicion, and distrust. That’s not solved by thrusting studies at people, nor by the backassward idea that paying credence to concepts of traditional knowledge (credence not being the same as complete deference) used by historically and currently oppressed people to empower themselves and their communities is ‘infantilizing’.

So I know, I’m one of those FAKE PROGRESSIVES john the drunkard likes to rail against, but I this stuff is part of my job, and I know what seems to work, and I know what sure as hell hasn’t.

 

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

Democracy Now did a segment on Anita Sarkeesian and #GamerGate yesterday.

Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent feminist critic of video games, was forced to cancel a speech at Utah State University last week after the school received an email threatening to carry out “the deadliest shooting in American history” at the event. The email sender wrote: “feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge.” The sender used the moniker Marc Lepine, the name of a man who killed 14 women, most of them female engineering students, in a mass shooting in Montreal in 1989. Sarkeesian canceled the talk after being told that under Utah law, campus police could not prevent people from bringing guns. We speak to Sarkeesian about the incident, the “Gamergate” controversy, and her campaign to expose misogyny, sexism and violence against female characters in video games despite repeated physical threats. “Online harassment, especially gendered online harassment, is an epidemic,” Sarkeesian says. “Women are being driven out, they’re being driven offline; this isn’t just in gaming, this is happening across the board online, especially with women who participate in or work in male-dominated industries.”

Sadly, or pathetically, the comments have filled up with the familiar misogynist dreck.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRinZyeugfY

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

From the National Post:

For Laurie Hill, resident of Canada’s largest aboriginal community, it’s just wrong to suggest that modern medicine is the only way to treat cancer and other serious diseases.

She stands firmly behind the Six Nations neighbours who took their 11-year-old daughter with leukemia out of chemotherapy, and are treating her with traditional, but unproven, native methods and other alternative health-care instead.

“Unproven” is a bit of a euphemism. Surely it’s more a matter of having abundant reasons to think traditional methods and alternative health-care aren’t effective against leukemia.

“There’s a fear of [aboriginal remedies] or denial of it. If things can’t be quantified or qualified, to them it’s irrelevant,” said Ms. Hill, as she shopped at Ancestral Voices Healing Centre Thursday. “Who are they [doctors] to say she will make it with their treatments. Just because they have a degree, that makes them more knowledgeable?”

Well…yes, probably. On this particular subject, if they have the relevant degree, then yes, that does – other things being equal – make them more knowledgeable. It’s possible that Laurie Hill’s neighbors are equally knowledgeable thanks to self-education, but it’s not terribly likely. For one thing, few people want to go to all the trouble of getting a medical education if they’re not going to get a degree.

Also, I bet the doctors aren’t saying she will make it with their treatments; I bet they’re saying her chances of making it are much better with their treatments than without them. And who they are to say that is people who know something about the stats.

As an extraordinary court case in nearby Brantford moved toward an end, a lawyer for McMaster Children’s Hospital argued that child-welfare authorities should have used their power to require the young woman to stay in treatment. With chemo, childhood leukemia now has a survival rate in the range of 90%, and remains a likely death sentence without it, experts say.

But Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice suggested physicians essentially want to “impose our world view on First Nation culture.” The idea of a cancer treatment being judged on the basis of statistics that quantify patients’ five-year survival rate is “completely foreign” to aboriginal ways, he said.

Oh please. That’s insulting. It assumes that people can’t learn anything new.

“Even if we say there is not one child who has been cured of acute lymphoblastic leukemia by traditional methods, is that a reason to invoke child protection?” asked Justice Edward, noting that the girl’s mother believes she is doing what is best for her daughter.

Yes, yes it is. Of course it is. You know what else is? We can say there is not one child who has survived being locked in a basement with no water or food for a month, and that that is indeed a reason to invoke child protection if a child is being held in a basement with no water or food. If a child has meningitis and the parents want to pray over her instead of taking her to a hospital, that is a reason to invoke child protection. Yes.

“Are we to second guess her and say ‘You know what, we don’t care?’ … Maybe First Nations culture doesn’t require every child to be treated with chemotherapy and to survive for that culture to have value.”

What?

The judge said the culture will still have value, so let the child die.

Wow.

There is also an issue of medical consent, but the child is 11, and if her parents have been telling her the traditional “treatments” are just as good, she’s probably not in a position to make an informed decision.

