Lots of girls calling for help.

Hundreds of children fearing for their lives have called a new national helpline set up to assist victims of forced marriages since its launch four months ago…Many are seeking ways to escape parents and family members who are trying to force them into unwanted marriages. Others have said they fear becoming victims of so-called “honour killings”, because of social and sexual behaviour that their community disapproves of.

A small but nevertheless significant point – if a ‘community’ disapproves of various forms of innocuous social and sexual behaviour enough to motivate killing the people who engage in it, then that ‘community’ is not ‘their community,’ and it’s misleading to call it that. It sounds cozy and loving and protective and, you know, communal, in a good way. But it isn’t any of that, is it – not if it’s so controlling and so puritanical that it prompts some people to murder female relatives. So newspapers should stop calling it that. They should say something blunter and more neutral – their neighbours disapprove of, their co-religionists disapprove of, their parents’ friends disapprove of; something like that.

Run by the refuge charity Karma Nirvana and initially funded by the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit, the network is staffed by survivors of forced marriages who help find refuges for women who predominantly hail from Britain’s south Asian and Middle Eastern communities. According to Jasvinder Sanghera, who was disowned by her family for refusing a forced marriage and went on to set up Karma Nirvana, the youngest caller to the new helpline was 13. “We have to move away from thinking that forced marriages and honour-based violence only affect a few people,” she said. “These numbers will be just the tip of the iceberg.”…When asked to name who was responsible for violence against them, just 13 per cent of victims mentioned husbands, while 71 per cent blamed immediate family. “For me this is one of the most shocking, but insightful statistics,” said Ms Sanghera. “It shows how violence is being perpetrated by the entire community, not just abusive husbands. That’s why it is so hard to tackle and so difficult for people to escape.”

It’s the entire community, and not ‘their’ community; more like their jailer. If it were really ‘their’ community they wouldn’t need to escape.

Hey it’s late September – yet again I’ve forgotten to say Happy Birthday B&W until weeks after the date. Well happy birthday B&W – it’s six years old. More than that, since I’m late. Staggering, isn’t it? Still here after all this time.

Go CFI, go IHEU.

Mr President, integrating the human rights of women throughout the United Nations system must start here in the Human Rights Council. No State should be permitted to hide behind tradition, culture or religion in order to justify any abuse of women’s human rights. This Council is the World’s primary institution charged with the promotion and protection of human rights, and has a sacred duty to fulfil. It must be possible here to freely exercise the right to freedom of expression in order to defend the human rights of all, including women, and to expose abuse, whatever the attempted justification.

Including women indeed; women most of all, since we’re the ones whose rights get snatched away and trampled in the dust by the religious bullies.

But of course Roy Brown wasn’t allowed to get away with it completely unopposed.

Later, a Pakistani delegate stopped Brown on the way to lunch to complain that he had “told only half of the truth” because honour killings were outlawed in Pakistan and that the police had arrested several people in connection with the two barbaric killings we had mentioned. Furthermore, the marriage of young girls was not on the increase in Saudi Arabia as we had claimed.

Too bad the Pakistani delegate is more worried about Roy Brown than about murders of women and child marriage in Pakistan.

Steven Weinberg on living without God.

Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smolder because of the heat of the flame, but because God wants it to darken and smolder.

Not a very curiosity-inspiring way to think about things. Whatever happens happens because God wants it to. Ho hum. What’s for dinner?

I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications—it’s still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.

Quite. This is what all the futile squabbles about what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible miss: it doesn’t matter what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible, all that matters is whether the rule in question is good or (as is all too often the case) jaw-droppingly horrible. If it’s the latter, then don’t obey it; that’s all.

Well I’ve been thinking (and murmuring, much of the time) that this all seemed rather hasty and unconsidered and likely to end in tears. It’s all very well, but writing someone a check for $700 billion to do as he likes with is really a little bit extravagant, when you think about it. I understand that he says the situation is urgent, but all the same, this business of shouting ‘hurry up, right now, there’s no time to lose, don’t stand there talking about it and thinking about the consequences and asking foolish questions and wondering if it will work, we’re in a crisis here, give me the 700 billion dollars right now!’ looks unpleasantly like…a rather bumptious way of bouncing legislators into throwing away a very very very large sum of money. Paul Krugman thinks much the same.

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing?

Hmmmmmm. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. No, on second thought, it isn’t.

