Here’s a piece of good news to counter the dead fish taste of the bad news we’ve been seeing lately – Michael De Dora has just been elected President of the United Nations NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief.
That’s terrific.
Here’s me talking to Michael about freedom of religion or belief at Women in Secularism last year. [Read more…]
You know Marwa Berro of Between a Veil and a Dark Place? (Did I tell you she was at Women in Secularism? I think I did.) She has a brilliant project: an ex-hijabi photo blog.
Featuring ex-hijabis with awesome hairstyles and tattoos and piercings. Ex-hijabis in bikinis and little black dresses and cargo pants and hiking boots. Ex-hijabis who are femme and ex-hijabis who are butch. Ex-hijabis who are women and ex-hijabis who are men. Ex-hijabis topless and legsome and all decked out and minimalistic and with long hair and buzzcuts and everything. EVERYTHING.
Basically ex-hijabis choosing how THEY want their bodies to look, because bodies are a joy and not a shame.
I’m thinking each post will feature a new ex-hijabi with a small story on their background and feelings about the shift from a life of obscurity to one where they can model and fashion their own bodies as they please.
Read the post for more details, and spread the word.
Dude, look in the mirror. You didn’t have any children (that we know of), so why are you shouting at Europe for having too few of them?
Pope Francis on Sunday criticized Europe for becoming what he called “tired” because of low birth rates and the increasing numbers of young people who neither work nor study.
Mirror. Mirror.
Dissident Scrapbook gives a nice clear account of the Sarah Kendzior/Jacobin magazine controversy for those who didn’t get all the details. (I’m one of those.)
It starts with an opinion piece on the Jacobin site by Amber A’Lee Frost called “Bro Bash”. The commentary is pretty simple. It says men on the Left who aren’t particularly feminist in their approach to thought, presentation, or behavior — often called “bros” or “brocialists” — should not be dismissed outright, and should also not be lumped in with outright misogyinists just for being, you know, men’s men. Frost basically argues that “bros” aren’t as bad as they’re reputed to be.
That article contains the following sentence:
And I just don’t think the diminutive label of ‘bro’ should be [used] to describe more insidious sexism, let alone violent aggression like rape threats.
A San Francisco station does a better job of taking pertussis seriously in its report; it says it can be deadly for infants and children.
But then it talks to a citizen.
“Hopefully people will catch it when their kids are showing symptoms and they’ll get treated right away and keep them away from other people,” said Katie Kresnak, [whose three children attend school in the district.
…
All of Kresnak’s three children have current Tdap shots, but she says other parents chose not to vaccinate.
“It’s frustrating to me, but of course people have their own reasons for doing things like that and I have to respect that, but its times like this that put other people at risk so that is a little frustrating,” said Kresnak.
No. No you really don’t have to respect that, and you shouldn’t. There is no such imperative, and in fact you shouldn’t because people have bad reasons and they are endangering their own children and other people’s.
(Ok one possible not-unreasonable motivation for not vaccinating or for delaying it is if one child had a bad reaction. We were told about one such case yesterday and that’s understandable. It’s ok to respect that, while still urging vaccination. But that’s it.)
Well, here’s a terrible bit of reporting on the whooping cough epidemic in California from local CBS News.
Infants and young children are most vulnerable to whooping cough.
Symptoms vary by age but include a cough and runny nose for one or two weeks. The cough then worsens and children may experience rapid coughing spells that end with a “whooping” sound.
In infants, symptoms may not include an apparent cough, but could include episodes in which the child’s face turns red or purple.
In adults, symptoms may include a persistent cough for several weeks.
And that’s it. Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it – the cough gets worse and makes a funny sound, and/or the child might turn red or purple in the face. What CBS doesn’t say is that the rapid coughing means the child can’t inhale. The cough pushes the breath out and it keeps going and it’s rapid, so the person coughing can’t breathe in. That’s bad! It’s like drowning; it’s like being suffocated or strangled; it’s terrible and can be lethal. That “whooping” sound that seems so amusing is the desperate noise the cougher makes as she finally drags in a breath with the little strength she has left. It doesn’t sound anything like a whoop to me, it’s a roughly voiced gasp rather than a whoop.
Why would they describe the disease so incompletely and misleadingly?
The New Republic published an article about Surry Hill in 2006. I’m reading it. I’m reading it and wondering what the HELL anyone was thinking suggesting Edwina Rogers to head the SCA – let alone actually approving her.
The piece of land it’s on was originally zoned for nine houses.
Edwina doesn’t know the total number of rooms in Surry Hill, but an elevator services the house’s three floors. Upstairs, Edwina’s bathroom (one of eight) features a small fireplace by the tub. But she is proudest of her home’s dazzling—and eclectic—art collection. “We do a lot of lobbying for foreign governments. I just can’t imagine any country we haven’t gotten a piece from,” she explains. Sashaying from room to room like a docent, she points out the eight-foot steel-plated pantry door from Rajasthan, the light fixtures from Venice, and the four Taiwanese stone statues, each weighing 300 pounds, embedded in her dining room wall. (The floor had to be reinforced with steel to support them.) Her most delicate pieces are housed in their own “art gallery”—a white-walled room where ancient figurines, pottery, and pieces of jewelry lay on cream-colored stands under Plexiglas. “We hired the company that does the Smithsonian’s display cases,” Edwina explains.
