I’m reading the BBC live summary of the Rotherham report. It’s horrifying.

14:01: Evidence of the “appalling” abuse of at least 1,400 children in Rotherham, South Yorkshire over 16 years has been laid bare in a new report.
14:01: The inquiry was carried out by Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work in Scotland.
14:02: Her independent inquiry into how social services in Rotherham dealt with allegations of child sex abuse between 1997 and 2013 found girls as young as 11 were raped multiple times, trafficked to other towns and cities, beaten and doused in petrol.
14:04: The report, which has been published in the last few minutes, says: “The police and the council both failed in their duties to protect some of the most vulnerable children in the borough.”

And yet, they don’t work for the Vatican.

14:08: In the report, Prof Jay highlights a “collective failure” by the authorities to stop the abuse.
14:08: It also notes a “clear evidence of child sexual exploitation being disbelieved, suppressed or ignored”.
14:10: The report was commissioned by Rotherham Council in 2013. It followed the jailing of five men from Rotherham for sexual offences against girls in 2010.
14:11: Rotherham Council is expected to respond to the report later. Last year, the council’s chief executive, Martin Kimber, apologised to victims who had been “let down” by its “systemic failure”.
14:12: The inquiry found that a report highlighting the abuse was submitted to the police and the council in 2002, but “was effectively suppressed”.

Suppressed. So the Rotherham police and council acted like the Vatican even though they don’t work for the Vatican.

14:16: Councillors and council officials were told about the abuse in 2004 and 2005 “in the most explicit terms”, the report found. But it highlighted evidence of a “macho, sexist and bullying culture” within the council, which stopped it providing an effective response.
14:17: The report found that no priority was given by South Yorkshire Police to the issue of child sexual exploitation.
14:18: The 1,400 victims identified in the report include both girls and a small number of boys, Prof Jay clarifies in response to one question.
14:21: Prof Jay says there was evidence that senior people in the council and police wanted to “play down” the “ethnic dimensions” of the sexual exploitation for fear of being regarded as racist.

Macho, sexist, bullying, and anti-racist – or not anti-racist but unwilling to be regarded as racist. Impressive.

From the report:

Executive Summary:

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone.
Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

And it was all just buried.

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

I wrote this column for the Freethinker. In it I take issue with the idea that emotion is the opposite of reason.

I don’t mean that people arguing or writing articles about moral or social issues should be in a heightened emotional state themselves; I mean they should not pretend the subject is a matter of pure logic or number-crunching or engineering.

Above all, what we should not do is claim that our argument is Pure Reason while that of our opponent is nothing but emotion. It won’t work, for a start, and it’s not likely to be true, and it’s toe-curlingly arrogant. It helps to remember that we all have enormous built-in cognitive flaws, and that it’s never safe to assume we’ve managed to correct or avoid all of them at any given time.

In any case it’s pointless to pretend we can think and talk about moral or political issues with emotion neatly extracted, because the reason we want to argue about them in the first place is because we care about them. They matter to us. We don’t bother to argue about things that don’t matter to us. Morality is rooted in feelings – we want some things and want to avoid other things. Morality comes in when we extend that to other people –

And then things get complicated.

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

David Colquhoun has a brilliant post that starts out being about ending the all-male status of the main and best UCL common room in the 1960s, and goes on to be about the importance of confidence for achievement, and continues on to be about the importance of role models and zeitgeist, and ends up being about the way over-competitiveness in academia drives out people who don’t like over-competitiveness and thus distorts and impoverishes academia.

Colquhoun loves UCL – its godless tradition, its multi-faculty nature, its comparative democracy.

From the start, the intellectual heart of UCL has been the staff Common Room. As I so often say, failing to waste time drinking coffee with people who are cleverer than yourself can seriously damage your career (and your happiness). And there’s no better place for that than the Housman room.

It is there that I met the great statistician Alan Hawkes, without whom much of my research would never have happened. It was there that Hyman Kestelman (among others) gave me informal tutorials on matrix algebra over lunch. It was there where I have met John Sutherland (English), Mary Fulbrook (German), many historians and people from the Slade school of Art. And it was there where, yesterday, I had an illuminating conversation with Steve Jones about the problems of twin studies for measuring heritability.

But guess what. When he first got there it was men-only. All that good stuff was available to men only. There was a women-only common room and a mixed common room, but the biggest and best was the Housman and that was men-only.

