And it doesn’t go well for him.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Not an environment where they are making free choices
Sep 20th, 2013 10:22 am | By Ophelia BensonIn news that surprised no one, a woman charged that inmates at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre are sexually harassed by guards.
A former detainee at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre has alleged that women held there have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances and abuse by security guards and other officials.
Testimony seen by the Observer and now with police, “Tanja”, a 23-year-old Roma woman released from Yarl’s Wood last March, describes having had sexual contact with three male guards. Tanja – not her real name – said attempts were made to deport her within days of her informing Yarl’s Wood’s management of the incidents. She also claims one security guard had inappropriate relations with at least four women.
The claims raise fresh questions over the treatment of vulnerable women at the Bedfordshire site, which is Britain’s largest immigration removal centre for women and can house up to 400 people. Sources at Yarl’s Wood say that more cases are likely to come to light following Tanja’s testimony, as women have been too fearful to come forward until now.
The next day the Guardian reported that the police have launched an investigation.
Harriet Wistrich of the law firm Birnberg Peirce urged the government to investigate and said consent could be an issue in the matter. Wistrich said the alleged case revealed by the Observer, involving a Roma woman who was released from the centre last March, was not an isolated one.
“The government needs to look at what the hell is going on at Yarl’s Wood, that this could happen in such a widespread abuse,” she said. “It’s not a one-off. They need to investigate the whole system there, because it has not worked.”
She said the issue was whether individuals being detained at the centre were capable of giving consent, adding: “The problem is that it is not an environment where they are making free choices at all … If an officer conducts himself way outside the permitted rules of behaviour, that may amount to another offence of misconduct in public office, whether it was consensual or not, even if it is not an assault.
“This is precisely the kind of case the government says they are gong to remove legal aid from. It is a classic example of the government saying they are saving money but actually, they’re removing challenges to the abuse of state powers.”
There’s a petition circulated by the Movement for Justice calling for a public inquiry.
H/t David.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
A personal act of worship
Sep 20th, 2013 9:54 am | By Ophelia BensonThe Independent gets a woman who wears the niqab to explain to the benighted rest of us why she’s so right and right-on and good for doing so.
The common impression that many people have about those that wear the niqab is that we are oppressed, uneducated, passive, kept behind closed doors and not integrated within British society.
So you know what’s coming next. She’s none of those things; she’s the opposite of all of them. Therefore the niqab is great.
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a proud Welsh and British citizen, a molecular geneticist by profession and an activist in my spare time.
An activist? An activist for what? Not feminism, I assume. “An activist” isn’t some automatic badge of virtue. Activists can be activists for fascism, for lower taxes for the rich, for forced pregnancy, for theocracy – for anything. Maybe she’s an activist for the niqab, or Islamism, or sharia. Maybe she’s an activist against secularism, or human rights, or abortion rights.
I have formerly been elected as the Wales Chairperson of a national Muslim student organisation and held other leadership roles including working with bodies such as the National Union of Students.
Ah that kind of activist. Well quite. She’s an Islamist and she wears the niqab. Yes we knew that – we knew there are Islamist women.
I wear the niqab as a personal act of worship, and I deeply believe that it brings me closer to God, the Creator.
Ok that’s the part that all this was leading up to. Wut? She believes wearing a mask over her face brings her closer to “the Creator”? Why? If “the Creator” didn’t want women’s faces to be visible, why didn’t it just design women accordingly? Without faces, for instance? Why would concealing a part of one’s body bring one closer to the entity that is supposed to have created that very body?
It’s a dopy idea. She tries to make it less dopy in the usual way, by saying she “deeply believes” it – but that just backfires with people who have learned to be even more suspicious when people start babbling about what they “deeply believe.”
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
“The trophies of the feminist agenda”
Sep 19th, 2013 6:06 pm | By Ophelia BensonAnd now for a visit to the WorshipFamily crowd. This time it’s a site called Fix the Family, whose subject and theme and purpose and enthusiasm seems to be loathing of feminism. But don’t be confused! This is not the slime pitter, Twitter harasser, Thunderfoot, call them all cunts brand of feminism-loathing. It’s the other kind. The family values kind.
