The Guardian reports on a cunning plan from lawmakers in Afghanistan.

A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called “honour” killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse.

The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering.

That’s family values. The family comes first, and outsiders must never mess with it. That’s how it is with the Amish, for sure – abused women and children are supposed to forgive, not report.

Under the new law, prosecutors could never come to court with cases like that of Sahar Gul, a child bride whose in-laws chained her in a basement and starved, burned and whipped her when she refused to work as a prostitute for them. Women like 31-year-old Sitara, whose nose and lips were sliced off by her husband at the end of last year, could never take the stand against their attackers.

“Honour” killings by fathers and brothers who disapprove of a woman’s behaviour would be almost impossible to punish. Forced marriage and the sale or trading of daughters to end feuds or settle debt would also be largely beyond the control of the law in a country where the prosecution of abuse is already rare.

But maybe Karzai won’t sign the law?

Don’t get your hopes up.

“We will ask the president not to sign until the article is changed, we will put a lot of pressure on him,” said Selay Ghaffar, director of the shelter and advocacy group Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan. She said activists hoped to repeat the success of a campaign in 2009 that forced Karzai to soften a family law enshrining marital rape as a husband’s right.

But that was five years ago, and since then Karzai has presided over a strengthening of conservative forces. In the last year alone parliament has blocked a law to curb violence against women and cut the quota for women on provincial councils, while the justice ministry floated a proposal to bring back stoning as a punishment for adultery.

It’s strange to see lawmakers actually promoting and protecting violence against women. “Vote for a better Afghanistan, with more violence against women.”

H/t Al Lee

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

Originally a comment on Creating false memories.

There is growing evidence that memories are actually stored in the brain in a very fragmented fashion, with individual fragments held in the place where the data point was processed. That is to say, your memory about driving to work this morning might consist of the sound of traffic and horns stored in the sound processing part of the brain, the route is stored in the part of the brain that processes spacial relationships, individuals signs stored in the parts that deal with vision, color, shape and contextual meaning, etc. These fragments are stored as archetypes: you do not have hundreds of memories about how bacon tastes, for example, you have only one or two that get used over and over again.

In the cerebellum, there is a kind of daemon that assembles these fragments into a cogent whole. This daemon is basically an idiot savant, capable of amazing feats but about as bright as a puppy. Like a puppy, it is very eager to please: if you ask for a memory that it does not know, it will assemble one for you out of the stored memory archetypes. There are independent checks, such as the part of the brain that gives rise to the “I’ve seen/heard/been here before” feeling, but ultimately the memory daemon is the final arbiter of what we remember.

If the daemon can be convinced that a memory exists, it will exist. Maybe it is an actual event — a birthday party or observation of a crime — with some facts remembered and other filled in to justify opinions or cover gaps. Maybe it never existed and was created from scratch, like a Ferris wheel made out of Tinker Toys. Once it has been sufficiently reinforced, it will be as real as any other memory.

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

Elizabeth Loftus in 1995:

This manuscript is close to the final version that was published with this citation:
Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995) The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.

So, scroll down to Lost in a Shopping Mall.

Most of the experimental research on memory distortion has involved deliberate attempts to change memory for an event that actually was experienced. An important issue is whether it is possible to implant an entire false memory for something that never happened. Could it be done in an ethically permissible way? Several years ago a method was conceived for exploring this issue; why not see whether people could be led to believe that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child even if they had not been. (See Loftus & Ketcham, 5 for a description of the evolution of the idea for the study). In one of the first cases of successful implantation (Loftus & Coan, 6), a 14 year old boy named Chris was supplied with descriptions of three true events that supposedly happened in Chris’s childhood involving Chris’s mother and older brother Jim. Jim also helped construct one false event. Chris was instructed to write about all four events every day for five days, offering any facts or descriptions he could remember about each event. If he could not recall any additional details he was instructed to write “I don’t remember”.

The false memory was introduced in a short paragraph. It reminded Chris that he was five at the time, that Chris was lost at the University City shopping mall in Spokane, Washington where the family often went shopping. That Chris was crying heavily when he was rescued by an elderly man and reunited with his family.

Over the first five days, Chris remembered more and more about getting lost. He remembered that the man who rescued him was “really cool.” He remembered being scared that he would never see his family again. He remembered his mother scolding him.