In 1967 we proposed a motion at the Housman AGM to desegregate all common rooms. It was defeated. The next year we did it again, and were defeated again.. But at the third attempt, in 1969, we succeeded. I was very happy to have had a small role in upholding UCL’s liberal traditions.

He then talks about marathons, and what we can learn from them.

One of the great thing about marathons is that women and men run in the same race. That means that almost all men have had to get used to being overtaken by very many women. That has been wonderfully good for deflating male egos. When I was training for marathons in the 1980s, my training partner, Annie Briggs was on the elite start -a good hour faster than I could manage.

Now we are accustomed to watching Paula Radcliffe run marathons faster than any but the very best men. She’s the world record holder with the spectacular time of 2 hours 15 min in the 2003 London Marathon (my best is 3 hr 57 min). That’s only a bit over 26 consecutive 5 minute miles. And that’s faster than I could run a single mile at my peak.

But wait, it gets even better than that.

It’s now utterly beyond belief that in the 1960s men were saying that women were too feeble to run 26 miles. It was sheer blind arrogance. After Switzer, progress was fast. In 1972 women were allowed to run in Boston, and within 10 years, the women’s record time had fallen by a full hour. Physiology hadn’t changed, but confidence had.

Of course it wasn’t until the 2012 Olympics that women gained total equality in sport. Everyone who said that women were incapable of competing in combat sports should see Rosi Sexton in action.

She’s the ultimate high-achiever. She’s an accomplished musician (grade 7 cello, ALCM piano) and she played at the Albert Hall with the Reading Youth Orchestra. She went on to get a first in maths (Cambridge, Trinity College), where her tutor was Tim Gowers. Then she did a PhD in theoretical computer science from Manchester (read her thesis). And she’s had a distinguished career as professional athlete, competing at the highest level in MMA. Why? “The other things I did, the music, the maths, just weren’t quite hard enough“.

A hat trick of accomplishment.

And this kind of thing is good pour encourager les autres.

It could not be more appropriate than to be writng this in the week when the Fields medal was won by a woman, Maryam Mirzakhani, for the first time since it started, in 1936. Genetics hasn’t changed since 1936. Confidence has.

UCL mathematician, Helen Wilson, points out the encouragement this will give to female mathematicians.

Confidence is important, encouragement is important, inspiration is important.

And he has one last point:

And the job of desegregation may not be entirely finished. In fact now it is harder to combat, since it’s unspoken. Once again, I’m reminded of Peter Lawrence’s essay, The Mismeasurement of Science. Speaking of the perverse incentives and over-competitiveness that has invaded academia, he says

“Gentle people of both sexes vote with their feet and leave a profession that they, correctly, perceive to discriminate against them [17]. Not only do we lose many original researchers, I think science would flourish more in an understanding and empathetic workplace.”

The perverse incentives that make academic life hard for women (and for many men too) are administered by HR departments (with the collusion of mostly elderly male academics). They are the very same people who write fine-sounding diversity documents and lecture you about work-life balance.

It’s time they woke up.

Understanding and empathy are important too.

By the way, want to know how I was alerted to this beautiful essay? Via Richard Dawkins on Twitter.

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

Anita Sarkeesian looks at women as background decoration in video games. Cool stuff: murdered women lying around in sexy poses with few clothes on. Phwoarrrr, sexy, also entertaining and funny, right? RIGHT?

For some strange reason the comments are disabled. So puzzling.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA

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

Originally a comment by quixote on “If you are from the Mehatar caste, you have to do this work.”

This post gave me a fullblown flashback. One of my most vivid memories from visiting India decades ago was the look in the eyes of one of the sweepers.

His job was dealing with a public toilet I was walking past. I can’t imagine who would use one of them because there were piles of shit everywhere inside (I could see partway into the door) and plenty outside from people who no doubt didn’t want to contend with the conditions inside. Indian food can be hard on the intestines, so the piles were not necessarily well-formed. He was sweeping this unspeakably foul glop with one of those short no-handle brooms. He was avoiding looking at anyone.

(I asked someone once why they didn’t at least have longhandled brooms, so the sweepers didn’t have to squat right down next to the shit. Well, proper handles were only for proper people. It just was Not Done to give the scum of the earth long handled brooms. Really. That was the answer.)