It offers reasons not to send your daughter to college. (I guess daughters aren’t allowed to read it, and neither are people who don’t have daughters.)
Probably the most controversial and rejected position we have at Fix the Family is that parents should not send their daughters to college. It is even more vehemently opposed than the submission of wives to their husbands. Both of these positions we have are a threat to the trophies of the feminist agenda, so the rejection we receive is always emotionally charged and ends up insulting, since once explained logically, the opposition runs out of substance and is only left to hurl insults and presume and misconstrue this practical wisdom into some chauvinistic evil. But to distinguish these 2 issues, we are NOT saying that sending a girl to college or women working is a sin. But after looking at the issues we raise, we would challenge anyone to convince us that college for girls is not a near occasion of sin.
Of course it is. At college they might learn to think critically, to ask questions, to reject bad stupid answers.
She will be in a near occasion of sin. Just think of the environment that college-age students live in. You have a heavy concentration of young people all living together without the supervision of parents at the most sexually charged state of life they will experience. How can one expect that anyone would be able to avoid these temptations, even on a Catholic college campus much less a secular one? So if it is unnecessary for one to be in a near occasion of sin, is it prudent to willingly put oneself there?
Oh that kind of sin. He just means sex. God what a claustrophobic little mind.
She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Nothing that is taught in a college curriculum is geared toward domestic homemaking. On the contrary, it is training in a very masculine role of a professional career. So there becomes a severe inner conflict in a woman when she starts trying to be a homemaker and juggle a career alongside it. Often when a career woman discerns the possibility of giving up her career, she faces the reality that she has had no training in homemaking and often has the thought “What would I do at home all day.” Stay-at-home mothers are actually very busy industrious women and do absolutely beautiful marvelous things.
You like them so much, you do them.
It must be popular thought – there are nearly five thousand comments there. Yeesh. The good news is, lots are hostile.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The loneliness of the Malcolm Gladwell scholar
Sep 19th, 2013 5:11 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Onion reports on a guy who’s just too intelligent for the women he dates.
MILWAUKEE—Describing his mind as both “a blessing and a curse,” local man Benjamin Walker, 27, told reporters Thursday that his intellect was probably just too intimidating for most women to engage with romantically.
“I’m a very, very smart guy, and I guess most women are pretty scared off by that, you know?” said Walker, confirming that women often seem extremely uncomfortable and agitated around him, most likely because of how cultured and well-read he is. “After I’ve been speaking to a girl for just a few minutes, she’ll usually start to get this look in her eyes like she wants to bolt and I can just tell that she’s feeling so intellectually inferior that it’s impossible for her to continue with the conversation.”
Poor thing. She probably just wants to talk about shoes or weddings or kittens.
According to the Milwaukee resident, whenever he is talking to a young woman and begins to expound at length on one of the many topics he is well versed in—such as Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers or the British graffiti artist Banksy—she begins to appear highly overwhelmed by his mental capacity and quickly grows visibly restless and distant.
…
The 27-year-old, who graduated from Syracuse University in 2007, told reporters that he subscribes to The New Yorker magazine and keeps up with the news on a daily basis—all facts that Walker said seem to persistently leave the opposite sex speechless when he inserts them into conversation.
…
Ultimately, however, Walker said there was only so much he could do to lower his cognitive standards to another’s level.
“Recently, for example, I talked to this girl at a bar for half an hour about Radiohead—quoting lyrics and telling her about how the band went in a new musical direction with [their 2000 album]Kid A—you know, really making it easy for her to understand,” Walker said. “Things were going great, and I was saying a lot of very interesting stuff, but when I tried to call her a few days later, she never picked up or returned my calls.”
He now lives full-time on Twitter and has become much more resigned to his fate.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Speak up, secularists
Sep 19th, 2013 11:29 am | By Ophelia BensonAbhishek Phadnis considers the silence of secularists in the face of the left-Islamist alliance.
