Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says music is permitted but bad and nasty.

Khamenei said: “Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.”…”It’s better that our dear youth spend their valuable time in learning science and essential and useful skills and fill their time with sport and healthy recreations instead of music.

Because…music, while permitted, is not a healthy recreation. It’s a recreation, but not a healthy one. It’s permitted, but it’s ungood. Why? Well because it’s pretty, and pleasurable, and emotive, and often sexy, and often exciting. We can’t be having any of that. It’s not healthful. Or useful. Or good. Or compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic. Which are established by a guy with a black cushion on his head, who looks as if he doesn’t rock out much.

Khamenei’s views are interpreted as administrative orders for the whole country, which must be obeyed by the government. Last month Khamenei issued a controversial fatwa in which he likened his leadership to that of the Prophet Muhammad and obliged all Iranians to obey his orders.

Controversial – really? I can’t imagine why. Guy says he’s like Mo and all Iranians have to do what he says. What’s the problem? It simplifies life. So does not having music. Simplicity is good, because it keeps people out of badness. Complicated things are bad.

Comment is Free Belief asks “Can we choose what we believe?” Usama Hasan answers briskly right from the outset.

God exists, obviously.

Oh; all right then! Nothing further to think about. He goes on to point out that the Qur’an says so, and give the sura where it says so. Then he gets to the thinky part.

God is a given, and our lives are an opportunity to learn about and experience God in countless different ways because the universe is a collection of theophanies: God’s infinite variety of names is manifested throughout the diversity of nature that includes our complex, intertwined lives.

He forgets to explain how he knows that.

Part I of this is getting long, so I might as well start another.

Redundancies was one I meant to do yesterday, and forgot.

• The reason why. Superfluous.
• The British “in an hour’s time.” Really superfluous. Why is “in an hour’s time” better than “in an hour”? It isn’t. It doesn’t add anything. Once you notice it, it sounds incredibly stupid.

It’s amusing that BBC presenters thoroughly mispronounce “Barack” when Catherine Sangster of the BBC Pronunication Unit has told them and everyone how it’s done. Doesn’t the BBC Pronunication Unit catch prominent mistakes of this kind? I mean the guy’s name comes up pretty often – you’d think someone would eventually notice. And they must get mail.

His name should be pronounced buh-RAAK oh-BAA-muh. When he first came to prominence, there was some disagreement about his first name, which was also sometimes pronounced buh-RACK or even BARR-uhk, but our recommendation is based on the pronunciation he uses himself…

Well quite. (And by the way it’s basically the same as Baruch – so it’s not as alien as all that.)

And then there’s the British insistence on pronouncing every single French word or name with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable, which is pretty much always wrong. Balzac, Renoir, Degas, Sarkozy, Chirac, café, etc etc etc.

But there’s also the Yank way with the letter T. Budder, bedder, pidder padder.

So it goes.

Drat. I thought I was going to be able to drop the subject now, but Aratina Cage pointed out another item. There was another dust-up at the Intersection last March, that I didn’t follow closely at the time. This one was by Kirshenbaum, and it involved taking some unattractive bluster in a few comments at Pharyngula as literal threats of violence against women. You know: as in taking “fuck you” as a threat of rape. I didn’t follow it closely because I didn’t feel like defending unattractive bluster, but I never thought it equated to literal threats.

In any case, as Aratina points out, the thread is full of comments by TJ under his many many fake names. The thread is still there. The whole thing is an attempt to make Pharyngula, and by extension gnu atheists, look bad. It’s full of fraud, and it hasn’t been corrected or even updated.

TJ got in there in a hurry. Milton C did the second comment. Philip Jr did 3, Seminatrix did 4, bilbo did 6, Vyspyr did 8, Petra did 9 and 14, bilbo did 15 and 17 and 20, Milton C did 21. Then TJ dropped out for awhile, then Petra returned at 93, Seminatrix 107, 109, 110, Milton 112, Polly-O 115, Seminatrix 118, 120 (saying “I think it paints PZ in a bad light”), 123, Philip Jr 128, 131, Seminatrix 138, 141, 142…and so on. That’s all of Kirshenbaum’s homework I’m going to do. I think Philip Jr and Vyspyr are suspected socks rather than confirmed socks; the others are solid.