Well, I must have been staring (little horrified Western white kid), because he looked up at me. His eyes were completely glazed. There was so much suffering, so far beyond endurance, there was nothing left. I’ve only ever seen that expression one other time, in a picture of a person who’d had his hands chopped off during the terror in Sierra Leone.

There are aspects of Indian culture which are a big contribution to humanity. And there are aspects which annihilate people like the sweepers, like widows, like so many millions there. It’s a vast, huge, gigantic human rights issue.

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

That HRW report on dalits and cleaning up human shit every day.

There are laws against hiring people to do this horrible job, but they’re not enforced.

However, because these policies are not properly implemented, people remain unaware of their right to refuse this role, and those who do refuse may face intense social pressure, including threats of violence and expulsion from their village, often with the complicity of local government officials.

Manual scavengers are usually from caste groups customarily relegated to the bottom of the caste hierarchy and confined to livelihood tasks viewed as deplorable or deemed too menial by higher caste groups. Their caste-designated occupation reinforces the social stigma that they are unclean or “untouchable” and perpetuates widespread discrimination.  Women usually clean dry toilets, men and women clean excrement from open defecation sites, gutters, and drains, and men are called upon to do the more physically demanding work of cleaning sewers and septic tanks.

It’s a good catch-22, isn’t it. They have to pick up the shit because they’re low people because they pick up the shit. Well that’s a maze there’s no way out of.

Ashif Shaikh, founder and convener of the Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, a grassroots campaign against manual scavenging, explained the systematic discrimination that emerges from this practice:

The manual carrying of human feces is not a form of employment, but an injustice akin to slavery. It is one of the most prominent forms of discrimination against Dalits, and it is central to the violation of their human rights.

In Kasela village in Uttar Pradesh state’s Etah district, women from 12 families manually clean toilets with the full knowledge of village authorities. After spending the morning manually removing excrement from the toilets, the women return to the houses they cleaned to collect leftover food as payment. They are given grain donations at the harvest and old clothes at festival times, but receive no cash wages. Munnidevi told Human Rights Watch she stopped going to homes where she was not given any food, but says she returned to work after her employers warned that she would not be able to enter community land to collect firewood or graze her livestock. “I have to go. If I miss a single day, I am threatened,” she said.

They’re not even paid. They’re forced to do it by economic threats and they’re not paid. Like post-Civil War Mississippi, it’s worse than slavery. With slavery there’s an incentive to keep the slave alive and even healthy.

Sevanti Fatrod, from Bhonrasa, in Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh, says that she, her mother-in-law, and her two sisters-in-laws cleaned toilets in 100 houses each day—allowing them to collect leftover food from the houses they cleaned:

I did not know that I would have to clean toilets. In Nepanagar, where I am from, my family did not do this work. My father told me that my husband’s family had a large jagir, with work that spanned 100 families—but he did not tell me what work this was. I learned my work when I came to Bhonrasa . . . A jagir, means the area that you own. I was called a maitarani [scavenging queen]—for what? My work was to clean people’s feces— for only one or two rupees a month. We were told we had to do it. There was no one to tell us we didn’t have to.[28]

While a jagir is considered a family asset, for the young women made to clean excrement immediately after their marriage, the jagir can be a traumatic inheritance. Sona, from Bharatpur city in Rajasthan, described her first day to Human Rights Watch:

The first day when I was cleaning the latrines and the drain, my foot slipped and my leg sank in the excrement up to my calf. I screamed and ran away. Then I came home and cried and cried. My husband went with me the next day and made me do it. I knew there was only this work for me.[29]

For people who practice manual scavenging, untouchability and social exclusion are inextricably linked. Manjula Pradeep, executive director of Navsarjan, a Gujarat based nongovernmental organization that has worked for decades around this issue explains:

Manual scavenging is itself a form of caste-based violence and needs to be understood that way. It is degrading, it is imposed upon very vulnerable people, and in order to leave manual scavenging, they have to make themselves even more vulnerable— they risk backlash, they don’t know how they will live.[30]

The horror of it is hard to encompass.

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

Thousands of people marched in an Oslo demonstration against ISIS organized by young Muslims.

The demonstration, organized by young Muslims in Norway, gathered people of different religious and ethnicities together in Oslo against religious extremism and the crimes of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The crowd filled the entire Grønland square as the demonstration started at 17.00.

After short talks by the organizers, demonstrators marched through Oslo streets towards Norwegian Parliement (Stortinget) with slogans of “No to ISIS”, “ISIS is not in Islam’s Name”, “Against ISIS terror for Peace”.

