Oh hey, a good idea.
Chanting to cure snakebites, claiming to be a reincarnated spouse to obtain sex, and charging for miracles could soon be banned by an Indian state seeking to stop charlatans preying on the vulnerable.
Many superstitions are widely held in India but a campaign group is lobbying hard for a new law in the western state of Maharashtra to outlaw several exploitative activities, with penalties of fines or up to seven years in jail.
One WikiLeaks staffer says why he felt he had to leave.
The final straw for me came on Friday. By drawing attention to, and then publishing in full, the unredacted cache of documents, WikiLeaks has done the cause of internet freedom – and of whistleblowers – more harm than US government crackdowns ever could.
Before the first publication of carefully redacted cables, human rights activists, NGOs, and organisations working with victims of horrific crimes contacted WikiLeaks begging us to take steps not to publish any names. To be able to assure them details would be protected was an immeasurable relief.
These cables contain details of activists, opposition politicians, bloggers in autocratic regimes and their real identities, victims of crime and political coercion, and others driven by conscience to speak to the US government. They should never have had to fear being exposed by a self-proclaimed human rights organisation.
More from “how to be a really high-quality doormat for God.”
This past week the local Preparing class invited two older mothers to share their experiences in marriage. It was quite sobering, and some of the girls came away from class unnerved by the burdens of marriage. What the mothers wanted to convey to the girls was, “Learn now while you are young to honor your husbands. Learn patience to continue in your role as a Help Meet, and commit yourself to God now while you are young so you can avoid some of our trials and errors as we struggle to find our way.” [Read more…]
Libby Anne’s parents always taught her that women and men are equal…sort of.
My parents taught me that men and women were different and had different roles to play, but that men and women and their roles were also equal and of equal worth. The male role is to provide for his family and protect them, to engage in politics and spiritual warfare, to have a career and make the decisions for his family. The female role is to keep the house and home, raise and teach her children, exercise hospitality and offer service to others, and support her husband. I was taught that these two roles are equally important and that men and women were thus different, but equal.
Except that, as she goes on to say, that’s bullshit. Just read Debbi Pearl, author of (I’m not making this up) Created To Be His Helpmeet and Preparing To Be A Helpmeet. Read her article “Learning To Become A Multi-Colored Girl.” [Read more…]
Terry Glavin doesn’t think much of Julian Assange.
Julian Assange, the Wikileaks archgeek, radical-chic avatar, the Chinese
Communist Party’s nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore’s
joint-venturer, absconding debtor, American celebrity pornographer Larry Flynt’s fair-haired boy, darling of Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin, Bianca Jagger… [Read more…]
In case you’ve missed it – I posted an article at Other B&W by the author of the Love, Joy, Feminism blog. It’s a must-read. She tells us what it’s like to grow up in the Patriarchal/Quiverfull world, and what it’s all about, and what it took away from her.
A wife and mother was all I wanted to be, because any dream of anything else was nipped in the bud before it ever took root. I truly believed that this was what God wanted of me, and that serving my family and raising my siblings was serving God. And I gloried in it. [Read more…]
Eric has a post on Christian interference and coercion with respect to assisted suicide. One aspect in particular hooked my attention.
Christians who are anti-choice-in-dying have been complaining for some time now that it’s not just about pain. In fact, they point out that of those in Oregon who choose assisted suicide very few are in intense pain. It is, they say, because of loss of independence, loss of dignity, loss of control that people choose to end their lives, not just because the pain is unrelenting and uncontrollable. And that is true. Choice in dying is not just about pain. It is about choice. It is to provide choice for people who do not want to go on living with the kinds of disabilities and distresses that make their lives no longer worth living — for them, not for others. It’s about individual life choices. And they are choosing only for themselves, not for others. It is about their sense of the worth and value of theirown lives, not about the lives of others. And Christians don’t want people to have that choice. They are determined, along with many of their Muslim and Jewish partners in crime, to make their will felt somewhere and by someone. Let it not be said that their influence does not stretch to some suffering person. They are still a vital force in society. Indeed, they say, they should be given a greater part to play in decisions regarding social policy, for religion is, after all, as the fatuous Karen Armstrong keeps repeating like a dripping faucet, about love and compassion, and about compassion and care for the sick and the dying especially. And they want someone left to have compassion on. [Read more…]
William Hamby has a rather annoying article on women in atheism. (The annoying quality is probably inevitable. We get tired of being written about. We get tired of men saying about women. That’s probably unfair; we’d probably get tired of men not saying, too; but all the same – it gets tiresome having men say about women.) He bases it, for some reason, on the elevator thing – and as G Felis points out, he does it rather snidely. He makes an arbitrary and unexplained distinction between “radical” and “mainstream” feminists that boils down to agree-with-Watson and disagree-with-Watson respectively, and I have to say that’s not consistent with usage over the past four decades or so. Agreeing with Watson or anyone that a man hitting on a woman in an enclosed space at 4 a.m. is not entirely civil is really not a very good definition of “radical” feminism. Feminism gets a whole fuckofa lot more radical than that.
Anyway. [Read more…]
Suzanne Moore is not persuaded by the new gang of anti-abortionists.
Now this new breed of anti-abortionists snip round the edges of the process with their strategies of delay … er, sorry, “independent counselling”. But beware their language of care. This is not about care but about control. This control absolutely depends on shame: sexual shame. This shame keeps us quiet. Shame keeps us locked into individual guilt. Shame even makes us stupidly grateful that we are allowed to have any choice at all.
This whole debate around counselling pivots on the idea of deep and private shame, positing the idea of counselling being used to sell an evil procedure. Women are always “vulnerable” dupes, never simply adults who have made decisions.
Sexual shame and worse – something more like witch-shame. A woman who doesn’t want to have what would be her own baby is some kind of terrifying violation of nature. Women don’t get to be just people, who can make choices; women are always a special case.
Oh honestly. Bad scientists, no cookie.
The editor of a science journal has resigned after admitting that a recent paper
casting doubt on man-made climate change should not have been published.
The paper was outside the journal’s field.
Publishing in “off-topic” journals is generally frowned on in scientific
circles, partly because editors may lack the specialist knowledge and contacts
needed to run a thorough peer review process.…
“The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted…, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.
“In other words, the problem I see with the paper… is not that it declared
a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public
media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its
opponents.“This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I
perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.”…
Mr Ward described the tactic of publishing in off-topic journals as a
“classic tactic” of scientists dismissive of man-made climate change.“Those who recognise that their ideas are weak but seek to get them into the
literature by finding weaknesses in the peer review system are taking a
thoroughly disreputable approach,” he said.
How tacky is that?! They ignored the scientific arguments of their opponents and they submitted the article to an off-topic journal. Tacky tacky tacky – and the editor is falling on his sword.
Note the caption under the conspicuous picture of one of the authors.
Dr Spencer is a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist.
Zap. For once the BBC connects the dots.