You know Rawls and the veil of ignorance?

John Scalzi offers the same metaphor but in a different vocabulary.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Commenters point out that there are other variables – money, class, ability/disability, etc. True. Straight White Male doesn’t name all the ways there are to be better off than other people, for sure. But the metaphor itself is useful. Especially when you’re reminded of a couple of things.

And maybe at this point you say, hey, I like a challenge, I want to change my difficulty setting! Well, here’s the thing: In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun. And you say, okay, but what if I want to replay the game later on a higher difficulty setting, just to see what it’s like? Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.

Your quest for donuts starts…now.

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

One of the most painful passages to write in Does God Hate Women? was the one about women accused of being witches in Ghana. It drew on news reports, like this from the New Jersey Star Ledger:

Near death after a 30-mile, weeklong walk, Tarana says she arrived at the Gambaga camp, which has sheltered accused witches since the late 18th century. Chief Ganbaraaba, she says, took her in, had her wounds tended to, and sent for Tarana’s children.

Not one has come.

You can see why that segment was tough going.

Another one:

While Adijah Iddrissu’s doll-like hands busy themselves shelling groundnuts, her large piercing eyes track her grandmother.

At 7, Adijah already has put in a year at Kpatinga…

Iddrissu explains: ‘I would love to send Adijah to school, but I really need her to work.’

Fifteen of the 45 outcasts at Kpatinga have a granddaughter with them. Like Adijah, none goes to school. What’s worse, many of the girls cannot slide back into their communities after their grandmothers die. To do so means being stigmatized possibly stoned — as punishment for associating with a witch.

They, too, will live out their lives in exile.

Burkina Faso is taking some small steps to help women accused of being witches.

In Burkina Faso, when a death is deemed suspicious, a group of men carry the corpse through the community, believing the deceased will guide them towards the person responsible for the death. The accused – almost always women – are then chased out of their homes.

According to the ministry for social action and national solidarity, about 600 women across the country have fallen victim to this practice. Most have found precarious shelter at one of 11 centres around the country, run by NGOs.

The steps are small though. Some say too small.

Although civil society and human rights organisations welcomed the action plan, they are not entirely satisfied with the government’s ambition on the issue.

“Contrary to what many people think, we could quickly put an end to this phenomenon,” said Zongo, who directs CJP’s programmes against social exclusion. “It calls for clear legislation; for example, we could ban ‘the bearing of the body’. The authorities must be more ambitious to achieve the plan’s objectives. We feel they are not very proactive.”

…

Dacouré believes any approach that attempts simply to punish people who threaten and beat women accused of witchcraft will fail. She points out that such actions are carried out by crowds that are difficult to prosecute, convict and sentence en masse. Instead, she suggests measures that would oblige the head of the community, perhaps even the chief, to pay damages to the victim.

“I’m convinced that when we target the wallets of these people who burn down women’s houses, who assault and exclude women like this – when, instead of the government taking care of the victims, we go into their pockets for money to reintegrate people – they’ll think more carefully before they act,” said Dacouré.

Crowds, is it? So…these women are scapegoats? Hate figures set up for the pleasure and amusement of the crowd? What does that remind me of…

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

E. J. Dionne, pleased with himself, tells us he’s not going to leave the Catholic church.

I’ve never been a fan of Dionne’s. He’s so centrist, so conventional, so smugly mainstream, so insistent on received wisdom.

So it figures that he would get all bristly at the idea that the Catholic church isn’t a wholly admirable institution.

He’s in a huff that FFRF ran that ad urging liberal Catholics to drop the ‘Catholics’ part.

Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.

I’m sorry to inform the FFRF that I am declining its invitation to quit. They may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized.

Oh shut up. Nobody’s asking you to ignore any good done, but paying attention to good done is not a reason for continuing to support an organization that also does immense harm, and attaches strings to even the good that it does.

And on women’s rights, I take as my guide that early feminist, Pope John XXIII. In Pacem in Terris, his encyclical issued in 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” Pope John spoke of women’s “natural dignity.”

“Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument,” he wrote, “they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.”

You want to go there? Ok. Let’s take a look at Pacem in Terris.

