As I mentioned at some point, I didn’t like Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell novels, as much of them as I read – I began skipping and skimming quite soon with both. But as so often, I do like her essayistic writing, at least as manifested in this talk published by the London Review of Books. It’s sharp, funny, vivid, specific, insightful, witty – it’s just dang good.

It’s about royal bodies, especially those of royal women. Marie Antoinette, Diana, Our Own Dear Queen, Anne Boleyn, Our Own Dear Kate.

And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.

And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at. I rejoined, mentally, the rest of the guests. Now flunkeys were moving among us with trays and on them were canapés, and these snacks were the queen’s revenge. They were pieces of gristly meat on skewers. Let’s not put too fine a point on it: they were kebabs. It took some time to chew through one of them, and then the guests were left with the little sticks in their hands. They tried to give them back to the flunkeys, but the flunkeys smiled and sadly shook their heads, and moved away, so the guests had to carry on the evening holding them out, like children with sparklers on Guy Fawkes night.

I love the flunkeys sadly shaking their heads. I love the guests having to stand around with splintery skewers in their hands. I love the cannibal staring.

Later she moves on to Anne and Henry.

It’s no surprise that so much fiction constellates around the subject of Henry and his wives. Often, if you want to write about women in history, you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.

But with the reign of King Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story. The history of the reign is so graphically gynaecological that in the past it enabled lady novelists to write about sex when they were only supposed to write about love; and readers could take an avid interest in what went on in royal bedrooms by dignifying it as history, therefore instructive, edifying. Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion. It used to be that Anne Boleyn was a man-stealer who got paid out. Often, now, the lesson is that if Katherine of Aragon had been a bit more foxy, she could have hung on to her husband. Anne as opportunist and sexual predator finds herself recruited to the cause of feminism. Always, the writers point to the fact that a man who marries his mistress creates a job vacancy. ‘Women beware women’ is a teaching that never falls out of fashion.

But never mind all that fine writing – the point is, she dissed Kate. Focus on that! Hadley Freeman gets us caught up.

Two weeks ago, Mantel gave a lecture at the British Museum, organised  by the London Review of Books. Not, one might have thought, an event ripe with potential for scandal. Nonetheless, scandal issued forth most biliously (if somewhat belatedly) when someone on Fleet Street noticed that Mantel’s speech had been published on the LRB website six days ago and that it contained – clutch your handkerchiefs to your mouths, readers! – comments about Kate, the Duchess of Somethingorother. These comments, incidentally, made (with Mantel’s characteristic subtlety and grace) the patently obvious points that Kate’s entire raison d’être now, in the eyes of the media and the royal family, is to be admired and to breed, just as Anne Boleyn’s had been. She has been embraced by the royal family because she seems like the anti-Diana; one who is not interested in her own publicity but is instead depicted by the royal press machine as safe and devoted to her husband and duties.

Yes but who gave Hilary Mantel permission to say so? That’s the important thing. It’s not how apt her comments are or how well she put them, it’s who said she was allowed to. You have to get permission to say things about the royals. Or you don’t, really, but it’s fun to pretend it’s naughty to do it, especially when it’s a woman doing it.

None of these observations is new, although rarely have they been better couched. They also took up a total of four paragraphs in a 30-paragraph speech – less than one-seventh, in other words – that otherwise focused on Mantel’s very perceptive observations of Henry VIII, the Queen and the nature of monarchy as a whole. But none of these can be illustrated with a photo of the eternally photogenic duchess and, more importantly, none can be souped up into some kind of non-existent squabble between two high-profile women (Boleyn being, famously if rather inconveniently, dead.) So it was Mantel’s “vicious, venomous” and “withering”“rants” and “attacks” on the Duchess that made the front pages of today’s Mail and Metro papers, as well as getting a prominent mention in the Independent and a somewhat smaller one in the Guardian. This kind of extrapolation is reminiscent of when a critic describes a film as “astonishingly bad” and the film poster then claims the critic described it as “astonishing!”

Catfight! Catfight! Bitchez be fighting!

