I am not generally a fan of insult humor of the kind made famous by Don Rickles, which consists of rude put downs of the other person. I tend to prefer the more subtle forms. [Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I am not generally a fan of insult humor of the kind made famous by Don Rickles, which consists of rude put downs of the other person. I tend to prefer the more subtle forms. [Read more…]
The statistics on rape in the US are truly horrible. On average, a woman is raped every two minutes and every year about 32,000 women get pregnant because of rape. One needs to keep those numbers in mind to understand why Republican Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock (who thinks that rape is god’s will) and Todd Akin keep saying these crazy things that either minimize rape or suggest that women were asking for it or simply have to deal with the consequences. They cannot stomach allowing that many abortions. And they are by no means the only such people in the Republican party. [Read more…]
In my book The Achievement Gap in US Education, I emphasized the distortions in thinking that can occur when people unquestioningly take the performance or behavior of one group (usually the majority group) as the norm and/or desirable, and evaluate all other groups by how they compare with that standard. [Read more…]
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, Fox News seems to think that the story of the attack on the US consulate in Banghazi that resulted in the deaths of four diplomats is a huge story in this election and is pushing it relentlessly, though there is no evidence that people care that much about it. [Read more…]
I have been railing at the use of drone attacks that have killed so many innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly other countries that we have not heard about. But since there is bipartisan consensus on this issue in the US, there has been hardly any serious discussion here, as can be seen from the fact that it has not been a factor at all in the election. [Read more…]
Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that religious groups, especially the orthodox/fundamentalist ones, seem to have no qualms about meting out harsh treatment to even their co-religionists for what, to the outsider, seems like absurdly trivial reasons. In that case, it was due to the inherent misogyny of orthodox/fundamentalist religions that seek to keep women in an inferior role, with strict rules about what they can wear, go, say, and do. [Read more…]
Documentarian Laura Poitras is one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, the so-called ‘Genius’ awards. Poitras is working on the last of a trilogy about the post-9/11 war on terror. The first one My Country, My Country is about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the elections in that country is 2005. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Here is the trailer. [Read more…]
You have to hand it to Barack Obama, despite all the reports of him being aloof and professorial, he does come across as a person who is comfortable and relaxed in public, quite unlike Mitt Romney who seems to be always on the edge of saying something that will be awkward. [Read more…]
Dan Barker, a former preacher turned atheist and now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, will be speaking on the topic of the separation of church and state on Thursday, Oct 25th, 7:00-9:00pm in the 1914 Lounge in the Thwing Center on the CWRU campus. Thwing Center is at 11111 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland just east of Severance Hall.
The event is organized by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry and is free and open to the public.
It is not uncommon for some religious people to want to restrict the rights of people of other religions. But it always surprises me the extent to which some religious people will go to restrict the rights of other people of their own religion, usually women. [Read more…]