The bit that Dionne quotes is in a section titled “Characteristics of the Present Day.” It starts with working men, and then goes on to women. The next section is titled “Equality of Men.” It begins

Today, on the contrary the conviction is widespread that all men are equal in natural dignity; and so, on the doctrinal and theoretical level, at least, no form of approval is being given to racial discrimination. All this is of supreme significance for the formation of a human society animated by the principles We have mentioned above, for man’s awareness of his rights must inevitably lead him to the recognition of his duties. The possession of rights involves the duty of implementing those rights, for they are the expression of a man’s personal dignity. And the possession of rights also involves their recognition and respect by other people.

Notice anything? Men. A man’s personal dignity.

I’m not convinced that Pacem in Terris belongs on the shelf next to Friedan’s book.

For the rest of the piece he scolds the bishops a lot. Well quite – but why is that not a reason to vote by leaving? The bishops are the ones calling the shots, not the rebel nuns and the Washington Post columnists.

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

I’ve just started reading Alom Shaha’s The Young Atheist’s Handbook, and it’s wonderful. Gripping, moving, funny, thoughtful – all the good things.

In the introduction he talks about “things in primary school which made me suspect that I had gotten a raw deal in having been born Muslim.” Other kids didn’t have to go to a religious building after school; they didn’t have to fret about being “good Christians”; their lives didn’t revolve around religion – plus Jesus sounded like a lovely man.

I couldn’t even read ‘our’ holy book because it was written in Arabic and, according to our local imam, all it seemed to say was that we should be really, really scared of Allah and that anyone who was not a Muslim was going to burn in the fires of hell for eternity. [p 13]

Not an attractive takeaway for a child, or for anyone.

There was a lot of Christmas stuff at school, and it was fun -

…a general having of the kind of fun that Muslims never seemed to have. The Ayatollah Khomeini once wrote, ‘Allah did not create man so that he could have fun’, and at times it felt to me like this was the dominant theme of Islam – the forbidding of fun. [p 13]

In chapter 2 he mentions being brought up, like many children,

with the notion that there is an invisible, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural being who would reward me if I was ‘good’ and punish me if I was ‘bad’. There was surely a period in my childhood where I believed this… [p 45]

I love that ’surely’, because it’s something I puzzle over, too. I can’t remember ever really believing it, so I have to suspect I didn’t. I think if I had ever really believed it, it would have been a big enough thing that I would remember it. Instead I remember things like Howdy Doody and Clarabelle.

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

There’s another thing about Romney’s chuckle chuckle notpology.

“Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” Romney said in a live radio interview with Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade.

Here’s what the other thing is about that. He was responding to the Washington Post article, so he knew what he was notpologizing for – he knew that it was for collecting at least five other senior boys to attack a junior boy, hold him down while he screamed for help, and cut off his hair.

Yet his response is to say “if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that.” If? If? If anybody was “hurt” or “offended” by being attacked by a gang of older boys?

What does he mean “if”? What can he possibly mean by it?

There is no “if.” It’s not an iffy thing. Assault isn’t conditional in that way. Assault isn’t a matter of taste – no, not even for masochists; assaulting a masochist is still assault. There is no “if.” Romney doesn’t get to change the well-understood meaning of things like a gang of boys attacking one younger boy, because he wants to make himself look better.

It’s odd, really. He could have done better. He could have promptly admitted it was a dreadful thing to do, and talked about how horrible it was for John Lauber, and said he feels really terrible that he was a mean, privileged bully as a teenager. I should think that would play better even as public relations. Instead he laughed, and minimized it as dumb, and made his apology conditional on people being petty and whiny enough to be “offended” by being attacked by a gang of older boys.

So he’s a shit; instinctively a shit. Not surprising, but not pleasing, either.

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

Obama seems to be hoping Afghan women will just fade into the background now.

Obama’s lack of overt attention to Afghan women has led many to fear their hard-fought gains will slip away as the United States hands off security responsibility to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with ever-present Taliban leaders still holding sway in much of the countryside.

Women’s issues are not on the formal agenda at the NATO summit the United States will be hosting in Chicago later this month. Afghanistan is poised to send an all-male delegation.

Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said it was “really worrying” that Obama only made a passing reference to women on his trip to Afghanistan last week, when he affirmed a general need “to protect the human rights of all Afghans – men and women, boys and girls.”

Not even putting women and girls first - making them second, just as the Taliban does.

For more than a year, the White House has been pursuing, with little success, reconciliation talks involving the Islamist group that could give it a share of power in Kabul.

“When you are negotiating with the Taliban, ensuring the rights of women is not a simple matter,” Nossel said. “In that sense you can understand why they are not talking about it but that is why it is doubly worrying.”