Radical Islam mines a rich seam of support in the British radical Left, nowhere more so than in our universities. In light of the Birmingham reversal, it may be instructive to take stock of the role of this unholy alliance in other recent events in British academia (of which I present a small selection) and what this implies for those of us who seek to keep this space secular.
In March, attendees were evicted from a debate at University College London for defying the gender-segregation imposed by the Islamist organisers, after the forewarned UCL issued glib assurances that there would be no segregation and did absolutely nothing to back them up. Two weeks later, the LSE Students’ Union twinned itself with the Islamic University of Gaza, which has been described as “the brains trust and engine room of Hamas”.
This time last year, the atheists of Reading University were evicted from their Freshers’ Fayre by the Labour-controlled Union for hosting a pineapple named ‘Mohammed’. Likewise, my own society has faced systematic harassment from the LSESU for refusing to genuflect to Islam, particularly since the Union’s 2012 thought-crime resolution banning “Islamophobia” (inter alia “hatred or fear of Islam…or Islamic culture” and “attacking the Quran as a manual of hatred”).
We have repeatedly been forced to take down cartoons from our private Facebook page, following anonymous complaints. We have also been arbitrarily thwarted in our attempts to better signpost ourselves for Islamic apostates (a heroic and persecuted ‘black’ minority that receives indifferent treatment from the Black Students’ Campaign) by incorporating “ex-Muslim” into the society’s name. Our latest proposal was rejected on the grounds that it ‘jeopardised the safety of ex-Muslims’, which came as news to the ex-Muslim organisations on whose recommendation we’d sought the change.
It’s a terrible, pathetic situation.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Leo Igwe on The Story
Sep 19th, 2013 11:14 am | By Ophelia BensonThis is exciting. A few weeks ago I got an email from a producer at National Public Radio’s The Story; she wanted to be put in touch with Leo Igwe. And so -
Result:
When Leo Igwe was a child living in Nigeria, he saw his father beaten after being accused of witchcraft. Accusations of witch craft run rampant in many parts of western Africa, and Igwe has made it his life’s work to bring attention to the problem. Many of those accused of witchcraft find refuge in “Witch Camps,” which offer safety after an accused individual has been ousted from a community. Igwe has visited camps in Nigeria and northern Ghana and tells host Dick Gordon what life is like inside them.
This is great, because it will inevitably get Leo more support for his work.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Look out! Fascists! Right there!
Sep 18th, 2013 4:12 pm | By Ophelia BensonDang but some people like to over-react to mostly-imaginary entities like “Atheism Plus” or “FTBullies”.
Like “the Denver Atheist” (there’s only the one?) for instance, in a post reasonably titled Atheism Plus Is A Fascist Movement Within The Atheist Community. Here’s how the one atheist in Denver arrives at that conclusion.
Let’s define our terms up front, shall we? Here’s the definition of the word “fascism”:
Fascism: any movement, ideology, or attitude that favors dictatorial government, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism
Here’s how I’m relating it to Atheism Plus:
Atheism Plus: a movement, ideology, and attitude that favors dictatorial organization, centralized control of atheism, repression of all opposition, and extreme loyalty to the movement, ideology, and attitude.
Yeah no. Dictatorial government is not the same as dictatorial organization. Fascists running a state is not the same thing as “fascists” posting on an online forum. (As far as I know there is no “Atheism Plus” apart from the forum. People don’t self-identify as Atheism Plus. It’s not a thing.)
And “centralized control of atheism”? What the hell? Where? How? What the hell? There is no centralized control of atheism.
There’s no “repression of all opposition,” either. There’s refusal to be tweeted at by harassers, but refusal to be tweeted at isn’t repression, and harassers aren’t the sum total of opposition, either.
And, to complete the ridiculous list, commitment to an idea is not the same thing as extreme nationalism. “Atheism Plus” (assuming for the sake of argument that it even exists) does not want to annex Poland.