So there it is. A large number of comments by a known fraud, sitting there saying variations on “I think it paints PZ in a bad light” over and over and over and over again. Not updated, not disavowed, not stamped with a warning.

That’s “journalism”; that’s “civility”; that’s “I don’t like labels”; that’s “commitment to the truth”; that’s dealing with “sore and unjustified abuse.”

So: Sheril Kirshenbaum: you need to fix that.

Jerry has a post on most-hated verbal infelicities. Solecisms, he elegantly says, but I’m going to be cagy, in order to avoid the obligatory lecture about How Language Works. There are no Mistakes; whatever most people do is Right; language is constantly evolving; lots of putative rules are just made up; language is arbitrary; what you think is a new Mistake actually goes back to Knut. Right. Got all that. Not talking about Mistakes. Talking about things I don’t like.

Because I thought I would mention a few things I don’t like.

• May instead of might. “If things had been different Hitler may have won the war.” No; he might have, but it is not the case that he may have; we know that he didn’t, so “may” is the wrong word.
• Impact as a verb.
• Beg the question used to mean raise the question.
• Dangling clauses. “Walking up the hill, a dog grabbed my lunch.”

And then there are some oddities of British English.

• Making up their own way of pronouncing Barack. I don’t get this. Why don’t people just take their lead from how he says it himself? Why do they think they get to have their own way of saying other people’s names? BBC reporters pronounce it in a really bizarre and stupid way – Ba-rakk, with the “Ba” pronounced as if it rhymed with hat. The two syllables rhyme – two short flat as, and with equal emphasis (a spondee). That’s comprehensively wrong. It’s pronounced like Barock, with the first syllable a schwa and the second accented. What’s the problem there? It’s not somehow hard for British people to say, the way a French r is hard for all anglophones to say. So why won’t they say it right? It’s so rude. It’s not as if it’s a word they already have a settled pronunciation for, so why do they insist on doing it wrong?
• Intrusive R. Laura norder, North career, Indier and China.
• Over-corrected missing R. They ah in the house. That one is perhaps a bit fussy, but it gets on my nerves. Since intrusive R is so pervasive in contemporary British English, why not just get over it and say they are in the house? People who make a self-conscious effort not to pronounce the intrusive R give an irritating little hitch when they say things like “ah in the house” – there’s a little pause and glottal stop there that just isn’t necessary. Go ahead, say are in; ah rin; it’s allowed even in your terms.
• Squeezed vowels. There are some accents (and I don’t know which ones – I don’t know enough to locate them – not Liverpool or Northern or West Country or East End or estuary) where the oo sound is so squeezed it sounds like ee. Troops are treeps. It’s irritating.

There, that’s enough being annoying for now.

There are no Mistakes, but on the other hand, there is good writing and bad writing. I’m an editor, and I do a lot of work on small verbal items of this kind. I use the subjunctive; I turn “impact” into “affect” or “harm”; I fix dangling clauses.

I also think that a lot of putative rules are made up though. The rule about prepositions at the end of a sentence, for instance – that’s a nonsense rule. Granted it can sometimes sound clumsy and inelegant to end a long complicated sentence with “of” or “for”…but it can also sound stilted and Martian to do the “of which” thing. I once had a very stilted “for which” thing in an article for TPM, and I wanted to change it into normal English, but I hesitated to do that to the author, who might think the rule is important. So I consulted Julian, and he said “normal every time!” That was what I thought. Sometimes “for which” is ok, but sometimes it just sticks out; this time it stuck out; TPM should be readable.

And that’s how it is in general. You want some flexibility, and a lot of sense of which rules (or “rules”) matter more than others, and a decent ear.

