To adapt a line of Kingsley Amis’s, God is a soppy fool with a fase like a pigs bum.

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

Have a little fuck the muthafucka courtesy of Tim Minchin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRDfut2Vx0

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

Florida’s a scary place. If you ever have the bad luck to be taken hostage there by a guy armed with a gun and a knife, you might find yourself being prosecuted if you survive.

A Florida woman is being accused of not defending her two children as their father stabbed them in the midst of a SWAT team standoff at an RV park.

On Monday, Deanna DeJesus pleaded not guilty to aggravated manslaughter and child neglect in the attack that left her 9-year-old son dead, NBC Miami reports. The 7-year-old, along with the defendant herself, were both severely wounded.

Her husband flipped out, see. He forced the woman and their two kids into the car and drove them all to an RV park, where he shot to death the owner of an RV and settled down in the RV for an afternoon of terrorization.

William Dejesus stabbed every member of his family before killing himself with the knife. His 9-year-old son, who had autism, died from the attack.

Now, Deanna DeJesus is facing up to 45 years in prison for not protecting the boys.

Prosecutors claim that the woman calmly held a child in each arm while her husband asked her which he should kill first. All the mother was able to say in court was that she couldn’t make such a choice, according to the Sun Sentinel.

Her 7-year-old son told investigators that because his mother wasn’t doing anything, he had grabbed a knife in an attempt to save his brother. However, his father regained control of the knife and stabbed him several times.

Deanna DeJesus said that she did not fight her husband because she knew she would be hurt if she did, according to WIOD.  Additionally, her attorney noted that after DeJesus’ husband stabbed her in the lung, she was physically unable to defend her children.

Prosecute that lazy bitch!

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

In re-reading Maryam’s talk and the comments on it I saw a link to a post by someone who attended the NSS Conference.

Nick was good, he says.

Nick was a fantastically eloquent and inspiring speaker – talking about self-censorship and imploring us to always be free to criticise “divinely inspired bigotry and facism”. His passion for free speech and how we should never be deterred from our right to it even in the face of threats of violence was fabulous, and evocative of Hitch in his refusal to back down to fascist terror threats in his robust rebuttals to religious lunatics. There is no greater compliment I can grant him than that.

But then there was Maryam…

Maryam’s talk was the highlight for me, Io, Narwahl and Chris as she delivered a devastating, passionate and ferocious salvo against islamo-fascism and the horrors of sharia law. I can’t do justice to how amazing she was, her presentation was a tour-de-force, and it was truly compelling and educational. I urge you all to read the talk in full right here. Go do it. Now. And only come back here when you are done.

You know, it was exactly the same at QED. She brought the fuckin house down. Everybody said she was the highlight.

He quoted a bit of what she said about sharia in Britain.

Shocking isn’t it? Maryam also urged everyone to stand up to this and to denounce anyone that would dare to call you a racist for questioning and criticizing islamists and sharia law.

I’m doing my level best.

There was an amusing bit about Dawkins’s talk.

Suffice to say it was about 40 minutes of trolling Christianity and it’s most peculiar sub-division, Mormonism. His presentation was typically sharp and witty, with his laying in to Mitt Romney a particular highlight.

Ah, I’d noticed he’d been tweeting about Mormonism and Romney a lot. Homework!

So anyway. Secularism, people. It’s not racism. Really, it’s not.

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

As I mentioned, in my horrid sarcastic mocking horrid way, I’m getting called Islamophobic a good bit these days. I’m getting called it here and even on the chat threads at Pharyngula, The Lounge and Thunderdome. (On the other hand it’s by the same people, so it doesn’t add up to more, it just adds up to repetition.)

I think this is frankly stupid. It’s as if the people who call me that had never heard of Maryam Namazie. Surely it can’t be the case that they’ve never heard of Maryam, can it? They don’t go round to her place and call her Islamophobic do they? Or do they.

Here’s Maryam at the National Secular Society conference in London last week:

Sometimes I really don’t know what more to say.

What else can be said about Sharia law that– at least in your gut – you don’t already know?

It is based on the Koran, the Hadith and Islamic jurisprudence. Its criminal code includes stoning to death for adultery and execution for apostasy and homosexuality. In Iran, for example, there are over 130 offences punishable by death.

Its civil code – which is imposed by Sharia courts in Britain – is discriminatory and unfair particularly against women. Basically it is a code of death and despair.

Not breaking news, is it? After all it is religious law. And that’s what – in my opinion – religion does best. A court based on the Bible and Torah would be similarly discriminatory and barbaric.