A few weeks later Chris was reinterviewed. He rated his memories on a scale from l (not clear at all) to ll (very, very clear). For the three true memories, Chris gave ratings of 1, 10, and 5. For the false shopping mall memory, he assigned his second-highest rating: 8. When asked to describe his getting lost memory, Chris provided rich details about the toy store where he got lost and his thoughts at the time (“Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.”) He remembered the man who rescued him as wearing a blue flannel shirt, kind of old, kind of bald on top…. “and, he had glasses.”

Chris was soon told that one of the memories was false. Could he guess? He selected one of the real memories. When told that the memory of being lost was the false one, he had trouble believing it.

Note, in case anyone reads this without having read previous threads including the comments, I’m not posting this here to suggest that Dylan Farrow has a false (created) memory. It’s part of the broader discussion about memory.

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

Now morally superior Woody Allen is sending his lawyer out to go on tv and trash Mia Farrow.

(It’s all very tabloid, isn’t it, very People magazine, very what’s new in Hollywood. But it’s also a classic of power-abuse and celebrity-abuse and men crapping on women. We’re stuck with it for a bit.)

An attorney for Woody Allen said Tuesday that Dylan Farrow was coached by her mother and Allen’s former girlfriend, Mia Farrow, to believe false memories of sexual abuse by Allen.

Elkan Abramowitz said on the Today show that Allen isn’t accusing Farrow of lying. “She was a pawn in a huge fight between him and Mia Farrow years ago, and the idea that she was molested was implanted in her by her mother, and that memory is never going to go away,” Abramowitz said.

A “huge fight” – over the fact that Allen decided to start fucking Farrow’s daughter 13 years into their relationship. How could anyone possibly think he could ever possibly decide to mess around with another one of her daughters??

Abramowitz said it’s no coincidence that the allegations are resurfacing just as Allen’s career is hitting a new upswing. “The fact that it’s being brought up now is suspect, the timing is suspect,” Abramowitz said. “Nothing’s happened, they haven’t had any relationship in the last 20 years so all of a sudden we’re seeing these allegations surface again and one has to wonder why. I think that it’s a continuation of Mia Farrow’s desire to hurt Woody Allen.”

Well he got a lifetime achievement award, but some of his achievements in the field of daughter-fucking and daughter-fingering were omitted. Somebody has to set the record straight.

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

Kathryn Joyce answers a question I’ve wondered about – yes, the way unmarried mothers were treated in the US (and elsewhere) was as bad (or almost as bad) as the way they were treated in Ireland, and yes, there were a lot of them, and yes, their babies were taken away from them.

It’s a time that in the United States is often referred to as the “Baby Scoop Era,” and during it some estimates hold that a full fifth of all children born to never-married white women relinquished their infants for adoption. For women sent to maternity homes, that number rose to 80 percent, comprising anywhere from 1.5 million to 6 million women. 

While, at least in the movie, Philomena maintained that she was never coerced into relinquishing her son, for many U.S. birth mothers or first mothers (preferred terms vary) who are now in their 50s, 60s, or older, the pressure they encountered at maternity homes was harsh and unapologetic. Severe isolation was normal, as was withholding information from women about their pregnancies and impending labor. Maternity home residents were forbidden visits with friends, family, or the fathers of their children, and weren’t allowed to receive letters or phone calls. They were sometimes dropped off at hospitals to labor alone, separate from married mothers, sometimes without pain medication, and pushed to sign relinquishment papers while they were still drugged or recovering from labor.

And so on. It was bad.

“They wanted to keep us scared to death,” said Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, the 65-year-old founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, which compiles documents from the period. “They didn’t want us to be repeats. It was so traumatizing that many mothers don’t remember the births.”

As a 17-year-old unwed expectant mother, Wilson-Buterbaugh was placed by her Catholic family in a Washington, D.C.-area maternity home in 1966. Women sent there were expected to work for their keep, and there were locks on the doors of the floors housing women considered flight risks. To Wilson-Buterbaugh, the differences between the U.S. maternity homes and the Magdalene Laundries are few. In the United States, widely available baby formula allowed infants to be adopted almost immediately, rather than staying with breastfeeding mothers, and U.S. women were sent home quickly, to return to their lives as “born-again virgins,” unlike their Irish counterparts, who were penalized with further years of debt-bondage. But for many, the sense of lifelong loss is the same.

It is a big difference that they weren’t kept locked up for years or decades. But that said – they were still treated like shit. Yet another chapter in the expanding volume Neglected Histories of the Ways Women Were Treated Like Shit.