It is worth looking at what is going on here. Lazy journalism, clearly, and raging hypocrisy, obviously: what has any paper done with Kate for the past decade but use her as decorative page filler? Indeed, when the BBC covered Mantelgate (Mantelpiece?) it included lingering shots of the duchess’s fair form while quoting in horror from Mantel’s speech about the royal women existing to be admired. This is also a good example of how the Mail fights back when it feels it is being attacked. For if Mantel was attacking anyone in her talk, then her aim was clearly at the Mail with its obsessive, prurient fascination with Kate. To see the Mail gasping at Mantel’s suggestion that the duchess is “designed to breed” when it has been on “bump watch” since she walked down the aisle is the Fleet Street reenactment of Captain Renault in Casablanca proclaiming himself to be “shocked to find gambling is going on here” while collecting his winnings. It then added helpfully that Mantel is “infertile” and “dreams of being thin”. Yeah, no wonder she’s jealous of our Kate, the fat childless cow.

Old ugly woman disses young pretty woman! Catfight! Bitchez be fighting!

But the liberal press has been arguably just as bad, with the Independent providing a kindly list, allowing readers to compare “the author and the princess”, again emphasising Mantel’s weight. The subject of women talking about women has become as fraught an issue for the left as it is for the right. The conservative press loves a good woman v woman – or “author v princess” – fight because it suggests that women are all hysterical girlies who can’t be trusted with proper grownup issues because they’ll start throwing tampons at one another…

On the liberal side, one of the tenets of the fourth wave of feminism, which is just starting to crest, is that women should not criticise one another’s life choices…

Mantel was discussing how the royal family and the media manipulate women; it is of little surprise that the media would attack her back. But this nonsense highlights how it is still, apparently, impossible to be a woman and put forth a measured opinion about one of your own without it being twisted into some kind of screed-ish, unsisterly attack. As Mantel has learnt to her cost today, it’s not only royal women who are expected to stay quiet.

Because if women don’t stay quiet, we’ll all go deaf from the catfights.

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

Eric MacDonald.

Welcome, Eric! We’re overjoyed to have you here.

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

Ben Radford is playing silly buggers again. Check out the title of his new post.

‘Over It’ Follow-Up: Why Would Anyone Criticize an Anti-Rape Poem?

He cites PZ’s post.

In response, PZ Myers wrote a blog titled, “You don’t get to be ‘over’ rape,” telling me (and, by extension, Eve Ensler) that “you don’t get to be ‘over’ rape.” I may disagree with Ensler’s statistics and methods (while agreeing with her goals), but I would never question her motivations, nor tell Ensler that she doesn’t “get to be ‘over rape’.” I am “over rape” in exactly the same way Ensler is “over rape.”

Why PZ Myers (or anyone else) would presume to criticize an anti-rape poem (of all things) by a prominent feminist is beyond me, but at least one of us is terribly, terribly confused.

Actually when he first wrote the post he said Melody wrote the post, then later corrected the mistake without saying he was correcting it. That’s not good practice (to put it tactfully).

But look at PZ’s post. It’s short, it won’t take long. He doesn’t say what Radford says he said.

He doesn’t say what Radford says he said.

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

I find that there’s a right I can have that I didn’t even know I could have. There’s a right to not see gay people. I did not ever know that. A conservative talk show host called Janet Mefferd says there is such a right.

Conservative talk show host Janet Mefferd this week waded into the controversy about an Indiana high school where a group of students wanted to organize a separate prom that would specifically prevent gay and lesbian students from attending.

After lamenting that “public schools are morally bankrupt,” Mefferd asserted that proms which allow all students — gay or straight — to attend actually violate the rights of Christian students who disapprove of homosexuality.

What right in particular, you might ask?

According to Mefferd, apparently the right of students not to even see gay people!

All right, let’s take a look at this group of high school students trying to organize a shunning of gay students.

Several parents, students, and others who believe gays should be banned from the Sullivan High School prom met Sunday at the Sullivan First Christian Church.

“We don’t agree with it and it’s offensive to us,” said Diana Medley.

Their idea is to create their own separate traditional prom. Students say there are several others from their high school who agree, but are afraid to take a stand.

“If we can get a good prom then we can convince more people to come and follow what they believe,” said student Kynon Johnson.

And now they want everyone to know where they stand.

“We want to make the public see that we love the homosexuals, but we don’t think it’s right nor should it be accepted,” said a local student.

So they want to shun them, because Jesus. Very nice.

Janet Mefferd explained.