Back at Six Nations, meanwhile, Ancestral Voices employee Hayley Doxtater said aboriginal remedies are becoming increasingly popular. She pointed to a cancer treatment — a collection of herbs including slippery elm and turkey rhubarb root ­ — that she said one customer has repeatedly traveled an hour from Toronto to buy for a sick friend.

“We have people come in here who are so happy that something works,” she said. “They’ll say ‘That stuff is amazing.’ “

Ah, the one hour drive evidence that the treatment is effective.

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

People at schools in various parts of the US are freaking out about Ebola because of a very flawed knowledge of geography, basic geography, as in, Africa is bigger than Rhode Island.

For instance, at a school in New Burlington, New Jersey, two Rwandan students are staying at home due to other parents’ fear that they will infect other children with Ebola. Rwanda is as close to the Ebola outbreak as New York City is to Seattle.

In Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a school principal’s recent visit to Zambia has led to a lot of parents choosing to keep their kids at home. But Zambia is in Southern Africa, over 3,000 miles away from the Ebola outbreak — the same distance between New Hampshire and Los Angeles.

I think people think distance shrinks internal distances – not from the perspective of the beholder, but literally. Africa is Far from Here so therefore it’s just a small thing like a magazine cover so therefore the virus can hop from one side to the other without even trying hard.

But in reality, Africa is a very big continent.

Africa is the world’s second largest continent. But it’s not unusual for Americans to classify it as a single entity, ignoring the many cultural, economic and geographic differences between its 47 countries. If three countries in Africa are going through an Ebola epidemic, the other 44 must be too, right?

Yeah, see, that’s what I mean. We don’t know much about it so we shrink it in our heads.

Wikimedia Commons

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

More provocations by former philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers. She obviously does them to provoke, because she knows it teases, so I’m being very kind and generous to her by calling attention to them. Or, if you prefer, I’m taking her bait like a damn fool. Whichever. But I just keep being fascinated by the trashiness of it all.

There are two sides, she says.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers · 21 minutes ago
Why is Wash Post taking sides rather than offering readers honest account of both sides of #Gamergate? @caitlindewey

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read/ …

Feminism is dangerous.

Little evidence that video games cause harm. But overexposure to hardline feminism appears to cause personal & social harm. Studies needed.

Nanananana, feminism is a big poopyhead.

It’s an odd way for an intelligent woman to make a living, relentlessly attacking feminism. Lots of women have done it in the past, but it seems odd nevertheless.

Jessica Valenti wrote about that glorious history last July.

As for all those rights won by so many feminists on behalf of so many more American women, the sad truth is that they fought other women every step of the way. Indeed, we live in a country with a long history of anti-feminist women: Before we had women like Christina Hoff Sommers and Katie Roiphe arguing that feminism was hurting men and that date rape wasn’t real, respectively, women were leaders in in the anti-suffrage movement of the early 1900s. And it was a woman - Phyllis Schlafly – who led the charge against the Equal Rights Amendment in the ’70s. Schreiber points out that some of the debates against the ERA were about “masculinity run amok”: “Phyllis Schlafly said if we were are treated as equals, then men will shirk their responsibilities,” she notes.

Remind me: Who are the man-haters again?

Between the last presidential election and the next one, between the feminist social media explosion and even Beyoncé coming out in our corner, right now is one of the most exciting times for feminism in decades. Yet here we have female anti-feminists – emboldened by Sarah Palin’s faux-feminist movement – raining on our progress parade. And it is especially irritating given that they’re using their gender as part of their organizing strategy. “It’s an identity politics angle that they criticize but often invoke,” Schreiber says.

Women stopping the progress of other women – especially those who don’t have the power and prestige to work for DC think-tanks or pen anti-feminist books – stings much more than when men do it.

Irritates, rather than stings – but maybe that’s just me.

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

Here is Efua Dorkenoo’s page at Equality Now.

Efua Dorkenoo became the Senior Advisor to Equality Now on the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) in February 2014, after having served as the Advocacy Director, FGM programme in Equality Now’s London office. She is also a trained  bio-social scientist in public health and an honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Health Sciences at City University, London. Starting in the early 1980s, her pioneering work on FGM has contributed to the international recognition of FGM as a public health and a human rights issue. From 1995-2001, she worked as the WHO’s first technical expert at their Geneva headquarters and assisted the organization in introducing FGM onto the agendas of the Ministries of Health of WHO Member States. Ms. Dorkenoo was awarded the British State Honours – OBE (Order of the British Empire) by the British Queen in recognition of her work as the founder of the UK NGO FORWARD in 1983 and for her campaigning work against FGM. In 2000, along with Gloria Steinem, she received Equality Now’s international human rights award for her lifelong activism on the issue of women’s rights. Ms. Dorkenoo’s  book, Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation, The Practice and its Prevention (Minority Rights Publications 1994), was considered a first on FGM and was selected by an international jury for inclusion on the 2002 prestigious book list, “Africa 100 Best Books for the 20th Century.”