[T]he financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital…unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense.

And one of the tweaks that some legislators want to make is to provide help for people who can’t pay their mortgages – by for instance arranging ‘work-outs’ so that they get lower mortgage rates – say 5%. But the trouble with that is – what about all the people who can pay their mortgages (though not easily)? They would like to pay 5% too, presumably; why is it only people who took on too much debt who get to have cheap mortgages? What about people who don’t have mortgages at all, but rent their living space? What do they get? Bupkis. This seems perverse to me. I believe in subsidized housing, but I don’t believe in subsidized mortgages, and I don’t quite see why anyone does. Why stop there? Why not give tax money to people who can’t make their car payments? In a little over your head with that new SUV? Well here, we’ll just slash the interest rate, courtesy of the taxpayer. Feel better?

We can’t have national health insurance, because we just can’t, that’s all, but we can have national mortgage insurance, along with tax benefits for mortgages. Why?

if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place…But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

Why indeed?

Good, the word is getting out. That was the idea. It needs to get out, and it also needs to be not a monopoly of right-wing blogs. This is not an inherently right-wing concern, to put it mildly – and the more it is left as such the more it strikes people as perhaps possibly vaguely racist – but it isn’t – so it’s good that it’s getting out.

PZ gets the word out. The Freethinker does too. Norm also does. Mick Hartley is another. Dale is another.

Austin Dacey has been in Geneva all this month on assignment from the Center for Inquiry to defend human rights against attacks from people who prefer religious rights. Hillel Neuer of UN Watch got down to work the next day.

For several years, states from the Organization of the Islamic Conference have advanced resolutions to combat “the defamation of religion,” which have passed handily. In March, the OIC, aided by Russia, China, Cuba, and the so-called non-aligned states, succeeded in altering the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression to include monitoring and reporting on “abuses” of expression on matters of religion. In late August, an Abuja, Nigeria regional meeting (in preparation for the Durban II conference on racism) issued a Declaration that calls on states to “avoid clinging inflexibly to free speech…with absolute disregard to religious feeling.”

No, not going to do that; going to go on clinging inflexibly to free speech with absolute disregard to religious feeling. Religious feeling going to have to take care of itself. (I know, I’m not a state, but once states avoid clinging inflexibly, they will expect their citizens to do likewise, won’t they.)

One would have thought that the UN would be a citadel for freedom expression, but it has now become home to blasphemy prohibitions. As I mentioned during the panel discussion today, this taboo is now in effect in the chambers of the HRC itself. Late in the eighth session of the HRC, an NGO representative attempted to raise questions about OIC-backed statements of “Islamic human rights,” and he was interrupted by the Pakistani delegation, which claimed that even to discuss such matters was an insult to his faith.

That was our friend David Littman. Austin teams up with David Littman later in the month. Read all of September, he tells about it.

And those of you who have blogs or websites or newspaper columns or radio chat shows – I don’t usually hit you up this way, but I’m going to now – please spread the word about CFI’s report on all this, written by Austin and by Colin Koproske. Lure people in with a teaser if you like, but anyway spread the word. This stuff is way too little reported. Let’s swiftboat it, only without the lying.

And then there is increasingly-Haredi Jerusalem.

Yoel Kreus…describes himself as a ‘shmira’, a Hebrew word that translates as ‘watcher of Israel’. ‘I make sure the rabbis’ decisions happen … I help you to be a moral person,’ he said…Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus’s two-room house…Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed…’Now I’m trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I’m not destroying their car.’

He’s not destroying their car, he’s helping them to be a more moral person. Wearing trousers, of course, is self-evidently immoral.

He maintained that separation was necessary beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood. ‘Having secular people on the buses is a problem. They go like animals, without clothes. Non-religious girls don’t dress properly. They encourage me to sin,’ he said…The transport ministry, which regulates and funds bus transport through private companies, has allowed operators to provide ‘kosher’ or ‘pure’ routes, where women are required to sit at the back and cannot board unless appropriately dressed. More than a dozen women have filed complaints after being verbally or physically attacked on the buses.

Just the other day we were arguing about how secular Israel is. More secular than Iran or Saudi Arabia, certainly, but not as secular as it could be. Not secular enough to prevent women being physically attacked on city buses because religious zealots don’t like the way they’re dressed. Not secular enough.

And speaking of ignorance and silliness, there’s always Theo Hobson.