 I feel for these Christian kids who are in a prom or kids who are at this high school who say, ‘you know something, do we have to go down this road?’ Whether the homosexual activists like it or not, and I know this isn’t politically correct to say this, but not everybody wants to see that. I know that that’s offensive to the activist crowd, they want us all to see it, they want us all to approve of it, they want us all to call it blessed and okay and rejoice and have parties and throw confetti in the air over this whole thing. But the fact of the matter is it’s a moral issue. You will always have Christians who will disagree with this and why should the rights of the activists trump the rights of Christians?

Throw confetti in the air? (She sounds a little like Ben Radford. “Feminists say all men are rapists!” “Teh gaze want us to throw confetti in the air!”) No, not confetti in the air. Not shunning. That’s different. Not organizing to attempt to shut some students out of their own prom.

And the fact of the matter is not it’s a moral issue. It doesn’t become a moral issue just because someone says it is. Shunning people because of unreasonable feelings of ick is much more of a moral issue than being gay is.

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

Dagnabbit. Ben Goldacre is in town, and doing a talk at Town Hall tonight, but I didn’t know about it and now I can’t rearrange things so that I can go. Drat!

Ben Goldacre’s earlier bestseller Bad Science hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science; now Goldacre puts the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope—and reveals a terrifying mess. Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions, says the author of Bad Pharma, but instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data are simply buried—and all of this is perfectly legal. It’s a world so fractured, Goldacre says, that medics and nurses are educated by the drug industry—and patients are harmed.

Wanna go. Can’t. Phooey.

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

Massimo has responded to Shermer’s post responding to him, by annotating the post.

…I begin with a Principle of Moral Good: Always act with someone else’s moral good in mind, and never act in a way that leads to someone else’s moral loss…

Well, that sounds good (and mighty close to Kant’s famous categorical imperative), except for the significant degree of begging the question hidden in Michael’s principle (but not in Kant’s). What is a moral good? Reading the principle as it stands I would have pretty much no idea of how to actually act, or whether my acting would lead to someone else’s moral good or loss.

Shermer in italics, Pigliucci below. That’s basically the problem I had, except that I (being an amateur) called it jumping to the middle as opposed to begging the question. Shermer doesn’t begin at the beginning by spelling out what’s in play, but instead simply assumes the very thing he’s supposedly elucidating, and jumps ahead to talk about it before he’s spelled it out.

Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women.

This is just a parenthetical observation, Michael, but that study has been debunked, together with a lot of the other questionable “science” about gender we get from a certain brand of evolutionary psychology…

The survival and flourishing of the individual is the foundation for establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best survive and flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality.

 

Natural selection has everything to do with survival (and reproduction), but pretty much nothing to do with flourishing. The latter, in turn, is an inherently cultural concept, that is difficult to articulate and whose specifics vary with time and geography. Which means that Michael’s “smooth transition” between is and ought is anything but smooth.

Michael keeps talking about survival and flourishing in a single breadth, invoking natural selection as working to increase both. This is absolutely wrong. Natural selection increases survival, and even that only insofar as it assures reproduction (after that, good luck to you, my friend!). Selection has nothing whatsoever to do with flourishing, the realization of which completely breaks any evolutionarily based “smooth transition” between is and ought. Not to mention, of course, that Michael should know that natural selection likely also produced a number of nasty behavioral patterns in humans (e.g., xenophobia), which we have been trying  — in good part through philosophizing about them! — to get rid of throughout the past couple of millennia.So, again, science — or more broadly, factual evidence — most certainly has a place at the high table of any meaningful discussion about how to achieve human goals and fulfill human desires. But philosophical reflection remains central to ethics because ethics is about reasoning on the implications of and conflicts generated by those goals and desires.

Natural selection isn’t moral. It’s the opposite of moral. Darwin said this in the “Devil’s chaplain” letter.

What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!

Dawkins wrote a wonderful essay on the subject. Natural selection is an absolute shit. Without it we wouldn’t be here, but that doesn’t make it not a shit.

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

The first few pages of Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust make an excellent antidote to Shermer’s amateurish and arrogant attempt to set everyone straight about morality. (It’s rude to call it amateurish, but perhaps not as rude as it would be if I were not an amateur myself. I am an amateur, and that’s why I want to get moral philosophy from philosophers rather than non-philosophers, and why I wouldn’t myself try to set everyone straight about morality.)