From everything I know it’s not so much not a simple matter, it’s impossible. Crushing women is always the Taliban’s very first priority. It’s the first thing they did when they first won the battle.

Over the past year, the volunteer group Young Women For Change glued more than 700 posters around Kabul showing a woman’s veiled face that read: “don’t grab my hair/don’t throw stones in my face/I can stand on my own two feet/I can build this country with you together.”

Almost all the posters were torn down within days.

Sigh.

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

And speaking of people getting all up in your face – there’s also the hot fashion for saying people who insult Mo should be killed. For once an official body is taking that seriously as what it obviously is: incitement to murder.

A British TV channel that broadcast a talk saying it is acceptable to murder someone who has shown disrespect to the prophet Muhammad is facing a heavy fine or potential closure by Ofcom.

…

The media regulator commissioned two English translations of the programme which revealed that the presenter of the show said: “If someone takes a step in the love of the Prophet, then this is not terrorism.” He also made a number of comments citing a “duty” to kill those who insult Mohammed, including: “I hail those who made this law [Pakistan's blasphemy law] which states that one who insults the prophet deserves to be killed – such a person should be eliminated.”

Ofcom said: “We considered that the broadcast of the various statements made by the Islamic scholar … was likely to encourage or incite the commission of a crime.”

Oh now that’s a welcome sound, like rushing water in a desert. The statements made by the Islamic scholar are likely to encourage or incite the commission of a crime, and a nasty crime at that – murdering someone for saying something about a guy who’s been dead for 14 centuries. Well done Ofcom.

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

Is it a free speech issue or a right not to be proselytized against your will issue?

Is there a difference?

Not really; it’s more that the two are in tension. People have a right to proselytize, but they also have a right to refuse to be proselytized. What do you do when the two clash?

Or, more pertinently, maybe you think people don’t have a right to refuse to be proselytized. But I mean actively proselytized as opposed to passively. No, people don’t have a right to obliterate all sources of proselytization, but yes, they have a right to tell other people to stop pestering them.

The Nova Scotia student who was suspended for wearing a T shirt saying “Life is wasted without Jesus” after he’d been told not to, was doing more than just wearing a T shirt.

Students said William Swinimer has been preaching and making them feel uncomfortable, and the shirt was the last straw so they complained.

“He’s told kids they’ll burn in hell if they don’t confess themselves to Jesus,” student Riley Gibb-Smith said.

Katelyn Hiltz, student council vice-president, agreed the controversy didn’t begin with the T-shirt.

“It started with him preaching his religion to kids and then telling them to go to hell. A lot of kids don’t want to deal with this anymore,” she said.

And they shouldn’t have to. They’re a captive audience. They have to be in school. Having to be in school shouldn’t mean having to be harangued by a religious zealot. That would apply to an atheist zealot too, by the way (but atheists are so much less likely to do that kind of thing, and threats of hell are right out).

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

Right. Romney looks back on his high school “pranks”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urjn5CjVbak

He chuckles a good deal, in a “we all know this is no big deal” way.

He does the classic notpology – “if anyone was offended or hurt by that” then he’s totes sorry but they’re obviously oversensitive.

Hey the guy was closeted! So obviously he Romney had no idea.

You know how boys are. [indulgent chuckle]

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

What about Mitt Romney and his fun-loving ways at prep school? What about that time he rallied a bunch of fellow seniors to tackle a junior, hold him down, and cut his hair off?

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

It’s a plant! This Friedemann fella is a secret friend of Obama’s.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified.

Oh. Probably not a plant then.

I’ve seen a lot of “he was young” commentary. But he wasn’t all that young: he was a senior in high school. By that age you’re sort of expected to control impulses to tackle people and cut off their hair. You’re also sort of expected to know how to live and let live. You’re expected to grasp that whatever your likes and dislikes may be, you don’t get to enforce them on other people with physical force.

Notice, too, that Romney collected a gang of people to tackle this one kid – who was a target for being Not Manly Enough.

Romney sounds like a high school shit. Yes, some people are high school shits and then improve – but some are just shits.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

So the others are troubled by it but Romney isn’t. The others feel remorse and Romney apparently doesn’t. That too is interesting.

His campaign is portraying him as a likable, funny guy at prep school, and that apparently fits the record. But.