When the protestors arrived at Eidsvold space, in front of Stortinget, the number has reached to almost ten thousand, according to the organizers.

That’s good. More of that!

A young demonstrator Ali (16) said being in the demonstration is important to take away from extremists people and ideologies and say that we do not share the same principles and values with those extremists.

Among other politicians and stakeholders, Prime Minister Erna Solberg also had a speech during the demonstration. Solberg said all stand together against extremists.

- Today it is about what we believe. We all believe in freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion and the political discussion to take place without violence, said she in her speech in the end of the demonstration.

The crowd was apparently much bigger than expected.

@JudeRoze tweeted some photos:

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

What was that I was saying about managing disagreement ethically? I must have been dreaming.

There’s a new article at the Richard Dawkins website, by one “Notung” who is a blogger at Skeptic Ink. So the article is pseudonymous, so it had better be scrupulously fair in whatever it says, right? Because surely it’s dirty pool to be unfair and be pseudonymous. Isn’t it?

An article on Religion News Service by Catholic journalist Kimberly Winston (an expert in the effects of different prayer beads on prayer) asks whether Richard Dawkins is an asset or a liability to atheism. Actually it tells us: he’s a liability. 

Nope, not scrupulously fair. Rudely inaccurate about a named journalist, rather than scrupulously fair. Jesus, Richard – this is how you take your revenge? You let A Nameless smear a named journalist on your website?

Actually it tells us: he’s a liability. Of the eight people who were interviewed, seven said that he’s a liability (though Hemant Mehta’s statement appears to have been misrepresented), and only one (Dennett) said that he’s an asset.

Nope, not scrupulously fair. That claim is not true. It’s false. Four of the seven said Richard is both: both an asset and a liability. I did, and so did Phil Zuckerman and Hemant Mehta and Adam Lee.

“Richard Dawkins has done a lot to bring atheism to a whole new generation,” said Phil Zuckerman, a sociology professor who studies atheism and who also credits Dawkins with speaking out against the pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church. “On the other hand, Dawkins seems to embody everything that people dislike about atheists: He is smug, condescending and emits an unpleasant disdainfulness. He doesn’t ever seem to acknowledge the good aspects of religion, only the bad. In that sense, I think he doesn’t help atheism in the PR department.”

See? That’s not hard to understand, is it? The “on the other hand” helps. Both.

So when his recent tweets about rape and pedophilia hit the Twittersphere two days after the release of the civility agreement with his longtime critic, the debate started anew.

“Perhaps he was testing it,” Benson said of the agreement, which she characterized as a positive step in repairing a rift over feminism within atheism that she traces to Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” comment.

Benson said Dawkins attracts people to the movement with his well-reasoned arguments against religion and superstition. But he then repels them with what many see as an unwillingness to listen to ideas other than his own.

“In his two or three recent Twitter combats, the most striking thing is he does not listen to anyone except his fans, no matter how reasonably things are put,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a good way to represent long-term, healthy atheism.”

Both.

And it isn’t only women atheists whom Dawkins upset. Writing on The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta said: “I’m a fan of Richard Dawkins. I know he means well. But damn, it’s annoying having to defend him. More importantly, I shouldn’t have to!”

Adam Lee, who blogs at Daylight Atheism, said: “I don’t think (Dawkins) has done more harm than good to the atheist movement, but the balance has been shifting towards harm. He has made comments about women and minorities that give people a bad impression of what atheism stands for. I wish he would stand back and let other people add their voices to his.”

Both and both.

And then there are some of the comments about Kimberly Winston…

Like this from “aquilacane” -

Catholic journalist Kimberly Winston (an expert in the effects of different prayer beads on prayer)

That’s like being an expert on the effects of different bird calls on the deceased. The first line of this article just screams “don’t read this crap written by a delusional and fraudulent moron”. If she were an expert she would admit the effects are zero as prayer has been demonstrated to have no effect. So, she must be a fraud a the very least.

Not cool.

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

BBC News reports on dalits in India whose job it is to empty non-flush toilets and carry away the shit for disposal.

Human Rights Watch has called on the Indian government to end “manual scavenging” – the practice of cleaning human waste by low-caste communities – in a new report.

The practice is banned by law in India, but it is rampant and activists say nearly 10 million are involved in this demeaning work which opens them to prejudice and abuse.