Churchland starts with her own amateur thinking about morality when she was in school and confronted with the unfairness of medieval trial by ordeal. Her history teacher tried to put the practice in context, to discourage the too-easy sense of moral superiority, but the unfairness still stood out.

So what is it to be fair? How do we know what to count as fair? Why do we regard trial by ordeal as wrong? Thus opens the door into the vast tangled forest of questions about right and wrong, good and evil, virtues and vices. For most of my adult life as a philosopher, I shied away from plunging unreservedly into these sorts of questions about morality. This was largely because I could not see a systematic way through that tangled forest, and because a lot of contemporary moral philosophy, though venerated in academic halls, was completely untethered to the “hard and fast”: that is, it had no strong connection to evolution or to the brain, and hence was in peril of floating on a sea of mere, albeit confident, opinion. And no doubt the medieval clerics were every bit as confident. [p 2]

See? I find that one paragraph more clear, more explanatory, more orienting,  more useful, than Shermer’s whole post, long as it is. There are a lot of questions; they are difficult and complicated, not easy and simple; it is hard to find a systematic way to answer them; confidence does not equal success. The questions need to be tethered to evolution and the brain, but that too is not easy or quick.

It did seem likely that Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to. [pp 2-3]

So she got a second PhD, this time in neuroscience.

She discusses the way this combination is apt to draw accusations of “scientism,” and explains why they are often mistaken but also what the accusation can get right.

In the present case, the claim is not that science will wade in and tell us for every dilemma what is right or wrong. Rather, the point is that a deeper understanding of what it is that makes humans and other animals social, and what it is that disposes us to care about others, may lead to greater understanding of how to cope with social problems. [p 4]

Shermer, and Harris before him, simply skipped over that part. They rush to the middle and start there, while Churchland starts at the beginning: we are social animals, we are disposed to care about others. Better, you see?

Then the is-ought problem. What’s the point of it?

…precisely because he was a naturalist, Hume had to make it clear that the sophisticated naturalist has no truck with simple, sloppy inferences going from what is to what ought to be. He challenged those who took moral understanding to be the preserve of the elite, especially the clergy, who tended to make dimwitted inferences between descriptions and prescriptions. For example, it might be said (my examples, not Hume’s), “Husbands are stronger than their wives, so wives ought to obey their husbands,” or “We have a tradition that little boys work as chimney sweeps, therefore we ought to have little boys work as chimney sweeps.” [p 8]

Clear instead of muddled.

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

Taslima gives a howl of rage and grief about Bangladesh and the murder of Ahmed Rahjib.

Rajib Haider Shuvo, a 26 years old  architect and talented young atheist blogger was brutally killed by the Islamists last night. He  criticized Islam the way I used to  criticize  Islam 26 years ago when I was living in Bangladesh.  He wrote  blogs under the pen name thaba baba. I wrote the same things in late  80′s using my real name. Thaba baba was killed. I survived but I was forced to leave Bangladesh 20 years ago. I would surely get killed like  Rajib if I lived in that country. I was on the top of the  hit list made by Islamic terrorists.

Bangladesh is a hopelessly pathetic country. A pure fucked-up country. The country has been  controlled by the Islamists. The society has been rottened  by the Islamists. The people have been manipulated by the Islamists. Atheists get killed. A few weeks ago, another Bengali atheist blogger, Asif Mohiuddin, was brutally stabbed by the Islamists. He quite brilliantly mocked Allah and Islam. Asif is fighting for his life. No doubt, Bangladesh sucks.

Islamization has wrecked one country after another. It merits every howl of rage and grief we can muster.

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

Michael Shermer is writing a book on science and morality, and he’s written a preview or summary or overture at Massimo Pigliucci’s blog.

It looks as if he’s just doing Sam Harris’s project all over again, which seems superfluous, but who knows. A sample from the preview or summary:

Given that moral principles must be founded on something natural instead of supernatural, and that science is the best tool we have devised for understanding the natural world, applying evolutionary theory to not only the origins of morality but to its ultimate foundation as well, it seems to me that the individual is a reasonable starting point because, (1) the individual is the primary target of natural selection in evolution, and (2) it is the individual who is most effected by moral and immoral acts. Thus:

The survival and flourishing of the individual is the foundation for establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best survive and flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality.