Mark Jones pointed this out in a comment. If this is accommodationism even I can live with it.

Today’s science-oriented atheists call us into right relationship with our time, and that means using all of our best information and cross-cultural experience.

Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. It is also a time of smart bombs, collapsing economies, and exploding oil platforms. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers.

So let today’s collective intelligence revitalize our faith traditions! Let us rejoice in the discovery that the atoms of our bodies were forged inside supernovas, and let us celebrate this natural process as divine.

Let the story of evolution be told in ways that engender familial love and gratitude that we are related to everything—not just monkeys, but jellyfish and zucchini too. Let us marvel at how rapidly our species has learned to care and cooperate in ever-widening circles: from family groups and tribes all the way to nation-states, and now globally.

An evolutionary God can be as vast, as real, and as all embracing as our creative Cosmos and no more inclined than the Universe to take sides in matters of war, weather, or geological upheaval.

All right! Let’s do that! Or let’s you do that, and I’ll just skip the words God and divine but I promise not to scowl or squirm or look out the window when you do, and we’ll all join hands and love each other to bits.

So, as I mentioned, a late reply to Mooney’s post about me on July 12.

We stopped allowing Benson to comment here back in mid 2009, for very good reasons–among other things, she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.

You can read the thread where they made this reasonable decision. My comments are numbers 35, 37, 90 and 92. They’re not flamey. Then at 104 we get TB:

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying…

Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions…

Benson is a troll – she’s added nothing to the conversation and deliberately misleads people about the content of the book. She has her own site to do that on – ban her here.

I asked M&K to delete the assertions that I was lying – I didn’t “demand,” I asked – but they did what TB demanded instead, and banned me shortly after that. I think that’s disgusting. Today, on the other hand, Mooney deleted part of a comment by Hitch, that Hitch then posted elsewhere:

And how Jean used snide remarks against New Atheists throughout.

That’s it – that’s what Hitch wrote, that’s what Mooney deleted. His rules are somewhat arbitrary.

The whole of the rest of the post deals with the fact that I said it was “bilbo” who called me a liar; my mistake, it was TB. That makes M&K look even worse, actually, because TB (Tim Broderick) is still a valued commenter, who has just succeeded in bullying Hitch off the Intersection. “bilbo” was one of “Tom Johnson”‘s sock puppets, but TB is a real and trusted regular fan and commenter – who announces that people are lying when they’re not. I should have checked again, of course; I should have gotten the right name; but the defense of allowing their fans to call their critics liars while preventing the critics from replying is not convincing. It’s also distasteful that it is made on a post where the comments are closed. It was distasteful on the “new atheists are medieval witch hunters baying for blood” post at Talking Philosophy, it was distasteful on the “Believe Me” post at Kazez’s blog, and it’s distasteful in Mooney’s post about me.

Mooney has done another “What Tom Johnson has taught Me” post. It repairs some previous omissions, so it is a small improvement, but it is flawed.

I regret that I gave this story undue prominence, and I want to apologize to all who were affected by that action.

No he doesn’t, not really. As usual, he omits some people, so he doesn’t want to apologize to all who were affected by that action. He doesn’t want to apologize to me, for instance. I was affected by that action. He shouldn’t give himself the moral credit for a blanket apology when he’s not in fact making one.

Mooney goes on to insinuate that gnu atheists did something to make Tom Johnson so crazy – but – that is

no justification for the trumped-up original story or for his other actions—which, as we now know, included creating multiple sock puppets over a long period of time and using them to nastily trash his “New Atheist” opponents.

Yes, and it was Mooney who hosted those sock puppets; it was Mooney who banned me for asking him questions about his book while allowing those sock puppets to trash-talk about his gnu atheist opponents, for months. Mooney helped to create the climate in which TJ grew and festered. Mooney obviously liked the nasty trashing of the gnu atheist opponents; that’s obvious because Mooney has a very quick hand with the delete button, so if he doesn’t delete something, it’s safe to assume that he likes it. TJ is the child of Mooney – that is, a product of the vituperative atmosphere Mooney created.