The report calls on the government “to ensure that local officials enforce the laws prohibiting this discriminatory practice”.

Check out the BBC story, because it’s full of vivid and tragic photos.

Munnidevi of the state’s Etah district says she does not get any money for her work. “Sometimes they give two rotis (home-made bread), sometimes just one. One house did not give me anything for two or three days. So I stopped going there. If they give me nothing, why should I go? Then they came to threaten me: ‘if you do not come, we will not let you on our land. Where will you get food for your animals?’ We own four buffaloes. I went back to clean. I had to.”

“The panchayat (village council) hires people to work as water suppliers, messengers, clerks, garbage collectors, and this work that I do – cleaning toilets,” says Anil of Dhule district in the western state of Maharashtra. “If you are from the Mehatar caste, you have to do this work. You are not told this directly, but it is what you are hired to do and what is expected, even from the villagers. If there is excrement to clean, they will come and call us to do it.”

“A village council brought our family here [from our native village in Maharashtra] to clean the dry toilets, water toilets, and open defecation. I collect all the excrement and throw it elsewhere. We actually want to go back home. We don’t like it here,” says Rajubai. “Because of this work, my health has declined. I eat very little food. It is very dirty work. But people are saying, the council will not allow us to leave and that is why they are not giving us the full payment.”

Horrible.

The Human Rights Watch report starts from here.

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

Another day another tweet.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
I apologise for impugning the morality of the approximately ten percent of women who deliberately choose NOT to abort a Down’s fetus.

It’s a Basil Fawlty apology.

One of the reasons I’ve always found Basil Fawlty so hilarious is that I’m like that myself. There’s generally a snotty asshole in me roaring to get out, and it often does get out. (I usually regret it when it does.) Some of Basil’s rages are my rages too, and I sympathized with some of them and cringed at others. It’s much the same with Richard. His Basil Fawlty runs away with him sometimes.

There’s an interesting exchange on his site between a commenter and him, on a post by Kevin Drum about the “brutality” of the intersection of social justice liberalism and social media. In a comment Richard underlines the claim that “the vitriol pours in, and it’s soul-crushing.” Katy Cordeth replies:

Sorry Richard but it sounds like you can dish it out but you can’t take it. You do have your own tidy line in hurling the vitriol.

I don’t myself tweet but I’d be surprised if all the criticism you’re subjected to is as one-dimensional as you’d have us believe. The responses on this site to your recent abortion tweets have for the most part been measured, even from those who couldn’t be considered part of the Dawkins fan base.

You and Mr Drum are free to try and disseminate the idea that all the negative feedback you’re on the receiving end of is ugly and irrational, but isn’t that a bit self-serving? You’re giving yourself carte blanche to say whatever you like without fear of reprisal. I’m sure there are plenty of ugly things tweeted at you, many of them quite hurtful. But hidden among the trollery there are, I have no doubt, many sensible, rational things being said. What the ratio is I have no idea. It’s your duty to sort the wheat from the chaff, not try and kid the world that it’s all chaff.

I don’t actually agree with those who say you should quit the medium; as I said in one of my deleted posts, I think you’re playing the role of carnival barker, both to drum up business for this site and to keep the atheism flame lit in the popular consciousness, and tweets about what you’re having for your tea or pictures of your kitty cat just won’t serve that end. I’m sure it’s hard-going for a deeply divisive public figure to have to run the gauntlet of unmoderated public opinion every day, but you can ameliorate this by injecting a little kindness and compassion into your Twitter submissions. Cold, clinical analysis may be the order of the day in the world of academia and even on this site, but the men and women who ride the Clapham omnibus are a passionate and mercurial lot. The same rules don’t automatically apply.

I think that’s all pretty sensible advice. Richard’s response is

Katy Cordeth, of COURSE I have no problem with those tweets that are indeed measured, sensible disagreements. My whole life as an academic has been largely devoted to such conversations. I’m used to that sort of discussion and thrive on it. There’s all the difference in the world between disagreeing with somebody on a question of moral philosophy, and calling them a twat, a cunt, an idiot, an ignoramus and a Nazi simply because you disagree with them. And if you are asking the ratio of vitriolic abuse to measured argument, a conservative estimate would put it at more than ten to one. Isn’t it OBVIOUS that that is what Kevin Drum is talking about? And his “avalanche” is not an overstatement.