Here we find a smooth transition from the way nature is (the individual struggling to survive and flourish in an evolutionary context) to the way it ought to be (given a choice, it is more moral to act in a way that enhances the survival and flourishing of other individuals).

Note to my readers: What I am outlining here is the basis for my next book, The
Moral Arc of Science, which I am researching and writing now, so I ask you to
post your critiques here or email me your constructive criticisms (mshermer@skeptic.com).
My role model is Charles Darwin, who solicited criticisms of his theory of
evolution and included them in a chapter entitled “Difficulties on Theory” in
On the Origin of Species. Of course, if you agree with me, and/or think
of additional examples in support of my theory, then I would appreciate hearing
those as well!

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

A long, horrific article about attacks on “witches” in Papua New Guinea.

One excerpt. Trigger warning.

Angela was naked, staked-out, spread-eagled on a rough frame before them, a blindfold tied over her eyes, a fire burning in a nearby drum. Being unable to see can only have inflated her terror, her sense of powerlessness and the menace around her; breathing the smoke and feeling the heat of the fire where the irons being used to burn her were warmed until they glowed. Would she be cooked, on that fire? She must have known it had happened to others before — and would soon infamously happen again, the pictures finding their way around the world.

The photographs witnesses took of Angela’s torture are shocking, both for the cruelty of the attackers and the torpid body-language of the spectators. Stone-faced     men and women and wide-eyed children huddle under umbrellas, sheltering from the drenched highlands air as Angela writhes against the tethers at her wrists and ankles, twisting her body away from the length of hot iron which a young man aims at her genitals.

There are more horrors, but a nun named Sister Gaudentia managed to save Angela and her mother in the end. Other women are not saved.

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

Another dip into the archives. This time our voyage in Time’s charabanc takes us to November 2010. The post was Tragic end of a sock puppet.

A sock puppet goes to jail.

A lawyer was sentenced Thursday to six months in jail after being convicted of an ultramodern crime that was all about antiquity: using online aliases to harass people in an academic debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Oh gosh, who would use online aliases to harass people in an academic debate? I never heard of such a thing.

Prosecutors said Golb crossed the line between discourse and crime by using fake e-mail accounts and writing blog posts under assumed names to discredit detractors of his father, a scholar. Golb said the writings amounted to pointed parody and academic whistle-blowing that he felt were protected by free-speech rights.

The New York Times now revisits.

“This has nothing to do with scholarly debate,” said Lawrence H. Schiffman, vice provost of Yeshiva University and a widely published authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, who became the prime target of Mr. Golb’s online activities. “It has to do with criminal activity.

“Fraud, impersonation and harassment are criminal matters,” he continued. “This was actually designed to literally end my career.”

Using free speech, which is totally ok. Or not.

He started a blog; then another and another, each under a different name. The aliases begot other aliases, known on the Internet as sock puppets: 20, 40, 60, 80. The sock puppets debated with other posters, each time linking to other sock puppets to support their arguments, creating the impression of an army of engaged scholars espousing Norman Golb’s ideas. Using the alias Charles Gadda (from the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda), Raphael Golb published articles on the citizen news Web site NowPublic and linked to them in comments and blog posts written under other aliases. The writings all championed Norman Golb as an honest scholar bucking a well-financed, self-serving conspiracy.

Fraud, in other words. Is that protected free speech? I don’t know, but I have a hard time thinking it should be. I’ve been arguing about this for years, because I think actual falsification shouldn’t be protected free speech, but there are those who think it should. I’m not saying it should get jail time, but should it be grounds for firing for instance? Yes. If David Irving had had an academic job, his falsification of history should have been grounds for firing. Raphael Golb doesn’t have an academic job, but what he was doing was fraudulent as hell.

One of Mr. Golb’s targets was a graduate student named Robert R. Cargill, who created a virtual tour of Qumran for the San Diego museum.

Norman Golb posted an article on the Web site of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago complaining that the film’s script ignored his theory.

Raphael Golb went further, sending pseudonymous e-mails to Mr. Cargill’s professors at U.C.L.A.

“I said this person should be compelled to answer the published criticisms of his work at his Ph.D. defense,” Raphael Golb said. Some of the e-mail messages suggested that Mr. Cargill, who describes himself as agnostic, was a fundamentalist Christian and an anti-Semite.