We are left with no reliable evidence of loud, boorish, confrontational public behavior by atheists at events with religious believers. Those who have problems with the “New Atheism” should not use this line of argument in their critiques, unless or until such evidence is produced.

We never had any such reliable evidence. We’ve had ten months with this lie out there, painting gnu atheists as rude stupid belligerent vulgarians. It’s ten months too late to say we have no reliable evidence for that now. We never did have. Mooney should have been able to see that last October.

Jean Kazez…has been sorely and unjustly abused online over this affair…

Bullshit. She’s been disputed and criticised, not abused and not unjustly. She wasn’t, for instance, called anything even approaching “useless putrid twat.” I was. Kazez was not subject to any misogynist raving, but I was. Yet Mooney weeps crocodile tears for Kazez and doesn’t mention me. Mooney probably realizes that he did a lot to create TJ and his sock puppets, and thus that he did a lot to inspire the sewage that TJ and his socks flung at me; but he doesn’t mention me. Mooney is at fault here, but he doesn’t mention it. His post is, as I mentioned, incomplete.

In conclusion, I want to thank everyone who has tried to establish and to explain the truth here: “Johnson’s” adviser and Jerry Coyne; and also TB and Jean Kazez.

That’s another one of those fake blankets. I did a lot more to try to establish the truth “here” than TB and Kazez did. I also did in fact point some of it out a hell of a lot sooner than they did – starting last October. So when Mooney says “everyone” he is misleading the reader; he doesn’t mean “everyone” at all. He doesn’t, for instance, mean me. Well he should. I suspect he knows he should. But he won’t admit it.

Furthermore, to repeat, TB is not a truth-seeker. TB called me a liar just for asking M&K a list of questions about their book. I was not lying when I did that. TB is not an honest broker here.

I’m disturbed that someone on my “side” of this debate would do the things “Johnson” has done, painting a group as uncivil based on what is at best a serious exaggeration, while simultaneously spewing reams of incivility towards that group online, under multiple identities. There is no excuse for such behavior–and moreover, there has been a very big cost in this case to a lot of people, both in time and in grief.

Quite, and I’m the one who got the worst of the spewed reams of incivility; yet Mooney never mentions me throughout the post.

If there is any silver lining at all here, perhaps after working to find out the truth together about “Tom Johnson,” so-called “New Atheists” and “accommodationists” might feel the inclination to be just a little bit more civil and trusting towards one another. We do have a shared commitment to the truth, and a means of discerning it—and those have won out in this case. Let’s not forget that as we carry on the argument for science and reason in the future.

Oh dear god. Mooney is the one who picked this fight, and then went on picking it and picking it and picking it – pissing on gnu atheists in every major media outlet that invited him, for months – yet he pretends both sides are equally to blame. And as for the shared commitment to truth…………that’s just beyond even ridicule. Let’s not forget that Chris Mooney is the last person in the world to be giving advice on either “civility” or truth-seeking.

Christina Patterson accepts a little too much.

 I accept that people should, except in certain professional situations which involve dealing with the public, be allowed to wear whatever they like, and that laws which prevent this are self-defeating, and that you can’t stop parents, or rabbis, teaching little boys that adult women shouldn’t even be brushed against on a bus, and I accept that some of these things are an inevitable consequence of a modern, and in many ways magnificent, multi-cultural society.

I don’t think we have to accept that you can’t stop parents, or rabbis, teaching little boys that adult women are contaminants. We have to accept that you can’t forcibly, physically stop them, but we don’t have to accept that you can’t slowly and carefully and fairly stop them by teaching them better. We don’t have to just shrug and say “oh well if parents or rabbis want to teach little boys that women are filthy, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Yes there is, and we have to do what we can about it, just as we do if parents or clerics are teaching children that black people, or dalits, or Jews, or foreigners, or atheists are filthy. We have to do what we can, consistent with liberal norms of freedom and autonomy, to counter ideas of that kind: ideas that are baseless and harmful and at the extreme dangerous.