Yet the numbers of people who continue to defend Sharia courts in Britain as people’s ‘right to religion’ is staggering.

Well? How about it? No cries of Islamophobia yet? No accusations of punching down?

In a Sharia court in Britain, a woman can’t even sign her own marriage contract; a male guardian must do it on her behalf. Child custody goes to the father at a pre-set age irrespective of the welfare of the child. Marital rape is seen to be the prerogative of the husband – a sharia judge recently said calling it rape is the act of aggression. The rules here in Britain are the same as the ones women in Iran face in family courts.

And they are also dealing with child marriages, which is nothing more than religiously-sanctioned child rape and paedophilia. In 2010, around 30 cases of child marriages were reported in Islington alone. At least three 11-year-old girls and two nine-year-olds had been forced into marriage with older men. The oldest girls were 16.

In the latest scandal, which by the way has only been covered by the tabloid rags like the Sun and Daily Mail, an investigation by the Sunday Times found imams in Britain willing to “marry” young girls after being approached by an undercover reporter posing as a father who said he wanted his 12 year old daughter married to prevent her from being tempted in to a ‘western lifestyle’.

Question these and you are often accused of Islamophobia, racism, intolerance, and denying people’s very right to religion and belief.

And punching down. Well, how about it? Anybody prepared to accuse Maryam of that?

I have a question for those who use human rights and anti-racist language to excuse and apologise for inequality, discrimination, violence against women and barbarity.

Even if it were people’s right to religion (most rights are not absolute and anyway Sharia courts are about politics not religion) – and even if they were real choices (let’s put aside the many threats and intimidation for now), what is your position on it?

Do you have one?

Do you think it’s wrong?

Whilst you may be very happy to promote it for the ‘other’ – what I call a racism of lower standards and expectations – would you like if for yourself and for your loved ones?

If not, then please stop apologising for it.

Hiding behind ‘rights’ and ‘choice’ to excuse misogyny is a betrayal of human principles. After all, years ago, certain men only had the ‘right’ to vote and own slaves.

Remember good old fashioned international solidarity – how I miss it – when we actually joined forces with those suffering under racial apartheid in South Africa for example.

Nowadays, many liberals and post-modernist leftists side with those imposing apartheid – sex apartheid – because it is considered the ‘right to religion’…

It’s a betrayal of human solidarity.

And this solidarity is fundamental particularly given that Islamism and Sharia law have killed a generation in what I call an Islamic inquisition.

Anyone?

Muslims after all are not a homogeneous community as Islamists portray. When you give group rights to the ‘Muslim community’, you basically give further power to the dominant elite – the imams and Islamic ‘scholars’ [as Richard Dawkins says, you do need to read more than one book to be considered a scholar] – at the expense of women, and many others.

Conflating Islamism (and its Sharia courts) with Muslim is part of the effort of feigning representation and is the narrative peddled by Islamists. In fact Islamism or political Islam is part of the project for controlling the population at large and is not an exercise in people’s rights and choices.

To accept the Islamist version and narrative is to hand over countless individuals – many of them dissenting – to the far-Right Islamic movement and to ignore the resistance, the political, social and civil struggles, and class politics. Conflating Muslim and Islamist is like conflating Christian or English with the English Defence League or the British National Party.

Very often also a criticism of Islamism, Sharia or Islam is touted as being racist, discriminatory, and Islamophobic. It’s not. Let me give you an example of this. When a British court told a Muslim hospital consultant that he must pay his ex-wife maintenance even though under Sharia he believed he owed her nothing, the doctor said that the ‘Family law in Britain is biased against Muslim people’ but isn’t his wife Muslim too?

It does all depend on how you look at it and whose side you choose to take.

This has nothing to do with racism.

Such accusations of racism are particular to the west.

If you are criticising Islam, the veil, Sharia law, or Islamism in Iran, Egypt or Afghanistan the debate is not framed in the context of racism or Islamophobia.

When the Saudi government arrests 23 year old Hamza Kashgari for tweeting about Mohammad, it doesn’t accuse him of racism, it accuses him of blasphemy – an accusation punishable by death.

But that same government will accuse critics of Saudi policy at the UN Human Rights Committee as Islamophobic and racist.

What I’m trying to say is that Islamists and their apologists have coined the term Islamophobia – a political term – to scaremonger people into silence.

These bogus accusations of Islamophobia and offence serve Islamism in the same way that Sharia law serves them where they have power. It helps to threaten, intimidate and silence criticism, solidarity and dissent.

They work like secular fatwas and are used not to defend Muslims from bigotry but to defend Islam and Islamism.