Mr. Cargill, who is now 39 and an assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa, remembered Mr. Golb’s campaign as a frontal assault meant to thwart his career.

“Any time someone hears the name Robert Cargill, they hear, he’s anti-Semitic,” Mr. Cargill said. “Let’s say I’m applying for a job and I’m in a pool of 10 finalists. When they do background checking, they see this Cargill looks like he’s being criticized as anti-Semitic. We don’t know if it’s legitimate, but it’s safer to go with someone else.”

This is what people are trying to do to all of us: put enough garbage out there that some of it will stick no matter how fraudulent it is.

Cargill traced Golb’s emails to his IP address. Golb pretends that is harassment.

Ronald Kuby, a lawyer for Raphael Golb, last week disputed Mr. Cargill’s characterization of himself as an innocent victim, writing in an e-mail message that “he played a vile role in this case. Among other things, Cargill spend hundreds of hours obsessively tracking down ‘Charles Gadda’ because of the latter’s online criticisms, engaged in his own sock puppetry while concealing it and condemning Golb for the same thing.” Mr. Kuby added, “Cargill is probably a lot of fun to chat with, but he is more than capable of using his hurt puppy persona to manipulate the criminal justice system.”

Mr. Golb put it this way: “Cargill was stalking me.”

Omigod. Yes, the way I “stalk” my harassers to correct their lies and protest their harassment. It’s not the same thing. At least the New York prosecutors get that.

There was this guy Schiffman the Golbs were mad at.

This time, in addition to using sock puppets, Raphael Golb said, he created an e-mail account with the address of Larry.Schiffman@gmail.com, and wrote to Dr. Schiffman’s employers, colleagues and students at N.Y.U., “confessing” to having plagiarized Norman Golb in developing his own ideas about the scrolls.

“Apparently, someone is intent on exposing a failing of mine that dates back almost fifteen years ago,” one e-mail read. “It is true that I should have cited Dr. Golb’s articles when using his arguments, and it is true that I misrepresented his ideas. But this is simply the politics of Dead Sea Scrolls studies. If I had given credit to this man, I would have been banned from conferences around the world.” The e-mail was signed, “Lawrence Schiffman, professor.”

Sitting among stacks of papers, books, conga drums, assorted sneakers and other clutter in his Greenwich Village apartment, a stone’s throw from N.Y.U., Raphael Golb said he had intended the e-mails as obvious parody — that no sentient person would believe a professor would write such things, or sign his missive “professor.” The distinction was important, Mr. Golb said, because the First Amendment protects parody. “I didn’t realize I was dealing with idiots,” Mr. Golb said.

Oh pu-leeze. No, that is not parody, any more than those two Twitter accounts that send tweets under my real name are parody. Parody would not use my real name; parody would not use Schiffman’s real name.

But people did believe the e-mails were real, Dr. Schiffman said. “I was walking out of my office and a graduate student says to me, ‘I got your e-mail from last night.’ I said, ‘wait a minute, what e-mail?’ ”

Dr. Schiffman went to the F.B.I., contacting an agent he had advised on a prior case. “You know how the F.B.I. says, ‘once you’re one of ours, you’re always one of ours?’ ” he said. “It’s totally true. They told me the assistant D.A. to call. ‘Tell him you spoke to us.’ ”

Raphael Golb was naked and asleep when police officers came to his apartment early on the morning of March 5, 2009, arresting him on 51 charges of identity theft, aggravated harassment, criminal impersonation, forgery and unauthorized use of the computers in an N.Y.U. library. He had been up all of the previous night writing comments or blog posts under his various aliases. The officers seized Mr. Golb’s computers and led him handcuffed from his building. Waiving his rights to a lawyer and to remain silent, Mr. Gold denied sending any bogus e-mail messages, telling the investigators that Dr. Schiffman had filed a false complaint “out of maliciousness toward my father.”

[pauses to gaze dreamily into the distance for several minutes]

Mr. Golb remains disappointed that First Amendment advocates, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, have declined to support him, though they were asked. “I’m astonished at their silence,” he said. “I don’t want to inflate myself, but the consequences of this are obvious. When we start to allow prosecutors to act on behalf of resentful professors to whom no harm was done at all, it’s frightening.”

