The European Humanist Federation points out that the 2014 EU report on countries that are candidates for membership does a lousy job of monitoring abuses of the rights of non-believers in those countries.
…the 2014 reports have clearly failed to address the situation for non-believers in these countries, with not one single mention of their situation being present within the section on ‘Freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ in this year’s reports.
If we get depressed about the tattered “heroes” of atheism and skepticism we can turn our attention away from them in favor of people like William Pooley, a nurse who caught Ebola while volunteering in West Africa. He was flown home to the UK and treated, and he recovered, so now he’s taking a well-deserved breather returning to Sierra Leone.
Mr Pooley will work at the isolation unit at Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he will train staff and set up new isolation units. [Read more…]
A month ago Christina Hoff Sommers did a 6 and a half minute video for the American Enterprise Institute in which she took a sarcastically skeptical look at the criticisms of gamer culture. There’s a partial transcript on the page and I transcribed some of the rest for myself.
Here’s another branch of the Harassing Women on Twitter industry – people threatening a woman with rape because blah blah blah blah.
TV presenter Richard Madeley has said people who sent “sick rape threats” to his daughter are in “deep trouble”.
Originally a comment by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood on A rebellion against moral crusaders.
So far as I can see, the authoritarian gaming press has, to varying degrees, come down on the side of virtue. If the gamers are winning, as Summers suggests, I’m not seeing it.
Of course, as an industry insider it’s always possible there’s something I’m not seeing. [Read more…]
Christina Hoff Sommers is promoting an article at Spiked about #GamerGate as fantastic and honest. Let’s see.
Video games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. They can be enormously time-consuming and often require a considerable level of dedication to master. However, there are good reasons for non-gamers to be paying attention to the video-games industry right now – it has become the site of a rebellion against moral crusaders and their relentless push to politicise every aspect of culture and society.
That’s not a good start. It’s never a good start to claim that it’s only analysis or criticism or interrogation of X that is political, while mere X itself just is, politics-free. [Read more…]
Andy Borowitz at the Borowitz Report at the New Yorker.
There is a deep-seated fear among some Americans that an Ebola outbreak could make the country turn to science.
In interviews conducted across the nation, leading anti-science activists expressed their concern that the American people, wracked with anxiety over the possible spread of the virus, might desperately look to science to save the day.
“It’s a very human reaction,” said Harland Dorrinson, a prominent anti-science activist from Springfield, Missouri. “If you put them under enough stress, perfectly rational people will panic and start believing in science.”
But that’s tragic because it’s science that got us here. If it weren’t for science there wouldn’t be all these pesky airplanes flying back and forth between Africa and Whiteland, and then Ebola would have stayed in Africa where it belongs, leaving the people in Whiteland to play their computer games in peace.
Kenana Malik told a poignant little anecdote in his talk on multiculturalism at the Secular Conference last weekend.
The Danish MP Naser Khader tells of a conversation with Toger Seidenfaden, editor of Politiken, a left-wing Danish newspaper that was highly critical of the Danish cartoons. Seidenfaden claimed that ‘the cartoons insulted all Muslims’. Khader responded that ‘I am not insulted’. ‘But you’re not a real Muslim’, was Seidenfaden’s response.
I knew it. Except it’s worse than I thought. Or it’s as bad as I thought but was only surmising.
The NFL, and women who are beaten up by their football player husbands.
Whenever Dewan Smith-Williams sees Janay Rice on television, she feels like she’s looking into a mirror. Smith-Williams, 44, remembers the denial, the secrecy, the sense of isolation, the shame. [Read more…]
A millionaire Salford couple kept a girl in their cellar as a slave for nine years. The BBC reports.
A deaf girl from Pakistan kept as a slave for nine years by a millionaire couple from Salford is to receive £100,000 in compensation.
Ilyas and Tallat Ashar were jailed last October after the girl was found in their cellar in 2009. [Read more…]