So. Explain to Maryam why she’s wrong and she really does have “a massive blind spot” on this subject. I dare you.

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

You know how Islamists say that jokes are unIslamic? Apparently one result of that is that Islamists don’t get practice in knowing when a joke is present. That means that sometimes they think a joke is actually a serious news item.

Fars News Agency, a semi-official mouth piece of the Iranian regime, earnestly published a word-for-word duplicate of an article from the Onion, a spoof news organisation based in Chicago.

The satirical article cited a fake Gallup poll which found that 77 per cent of white, rural voters would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Mr Ahmadinejad than with the US president.

It went on to cite a made-up West Virginian named Dale Swiderski, who said that he preferred the Iranian to Mr Obama because: “He takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”

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

Check it out: a stirring promo for the American Atheists 50th birthday bash next March, at which I will be there.

The first voice is Anthony Grayling. The second one you probably recognize. The third of course is Dave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUFNsUn9nxc

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

Sometimes an organization doesn’t speak for its members when it speaks. Sometimes an organization (or someone at the top of it) says something that’s abhorrent to many or most or almost all of its members. That can happen.

There’s SlutWalk London for instance. Sarah Ditum asks what it’s doing lining up behind Julian Assange.

Oh dear, SlutWalk London. On Saturday you’re marshalling crowds of women in fishnets and bras to chant “my dress is not a yes” and promoting petitions insisting that the Home Office should prosecute rapists. Come Tuesday, you’re taking to Twitter to issue statements objecting to the extradition of Julian Assange to face rape charges in Sweden. Rapists should be prosecuted, but according to SlutWalk London, the fact that many who are accused of rape ultimately aren’t convicted means that this particular accused rapist shouldn’t be subject to due process. It’s an awkward position to adopt, and the most awkward thing of all is the way it conscripts those who joined the march to a cause that was never part of the prospectus.

…

SlutWalk London has inadvertently lined itself (and its unwitting supporters) up with an unappealing gaggle of rape apologists and victim blamers. It’s all very well for the statement to stress “We are not saying the women lied or that they should not get justice,” but lots of people who support Assange have said that women lie. If an anti-rape campaign must intervene on this case at all, surely it should be addressing those grotesque statements, not condoning the position of those who made them.

Sarah asked SlutWalk London to comment, but they

made it very clear that they didn’t want to comment, or discuss the issues here is any way.

It’s odd. We’re used to seeing organizations pitch women overboard the instant they think some other issue or cause or problem is more important, but it’s surprising to see a women’s organization doing that.

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

Secular Coalition for Pennsylvania to Officially Launch Sunday

Thu, 09/27/2012 – 14:42

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

Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is not a cultural relativist. He too talked to the New York Times, in his case about his new memoir about the fatwa years.

I found myself caught up in what you could call a world historical event. You could say it’s a great political and intellectual event of our time, even a moral event. Not the fatwa, but the battle against radical Islam, of which this was one skirmish. There have been arguments made even by liberal-minded people, which seem to me very dangerous, which are basically cultural relativist arguments: We’ve got to let them do this because it’s their culture. My view is no. Female circumcision — that’s a bad thing. Killing people because you don’t like their ideas — it’s a bad thing. We have to be able to have a sense of right and wrong which is not diluted by this kind of relativistic argument. And if we don’t we really have stopped living in a moral universe.

So no. We don’t have to respect Arab traditions even when they conflict with our values. We can say that some traditions are bad. We probably don’t want to embark on careers as diplomats if we do that, but otherwise – we can say.

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

What was that about women and indecency and men are always right? That’s how it works in Saudi Arabia for sure. Saudi Arabia detained and deported a lot of Nigerian women who went there for the hajj but did it without a male relative along to make sure they didn’t fuck every man they saw. Sluts.

Since Sunday, hundreds of Nigerian women – mainly aged between 25 and 35, according to Nigerian diplomats – have been stopped at the airports in Jeddah and Medina.

Bilkisu Nasidi, who travelled from the northern Nigerian city of Katsina, told the BBC that hundreds of women had been sleeping on the floor, did not have their belongings and were sharing four toilets at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah.

She said she was part of a group of 512 women being deported to five states in Nigeria on Thursday.

With many of them now facing deportation, she said the atmosphere at the airport was not good, and the women felt “victimised”.

What, just because they took the trouble and spent the money to go to SA for the hajj which is an “obligation” according to Islam and the Saudi “guardians of Islam” (as they consider themselves) wouldn’t let them do the hajj? Pffffffff. Whiners. They’re indecent, don’t they get it? They have that filthy hole between their legs.