The problems didn’t stop at U.S. borders either. Similar adoption programs occurred in other countries, particularly Commonwealth nations. However, some of these nations have begun to acknowledge their mistakes. In Canada, several churches have undertaken archival digs to determine what role they may have played in coercive adoptions. In Australia, the advocacy of Baby Scoop Era mothers resulted last year in a national apology from the prime minister for forced adoptions, modeled on the country’s previous apologies for human rights abuses—including forcible adoptions—of indigenous people.

Not a volume, not even a set; a whole shelf.

For the New York Post’s Kyle Smith, this is apparently unknown history, papered over with the assumption that more adoptions are good, and therefore maternity homes that facilitate more adoptions are good. That’s not a big surprise, but even likely allies seem unaware of the connections between Philomena’s quest and the experiences of millions of U.S. women. Last week, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) partnered with the real Philomena Lee to call onIreland to open its adoption records and grapple with its past (a call reflected in a recent Change.org petition aimed at the Catholic Church). U.S. birth mothers/first mothers have started a Facebook group called “We Are the American Philomenas,” and they share a sense of bafflement that most people are unaware of how common their story is.

“It’s just beyond our comprehension that they can’t connect those dots, especially after all the efforts we’ve made,” Wilson-Buterbaugh says. “There are millions of Philomenas out there, from just about every country. We’re just flabbergasted that people aren’t figuring this out.”

Ok. Time to fix that.

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

I’ve been thinking about memory, naturally. I often do anyway, and Dylan Farrow’s open letter has brought it to the fore again. I was thinking yesterday about how non-specific and narrative and composite my memories are, at least the older ones. I set myself a question: can I summon up a clear distinct visual memory that I know to be one memory, like a photograph?

I tried hard for some time, and couldn’t do it. I suspect it can’t be done. If I see something only once, I don’t properly remember it at all. If I see it repeatedly, I can visualize it, but I can tell the visualization is composite – it’s not a one-time look that gets frozen.

Is anybody else different?

Probably not. If memory were not like that, people would probably not take so many pictures. We like pictures so much because we don’t remember what we see.

It’s sad, isn’t it.

I’ll tell you what I can remember way better than I can remember anything visual, and that’s navigation. How to get to places. I can go for walks in my head. It’s quite a good game – “Suppose you’re in Ladbroke Grove, and you decide to walk to Highgate. Go.”

It all makes sense, I’m guessing. Composite memory is plenty good enough for facial recognition and other kinds of recognition – in fact better, because you don’t get a false negative just because an expression is different or the wind is blowing.

Well, it’s stupid to babble about it, I have multiple books that spell all this out, and I’ve even read some of them. But then one has to remember it all…

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

I was reading this article about child sexual abuse and belief, in which Andrea Grimes starts by telling us a little about herself -

I am an only child and I have awesome, twangy Texas-raised parents who Texas-raised me. My best friends are brilliant academics who sort of hate academia. I am overly friendly in awkward situations. I am funny and I love Star Trek. I throw big parties. I do yoga at home so I can skip savasana. I talk too much.

And when I was a kid, a relative sexually abused me.

I was reading this article, I say, and when I read that sentence I suddenly remembered that I can say the same thing, and that it was odd that I hadn’t thought of that while thinking about memory and Dylan Farrow.

It is odd. Why didn’t I think of it? Then again, of course, being in the habit of second-guessing my memory, now I’m not sure I didn’t. But at the time I first read that sentence – an hour or so ago – I did think I hadn’t, and I did feel surprise.

I was only a little older than Dylan Farrow was in August 1993, that’s the thing. I’m not sure how much older; I was at least 8 and a few months (because of where I was at the time) but possibly 9.

It was very minor, in comparison. I was much more grossed out and freaked out by a stranger assault a year or two or three later. But it wasn’t nothing. (I don’t want to be coy. It was a cousin 20 years my senior, one I liked a lot because he was funny and irreverent. He came into my bedroom one evening after I’d gone to bed, and put my hand on his fly. Oh hai: that’s a penis there. That’s all.)

Frankly I find Dylan Farrow’s story very plausible. I just have reservations about the insistence on vows of belief, because of the epistemology of it. Do I think it happened? Hell yes. Do I “believe” it? That’s the wrong question.