What’s the matter with everyone? Jeez.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Not if but where
Sep 18th, 2013 12:19 pm | By Ophelia BensonI had an interesting Twitter conversation with Dave Silverman yesterday, which continued with other people later. It was about the recurring subject of having an all-inclusive political movement on the one hand, and standing by certain values or commitments on the other hand.
Dave obviously has to lean heavily toward the former, because that’s his job. The atheism comes first, by a long way, and everything else comes second. But does everything else come nowhere? I don’t think so. I think there are limits. I don’t think Dave would welcome the KKK or the American Nazi Party as allies, for instance. Just for one thing, accepting them as allies would mean the loss of a lot of other allies, so you can frame it as a completely hard-headed practical decision. But for another thing, it would ruin the brand, and I know Dave doesn’t want to do that: that’s why he always disavows things like vandalism of churches or mosques. He doesn’t want atheism (and especially AA) mixed up with that; he wants them clearly and starkly separated.
So the question turns out to be not if but where: not if there are limits, but where they are drawn. He draws them more widely than I do, because he has to. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t draw them at all.
It’s my view that over the long haul, it will be best to separate American Atheism clearly and starkly from overt noisy misogyny and sexism. I’m pretty sure AA is already clearly and starkly separated from overt noisy racism, as I indicated above; I think overt noisy misogyny and sexism and overt noisy homophobia and trans-bashing should be in the same category.
Not everyone agrees with me on this.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
What Karen Armstrong learned
Sep 18th, 2013 11:39 am | By Ophelia BensonKaren Armstrong tells her much-recycled story again. Once she tried to be a nun, then she got fed up with it and tried to be an academic and was all skeptical and shit. Then she sat down to read quietly and she discovered religion was right about everything after all.
I suddenly found that I was learning a great deal from other religious traditions. From Judaism, I learned to never stop asking questions — about anything! — and never to imagine that I had come to the end of what I could know and say about God.
But you don’t need Judaism to learn to never stop asking questions about anything. And then, why should you think there is a god in the first place, to never imagine you’d come to the end of what you could know and say about? How can you “know” anything about a presumed god?
Jews even refuse to speak God’s name, as a reminder that any human expression of the divine is so limited that it is potentially blasphemous.
Blah blah blah. So you always say, and you want us to be impressed, but I’m not impressed. I’m not impressed that people assume there is such a thing as “the divine” and then construct stupid rules about it, and I’m not impressed that gasbags like Armstrong come along thousands of years later to gape in bovine astonishment at the profundities people have uttered about this imaginary “divine.”
Divinity is a kind of candy, and much more useful than “the divine.”
From the Eastern and the Russian Orthodox Christians, I learned that Jesus was the first human being to be totally possessed by God — just as Buddha was the first enlightened human being in our historical era — and that we can all be like him, even in this life.
Blah blah blah. From watching Loony Tunes I learned that Bugs Bunny spoke with a Brooklyn accent; so what?
From the Quran, I learned that all religious traditions that teach justice, compassion and respect for all others have come from God.
Oh yes? For all others including the women stoned to death for “adultery” which includes being raped? Including the little girls raped to death by their “husbands”? Including the “infidels” and “apostates” put to the sword?
And I was enthralled to find this quotation from the great 13th-century Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi:
Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest; if you do this you will miss much good. Nay, you will fail to realise the real truth of the matter. God the omnipresent and omniscient cannot be confined to any one creed, for he says in the Quran: “Wheresover ye turn, there is the face of Allah.”
Well then you’re very easily enthralled, I must say.
It seems odd to finish my quest by realizing how little I know. But that is the way human beings experience the world. No matter how much we know, something always eludes us. If we can just let go of our desire to know it all and be in control — which brings us so much anxiety — we experience great freedom. The world is no longer cut down to suit our tiny minds; instead, we see fresh possibility and mystery in every thing and everybody around us. Unknowing is built into the human condition.
