A long, horrific article about attacks on “witches” in Papua New Guinea.

One excerpt. Trigger warning.

Angela was naked, staked-out, spread-eagled on a rough frame before them, a blindfold tied over her eyes, a fire burning in a nearby drum. Being unable to see can only have inflated her terror, her sense of powerlessness and the menace around her; breathing the smoke and feeling the heat of the fire where the irons being used to burn her were warmed until they glowed. Would she be cooked, on that fire? She must have known it had happened to others before — and would soon infamously happen again, the pictures finding their way around the world.

The photographs witnesses took of Angela’s torture are shocking, both for the cruelty of the attackers and the torpid body-language of the spectators. Stone-faced     men and women and wide-eyed children huddle under umbrellas, sheltering from the drenched highlands air as Angela writhes against the tethers at her wrists and ankles, twisting her body away from the length of hot iron which a young man aims at her genitals.

There are more horrors, but a nun named Sister Gaudentia managed to save Angela and her mother in the end. Other women are not saved.

 

 

Another dip into the archives. This time our voyage in Time’s charabanc takes us to November 2010. The post was Tragic end of a sock puppet.

A sock puppet goes to jail.

A lawyer was sentenced Thursday to six months in jail after being convicted of an ultramodern crime that was all about antiquity: using online aliases to harass people in an academic debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Oh gosh, who would use online aliases to harass people in an academic debate? I never heard of such a thing.

Prosecutors said Golb crossed the line between discourse and crime by using fake e-mail accounts and writing blog posts under assumed names to discredit detractors of his father, a scholar. Golb said the writings amounted to pointed parody and academic whistle-blowing that he felt were protected by free-speech rights.

The New York Times now revisits.

“This has nothing to do with scholarly debate,” said Lawrence H. Schiffman, vice provost of Yeshiva University and a widely published authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, who became the prime target of Mr. Golb’s online activities. “It has to do with criminal activity.

“Fraud, impersonation and harassment are criminal matters,” he continued. “This was actually designed to literally end my career.” [Read more…]

Whither civility, eh? Dan Fincke has his Pledge. (His what? His pledge? What is he, Louisa May Alcott?) Chris Clarke has his sarcastic pledge. I like Chris Clarke’s better.

I pledge to keep a sense of perspective. Tossing basic civil rights under the bus in order to maintain a jury-rigged superficial peace in a single-issue movement is a bad bargain.

That. Fincke’s pledge (his pledge?) is all too reminiscent of Lee Moore’s attempt to jury-rig peace between harassers and the people they are harassing. [Read more…]

There’s a nice atheist/freethinkers/humanist con coming up: Apostacon: A Midwest Freethought Conference, in Omaha, September 20-22. Omaha! The heart of the midwest. A place in need of more and more apostates and freethinkers.

A couple of thoughts though. One, not nearly enough women. Four out of nineteen. Not.e.nough.

Two, they forgot to get Vyckie Garrison to speak. Midwest freethinkers and apostates! You’re missing a trick! Vyckie is just up the road from you. Vyckie is No Longer Quivering. You need Vyckie.

Vyckie’s talk at Eschaton 2012 was dynamite. I can’t wait for the video to come out so that you can see for yourselves. She has fascinating material – life as a Quiverfull woman, and what it did to her and her children and her husband, and how much better things are now that she and her children have escaped. She has fascinating material, and she presents it well – not least, she’s damn funny.

They need her.

Mary Ellen boiled down the irony of the pope’s retirement very neatly on Monday, but unfortunately in the rush of various flying missiles I didn’t get to it until today.

Guest post by Mary Ellen Foley

Somebody gets into a situation in which their health begins to fail, and if they stay in that situation, it might kill them.  They believe that God himself put them into that situation, but they just don’t feel that they can see it through — the strain is just physically too much.  And anyway, they’d prefer a quiet life, and they want to spend their time studying.

So if this person is a pregnant woman whose pregnancy is life-threatening, the Pope says she has to go through with it even if it kills her.

If this person is the Pope himself, however, he gets to retire.

The Tories want to re-describe poverty as being not to do with a lack of money. Next project: re-describe hypothermia as being not to do with lack of heat.

The government’s desire to alter the official definition of child poverty risks deliberately downplaying the importance of money just as a series of government policies will reduce the incomes of poor families, a group of senior academics warn in a letter to the Guardian.