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

An interesting article by Rumy Hasan in Open Democracy last December: Beware of Islamism with a liberal veneer. We’re well familiar with that phenomenon. The two women sitting next to Abhishek and Chris on The Big Questions were classic examples – using liberal rhetoric to defend illiberal traditions and practices, while enveloped in degrading black bags.

The recent outcry among British politicians and the London press over gender segregation in universities has shone a light on a relatively new phenomenon: the recourse to the foundational principles of liberal democracy by Islamists in pursuit of their agenda. This approach appears to be working as is evidenced by Universities UK’s (UUK) policy guidance (now withdrawn) on gender segregation at events organised by Islamic Societies. In very reasonable language, UUK advised:

“Concerns to accommodate the wishes or beliefs of those opposed to segregation should not result in a religious group being prevented from having a debate in accordance with its belief system”.

A thoroughly reactionary, sexist, practice was justified on the basis of rights – specifically the right of Islamist speakers and Muslim women to have segregated seating. This demand is thought reasonable because of the importance afforded to religious beliefs – non-religious beliefs are not granted this privilege.

We get it in the US too – the “right” to home school, the “right” to deny children medical care on religious grounds, the “right” to refuse to vaccinate one’s children, the “right” to refuse to perform abortions or dispense the morning after pill even though it’s part of your job.

It is curious – and revealing – that similar ‘liberal-minded’, ‘reasonable’, ‘freedom of choice’ arguments are not invoked for segregation on the grounds of race or ethnicity along the lines of the judgment – that set out the doctrine of ‘separate and equal’ facilities for races – of the US Supreme Court in the notorious Plessy versus Ferguson case of 1896. But, pray, why are so many who would rightly denounce this doctrine on the grounds of race, apply it on the grounds of gender? To this question no satisfactory answer is provided; a simple appeal to respect for religious belief suffices.

I keep saying.

The General Secretary of the LSE’s Student Union, Jay Stoll, provided a simple answer to the outrage felt by UUK’s policy guidance: on Channel 4 News he baldly asserted that this was a manifestation of ‘Islamophobia’. He naturally hoped that such ‘analysis’ would quell the critics and end the debate. Now Mr Stoll has some form on this: back in October at the Freshers Fair, his Students Union forced two members of the LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society to remove their ‘Jesus and Mo’ t-shirts on the grounds that this constituted ‘harassment’ of Muslim (not Christian) students (hence was Islamophobic but not Christophobic). Thankfully, after vigorous campaigning and threat of legal action, Craig Calhoun, the Director of the LSE – but not the Students Union – has apologised to the two students. One should, therefore, not be unduly surprised if the LSESU gives support to requests by Islamic societies for segregated audiences at meetings they organise on campus; and helps with its enforcement.

Well so far, that hasn’t happened that I’m aware of – and I think I would be aware if it had because I think Chris and Abhishek would tell me.

Whilst recognising that Islamists in Muslim-majority countries – from the Wahabbi House of Saud to Sunni Pakistan to Shia Iran – are contemptuous of liberal, democratic, values, many Islamists in the west now realise that this rejectionist approach is counterproductive to their cause. Hence they are skilfully resorting to arguments coated with liberalism. It is, therefore, imperative that those concerned by the corrosive values of Islamism: gender segregation, attack on freedom of expression, and veiling are only three instances – should see through this liberal veneer to reveal the reactionary agenda underneath and to put up robust opposition to their demands.

We’re doing our best. But there are always the useful idiots…like Bob, the author of one of the comments:

Presumably Hasan sees himself as someone who stands up for genuine liberal values. Yet he denies the right of Muslim women to sit separately from men if they choose – even if, as happened at the iERA meeting at UCL, a mixed-gender section is available to those who don’t want single-gender seating. And he justifies the French ban on women wearing the niqab.

Some liberal! What happened to John Stuart Mill’s principle, which is the bedrock of liberalism, that individuals should be free to act as they choose, free from interference by the state or anyone else, as long as they cause no harm to others?

See? That’s exactly what the two women next to Abhishek and Chris claimed, and it’s dead wrong. It’s dishonest. Nobody is denying the right of Muslim women to sit anywhere they want to sit – provided there are empty seats. All anyone is denying is a guaranteed pre-arrangement of segregated seats, which is to say, an imposition of segregation on everyone who attends.

We don’t get pre-arrangements like that in the normal course of things. We don’t get to stipulate what kind of people we want to sit next to on buses, in restaurants, on planes, in movie theatres, at concerts, at political meetings – even in church, as far as I know. (In mosques, on the other hand, it’s a different story. Well there you go. That’s why some people stop going to mosques.)