It was fun last night. PZ was there, Cam and Josh were there, and about thirty other interesting people were there. We bayed for blood, we cooked little children into soup, we tore up holy books, we made plans for world domination. The usual.

It seems unlikely that there is anyone in the Seattle area who reads me but doesn’t read Pharyngula, but just in case there is, PZ is in town (in Auburn actually) and we’re going to meet up at the Pike Place Brewery so that Pharyngulites can buy us a beer. Cam and Josh will be there I think. Come along.

Jerry Coyne has done a post on “Tom Johnson” and “Exhibit A” and the mythical rudeness and savagery and tendency to spit and kick of the mythical “New Atheists.”

The upshot is, Exhibit A never happened. It was a story. The guy who played the part of “Tom Johnson” made it up. He has apologized to Jerry via email, and says he will apologize to other people soon.

So that’s that. The “new atheists are evil and Exhibit A may have happened” crowd are wrong, and we can stop arguing about it.

There’s another thing.

“Tom Johnson” (hereafter “TJ”) remains anonymous, though his identity is apparently known by Mooney, Jean Kazez, and others.  For a few weeks I have known it as well, as I am friends with some of the principals in this case.  In return for my promise not to reveal TJ’s real name, I have been party to some of the details of the situation presented as “Exhibit A.” I have also questioned the other person who was supposedly involved in that “conservation event.”  I have spoken to TJ’s advisor (Johnson is a graduate student at a university in the South), and have learned more of the details from that person.  TJ has apologized to me by email for his actions, and says he will be apologizing to others soon.  His advisor and his university are looking at his actions to see if any formal academic transgressions occurred. [emphasis added]

He’s being held accountable, so we don’t need to hold him accountable. So that’s that. Excellent. I wanted him to be held accountable in some way, if only to make it more difficult or risky for him to do it again, but I did not want to out him. I wasn’t baying for blood; I wanted accountability for someone who called me a liar and a useless putrid twat. I do not think that makes me a medieval witch-hunter baying for blood. I’m glad we have that straight.

Exactly. If only more people realized this.

It’s a question of integrity. If I don’t agree with some of the church’s most central teachings that rule out – on a spectrum from abomination to sinful – contraception, abortion, sex before marriage, homosexual sex, divorce and women priests, then I really shouldn’t be a member.

Quite right, not least because your membership does its bit to endorse those central teachings. Membership is a kind of vote – passive, but nonetheless countable. If you think some of the church’s most central teachings are reactionary and hostile to women, then quite right, you shouldn’t cast your vote for them.

I haven’t practised since I made my Confirmation, yet my name is still on the membership register, the baptismal roll. The church can count on my apparent allegiance when quoting membership statistics to bolster its authority. It does so routinely when opposing legislative change. In Australia a quarter of the population identifies as Catholic, although only 15 per cent of that quarter attend Mass regularly. In Ireland about 43 per cent of the total population are churchgoers, with about 90 per cent of residents identifying as Catholic. Now, after the clerical child abuse scandals, I’ve had enough. Way too much. I want out.

Quite right. See if you can get Madeleine Bunting to go with you.

Salon has an amusing piece by Alex Pareene on what the pranks of Andrew Breitbart mean. First Pareene quotes Politico’s take on that:

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

then points out

Actually, VandeHarris, lots of people figured this one out! It was really easy!

Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of anything. Some things are not as difficult as some people make out. Obvious glaring fakes are not as hard to spot as some people claim.

Pareene points out a lot of things that made the story look fake to the most casual eye.