No. Shut up. Stop saying that shit. It’s bad and dangerous. It’s not about any “desire to know it all,” it’s about a desire to know more than we do right now, and that is a good thing. Stop misrepresenting it and stop talking emetic bullshit about the joys of ignorance while simultaneously peddling the same old theistic crap.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Why not fairy tales instead?
Sep 17th, 2013 4:35 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Texas Education Agency is meeting, and the creationists are pushing harder than ever. The Texas Freedom Network reports:
“Any statements made were my own personal beliefs.”
That’s how Karen Beathard, an official state textbook reviewer, defends telling publishers that the biology textbooks they submitted for adoption in Texas this year should include “creation science based on biblical principles.”
Her statement encapsulates precisely the problem with the science textbook adoption process in Texas. Some State Board of Education (SBOE) members decided to nominate reviewers based on their personal beliefs, not their qualifications or expertise. And because they did so, SBOE members have undermined public confidence that the review process was anything but a sham.
Ms. Beathard, a dietician/nutritionist, has every right to her personal beliefs. The Texas Freedom Network will stand up for her right to express those beliefs in public or in private. But Texas students should get a 21st-century education that prepares them for college and the jobs of today. That means their textbooks should be based on established, mainstream science, not the personal beliefs of individuals who simply aren’t qualified to evaluate those textbooks.
It’s like engineering. You’re free to believe you can build a suspension bridge out of toilet paper, but you’re not free (or you shouldn’t be free) to get that belief taught to students in public schools.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
In a car
Sep 17th, 2013 11:21 am | By Ophelia BensonMike Booth recommended this on Twitter, so I will pay it forward.
Minneapolis. A woman with her arms full of paperwork waiting for the lightrail. A man in an SUV.
So, that’s where we were. Me, minding my own business. You, apparently observing my ass. At that point you had options. You could have driven past me and said nothing. You could have turned up your radio and waved, ensconcing us in some beats and camaraderie. You could have shouted out, “Happy Friday! Yeehaw!” Any of those options would have been great. I probably would have waved, smiled, and started my weekend on the same high note as you.
Instead, you chose the most pathetic option available to you: You leaned out of your window and made some ridiculous series of leering comments about whether I was wearing a thong, right as the light changed and you peeled off, pleased with yourself and saved from any consequences.
If you’d stuck around, I would have happily shouted a few things of my own at you: that it’s people like you that make women avoid walking alone or taking transit even in broad daylight in their own cities; that no matter what screwed up metric you use it’s not a “compliment” to have someone interrogate me about my underwear; that thanks to you I would spend the entire train ride home feeling scrutinized and gross because you didn’t have the willpower or maturity to keep your mouth shut; that your wife and daughters or at the very least your mother deserve better than a cowardly man who shouts at women from the safety of his car.
Right?
Who the fuck does that? What kind of person shouts crap from a car at a stranger standing on the street? What kind of pathetic, chickenshit, bullying, power-imbalance-abusing creep uses the fact that he’s in a car to enable him to hassle a random stranger who is not in a car? What is wrong with people?
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Meet some geek girls
Sep 17th, 2013 10:52 am | By Ophelia Benson
Gentlemen lift the seat
Sep 17th, 2013 10:00 am | By Ophelia BensonNormal service has been restored. We apologize for the inconvenience. Your commentary is appreciated. Please hold. Your call will be answered in the order it was received. Thank you for flying with us and we look forward to seeing you again soon.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
A post-antibiotic era
Sep 16th, 2013 6:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonYou know what’s really scary? Antibiotic resistance. The CDC says how scary.
The agency’s overall — and, it stressed, conservative — assessment of the problem:
- Each year, in the U.S., 2,049,442 illnesses caused by bacteria and fungi that are resistant to at least some classes of antibiotics;
- Each year, out of those illnesses, 23,000 deaths;
- Because of those illnesses and deaths, $20 billion each year in additional healthcare spending;
- And beyond the direct healthcare costs, an additional $35 billion lost to society in foregone productivity.
“If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC’s director, said in a media briefing. “And for some patients and for some microbes, we are already there.”