Let me put this crudely. She’s too god damn rich to run an organization such as the Secular Coalition for America. I realize it’s not a left-wing organization or an anti-poverty organization or a socialist organization, but all the same, it is an organization that intends to improve things, that is progressive, that wants and needs to appeal to large numbers of ordinary people as opposed to the richest .01%. It’s not intelligent to put someone that grotesquely over-moneyed in the job of running an organization of that kind. It’s alienating. It’s alienating before you even get to how the Rogerses got so fucking rich. [Read more…]
Here’s a thrilling item from 2008 – somebody called Mario Correa pays a visit to Surry* Hill, the 18,000 square foot house of DC “Superlobbyists” Edwina and Ed Rogers. Inside the palatial residence with hot and cold running champagne, Edwina Rogers shows the host how she wraps speaker gifts for a conference she’s having: she wraps them in money. Isn’t that fun and exciting? Oh yes it’s very fun and exciting.
*No, I don’t know why they misspell Surrey.
Dahlia Lithwick considers the question of why it’s taboo to discuss whether or not Supreme Court Justices’ rulings and views are shaped by their religions.
In a country historically averse to political debates about competing faiths, nowhere is frank discussion of religion more taboo than at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Religion is the third rail of Supreme Court politics. It’s not something that’s talked about in polite company,” as Jeff Shesol, the author of a book about the New Deal Court, put it. He was speaking with NPR’s Nina Totenberg in 2010, when John Paul Stevens was looking at retirement and, for the first time in American history, there was the prospect of six Catholics, three Jews, and no Protestants on the highest court in the land—a watershed almost too “radioactive,” Totenberg remarked, even to note. And beware of venturing any further than that, as the University of Chicago Law School’s Geoffrey Stone did in a controversial 2007 blog post suggesting that the Supreme Court’s five conservatives likely derived their abortion views from Catholic doctrine: Scalia—a devout Catholic, and the current Court’s longest-serving conservative—announced a boycott of the school until Stone leaves the faculty.
Dear “non political” people, entering into the lobbying arena to advocate for “non-ideological” policies,
When complaining that people only disagree with you because of their own “political ideology”; it’d be good if you could at least grasp the existence of the horizon of your spectacularly large bias blind spots. (Also, if you could ditch the vanity, which you also seem to have a problem with, that’d be great, thanks).
Just because you can’t spot a number of the inferred values, unspoken assumptions, knowledge gaps, political preferences and statistical biases presented by your lobbying actions, doesn’t mean they aren’t out there in the open for everyone else to see and/or discuss.
And pretending that your interlocutors are trying to put their “sacred cows” out of range of criticism, when they shift the focus to parts of your arguments that you aren’t addressing; please cut that shit out. Your interlocutors don’t want to talk about those “sacred cows” because they aren’t relevant in the context of the discussion they want to have, nor in the context of any discussion they may ever be interested in. We’re not dealing with “sacred cows”, we’re dealing with red herrings; your red herrings.
What is relevant, is dependent upon what it is exactly that is being discussed, and raises the question of who in a democracy, decides upon what is being discussed.
Here’s the kicker. When you get involved in lobbying government, your campaign and your organisation, and anything anyone can find out about it, are all topics of discussion for the public. The people you’re whining about, those with the “sacred cows” who are “silencing” you with mere criticism; they often don’t have the platform that you do – they don’t place their interests out there for the public the way that lobbyists do, because they can’t.
Instead, their interests are usually expressed in the smaller, more personal spaces that rightfully, they hold greater sway over, either by way of rights to privacy, or editorial control, or other equivalents. They decide in their personal space, what gets discussed, and hence ultimately, what is relevant in that setting.
You aren’t the editor of their blogs. You don’t get to demand what gets discussed in their personal, non-lobbyist space; it is their right to set the context of their own discussions, and it’s not your entitlement to expect otherwise.
They aren’t loyal foot-soldiers for self-appointed “thought leaders”; they are citizens.
Conversely, when you lobby governments, the public gets to take their interests, and their contexts, to the table, to discuss your “non-politics” accordingly – all without ceding control to you if they’re not using your political organs. That’s part and parcel of the business of lobbying in a democracy, irrespective of whether or not you are in fact, “non political”.
Yes, discursively this is one sided. You know what else is one-sided? The disparity in resources behind lobbyists and bloggers. Suck it up, lobbyists.
There are only a few ways, generally, that a lobbyist can act in this situation, and each carries its own set of implications.
Being a professor does not make you an elitist, and it never has. Lobbying without accountability, while expecting bloggers, journalists and private citizens to be just as, if not more open to being persuaded about what’s up for debate, does.
You can go down this road, but people rightly get to call you an elitist for doing so, and your complaints about this can be reasonably laughed at. In this case, you’re comedy material. Learn to live with it.
Alternatively, if you don’t like the realities of lobbying in a democracy (and I’ve noticed that you like calling yourself democratic), you can always go back to the academy where you rightly have a captive audience; your students. The electorate should value insight and intelligence, but the electorate is not, nor are its journalists, bloggers or activists, a captive audience.
Nor is the electorate your classroom, nor is it something that should remain passive when you use substantial lobbying influence to seek something from government.
If you don’t understand how your lobbying fits into a democracy, irrespective of what tack you take, you’re incompetent as a lobbyist, and quite possibly as a public intellectual as well. This in addition to potentially being an elitist jerk.
With all due respect,
Bruce
[Read more…]