I was particularly interested by “There’s all the difference in the world between disagreeing with somebody on a question of moral philosophy, and calling them a twat, a cunt, an idiot, an ignoramus and a Nazi simply because you disagree with them.” Yes, there is, and that’s what we meant by the relevant passage in the joint statement.

Disagreement is inevitable, but bullying and harassment are not. If we want secularism and atheism to gain respect, we have to be able to disagree with each other without trying to destroy each other.

In other words we have to be able to manage disagreement ethically, like reasonable adults, as opposed to brawling like enraged children who need a nap. It should go without saying, but this means no death threats, rape threats, attacks on people’s appearance, age, race, sex, size, haircut; no photoshopping people into demeaning images, no vulgar epithets.

Emphasis added.

I think Richard is not used to being on the receiving end of the avalanche. I hope he is remembering to extrapolate from his experience of the avalanche to our experience of it for the past more than three years.

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

I’ve long disliked Vandana Shiva, and here’s more reason to dislike her: Michael Specter in the New Yorker:

Like Gandhi, whom she reveres, Shiva questions many of the goals of contemporary civilization. Last year, Prince Charles, who keeps a bust of Shiva on display at Highgrove, his family house, visited her at the Navdanya farm, in Dehradun, about a hundred and fifty miles north of New Delhi. Charles, perhaps the world’s best-known critic of modern life, has for years denounced transgenic crops. “This kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God and God alone,” he wrote in the nineteen-nineties, when Monsanto tried to sell its genetically engineered seeds in Europe. Shiva, too, invokes religion in her assault on agricultural biotechnology. “G.M.O. stands for ‘God, Move Over,’ we are the creators now,” she said in a speech earlier this year. 

Oh piss off, both of you. You could say the same thing about farming of any kind, including “organic.” You could say it about houses (how many of those do you have, Charles?) and medical care and cooking.

Piss off.

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

Steven Salzberg at Forbes points out that Whole Foods Markets does some very good things, like having a seafood sustainability policy and offering humanely-raised chicken and beef. On the other hand it also does ridiculous things, like flogging homeopathy, opposing GMOs, and refusing to sell aspirin.

Whole Foods sells homeopathic medicines that are little more than snake oil. They make claims for health benefits, both on their shelves and on their website, that are based on little more than magical thinking. For example, they sell “homeopathic flu remedies” claiming that “when taken at the first sign of sickness, these can provide temporary relief of symptoms including fever, chills, and body aches.” This is simply false: no homeopathic treatment has ever been shown to be effective at treating flu symptoms. (I’ve written about homeopathy in more detail here and here.)

It’s ironic that on the one hand, Whole Foods proclaims “We’ve long believed that consumers have a right to know what’s in your food”. But when it comes to homeopathic remedies, they neglect to inform consumers that these remedies do not contain the ingredients on the bottle at all.

Well that’s because there aren’t any! That’s what makes it work!!

Wait…

Whole Foods has an anti-GMO policy, adopted across all their stores, that ignores the science of GMOs. They announced last year that they would label all products in their stores to indicate whether they contained Genetically Modified Organisms. They also have announced that they are trying to eliminate GMOs from their shelves.

That’s just…superstitious.

Whole Foods won’t sell the pain relievers aspirin and ibuprofen, because they’re not “natural.”Instead, their Whole Body department sells a wide range of nutritional supplements, for which they make claims such as this:

“Not sure which supplement to choose? Grab a full-spectrum wellness or immune support formula. These combinations of herbs, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants are specifically designed to effectively improve overall wellbeing and enhance immune support.“

And you can’t tell us they didn’t, because that’s so vague you won’t be able to tell!

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

Gosh, even Sarah Palin got in on it. I wouldn’t have thought she’d know who Dawkins is.

Mr. Dawkins, I’d let you meet my son if you promised to open your mind, your eyes, and your heart to a unique kind of absolute beauty. But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I’ll make sure he’s polite, though!

Love,

Sarah Palin & family

It would be interesting if he actually took her up on it.

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

In Dublin this afternoon, thousands of people marched in support of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian people.

Organisers said 8,000 people took part in the march, many of whom held signs reading “equal”. Some dressed in sashes and tiaras after the news that the newly crowned Rose of Tralee, Maria Walsh had publicly come out as lesbian.