But Friedemann and several people closest to Romney in those formative years say there was a sharp edge to him. In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.

It’s not entirely out of the norm in the culture of this time and place, either. “Like a girl” – still a popular insult; just ask Tom Harris MP. But the norm is never universal, and it wasn’t universal even then. Some people are thoughtful enough to realize that the norm can be stupid or vicious or both.

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

Strange but true.

An Iranian cartoonist has been sentenced to 25 lashes for a caricature of a local MP, the semi-official Ilna news agency has reported.

Ahmad Lotfi Ashtiani, MP for Arak, took offence to a cartoon published in Nameye Amir, a city newspaper in Arak.

 What can one say? When one is familiar with the principle that the people are allowed to criticize people such as employers and monarchs and MPs, what can one say about a cartoonist being sentenced to whipping for a mild cartoon like the above?

Shokraye was subsequently sued by the MP for having insulted him. A court in Markazi province, of which Arak is the capital, sentenced the cartoonist to 25 lashes – an unprecedented punishment for an Iranian cartoonist.

His sentence has triggered outcry among Iran’s online community with many calling on cartoonists to draw new caricatures of the MP. Many have expressed their anger on Twitter and Facebook.

Speaking to the Guardian, Nikahang Kowsar, a prominent Iranian cartoonist who fell foul of the Iranian regime after famously caricaturing a prominent cleric like a crocodile in a series of cartoons, said: “This verdict is a direct threat to each and every cartoonist working inside Iran. From now on, if this sentence is not set aside, any public official could sue the cartoonists for portraying him/her in a cartoon.”

You know what to do. If you have any cartooning talent, get out there and put it to good use.

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

We’ve had it wrong all this time – it’s not women who are kept down and held back and put in their place, it’s men. And it’s not just anonymous ranters on Reddit who say so, either.

In The Second Sexism, shortly to be published in the UK, David Benatar, head of the philosophy department at Cape Town University, argues that “more boys drop out of school, fewer men earn degrees, more men die younger, more are incarcerated” and that the issue is so under-researched it has become the prejudice that dare not speak its name.

“It’s a neglected form of sexism,” Benatar says in a telephone interview. “It’s true that in the developed world the majority of economic and political roles are occupied by males. But if you look at the bottom – for example, the prison population, the homeless population, or the number of people dropping out of school – that is overwhelmingly male. You tend to find more men at the very top but also at the very bottom.”

I suspect that’s his own particular definition of “the bottom.” I suspect there are a lot of women on the bottom too – for example, the wives and daughters of male prisoners and the homeless population and the droppers out of school. But in any case that casual admission plus brisk dismissal of the fact that most economic and political roles are occupied by males is pretty absurd.

Men are also increasingly the butt of jokes.

Riiight - that’s why Tom Harris says a protester who throws an egg and runs away is “like a girl.”

Give me a break.

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

On the one hand, yes, religion as mostly practiced and interpreted now is illiberal and intolerant and sucky, but on the other hand, it always could be fluffier and nicer, if people would only.

But they won’t, so what’s the point of saying that?

Oh, you know…it fills the time. It’s not as hazardous as snowboarding. It’s easy.

Christianity, Islam and the other world faiths shouldn’t be completely disregarded. Many of the ethics they teach – and the faith, and in turn, the security which they offer believers – are far too valuable to ignore; what needs to change is our understanding. It is up to the intellectual religious leaders, who have the ability to engage with the intelligent as well as the uneducated, to renovate religion.

No. The items that are too valuable to ignore? Here’s the thing: they’re not inherently religious. They don’t depend on religion. We don’t need to keep religion to keep the items. We don’t decide which items are valuable and which are sucky on the basis of religious criteria; we use other criteria, as Plato pointed out such a god damn long time ago. We can make our own good things. We can transmit them, we can teach them, we can defend them, we can enshrine them in bills and declarations of human rights. We don’t need god to help. We do it better without god.

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

Four men in Iran are due to be hanged very soon – as in, any time now – as their sentence has been approved by a hight court.

According to HRANA and JOOPEA, these four men will be hanged for sodomy according Shari’a law.

…

London based Iranian Human Rights Lawyer, Mehri Jafari said: ‘I am horrified and saddened to have heard the news about these four men. Not only with regards to the execution which is about to take place, but the fact that is beyond our control.