Fuck.you. Harm was done, you piece of shit. I hope your prison food is full of weevils.

The district attorney’s office declined to speak on the record about a pending case, but in a statement after the verdict in 2010, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney, said, “Using fictitious identities to impersonate victims is not what open academic debate seeks to foster,” adding: “It is true that the vast majority of identity thieves seek to steal their victims’ money, but in some cases, identity thieves maliciously intend to damage their victims’ reputations and harass them, while cowering in anonymity. Such was the case here.”

Weevils and the feces of weevils.

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

Whither civility, eh? Dan Fincke has his Pledge. (His what? His pledge? What is he, Louisa May Alcott?) Chris Clarke has his sarcastic pledge. I like Chris Clarke’s better.

I pledge to keep a sense of perspective. Tossing basic civil rights under the bus in order to maintain a jury-rigged superficial peace in a single-issue movement is a bad bargain.

That. Fincke’s pledge (his pledge?) is all too reminiscent of Lee Moore’s attempt to jury-rig peace between harassers and the people they are harassing.

Fincke’s “civility” has resulted in mildew people posting lies about me in his comments, which are still sitting there uncontradicted because Fincke has wandered off somewhere, and new comments are held in moderation. I posted a correction yesterday morning – some 30 hours ago – and it still hasn’t appeared. Civil? Not so much.

“Pitchguest” – safe behind the mask – posted the lies. “Commander Tuvok” – safe behind the mask – repeated them.

Or if we should continue, why not Ophelia Benson, who called an AVfM contributor a ‘stupid bitch’ (despite how she doesn’t use such epithets)

No I didn’t. I called myself that, ironically, in a tweet. I’ve posted that correction before, and we all know “Pitchguest” and the rest of them have seen it because we know they leave nothing of mine unread unmonitored unstalked. They know they’re lying, but they go on lying, and Fincke doesn’t even curate his own comments responsibly. “Civil” ha.

Comments on Chris’s post took me back to one from March 2008. Gosh those were the days. Sheril Kirshenbaum ordering PZ to mind his manners. That in turn reminded me of one at ur-B&W from 2009, citing G Felis (the philosophical primate) quoting Mill.

So have some Mill again, courtesy of Bartleby.

Mill wrote in an age when paragraphs were long – our acquaintance Mr Paden would feel more at home there – and his paragraphs were long even for that age. I’ve made paragraphs where there were no paragraphs. Begging your pardon, Mr Mill.

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

But this, though an important consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.

Yes.

Skipping ahead a little.

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions.

Punching down, in other words.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.

And, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on feminism, than on ideological sexism.

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

There’s a nice atheist/freethinkers/humanist con coming up: Apostacon: A Midwest Freethought Conference, in Omaha, September 20-22. Omaha! The heart of the midwest. A place in need of more and more apostates and freethinkers.

A couple of thoughts though. One, not nearly enough women. Four out of nineteen. Not.e.nough.

Two, they forgot to get Vyckie Garrison to speak. Midwest freethinkers and apostates! You’re missing a trick! Vyckie is just up the road from you. Vyckie is No Longer Quivering. You need Vyckie.

Vyckie’s talk at Eschaton 2012 was dynamite. I can’t wait for the video to come out so that you can see for yourselves. She has fascinating material – life as a Quiverfull woman, and what it did to her and her children and her husband, and how much better things are now that she and her children have escaped. She has fascinating material, and she presents it well – not least, she’s damn funny.

They need her.

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

Mary Ellen boiled down the irony of the pope’s retirement very neatly on Monday, but unfortunately in the rush of various flying missiles I didn’t get to it until today.

Guest post by Mary Ellen Foley

Somebody gets into a situation in which their health begins to fail, and if they stay in that situation, it might kill them.  They believe that God himself put them into that situation, but they just don’t feel that they can see it through — the strain is just physically too much.  And anyway, they’d prefer a quiet life, and they want to spend their time studying.

So if this person is a pregnant woman whose pregnancy is life-threatening, the Pope says she has to go through with it even if it kills her.

If this person is the Pope himself, however, he gets to retire.

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

The Tories want to re-describe poverty as being not to do with a lack of money. Next project: re-describe hypothermia as being not to do with lack of heat.