[A] creationist is not someone who subscribes to the idea of divine creation; it is a believer who refuses to admit the difficulty entailed in Christian faith, who wants it to be as easy as science…[W]hen I say that I believe that God created me, and the whole world, I am making a difficult statement of faith. It is the most difficult statement of faith that can be made: it is saying that I trust God will right all wrongs, cure all pain. For Christians do not just believe that God created the world, but that he created it good, and that this fundamental goodness will ultimately triumph.

A couple of points. One, it’s not just difficult (and for most people it’s not even difficult, it’s dead easy), it’s wicked. Possibly that’s what Hobson means by ‘difficult,’ but if it is it must be cowardice that prevents him from saying so (because why else wouldn’t he say so?). It’s wicked to say all that because it means that all the suffering the world is so full of is ‘good’ and intended by a conscious agent; that’s a bad thing to say. At that rate one could just take Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot to be incarnations of God; at that rate we are trained to embrace cruelty instead of rejecting and reviling it.

The second point is that it’s typical of Hobson’s particular kind of conceit, to say that ‘faith’ is difficult while science is easy. Bullshit. It’s faith that is easy, because it’s an act of will, with no skill or knowledge required; science is difficult because you have to know lots of stuff to do it. It’s just conceited self-flattering rhetoric to reverse the terms that way.

Sam Harris is not entirely impressed by Sarah Palin, or by the fact of her candidacy.

However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride…and, above all, upon the “liberal elites” with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

This is what always infuriates me. Whence comes this conviction that ignorance is a terrific quality for a president to have? Nobody wants a plumber who can’t find the sink, or a pilot who never learned to fly, or a doctor with a fake diploma, or an amateur engineer. Why is the presidency considered a job for ignorant and dim-witted people? I get that ‘likability’ is a huge factor, but I don’t get why people don’t insist that it at least be paired with above-average brains and education.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington…The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation…The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin’s lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary. We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.”

Several women in the US know what it’s like to be a ‘mom’; that by itself is not a reason to elect any one of them to the presidency. Yet apparently people think it is. Is it too late to return to aristocratic government?

Stanley Fish is a smug bastard. This is not news, but he’s smugger than usual in his New York Times blog post on Rushdie and Spellberg and Jones. The first sentence is a staggerer.

Salman Rushdie, self-appointed poster boy for the First Amendment, is at it again.

That just irritates the bejesus out of me. Self-appointed? Poster boy? At it again? Excuse me? He could hardly have been less self-appointed – it was the Ayatollah and his murderous illegal bloodthirsty ‘fatwa’ that appointed Rushdie a supporter of free speech, not Rushdie. And Rushdie defends free speech in general, not the First Amendment in particular; how parochial of smug sneery Fish to conflate the two. And ‘poster boy’; that’s just stupid as well as insultingly patronizing: Rushdie doesn’t swan around with a crutch, he makes arguments in support of free speech. And ‘at’ what again? ‘At’ saying that publishers shouldn’t give in to threats either from Islamists or from academics speaking for notional Islamists or ‘offended’ Muslims who in some distant subjunctive world might be ‘offended’ by a novel about Mohammed’s child ‘bride’? Now that’s ‘self-appointed’ – Denise Spellberg did a lot more self-appointing than Rushdie did.

Random House is free to publish or decline to publish whatever it likes, and its decision to do either has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western tradition of free speech or any other high-sounding abstraction.

Of course Random House is free to publish or not publish, but what happened is not quite that simple; Random House decided to publish and then at almost the last minute decided not to, for a very stupid and craven reason that then became public. That’s not illegal – Random House is ‘free’ to do that (depending on what it says in the contract, that is), but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t point out how stupid and craven Random House is.

Rushdie and the pious pundits think otherwise because they don’t quite understand what censorship is. Or, rather, they conflate the colloquial sense of the word with the sense it has in philosophical and legal contexts. In the colloquial sense, censorship occurs whenever we don’t say or write something because we fear adverse consequences, or because we feel that what we would like to say is inappropriate in the circumstances, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. (This is often called self-censorship. I call it civilized behavior.)

Oh do you; do you really. Someone decides not to write something because (for instance) she fears being killed by enraged Islamists – and you call that ‘civilized behavior’?