Let’s define it as a lack of initiative, shall we? A shortage of grit and determination and ambition? A refusal to get up at 5 a.m.? A habit of eating three pieces of pie every evening?

A consultation on how to measure child poverty more accurately that was launched last November, seeking input from charities and experts into “better measures of child poverty”, comes to an end on Friday. The government believes that a wider definition of what constitutes poverty will give a better picture of what it means to “grow up experiencing deep disadvantage“.

A better picture, eh? So that they can hang it next to the Van Dyke in the library?

Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, the lead consultant on the UK’s contribution to Unicef’s Child Well-Being report, said he believed that the government was “trying to move the goalposts” at a time when child poverty was increasing rapidly.

He described the consultation document as the worst paper setting down government policy direction he had ever read, questioned whether it was written by civil servants and said it read more like it had been “plagiarised from a right-wing thinktank tract”.

He said civil servants had been working for the past 40 years on developing accurate poverty measures, but the document had ignored previous work by the department on the subject as well as ignoring work by academics in the field. The new approach would not work because it attempted to “combine all sorts of things that are the consequence of poverty or may be even be the causes of poverty, but are not a measure of child poverty”.

That’s the best wheeze of all: treating the consequences of poverty as the causes of poverty. That way you get to stop spending money on it, and you get to sneer and judge at the same time. Look at you, you dirty peasant, you never went to school; no wonder you’re poor!

In a speech to launch the consultation, Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, outlined his theory that other factors aside from money caused poverty, highlighting his concern about children growing up in “dysfunctional families”.

He argued: “It cannot be right that experiences so vital to childhood, like seeing a parent go out to work or growing up in a stable family, are not reflected in our understanding of child poverty.” He was critical of the Labour government’s focus on “income as the significant cause and solution”.

Sure enough…

More on Ahmed Rajib and the context of his murder.

A blogger who had been critical of Bangladesh’s Islamist groups was killed in the capital late Friday, police said, a day after he attended a big rally against leaders of the country’s largest Islamic party.

…

Police found the body of Ahmed Rajib, 35 — better known by his online identity Thaba Baba — near his home in Dhaka’s Pallabi suburb, with his head hacked apart with a machete. [Read more…]

Another upcoming event, this time in Dublin. Atheist Ireland is doing a conference called Empowering Women Through Secularism the weekend of 29-30 June 2013. I will be there.

Everybody should go to this! It will be fantastic.

Speakers will include

• Ivana Bacik, Irish Senator and member of Atheist Ireland
• Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Ophelia Benson, author and commentator, USA
• Ann Brusseel, Member of Flemish Parliament, Belgium
• Mairin de Burca, writer and secularist, Ireland
• Jane Donnelly, Education Policy Officer Atheist Ireland
• Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Anthea McTiernan, Editor Irish Times Ticket Magazine
• PZ Myers, science professor and blogger, USA
• Maryam Namazie, Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain
• Taslima Nasrin, novelist and activist, Bangladesh and India
• Michael Nugent, Chairperson Atheist Ireland
• Nina Sankari, Polish Rationalist Association
• Farhana Shakir, lawyer and legal consultant, Pakistan
• Kate Smurthwaite, comedian and activist, Britain
• Anne Marie Waters, One Law for All Campaign, Britain
• Rebecca Watson, Skepchick network, USA

Fantastic, I tell you.

An activist blogger was murdered in Dhaka today.

A blogger and online activist, who was active in the Shahbagh movement, was killed in the capital’s Pallabi area Friday night, prompting the Shahbagh protesters to return to their 24-hour demonstration.

Police recovered the body of 30-year-old Ahmed Rajib Haider, full with indiscriminate stab injuries, from near his Kalshi residence in Mirpur.

I know nothing about the Shahbagh movement, but if he was killed for being an activist, I know something about the movement’s enemies, and thus a little about the movement by inference.

Pallabi police also confirmed that Rajib was an active participant of Shahbag movement.

Rajib used to write a Bangla blog nicknamed ‘Thaba Baba’.

He had also written many blog on the country’s Liberation War and Jamaat-e-Islami’s wicked activities.

About eight hours before his assassination, Rajib posted a status on Facebook calling upon mass people to boycott Jamaat’s media houses, coaching centers, cultural organisations and commercial institutions.

Ah. He was an opponent of Jamaat. Now he’s full of stab wounds, and dead.

Thanks to Tasneem Khalil for alerting me.