‘There are two important issues in this case; the location of the alleged occurrence and the interpretation of the Sharia’ law that a Hodud (strict Sharia punishment) is [im]minent.  Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad is one of the most undeveloped provinces in Iran and it is obvious that a lack of access to lawyers and fair trial can be considered a serious issue in this case. After this announcement it is very likely that the execution will be carried out soon, and the remote location makes it difficult to exert any influence on the process.’

Mehri further pleaded: ‘I hope international organisations act quickly and effectively on this specific case.’

So, spread the word.

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

Richard Carrier has a great extended interview with Susan Haack.

One sample:

But I’m also sure that many of the “difficulties and annoyances” of my life in philosophy have arisen, not simply because I’m a woman, but because of other characteristics of mine—though I suspect people find some of these particularly hard to take in a woman. For one thing, I’m very independent: rather than follow philosophical fads and fashions, I pursue questions I believe are important, and tackle them in the ways that seem most likely to yield results; I am beholden to no clique or citation cartel; I put no stock in the ranking of philosophy graduate programs over which my colleagues obsess; I accept no research or travel funds from my university; I avoid publishing in journals that insist on taking all the rights to my work; etc., etc.

Read the whole thing.

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

A student in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta had a good idea for her research project on workplace hazards: high heels. She’s required to wear them herself for her job as a server, and she’s fallen a few times while carrying trays.

It’s brilliant, isn’t it? The job of a server is to carry heavy plates or trays, so naturally the thing to do is handicap them by requiring them to wear shoes that are harder to walk in than shoes without high heels. Naturally. Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it in high heels and backward.

She talked to 35 servers; all had slipped or fallen on the job; 40% said they’d been injured as a result. 91% said they were required to wear high heels for work.

H/t Christopher Moyer.

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

And then, speaking of where you’d prefer to live, there’s life with Ismail Belghar of somewhere in New South Wales.

Belghar, who has been married to his wife for 11 years, became aware she had been to the beach in late 2009 because her shoulders were slightly sunburned.

He rang his sister-in-law and said: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach.”

Just before Christmas, 2009, Ms Kokden came face to face with Belghar while out shopping with her brother at the Broadway Shopping Centre.

Belghar slapped her across the face then carried her to the railing around the car park where he held her out over it.

She was freed when her brother tackled Belghar.

Family life, eh?

The court heard, because of his religious beliefs and because he thought he had absolute authority over her, Belghar felt it “abhorrent” that his wife, Hanife Kokden, had been to the beach where she “displayed her body”.

In March, Judge Ronald Solomon had granted Belghar a trial before a judge sitting alone after agreeing he may not receive a fair trial with a jury.

“The attitude of (Belghar) … is based on a religious or cultural basis. In light of the fact there has been adverse publicity regarding people who hold extreme Muslim faith beliefs in the community, I am of the view that the apprehension by (Belghar) that he may not receive a fair trial is a reasonable apprehension,” Judge Solomon said.

Nicely circular, innit. Belghar has disgusting religious beliefs, along with an opinion that he has absolute authority over his wife. He might not get a fair trial because a jury might dislike his disgusting religious and spousal beliefs. Therefore he can get a judge all to himself.

So the more disgusting your beliefs (and their resulting actions) are, the more special treatment you should get? Is that the logic?

An appeals court overruled the judge, so if that is the logic I guess the court didn’t accept it.

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

Nice. Last month the Muslim Canadian Congress gave Irshad Manji a freedom of speech award – the first “Mansoor Hallaj Freedom of Speech Award.”

I like the picture.

I also like the way Tarek Fatah explained it in the Toronto Sun.

Earlier this week, the Kuwaiti parliament voted to institute the death penalty against any Muslim who is judged by Islamic clerics to have insulted God.

As medieval as this may sound to the ears of the Western non-Muslim, the threat is real and the target is the millions of Muslims, like me, who are fed up with the clerics who have sucked the joy out of our lives for centuries.

The tradition of silencing dissident Muslims by beheading them is not new; its most famous victim was beheaded in Baghdad over a 1,000 years ago and the most recent ones are the victims of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Today, at the Toronto Public Library on Palmerston Street, a group of Muslims are going to say “Enough is enough.” They will honour a 21st century Muslim reformer in the name of a 10th century Muslim rebel who died for speaking the truth. This will be their rebuke to the Kuwaiti parliament.

Where would you prefer to live? Tarek Fatah’s Toronto or Kuwait?

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