I don’t believe a word of it; I don’t believe that even of Stanley Fish; I think he must have lost track of what he’d just said by the time he wrote the bit about civilized behavior. But that was stupid of him, and smug, and sloppy. If he does believe that, then he’s a moral imbecile.

But censorship is not the proper name; a better one would be judgment. We go through life adjusting our behavior to the protocols and imperatives of different situations, and often the adjustments involve deciding to refrain from saying something. It’s a calculation, a judgment call. It might be wise or unwise, prudent or overly cautious, but it has nothing to with freedom of expression.

Oh yes it does. When the ‘imperative’ of a particular ‘situation’ is that our judgment tells us not to write a novel or play or cartoon because of threats of violence then that has a great deal to do with freedom of expression. If we can’t safely write X Y or Z because furious religious zealots might kill us if we do, then we don’t have freedom of expression. It’s been taken away from us by criminal extortionists. Stanley Fish ought not to be so complacent about this.

Hitchens reads Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book.

He can take a long time to show how agonized he is by leftist compromises with every disgraced regime and ideology from Slobodan Milosevic to Islamic jihadism, but the effort expended is worthwhile and shows some of the scars of political warfare from Bangladesh to Bosnia. He is much readier to defend Israel as a democratic cause than are most leftists and many Jews, but he was early in saying that a Palestinian state was a good idea, not because it would appease Arab and Muslim grievances but for its own sake. (This distinction strikes me as both morally and politically important.)

Well yes – very important indeed. Grievances (as I have pointed out more than once) are only as good as they are, and no one should appease them if they stink. It is a grievance to many people that women should be able to go outside without permission; it is a grievance to many people that gays should no longer be ostracized or persecuted; it is a grievance to many people that the pope has limited powers; it is a grievance to many (other) people that sharia is not the law of the world. Grievances, like so many things, have to be judged on their merits.

One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islam­ism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”

That’s the totalitarian temptation all right – no part of life left to the discretion of the owner; everything supervised and controlled and specified (left foot first on entering the toilet); no idling, wandering, dreaming, inventing. Totalism in all directions, as far as the eye can see.

In conclusion, Lévy repudiates radical sympathy with theocracy, and indeed theology, by inverting Pascal and saying that “we have to make an antiwager that we can win not by betting on the existence but on the nonexistence of God. That’s the price of democracy. And the alternative, the only one, is the devil and his legions of murderous angels.”

The die is cast.

Anthony Grayling quotes Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615, in his reply to Steve Fuller’s reply to his review of Fuller’s Dissent Over Descent. Grayling quotes Bellarmine because ‘Fuller’s endeavour turns in important part on trying to show that science is the child of religion, that its styles of thought are religion’s styles, and that the very coherence of the scientific enterprise owes itself to the grand narrative of the religious world-view,’ and the Cardinal does quite a good job of showing why that is a ridiculous notion.

As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers. Now if you will read, not merely the Fathers, but modern commentators on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will discover that all agree in interpreting them literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth with immense speed, and that the Earth is very distant from the heavens, at the centre of the universe, and motionless. Consider then, in your prudence, whether the Church can tolerate that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a manner contrary to that of the holy Fathers and of all modern commentators, both Latin and Greek.

If science is the child of that, then a rhinoceros can be the child of a fruit fly, a hummingbird can be the child of a grey whale, a snow leopard can be the child of a star fish. A way of thinking that ‘forbids’ something, and in particular that forbids anything ‘contrary to the common opinion’ of some guys called ‘the holy Fathers’ is not a scientific way of thinking. A way of thinking that points out what commentators on certain chapters of a particular very old book ‘agree in interpreting them literally as teaching’ what the sun is and does (and gets it dead wrong) and then points out (in a threatening manner) that ‘the Church’ isn’t going to tolerate contradiction of agreed interpretation by commentators on parts of a very old book – is also not a scientific way of thinking; it is of course not only the opposite of a scientific way of thinking, it is its deadly, violent, murderous enemy.

Like some others, Fuller wants to see religion…as giving us our idea of the odyssey, the quest, for truth and understanding (“salvation” secularised), a plumbing of mysteries and a searching out of hidden meanings, our errors and stumblings on the way justified by the faith that we can get there in the end. Thus one sees the trick: the infection of the argument by religious terminology to sacralise what is essentially so different from the static metaphysics, the unchanging and marmoreal already-revealed Truth of the faith, which requires not investigation and questioning – for that you die at the stake – but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship.