“We’re not happy about the situation – other than the Hajj we would not be interested in coming back to Saudi Arabia but unfortunately it is the holy land to us Muslims and we will have to look beyond the treatment and come back.”

Well that’s just exactly stinking it, isn’t it. Saudi Arabia is a vicious misogynist shit hole, but it’s “holy” to Muslims, so they have to “look beyond the treatment” which is part and parcel of Islam itself, and go back. They think they “have to” go back to the holy land of the hateful misogynist religion. It’s sad. It’s horribly sad. The religion kicks them in the face, and they still think they “have to” obey its rules and fulfill its obligations.

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

What’s new in Tunisia? Nothing much. Two police officers accused of raping a young woman have accused the young woman of “indecency” and a judge has hauled her into court to respond to the accusation.

Leading human rights, feminist groups and other prominent members of civil society have formed a committee evening to co-ordinate a campaign in support of the woman, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the Tunisian League of Human Rights.

Faïza Skandrani, the head of the Equality and Parity organisation, told Al Jazeera that the case was an important one for two reasons: it marked the first time a woman allegedly raped by the police had taken the case to court, and it was the first time the authorities were trying to publicly shame a woman into dropping such charges.

“The investigating judge is turning her from the victim to the accused, to help the police officers get away with it,” she said. “I’ve heard about similar cases in Pakistan, but this is a first in Tunisia. Next they will be charging her with prostitution.”

It’s classic, isn’t it. Women are “indecent” simply by existing, so there’s no such thing as rape, there’s only women sucking in men with their indecency between the legs. If the woman is there to be raped, then it’s her fault by definition, even if the man had to break down a couple of walls to get at her. If she is not sealed up beyond possible access then she’s indecent and a sucker-in of men. Stone her.

Activists see the case as an important one because of the symbolism in the wider cultural battles between those who want Tunisia to maintain its position as one of the most progressive countries in the Arab world, and religious conservatives.

“This is a drop in the ocean of the problems we’ve been fighting,” Skandrani said. “Each time we close one door, they open another.”

“The revolution was about freedom and democracy, not about undermining women’s rights,” she said. “They want to build a society where women can be used and treated like objects and where the man is always right.”

Bad luck to them.

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

Rebecca’s gone off the whole naked calendars idea. I’m glad about that, because I was never on it, but didn’t say so, because you know, I’m a million years old, I come from that boring generation that did second wave feminism and didn’t get it about pole dancing as empowerment.

“Why don’t you make the Skepchick Calendars anymore?” Ever since I stopped producing not-quite-nudie calendars back in 2007, I’ve heard that question a lot. The problem is that I never have the 30 minutes I’d need to list half the reasons why I no longer do it. But now, I will list a few of those reasons in the desperate hope that organizations that need money or publicity or whatever will read this and make the decision to not produce calendars.

You see, in the past few days I’ve heard of two different calendar projects from within my circles: ScienceGrrl is a calendar of female scientists, and proceeds will apparently go to encouraging girls to pursue STEM degrees. New organization Secular Woman has also announced a calendar, which will feature nude atheists and benefit a cancer charity and the org’s own travel grants to send women to conferences.

I know. Really. Please stop.

Rebecca gives some background. It was partly a jokey thing at first.

And then I stopped. Why? For some of the same reasons that I’m turned off by the current crop of calendars:

1. Regardless of the intent behind the calendars, regardless of how much fun we had making them, regardless of how empowering we found them, regardless of the racial and age diversity we showcased, and regardless of the fact that they were run by a woman and benefited women, pin-up calendars added to an existing environment in which women were seen first as sexual objects and maybe if they’re lucky they’d later be seen as human beings with thoughts and desires of their own. Back in 2005, I thought skeptics weren’t affected by the patriarchy and that misogyny was something left to the religious. In a community like that, a pin-up calendar of women would be absolutely fine. I learned that a community like that does not exist and it was naive of me to assume otherwise.

Yes. That was why I was never on it, in a nutshell, but for all I knew the fans of the idea knew better than I did.

2. Adding a calendar of men did not balance out the calendar of women. In a perfect non-patriarchal world, it would, but what I realized was that the women in the calendars were not being seen in the same way as the men in the calendars. The women were objectified on a level unmatched by those viewing and commenting on the men. This was something difficult for me to objectively evaluate at the time and was just a hunch based on my casual observations, but that hunch was confirmed last year when I had shitlord after shitlord emailing me to tell me that I have no right to complain about being groped or propositioned at conferences because I posed in a calendar for skeptics (see my filthy slut photo as the featured image on this post).

Sigh.

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