The government’s desire to alter the official definition of child poverty risks deliberately downplaying the importance of money just as a series of government policies will reduce the incomes of poor families, a group of senior academics warn in a letter to the Guardian.

Let’s define it as a lack of initiative, shall we? A shortage of grit and determination and ambition? A refusal to get up at 5 a.m.? A habit of eating three pieces of pie every evening?

A consultation on how to measure child poverty more accurately that was launched last November, seeking input from charities and experts into “better measures of child poverty”, comes to an end on Friday. The government believes that a wider definition of what constitutes poverty will give a better picture of what it means to “grow up experiencing deep disadvantage“.

A better picture, eh? So that they can hang it next to the Van Dyke in the library?

Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, the lead consultant on the UK’s contribution to Unicef’s Child Well-Being report, said he believed that the government was “trying to move the goalposts” at a time when child poverty was increasing rapidly.

He described the consultation document as the worst paper setting down government policy direction he had ever read, questioned whether it was written by civil servants and said it read more like it had been “plagiarised from a right-wing thinktank tract”.

He said civil servants had been working for the past 40 years on developing accurate poverty measures, but the document had ignored previous work by the department on the subject as well as ignoring work by academics in the field. The new approach would not work because it attempted to “combine all sorts of things that are the consequence of poverty or may be even be the causes of poverty, but are not a measure of child poverty”.

That’s the best wheeze of all: treating the consequences of poverty as the causes of poverty. That way you get to stop spending money on it, and you get to sneer and judge at the same time. Look at you, you dirty peasant, you never went to school; no wonder you’re poor!

In a speech to launch the consultation, Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, outlined his theory that other factors aside from money caused poverty, highlighting his concern about children growing up in “dysfunctional families”.

He argued: “It cannot be right that experiences so vital to childhood, like seeing a parent go out to work or growing up in a stable family, are not reflected in our understanding of child poverty.” He was critical of the Labour government’s focus on “income as the significant cause and solution”.

Sure enough…

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

More on Ahmed Rajib and the context of his murder.

A blogger who had been critical of Bangladesh’s Islamist groups was killed in the capital late Friday, police said, a day after he attended a big rally against leaders of the country’s largest Islamic party.

…

Police found the body of Ahmed Rajib, 35 — better known by his online identity Thaba Baba — near his home in Dhaka’s Pallabi suburb, with his head hacked apart with a machete.

“We recovered the machete. It is clear the attacker wanted to murder him. They did not touch his laptop or other valuable objects,” police official Sheikh Motiur Rahman told AFP.

Police have not commented on a possible motive for the killing, but Rahman, citing Rajib’s relatives, said the blogger played a large role in organising the anti-Islamist protests.

Rajib’s brother, who declined to be named, told AFP his sibling had been “threatened frequently” by Islamists angry at his role in the protests and his writings against the religion.

He isn’t the first.

The killing late Friday was the second fatal attack in Dhaka against a blogger critical of Islamist groups in less than a month, after the stabbing death of a self-styled online “militant atheist” by three unidentified men near his office in the upscale Uttara district.

Taslima doesn’t live in Bangladesh any more. Tasneem doesn’t live in Bangladesh any more.

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

Another upcoming event, this time in Dublin. Atheist Ireland is doing a conference called Empowering Women Through Secularism the weekend of 29-30 June 2013. I will be there.

Everybody should go to this! It will be fantastic.

Speakers will include

• Ivana Bacik, Irish Senator and member of Atheist Ireland
• Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Ophelia Benson, author and commentator, USA
• Ann Brusseel, Member of Flemish Parliament, Belgium
• Mairin de Burca, writer and secularist, Ireland
• Jane Donnelly, Education Policy Officer Atheist Ireland
• Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Anthea McTiernan, Editor Irish Times Ticket Magazine
• PZ Myers, science professor and blogger, USA
• Maryam Namazie, Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain
• Taslima Nasrin, novelist and activist, Bangladesh and India
• Michael Nugent, Chairperson Atheist Ireland
• Nina Sankari, Polish Rationalist Association
• Farhana Shakir, lawyer and legal consultant, Pakistan
• Kate Smurthwaite, comedian and activist, Britain
• Anne Marie Waters, One Law for All Campaign, Britain
• Rebecca Watson, Skepchick network, USA

Fantastic, I tell you.

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