Just so, and as we’ve seen, more than once, that’s also what Martha Nussbaum does in her book on freedom of ‘conscience’ and religion: she talks repeatedly about a ‘quest for meaning’ when in fact what most religion delivers is not a quest at all but a settled dogma which reqires, indeed, not investigation and questioning but submission, acceptance, obedience, worship. There’s something really annoying about fans of religion pretending that religion is the source of quests for truth and understanding when for the most part it is the opposite and enemy of any such thing.

Alan Wolfe reads BHL on speaking truth to power.

It is frequently said that we ought to tolerate religious differences; whatever we might think of Islam, we should respect the rights of adherents to believe what they want. No, Levy responds, what the Muslim world needs is not tolerance but secularism.

‘No’? What do you mean ‘no’? That’s not a ‘no’. That is in fact a yes. We ought to tolerate religious differences; whatever we might think of Islam, we should respect the rights of adherents to believe what they want, and secularism is by far the best way to create such a state of affairs, because secularism puts religion aside for purposes of government, thus making it unnecessary to meddle with or even take note of what people believe (about religion, which has to be what Wolfe means here). It is theocracy that cannot respect people’s right to believe what they want, not secularism. Secularism does not (and should not) undertake to respect people’s right to do what they want (without qualification), but that’s a different matter. My guess would be (not having read the book) that that’s what BHL meant by ‘not tolerance but secularism’ – my guess would be that if he did say tolerance is not what’s needed (if that’s not just Wolfe’s careless paraphrase) then he meant blanket tolerance for religiously-inspired actions is not what ‘the Muslim world’ needs.

It is not freedom of opinion that we ought to seek but freedom of thought. Only by applying to Islamic societies the same standards of free inquiry that we apply to our own do we treat Muslims as our equals. If Muslims say that cartoons caricaturing their prophet are offensive and should not be published, we should ignore their calls for sympathy and in the name of freedom of thought be willing to stand charged with blasphemy.

Yes, that’s right – especially when ‘calls for sympathy’ take the form of arson and riots and murder, or lawsuits, or threats. It is indeed the case that applying the same standards of free inquiry everywhere is the only way to treat people with respect; the alternative is a pitying kind of condescension.

The problem with this way of thinking is not just that secularism taken to such an extreme is itself illiberal; knowing what is right, it tramples on the sensitivities of others with little regard for how they may understand the world.

No, because secularism doesn’t take any understanding of the world away from people, it just creates neutrality about world-understandings in the public sphere.

On the other hand, I can’t disagree with Wolfe’s next point. I wish I could.

But Israel is not a secular society; it is a Jewish state. If we are to tell Muslims that they ought to open up their societies to outside influences, shouldn’t we be putting pressure on Israel to reform its incredibly strict marriage laws?

Yes.

The Women’s studies list is on a roll at the moment – I’m going to have to regale you a little more. All this sagacity must not blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air, wouldn’t you agree?

This seems to have something to do with the discussion of dimorphism, though it’s hard to be sure, because the chain of reasoning is a little…well, missing some links in places. But it starts off with biology, via Wikipedia. Then it gets into critical thinking…

The questionable variable here is what these guys considered ‘fundamental’ and the mindset that created the idea of biology as ‘socially acceptable’ at the time when life was first described by biological scientists – especially in the terms and roots that are still being used some 200 years later – unchanged since their creation. Biology is a socially constructed concept too – dated. It categorizes and defines ‘organisms’ a certain way – not wholistically – and not the
only way possible, I might add. I am no science major, but I know Einstein’s theories and Physics has already proven most of the fundamentals of biology to be faulty.

See?

I admit, I am a science heretic. It is a belief system and I’ve confronted it’s limitations – quite soundly and concretely – for my own understandings…Frankly, I am tired of seeing ‘respected’ scientific studies that continually study an environment that they deny exists in the first place. It is not logical thought. What we were taught as logic is simply what we were taught and thus not logical, but you have to question it before you can see it as ‘not logical’. My views can be perceived as not ‘logical’ because they are deviating from taught beliefs. Logic doesn’t mean it makes sense. It means it follows a certain line of thinking. It is the certain line of thinking women have attempted to confront.