I wonder if Bob would say

Presumably Hasan sees himself as someone who stands up for genuine liberal values. Yet he denies the right of white people to sit separately from black people if they choose -  even if, as happened at the iERA meeting at UCL, a mixed-race section is available to those who don’t want single-race seating.

My guess is that he wouldn’t, yet he feels comfortable and righteous saying it about gender. Spot the real liberal, eh?

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

Charlie Klendjian says it’s time to pick a horse.

In censoring themselves Channel 4 News and Newsnight not only failed in their task of reporting the news to their viewers – to enable their viewers to form their own opinion about the cartoon – but they also reinforced the very religious taboo that Nawaz had received death threats for challenging and which had landed Chris and Abhishek in hot water with the Libyan School of Economics – sorry, the London School of Economics. As Nawaz tweeted:

“Thank you @Channel4News you just pushed us liberal Muslims further into a ditch #LynchMobFreeZone #TeamNawaz”.

I am appalled at the treatment of Nawaz and I am appalled at the editorial decisions of Channel 4 News and Newsnight to censor the Jesus and Mo cartoon. Religious censorship is bad even on a good day, but when it prevents discussion of the actual news item at hand it becomes surreal.

But it’s not censorship, it’s careful sensitive thoughtful considerate avoidance of Offending someone. It’s Nice, which is the opposite of Mean, so it must be good. Mustn’t it?

It’s high time we all faced up to a very unsettling reality here: sharia law is alive and kicking in the United Kingdom in 2014, and so is its deadly blasphemy code. After Nawaz had tweeted the picture Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation referred to him as “Gustake Rasool”, which means “Defamer of Prophets”. This is a religious and legal charge punishable by a death sentence in Pakistan. Nawaz travels regularly to Pakistan and has family there. Shafiq also tweeted that:

“We will notify all muslim organisations in the UK of his despicable behaviour and also notify Islamic countries”.

It’s tempting to think this is a difficult legal or moral conundrum. It isn’t. There are difficult legal and moral issues out there but this is not one of them. The question before us is very simple: do we have the right to depict Mohammed? It’s a simple question and so it deserves a simple answer. The answer is either yes or no. My answer is yes. If your answer is “yes, but”, then sorry that’s just not good enough. If you have to pause for thought before answering the question then you’ve probably already decided the answer is no.

My answer is yes with no buts. Religious taboos do not apply to people who have no interest in the religions that spawn them. As far as I’m concerned they don’t apply to people who do have an interest in those religions either, unless those people consent – and even then they shouldn’t apply in such a way that other people’s rights are abridged. A religious taboo on men talking to women could very easily abridge women’s right to work and function in the public sphere, like for instance doing their jobs.

“Oh but we have to be respectful because depiction of the prophet Mohammed is forbidden in Islam and so it’s offensive to Muslims”, I hear you say, clutching your dusty GCSE Religious Studies certificate proudly (I have an ‘A’ grade myself; it was one of my favourite subjects).

You’re wrong.

Point 1: there is a history within some strands of Islam of depicting Mohammed.

Point 2: all Muslims are individuals. Some of them will find a depiction of Mohammed offensive and some won’t. Why are you more concerned about the Muslims that want to enforce blasphemy codes rather than those challenging them, often at great risk? In choosing to instinctively sympathise with those seeking to enforce blasphemy codes you make it even harder for liberal and secular Muslims to rise up. As Nawaz says, you push them “further into a ditch.” You side with the oppressor rather than the victim. Think about that, carefully.

Why indeed? Why why why? Why side with religious zealots (to put it no more strongly) against the people who don’t want to be pushed around by them?

Point 4: if someone is offended, so what? Do you know how offended some men (and women) were at the idea of women having the vote in this country? Do you know how offended some white people were at the idea of racial equality in the US and South Africa?

That’s an argument I make often. The very people who are so offended by images of Mohammed are indeed also offended by women having rights and walking around in public just as if they were human beings too. Why side with them?

Don’t think you can straddle both sides of the Jesus and Mo argument, arguing in one breath how free speech and free expression are important but in another breath how we have to be “respectful” and not cause offence, like a Hollywood stuntman expertly riding two horses. At some point those horses will go their separate ways. Pick a horse now – while you still have something of a choice.