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

Another big loss.

Efua Dorkenoo, widely seen as the mother of the global movement to end female genital mutilation, has died after undergoing treatment for cancer, her family have confirmed. She was 65. Dorkenoo – known affectionately to many as “mama Efua” – was a leading light in the movement to bring an end to FGM for more than 30 years, campaigning against the practice since the 1980s.

The girls’ and women’s rights campaigner saw the progression of the movement to end FGM go from a minority, often ignored, issue to a key policy priority for governments across the world. Proof of this arrived with the launch of The Girl Generation on October 10 – a major Africa-led campaign to tackle FGM across the globe, run by a consortium of charities and organisations and funded by the department for international development. Dorkenoo – the natural choice to lead the consortium, wrote simply on the day of its launch: “ Finally, The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM is here, and I hope you like it.” A week later she died in hospital.

Well I’m glad she lived long enough to know about the launch.

She was born in Ghana and moved to London when she was 19 and worked as a nurse.

Working with African women in the UK, she became aware of the health and mental complications that result from FGM and began campaigning against the practice with the human rights organisation Minority Rights Group.

She went on to gain a masters degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicineand was an honorary senior research fellow at the School of Health Sciences at City University, London.

In 1983 she co-founded FORWARD (The Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development), which became a leading organisation in the battle to raise awareness about FGM. The procedure, which still affects more than 125 million girls and women worldwide and is widely practised in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, was outlawed in the UK in 1985. She published a seminal text on FGM – Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Prevention, in 1994.

Dorkenoo was instrumental in getting FGM on the agenda in ministries of health while working at the World Health Organisation from 1995-2001, and went on to become the advocacy director and then senior advisor on FGM at the human rights organisation Equality Now. She was awarded an OBE in recognition of her campaigning work against FGM.

She was an inspiration to young women.

Leyla Hussein, co-founder of Daughters of Evewith Ali, said the formation of an African-led movement against FGM was Dorkenoo’s lifelong dream and despite ill-health her last months were spent visiting everyone from politicians to village leaders across the world. “The Girl Generation was Efua’s baby and she had been trying to make it happen for 30 years,” she said. “Last week Efua gave birth to it, with every last breath she had she worked to make that happen. She was an incredible African female warrior and she never gave up.”

Yet another everyday hero.

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

Pragna Patel on the difficulty of human rights work between conservative views of economics and law on the one hand and religious fundamentalism on the other.

First, we are compelled to challenge the state for removing legal aid from a huge range of civil and criminal matters which impact not only on individual rights but also on our demands for institutional accountability in the face of abuses of power that seem to be growing rather than diminishing. The government’s ‘reforms’ on legal aid are strongly located in a fiscal context that reiterate some of the key overarching aims of the present government: localism, alternative dispute resolution strategies, deficit reduction and deregulation. Taken together these measures are destroying one of the great pillars of the welfare state.

They have forced SBS into leading or supporting legal and political challenges against various legal aid cuts.

This development is directly linked to the challenges that we face on the second front: increasing privatisation of justice and state adoption of a ‘faith based’ approach to address minority issues. This has meant amongst other things, challenging religious fundamentalists and ‘moderates’ alike who are using the vacuum created to influence and shape law and social policy by reference to a regressive religious identity that they have come to define.

That’s something I don’t think I’ve paid enough attention to – the fact that it’s just plain cheaper for the government to outsource dispute resolution to theocrats. Cheaper but worse, as cheaper so often is.

Muslim fundamentalists have mounted what can be described as a two pronged pincer like manoeuvre based ostensibly on the demand for religious tolerance, but which is in reality a bid for power in which the control of female sexuality is central. On the one hand they seek to ensure that personal religious codes are normalised within the legal system, and on the other they seek to formalise a parallel legal system through the establishment of alternative religious forums for dispute resolution in family matters. This process – a sort of ‘shariafication by stealth’ of the legal apparatus – involves making state law and policy ‘Sharia’ compliant. If successful, we have no doubt that it will lead other religions to demand the same level of accommodation.