Ah yes – logic is a ‘certain’ (male, patriarchal, phallic, linear, hierarchical, situated, constructed, stupid, wrong, smelly) line of thinking, and women have attempted to confront it, because women have something different, and better, than mere ‘logic.’ Women have – uh – holistic (or do I mean wholistic) different better womanier stuff. Women have holistic critical thinking, which beats logic any day.

Bad news.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims. It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The government did this quietly? Why, exactly? And how? And what are they thinking?

There are concerns that women who agree to go to tribunal courts are getting worse deals because Islamic law favours men. Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons. The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

Well, exactly. This is why this kind of shit is not a good idea and should not be done, not noisily and certainly not ‘quietly.’

In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment. In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations. Siddiqi said that in the domestic violence cases, the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance.

No – that’s dead wrong. The men were given a second chance, and the women were denied the chance to escape violence. ‘The marriage’ should not be ‘saved’ at the expense of the woman’s safety and freedom, and it’s not ‘couples’ who need chances, it’s people who do, one at a time. This business of valuing marriages and couples more than the women who are trapped inside them is a terrible cheat.

More hilarity on the Women’s Studies list. My friend Daphne Patai responded to a message that referred to ‘some mythically uniform
biologically based concept of “women”‘:

Unfortunately, the “biologically-based concept” IS what unites all women. It
is far from “mythical.” There is such a thing as biological sexual
dimorphism, period. The social/historical construction of what it means to be
a woman is a separate issue, but the biology is very real.

Hard to believe one wants to teach one’s students from a starting point that
is patently false. As I’ve commented many times before on this list, the
existence of biological anomalies does not change the fundamental facts, and
I don’t see it as a service to our students to attempt to deny those facts.

The next day there was a reply, quoting ‘There is such a thing as biological sexual
dimorphism, period.’ – let’s call this one Helen, because that is not her name:

She’s right, of course, but only insofar as “dimorphism” is a sign, a construct, with the same relationship between signifier and signified that any sign possesses. Does “dimorphism” exist “in nature”? Well, sure, but so do “anomalies,” themselves “natural” and only defined as a “violation of the law” (a-nomos) if one constructs them so culturally. No culture, no dimorphism. Period.

I’ve been keeping my head down, having stirred up enough hornet’s nests for awhile, but I had to reply to that:

Well, not quite. No culture, no concept of dimorphism, of course, but the phenomena that dimorphism names go on existing with or without the concept. That thing that’s happening on the area we call ‘the Gulf Coast’ right now would still be happening even if no one called it Ike, or a hurricane, or lots of wind and rain.

Helen came back today:

Actually the appropriate analogue here would be between whether Ike is an “anomalous” weather pattern or simply weather. Folks who insist on dimorphism do so to reinforce a notion of stability and absolutes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Call it a hurricane, or call it Central Park, but it’s still no less real than a clear day and only defined by a binary if we insist on defining everything with a binary. Students benefit from having the ability to think critically about these matters. I am happy to be someone that comprehends the concepts and is able to help them do so.

I love that – she is happy to be someone that comprehends the concepts. Only she doesn’t! It’s not quite so amusing that she ‘helps’ the students to do likewise. I answered again (might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb) –

Really? So a zoologist who (for instance) points out that gorillas are more sexually dimorphic than chimpanzees does so to reinforce a notion of stability and absolutes in spite of all evidence to the contrary? I can’t get any intelligible meaning out of that.

A new respondent came back with something so funny that it looks like a hoax, but I don’t suppose it is.

I’m not too familiar with why zoologists do what they do :) But I
would suggest that just by invoking the term “dimorphism” on both
gorillas and chimpanzees, the zoologist would be imposing human-type
heterosexual & gender normativity on them. I believe that’s called
anthropomorphism, which I think (I’m not sure) received a lot of
criticism for imposing human myths onto the animal world and hence
reproducing and reinforcing the views of such normativity (for her
audience) as naturalness by way of science (claims of objectivity and
neutrality). In addition, especially if the zoologist is from the US
or Europe (or especially if she -generic she- received her zoology
education there), I’d imagine, it would be quite hard for her to think
about gorillas and chimpanzees without unconsciously invoking in
herself some remnants of scientific racism in the background (i.e. can
the zoologist think about material realities in the absence of
history, language, and ideology?).

I replied, but then sadly the manager closed the thread, so that’s the end. Makes you think, don’t it.

I’m not a huge fan of our future president.