Bacteria evolve. Resistance to antibiotics is selected. Problem.
In an interview before the report became public, Frieden said that some of these actions are already happening. “My biggest frustration is the pace of change,” he told me. “Hospitals are making progress, but it’s single digits in terms of the number of hospitals that are being very proactive. The challenge is scaling up what we know works, and doing that fast enough so that we can close the door on drug resistance before it’s too late.”
Yes but the people in charge have more important things to do, like…uh…
I got nothin.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
E. coli in the font
Sep 16th, 2013 5:57 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt turns out that God’s a comedian. Holy water is full of shit.
Despite its purported cleansing properties, holy water could actually be more harmful than healing, according to a new Austrian study on “holy” springs.
Researchers at the Institute of Hygiene and Applied Immunology at the Medical University of Vienna tested water from 21 springs in Austria and 18 fonts in Vienna and found samples contained up to 62 million bacteria per milliliter of water, none of it safe to drink.
Tests indicated 86 percent of the holy water, commonly used in baptism ceremonies and to wet congregants’ lips, was infected with common bacteria found in fecal matter such as E. coli, enterococci and Campylobacter, which can lead to diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, and fever.
Nitrates, commonly found in fertilizer from farms, were also identified in the water. If ingested, water containing nitrates over the maximum contaminant level could cause serious illness, especially in infants younger than 6 months, which could lead to death if untreated, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Oh well, antibiotics will save everyone.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
If we’re all going to police what we say
Sep 16th, 2013 5:40 pm | By Ophelia BensonMatt Yglesias points out that misogyny is not actually a necessary ingredient for cooking up a batch of innovation.
Former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson offers some further reflections on the question of women in technology:
I think the tech world is just kind of—it doesn’t have a woman problem. Women in tech are great. There’s just not that many of them because tech is just a kind of thing that a lot of women aren’t that interested in, I think. I mean, I don’t think it has a problem. I’d worry more about taking away what makes tech great. The freewheeling nature of it is what leads to innovation. And my fear is that if we’re all going to police what we say, maybe we lose that innovation. And tech is important, it’s really important to this country and to the world. And I’d hate to see us kill the goose that lays the golden egg by turning it into a politically correct wasteland.
This bit about the “freewheeling” (i.e., misogyny-tolerant) nature of the technology culture as being key to innovation is some truly pernicious nonsense. Innovation is great, and it’s great that there’s so much innovation in the computer programming space. But the startup culture’s chest-thumping about it tends to encourage this kind of thing where “innovation” becomes an all-purpose shield against criticism.
That’s a pretty ridiculous claim. You could just as easily say that if techbros didn’t waste so much energy talking misogynist smack, they could innovate even more.
At the end of the day, the innovative nature of the digitial technology industry isn’t some great mystery. Hiring some programmers and buying them a few computers is really cheap compared to, say, building a factory. What’s more, when your computer program crashes nobody dies. Engineers who build airplanes are held to a much higher standard and need to proceed much more cautiously. And this, fundamentally, is where the innovation comes from. People can tinker around. They can launch services without being 100 percent sure they’ll be able to scale them properly or handle edge cases. When the servers get overloaded, there’s no explosion, no oil spill, no wreckage, nothing but an error message. It’s nice! People can try a lot of new stuff, and talented people don’t necessarily need to spend years paying their dues to give their big ideas a shot.
But none of this has anything to do with people being jackasses to women.
Well there went that excuse.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Burn her
Sep 16th, 2013 5:26 pm | By Ophelia BensonA defense lawyer in the Delhi gang rape case made some remarks that could get him disbarred.
Mr Singh caused shock saying he would have “burned my daughter alive” if she was
having “premarital sex and went out late at night with her boyfriend”.He told the BBC on Monday his personal views had been taken out of context.
“I was asked about my views on a personal matter and I answered that in my personal capacity of being the patriarch of my house,” he told the BBC.
Ah yes, and this is why some of us are not all that fond of patriarchy.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