She talks about examples we’re familiar with – gender segregation at UK universities and the Law Society’s guidance on “sharia-compliant” wills.

Support for parallel legal systems come not only from male religious leaderships and the state, but also alarmingly from within feminism itself. For instance, in feminist discussions on intersectional frameworks for understanding violence against women it has become fashionable to talk of the intersection of religion and gender, and to refer to the need to develop a feminist response that is sensitive to the growth of religious values, especially post 9/11 and the rise of anti-Muslim racism. This has amounted to support for the accommodation of religious legal codes. Yet few if any acknowledge the fact that wherever parallel legal systems operate they generally suppress dissent, and seek to remove women from public spaces metaphorically speaking and to impede their fundamental freedoms in the private sphere.

Oh shit, has it? If that’s intersectionalism, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

What we see at work here is clearly an attempt to impede the development of secular, progressive, political resistance by de-legitimising and locating our struggles for access to justice, outside of so called community, anti-racist and feminist concerns. These struggles are now taking place on many fronts as both religious right forces and the state mount an assault on secular human rights values in pursuit of power without accountability.

This article is an extended version of a presentation given by the author at theSecularism 2014 Conference held in London last weekend

That’s Maryam’s amazing conference.

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

Tolu Ogunlesi reports on another everyday hero.

Last month, the Nigerian government released the 2014 National Honours award list: more than 300 people, many of them serving government officials, seemingly recognised simply because of the public office they hold, not for anything particularly honourable or heroic. An outcry followed, largely due to the absence of one name: Dr Stella Ameyo Adadevoh. A government spokesman was forced to explain that the awards are never given posthumously.

The public’s indignation was understandable: Adadevoh was the Nigerian doctor who oversaw the treatment of Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian national who brought the Ebola virus to Nigeria. She died of the virus on 19 August, one of eight fatalities out of 20 cases (each linked to Sawyer) in the country. Without her dedication, it is quite possible that the World Health Organisation would not have declared Nigeria – the most populous country in Africa – Ebola-free on Monday. The significance of her actions, and those of her hospital colleagues, cannot be overstated.

It’s heartbreaking.

In a fine tribute, Nigerian journalist Simon Kolawole explained and convincingly that Adadevoh was only doing her job as a medical professional. He wrote: “There were various options in front of her when she discovered Sawyer had Ebola: one, quietly say ‘e no concern me’ and discharge him quickly to avoid contaminating the hospital; two, refer him to [Lagos University Teaching hospital], not minding the bigger consequences for the rest of Nigeria; three, act responsibly in line with the ethics of the medical profession and ‘detain’ him because of the peculiarity of the disease.”

That this needed to be pointed out at all is perhaps testimony to how unused Nigeria has become to the idea of people doing their jobs as they should. It is precisely the reason Adadevoh needs to be honoured: as a reminder that heroism can be attained as much in everyday work clothes as it can in superhero capes.

We in the US need that kind of reminder too: that heroism can be attained as much in everyday work clothes as it can in football uniforms or banker suits or movie star glamor clothes.

Her name should become famous along with Malala’s.

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

Raif Badawy’s wife Ensaf Haidar writes about what Saudi Arabia is doing to her husband.

In May, his sentence was reduced to 10 years in prison, a fine of $100,000 and 1,000 lashes. He is to be lashed 50 times each Friday after prayers until it reaches 1,000 lashes.

Ra’if is not a criminal. He is not a murderer or a rapist. He is a blogger. That’s it. His only crime is being a free voice in a country that has no tolerance nor understanding for freedom.

He’s a blogger. I’m a blogger. I try to imagine being lashed 50 times to punish me for that. I try to imagine spending ten years in prison for that. I can’t.

Two years have passed since Ra’if was arrested and I still face a burning emptiness and a series of insomnia-inducing questions: When is he coming back? And in what state? Am I going to hug him? Kiss him? Will I cry?

These are our allies.

I arrived in Canada after escaping Saudi Arabia via Cairo and Beirut. We will settle here and attempt to have a normal life, but always await Ra’if’s return.

I am unable to thank every person who supported me and Ra’if. Amnesty International especially spared no effort to advocate for my husband’s release. I also must thank Ra’if, who taught me how to endure the impossible, stay strong and fight tirelessly to get him back.

Perhaps he won’t return soon, but I will get him back some day. He promised me that he would come back no matter what. Ra’if should be free, filling the world with happiness, love and his fighting spirit.

The government of Saudi Arabia is evil.

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