Real-life reporters are supposed to be baffled as to how to respond to this fact-lite outrage? Shouldn’t they have just found the full video, or interviewed Sherrod, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did? If you have to write about the latest Breitbart outrage RIGHT THIS SECOND, you write, “Bomb-throwing propagandist with history of disregard for factual accuracy posts race-baiting video intended to score political points against NAACP and black people in general.” It was a really easy story!

Yes, that does sound familiar.

Several people (some via email rather than comments) have pointed out this observation of Glenn Greenwald’s in a letter at Salon:

I think it’d be worth it to sue [Andrew Breitbart] just to uncover his “source” who did the editing. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Ignore the part about suing, that’s not the issue here. The issue is the implicit claim that a fraudulent “source” does not deserve or have a right to remain anonymous and the explicit claim that journalists are supposed to expose such sources when they (the sources) use the journalist to propagate the fraud. The above-mentioned people note that this means Chris Mooney, being a journalist, is supposed to expose his fraudulent “source” who used him to perpetrate a fraud.

That is an interesting point. It prompted me to take another look at those two (everlasting, wretched) “Tom Johnson” posts. Well yes – Mooney does help the fraud to perpetrate smears of Dawkins, PZ and Jerry Coyne.

In Counterproductive Attacks on Religion – Exhibit A “Tom Johnson” says

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like…

In comment 10 on that post “Tom Johnson” corroborates his own story by saying it’s true:

Sorbet, I don’t doubt that you have NA friends who are not combative, but please don’t doubt that I have NA colleagues that are. For what it’s worth, I’m not exaggerating my case or making things up.

Well, it is, of course, worth nothing, and exaggerating and making things up are exactly what he was doing. He goes on, in his pleasant way:

…when I ask them about why they feel that they need to chastise the faithful when they’ve asked us to come help (trust me, we have heated discussions), they directly quote PZ Meyers, Jerry Coyne (especially), and Dawkins as why it should be a “good” scientist’s job these days to attack the faithful – no matter how moderate the faithful may be. I then get called a faithiest (thanks, Jerry Coyne) for NOT calling the religious ignorant and stupid.

So there you have it – a known fraud telling lies about people on the blog of a journalist, who is still protecting his identity. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

On the second post, My Thanks to Tom Johnson, Mooney smeared a number of people:

Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym).

I’m part of that offensively-named “machine” because I did a post, not “targeting” the Tom Johnson post, but pointing out that it looked like bullshit and was the product of an anonymous source and that Mooney, as a journalist, should be more skeptical than that. I was right, and I did nothing wrong in expressing skepticism about “Tom Johnson,” but I was part of the smear based on the lies told by the fraudulent “source.” “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Food for thought.

Martha Nussbaum starts her discussion of burqa bans with her version of the justification for the free exercise clause of the US Constitution and freedom of religion in general. It’s a rather sentimental picture.

Let’s start with an assumption that is widely shared: that all human beings are equal bearers of human dignity.  It is widely agreed that government must treat that dignity with equal respect.   But what is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance?

We now add a further premise: that the faculty with which people search for life’s ultimate meaning — frequently called “conscience” ─  is a very important part of people, closely related to their dignity.

The problem with that as a justification for the free exercise clause and for freedom religious practice is that it’s so incomplete. Nussbaum is very very fond of talking about religion as the way “people search for life’s ultimate meaning,” but that’s far from being all that religion is, and Nussbaum’s presenting it that way is misleading, even obfuscatory. Religion is other things too, including a set of rules. A religious set of rules is often reactionary, and it is always “sacred,” which makes it less accountable to human ideas and wishes, and more difficult to change.

Religion is not just about the individual’s search for meaning; religion is social, and often demanding, or frankly coercive. The free exercise of religion often means the freedom to force subordinates to obey religious rules. Nussbaum makes the whole system sound a lot more benevolent than it can be assumed to be.

That’s especially obvious in the case of the burqa. The burqa is not really part of women’s “search for meaning” in the sense people like Nussbaum, and like me, understand it; it’s part of a system of rules forced on people by tradition and custom and authority. Yes it may be that some people “find meaning” by obeying such rules, but the truth is it doesn’t matter if they do or not; the rules are rules, and they have nothing to do with freedom.