Comedian and writer Tara Flynn introduced speakers at a stage on St. Stephen’s Green. Ms Flynn recently starred in an LGBT Noise ‘Armagayddon’ video, which went viral internationally.

…

The march was notable for the number of straight people marching alongside LGBT people, along with families, and an almost endless array of colourful banners and signs. Representatives from LGBT youth organisation BelongTo, INTO LGBT Teachers’ Group, the USI, trans rights organisation TENI, and LGBT Pavee representing the Traveller community also spoke.

Also Atheist Ireland.

Irish Times journalist Fintan O’Toole called for Irish society to replace “tolerance” of LGBT people with “citizenship”.

Yes, the hell with tolerance. There’s nothing to “tolerate.”

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

Kenan Malik did this talk at the Global Humanist Conference a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been meaning to read.

Right at the beginning we run into a funny (odd and haha both) idea.

Every year I give a lecture to a group of theology students – would-be Anglican priests, as it happens – on ‘Why I am an atheist’. Part of the talk is about values. And every year I get the same response: that without God, one can simply pick and choose about which values one accepts and which one doesn’t.

Ye-es…and?

Of course one can pick and choose about which values one accepts and which one doesn’t, and one had damn well better do exactly that, because the alternative is simply unconditional obedience and the perils of that ought to be blindingly obvious.

Yes, clerical friends, that’s exactly what one can and should do. Yes, you do actually have to think about what values to accept and what values to reject. There are plenty of values that ought to be rejected – aversion to other races for instance, or to same-sex pairing, or to women in public life.

Kenan of course says the same thing.

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

You know what English needs? It needs a word that’s the opposite of “want.” It needs a word for want-not. Just adding a not doesn’t do it, because it’s too limp, too reactive, too mere. We need a word that’s more forceful, more feeling, than “don’t want.” An unwant word. A verb form of aversion.

Is there a verb form of aversion? If so it’s certainly not in active use. English needs a word like that that is in active use, and so is available to use.

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

This time it’s former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve, in the Telegraph, with a candlestick.

Britain is at risk of being “sanitised” of faith because an “aggressive form of secularism” in workplaces and public bodies is forcing Christians to hide their beliefs, a former attorney general has warned.

What an arrestingly fresh and novel thought!

Dominic Grieve said he found it “quite extraordinary” that people were being sacked or disciplined for expressing their beliefs at work.

So do I! But they aren’t. So I don’t. I find it “quite extraordinary” that political talkers keep telling whoppers about this. People don’t get sacked just for “expressing their beliefs at work.” They get sacked for, for instance, refusing to do the work at work. They get disciplined for insisting on wearing dangling jewelry when there are safety rules forbidding it.

He described Christianity as a “powerful force for good” in modern Britain and warned that Christians should not be “intimidated” and “excluded” for their beliefs.

Quite right! They shouldn’t. And they’re not.

On the other hand people who don’t share their beliefs shouldn’t be intimidated and excluded either. That includes atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs – shall I go on?

He said that politicians and public figures should not be afraid of “doing God” and that they have a duty to explain how their beliefs inform their decisions.

The “appalling” scenes in Iraq, which have seen Islamic extremists behead and crucify religious minorities including Christians, showed that it was “more important than ever” for people to express their religious beliefs, he said.

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

You know: the comma before “and” in a list of three or more items.

Have some paradigms:

The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor. Here are some quotes that have served as shots exchanged in the Oxford comma wars.

Pro: “She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.”

This example from the Chicago Manual of Style shows how the comma is necessary for clarity. Without it, she is taking a picture of two people, her mother and father, who are the president and vice president. With it, she is taking a picture of four people.

Quite. The “Oxford” comma is necessary there; it simply does one of the jobs a comma is supposed to do.

Con: “Those at the ceremony were the commodore, the fleet captain, the donor of the cup, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones.”

This example from the 1934 style book of the New York Herald Tribune shows how a comma before “and” can result in a lack of clarity. With the comma, it reads as if Mr. Smith was the donor of the cup, which he was not.

Ok well I tell you what, that’s not a good sentence, with or without the comma. Just re-do the sentence. That’s the other way to fix these little problems – just re-do the damn sentence.

The commodore and the fleet captain were at the ceremony, along with the donor of the cup (Susan Milligram) and Steve Jones and Bob Smith.

Still not elegant, but at least you can figure it out without getting a crick in your neck.

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