Now that’s a metaphor.

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

An item from Twitter by someone who goes by @vrunt.

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

Something called SOAS Muslim-Christian Dialogue has written an open letter to Student Rights. (SOAS is the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.)

As members of SOAS Christian-Muslim Dialogue Society, we oppose your vilification and targeting of university Islamic societies including SOAS Islamic Society on the issue of gender segregation in their events.

We support the right of each student to act according to his or her personal religious convictions. For some, segregated seating serves these convictions and allows participation in mixed events. We support the right of SOAS Islamic Society to accommodate both segregated and mixed seating in any event.

We oppose the notion that segregated seating is somehow indicative of extremism, and believe this to be motivated by Islamophobic sentiments.

As members of a Society including Christians, Muslims, and individuals of other faiths and none, we stand with SOAS Islamic Society in this matter.

That’s very wrong and obtuse. Each student has a right to sit wherever she can find a place. No one disputes that. The issue is not choosing a seat, the issue is imposing segregated seating. They fudge that the same way Universities UK did by talking of “both segregated and mixed seating in any event,” but including a section of non-segregated seating doesn’t make the two sections of segregated seating acceptable. As we keep pointing out, they wouldn’t be acceptable if the criteria were race or religion instead of gender. Whites here, blacks there, mixed in between – no, that’s not ok. Neither is the gender version.

Student Rights has a reply.

Like yourselves we support the right of individual students to act according to their religious convictions, and have repeatedly stated that if these individual students wish to choose to sit separately from the opposite gender during events then that should be of no concern.

However, students do not have the right to impose their religious views on others, and in accommodating areas of segregated seating student societies are doing just this.

This view is supported by the EHRC, which has declared that “in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public it is not, in the commission’s view, permissible to segregate by gender“.

In supporting the right of SOAS Islamic Society to impose segregated areas in this way you are therefore in opposition to the EHRC and are potentially also supporting a breach of SOAS’s Equality and Diversity Policy, as well as failing to support the many Muslim women who have joined the campaign against this practice.

But the EHRC is so…you know…E.

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

This is a horrifying development – from The Guardian Comment is Free:

For A-level students in the UK, there is only one exam board that runs a real philosophy course. And that’s about to be changed into yet another religious education course.

For the last nine years, I have taught the AQA’s A-level philosophy course. It’s a good course, and the only one to represent the breadth of philosophy as a discipline in its own right. So I was somewhat surprised to learn that the AQA have this week, without warning or consultation, published a completely new draft syllabus, which is now just waiting to be rubber-stamped by Ofqual.

The new specification completely excludes the previous options to study aesthetics, free will, all European philosophy since Kant, and – most significantly – political philosophy. This will be all replaced with a compulsory philosophy of religion topic, which will make up 50% of the AS course.

And that’s not even all, or even the worst. The new specification also reduces the how of philosophy to focus on the what. The how is the important part!

The exam board will also reduce the marks given for students’ ability to critique and construct arguments, and more marks will be given for simply knowing the theories involved. Essentially, where young philosophers were previously rewarded for being able to think for themselves and question the role of government, the new course can only be passed by students who can regurgitate classic defences of the existence and perfection of God.

Appalling. Let’s hope the secular philosophers can intervene and fix this mess.

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

I’m going to do a Miss Manners thing here and propose a rule of etiquette.

If you’re in a couple, don’t start fucking one of your partner’s children. No, even if that child is adopted. Really. That’s a rule. It’s a good rule. Follow it.

No, even if that child is no longer a minor. No, don’t stay with your partner waiting patiently until that child turns 18 and then pounce.

No, even if the child says you were never a parental figure. Even if you were always buried in a newspaper or playing a video game whenever that child was in the room – even then, don’t start fucking that child.

Are there exceptions to this rule? All rules have exceptions; there must be exceptions to this rule. Are there?

No.

No, this is an exceptionless rule.

But what if you go on to marry your ex-partner’s child? Is it ok then?

No.

But what if you marry your ex-partner’s child and the two of you adopt children. Then it’s ok, right?

No.

No, it’s not ok if you marry your ex-partner’s child and the two of you adopt children. What’s more, somebody should keep a close watch on those adopted children. As many people as possible should keep an eye on those children. That’s doubly or triply true if those children are the same sex as the parent who is the child of the ex-partner. Everyone involved should be alert to patterns. But that is only damage mitigation; the rule is don’t start fucking one of your partner’s children; if that rule is obeyed then the damage mitigation will not be needed. Just don’t start fucking one of your partner’s children. It’s a simple rule.