Mona Eltahawy made a compelling point in a discussion of the burqa ban:

What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

Well yes. That’s not a slam-dunk argument for state bans on wearing it, but it is at least part of the picture, which critics of the ban tend not to dwell on.

 I have met Muslim women who have a very elaborate explanation for why they wear the burqa — they say that women are candy or diamond rings or precious stones who have to be hidden away in order to appreciate their worth. And I’m appalled! We should talk about this because if we’re really going to discuss this as feminists, is that something a feminist should be defending? That a woman is a piece of candy?

………..A bowl of ice cream?

People are discussing the uses and abuses of irritation, or anger, or zeal, or dickishness, or baying for blood. This is prompted by a talk Phil Plait gave at The Amaz!ng Meeting a couple of weeks ago. He took an informal poll, Matt D tells us:

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that?…Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?

Not many hands. But as lots of people have pointed out…so what? Hardly anyone does get in people’s faces, screaming, and call them idiots, brain-damaged, retards. Many people do various things that are well short of that, some of which could be considered alienating to some; excessive; tactless; and so on. But that’s not a very exciting claim. Some people are tactless and alienating. Well yes, how true. And?

Stephanie Zvan notes that sometimes a blast of well-directed anger is exactly what’s needed.

a friend gave me Flim Flam. James Randi told me how people had lied to me under the guise of nonfiction, under the guise of science. He was, in fact, kind of a dick about it. That’s not a very nice book by any definition of the word. It uses name-calling. It sneers.

But oh, it was exactly what I needed. I needed it both for the information it gave me and for the anger and vitriol. Without Randi’s vitriol, I wouldn’t have been able to make the clean break in thinking that I did.

PZ says again that things aren’t as simple as mean bastards v wonderful nice people.

Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It’s just not right.

The awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who bay for blood and stomp on small children in Sunday school. Let’s have the complete picture here.

A Cardiff councillor

 is being investigated for allegedly breaching the code of conduct for local authority members which demands they “show respect and consideration for others”.

How? By calling Scientology stupid on Twitter. So showing respect and consideration for others means one is forbidden to call Scientology stupid? Why?

Are we allowed to call astrology stupid? Is it ok to call homeopathy stupid? Can we say belief in alien abductions is stupid?

In other words, does respect and consideration for others cash out to not calling any ideas or ideologies or religions or pseudo-sciences whatsoever “stupid” on the grounds that some people believe in them?

Mr Dixon said: “I don’t see why the Scientologists should have any greater protection from ridicule than I should have as a member of the Liberal Democrats. I can’t believe it has got this far.”

That’s just it. Why, indeed, should they? Just because they call themselves the Church of Scientology?

The Church of Scientology, whose followers include Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, is not recognised as a religion in Britain although it is in the United States.

However, in March last year the Crown Prosecution Service decided that anyone who attacks Scientology can be prosecuted under faith hate laws.

And “attack” of course is defined as “calls stupid” for the purposes of accusing someone of a crime under “faith hate laws.”

Hey, I’ll oblige. I hate “faith” – I hate the word and I hate the thing it nominates. I also hate “faiths”; I also think they’re mostly stupid.

I don’t work for Cardiff council though, so they probably won’t get around to me any time soon. But not for want of ignorant illiberal bedwetters who think people should be forbidden to call unreasonable beliefs stupid.

The complaint was made by John Wood, a member of the Church of Scientology, who lives near the Head Quarters in East Grinstead. He said: “People are free to say what they like but I felt that as a person in a position of public office that he had to be violating some kind of code of conduct.”

People are free to say what they like except they’re not if I can find some pretext to get them into trouble for saying what they like, and fortunately in this case I succeeded in finding one: the guy was violating some kind of code of conduct. So yaboosucks.