[A] Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said. “You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!” Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform…But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image. Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance…

We’re supposed to think she’s just a real nice gal, and that a real nice gal like that is just who should be the next president as soon as that pesky John McCain gets out of the way. But why we are supposed to think that is mystifying to me. I never do quite get why people don’t want someone better than they are to be in a job like that. I certainly want someone better than I am to be in a job like that. I can’t even keep my bookshelves tidy, so how could I not want someone better? But other people apparently cry with one voice ‘She’s just like us!’ and swoon with bliss. I don’t get it.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Oh, good, that’s just what we need – after eight years of an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy, another one that does the same thing.

I particularly dislike what she said in that interview –

“Can you look the country in the eye and say, ‘I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?'” When Palin said she [didn’t] hesitate in saying “yes,” Gibson asked her if that didn’t perhaps show some “hubris.” Palin countered that it shows “confidence” and and “being so committed to the mission.”

Yes it shows confidence, but confidence is not a good thing when it’s unwarranted (except in very rare circumstances, when you have to jump or die). Bush showed great ‘confidence’ when he went after the presidency, too, but he shouldn’t have, because he has none of the qualities required to do the job well. Neither does Palin, and Palin hasn’t even gone through the primary process (flawed as it is), yet we’re very likely to be stuck with her as president. It’s a bad joke, and a nightmare.

So we need to get permission from Jordan to say things now.

[A] Jordanian court is prosecuting 12 Europeans in an extraterritorial attempt to silence the debate on radical Islam. The prosecutor general in Amman charged the 12 with blasphemy, demeaning Islam and Muslim feelings, and slandering and insulting the prophet Muhammad in violation of the Jordanian Penal Code. The charges are especially unusual because the alleged violations were not committed on Jordanian soil.

Yeah and because the ‘crimes’ are not crimes in places that are not, you know, insane. We’re not used to thinking of ‘insulting the prophet Muhammad’ as something that is covered by a Penal Code. We don’t want to get used to it, either.

Jordan’s attempt at criminalizing free speech beyond its own borders wouldn’t be so serious if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, it is part of a larger campaign to use the law and international forums to intimidate critics of militant Islam…[T]he U.N. Human Rights Council in June said it would refrain from condemning human-rights abuses related to “a particular religion.” The ban applies to all religions, but it was prompted by Muslim countries that complained about linking Islamic law, Shariah, to such outrages as female genital mutilation and death by stoning for adulterers. This kind of self-censorship could prove dangerous for people suffering abuse.

Well I guess no one will be reading Does God Hate Women? aloud at the UN HRC then. Too bad.

Amman has already requested that Interpol apprehend Mr. Wilders and the Danes and bring them to stand before its court for an act that is not a crime in their home countries…Neither Denmark nor the Netherlands will turn over its citizens to Interpol, as the premise of Jordan’s extradition request is an affront to the very principles that define democracies. It is thus unlikely that any Western country would do so, either. But there is no guarantee for the defendants’ protection if they travel to countries that are more sympathetic to the Jordanian court.

So the noose tightens – a little more all the time.

Michael Reiss, a priest, a biologist and the Royal Society’s director of eduation, says he ‘feels’ that ‘creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.’

But a world view can be a misconception, and often is. The two are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. That is in fact a problem with a lot of world views: they are based on misconceptions.

Other scientists, fortunately, disagree with Reiss.

Professor Reiss, a biologist, was speaking at the British Association’s Festival of Science in Liverpool. Other scientists were vociferous in their response, saying that creationism should remain entirely within the sphere of religious education. Professor Lewis Wolpert, of University College Medical School, said: “Creationism is based on faith and has nothing to do with science, and it should not be taught in science classes. It is based on religious beliefs and any discussion should be in religious studies.” Dr John Fry, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, said: “Science lessons are not the appropriate place to discuss creationism, which is a world view in total denial of any form of scientific evidence. Creationism doesn’t challenge science: it denies it!”

The Independent takes a ‘this side that side’ view, as if it were running for office.

Proponents of evolution believe species change by a process of random genetic mutations. They believe the world is 13-14 billion years old. Creationists, in contrast, believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that its existence is the result of one of the processes described in religious texts like the Bible.

It’s not a matter of each side ‘believing’ things in exactly the same sense, and shouldn’t be presented as such. One side has grounds for the ‘belief’ and the other side doesn’t, so it’s misleading to use the same word for both unless that is pointed out.