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

One take, by Robert Weide in The Daily Beast. First, who he is:

I produced and directed the two-part PBS special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, that premiered in the U.S. on the “American Masters” series. I also supervised and consulted on the brief clip montage that aired as part of the recent Golden Globes telecast, when Allen received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Now, his take:

I was actually somewhat impressed with Ronan Farrow’s now-famous tweet from the summer of 2012: “Happy father’s day—or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.” The target was fair game, and I remember thinking Ronan had inherited his father’s wit—before his actual paternity came into question. (A good sense of humor and the ability to think on his feet will serve him well on his own show on MSNBC.)

A different take, this one by Maureen Orth in her long Vanity Fair article last November:

Allen brought another action before Judge Wilk in order to be able to see Dylan and to resume unsupervised visits with Ronan. He and the boy had never gotten along. As I reported in the 1992 Vanity Fair story, Ronan, at three, had kicked Allen, and Allen had twisted the child’s leg until he screamed. According to court testimony in the second trial, in June 1996, Ronan’s psychiatrist testified that on a supervised visit to Allen’s apartment in 1995, Ronan, then seven, reported that he had kicked Allen, who then grabbed him by the neck with both hands and threw him down on the couch. Shortly thereafter, the supervised visits were suspended.

At the end of the trial, in which both sides referred to Ronan’s “phobic reaction” to Allen, Judge Wilk informed Ronan that he would have to resume visits with his father in the office of his psychiatrist—which Allen vehemently objected to. Ronan started heaving uncontrollably, collapsed on the floor in front of everyone, and had to be carried out. The judge ruled that Dylan did not have to see her father at all. Allen appealed again and lost. He never saw Ronan again either. Last year on Father’s Day, Ronan tweeted, “Happy father’s day—or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.”

Weide thought that tweet was a piece of wit, something to smile at, a sign of talent and quick-thinking. Great god almighty.

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

Once more I have to link to the Daily Mail. What is this thing where once in awhile the Mail publishes something good?! It’s so disconcerting. Today’s something good is a neener-neener for the mayor of Sochi who told the world there are no gays in Sochi.

As statements go, last week’s assertion by the mayor of Sochi that there are no gays in the resort hosting the Winter Olympics deserves a gold medal in gibberish.

Ridicule was immediately heaped on Anatoly Pakhomov, a burly Vladimir Putin supporter, after his views were broadcast on the BBC’s Panorama programme, prompting yet more concern over Russia’s fitness to host the Winter Games – the  ‘Putin Olympics’ – which open in five days’ time.

Now, one local gay man has written a scathing open letter to the 53-year-old mayor, making it clear that he is definitely not the only gay in the Olympic Village.

‘The absurdity of your statement is similar to the old canard that there was no sex in the USSR,’ said 24-year-old tour guide Andrey Ozerny.

‘You are mistaken or simply pretending when you say you do not know one single gay person.

‘Believe me, there are enough of them in your own administration, and you probably often share meeting rooms or offices with them.’

It’s Schrödinger’s gays.

Another more famous gay club – Mayak – offers nightly drag shows for up to 400 customers in a dimly  lit, one-storey building close to the seafront.

There is no sign outside because it has been ripped down so often by homophobic youths. The dancers include a Muslim former butcher, an Armenian who also owns a strip club, and a Ukrainian who loves to sing like Whitney Houston and dress like Adele.

The best of the best: A poster for the Mayak gay club pokes fun at the forthcoming winter Games

In a gold sequin dress, drag queen Andrei Kavaltshian, 44, is well known in Sochi. He powders his cleavage before risking a joke about Putin: ‘Our president has sensual lips and such a toned body.’

The mayor’s strange lack of knowledge is tackled by Andrei Tanichev, co-owner of the Mayak.

‘There are many gays in Sochi, more than in most Russian cities,’ he said. ‘Our mayor knows this. He is fully aware of our club, and was in touch with us long before this TV programme.’

Not Schrödinger’s then. More like bullshitter’s.

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

Nicholas Kristof publishes it on his blog.

What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.

For as long as I could remember, my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me. These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters. But what he did to me in the attic felt different. I couldn’t keep the secret anymore.

But he’s Woody Allen, so…he gets a Golden Globe lifetime achievement award.

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