I’m finding a lot of commentary and some (possible) news about Malala Yousafzai on Twitter (via #Malala).

The important item is a new update on her condition.

Doctors at the Saidu Sharif Medical Complex said that Malala was out of danger after the bullet penetrated her skull but missed her brain.

“A bullet struck her head, but the brain is safe,” said Dr Taj Mohammed.

“She is out of danger,” he added.

Dr Laal Noor, from the same hospital, confirmed that the bullet broke her skull but missed her brain.

“The bullet struck her skull and came out on the other side and hit her shoulder,” he told AFP.

The same item includes more evil shit from the Taliban.

SWAT: The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which attacked National Award Peace winner Malala Yousafzai on Tuesday have said that they will target her again if she survives because she was a “secular-minded lady”.

A TTP spokesperson told The Express Tribune that this was a warning for all youngsters who were involved in similar activites and added that they will be targeted if they do not stop.

…

Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said his group was behind the shooting.

“She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol,” Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,” he said.

One item claims that Imran Khan says it’s about the drones.

According to Imran Khan, Pakistani Taliban’s violence is a reaction to drone attacks. Was #Malala a drone pilot?

God hates women and schoolgirls.

 

A 14-year-old schoolgirl in the Swat valley in Pakistan has been shot in the head. The Taliban says it did it. Malala Yousafzai is also a campaigner for girls’ education. She was attacked on her way home from school in Mingora. She’s reported to be out of danger.

Ehsanullah Ehsan told BBC Urdu that they attacked her because she was anti-Taliban and secular, adding that she would not be spared.

Clear and to the point. [Read more…]

Hey look, Salman Rushdie is on C-Span live right now. Well actually not right now, the woman who co-owns Politics and Prose is on right now, introducing him. Melody was on before that.

Now Robert Siegel is talking.

So watch and listen!

I’ll live-blog it, that’s what.

Paraphrase: It’s very difficult to write about duration. It was like the pampas, as Borges described it. You can’t take a picture of it, because it looks like a field. You can only get a sense of it by traveling in it, and then it just goes on and on, and it’s always the same, and it goes on and on, and it’s always the same, and it goes on and on.

The fatwa was like that.

One of the greatest things about the history of literature is that writers have always taken on ogres. When Mandelstam wrote about Stalin he knew who he was. When Lorca wrote about Franco he knew who he was. Writers have always stood up to tyrants.

The Satanic Verses wasn’t primarily a novel about Islam. It was primarily about migration.

I have less religion than you could inscribe on a chewed-off fingernail. [applause]

After he signed the absurd statement of religious faith, he felt like throwing up. “At that point, I just thought the hell with it. No more appeasement, no more apology. Fuck it.”

Out of that moment – it was an awful moment – he became the person he is, the person who could say what he says.

It was Christmas Eve 1990. Weirdly enough, I remember it. I was horrified that he’d made a “statement of faith.”

We can’t live in a world where what we can say is determined by violence.

[On the bounty] No one’s ever taken this old gentleman seriously, even in Iran, because he doesn’t have the money.

That’s one of the problems with Iran is that even the liberals are assholes.

What you need when you write for children: you need lots of jump.

It’s strange coming to Washington with Christopher not here.

We invented this game of titles that didn’t quite make it. A Farewell to Weapons. Toby Dick. aka Moby Prick. Blueberry Finn.

They weren’t close friends until the fatwa. They became close friends because he wanted it that way.

Update: this item is from 1996. [hides scarlet face]

There’s an Alabama State Senator (Republican) running for Congress, who says slavery was a good thing for the people who were slaves.

Mr. Davidson referred to Leviticus 25:44 — “You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you” — and quoted I Timothy 6:1 as saying slaves should “regard their own masters as worthy of all honor.” [Read more…]

Taslima has a chilling little graphic…

An unpleasant little story from India.

…a 12-year-old boy was allegedly chained by authorities of a local madrassa to prevent him from escaping from the school.

According to Medak town police, the boy has been studying in ‘Minhaj-ul-uloom’ religious school for the past three years and had earlier made several attempts to run away from the madrassa, as he was not a quick learner and had a stammering problem.

The police said that the madrassa management had chained the boy a few days ago to prevent him from escaping.

To prevent him from “escaping” – as if he were somehow legally obliged to be there.

“There is no compulsion in religion.” Oh really?

It’s interesting to see the Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn unabashedly announcing that theism is part of citizenship in the US.

This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian. We’ve got the Creator in our Declaration of Independence. We’ve got “In God We Trust” on our coins. We’ve got “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. And we say prayers in the Senate and the House of Representatives to God.

Excuse me. I am a citizen. I don’t have to claim anything (and neither does any other citizen), and I certainly don’t have to claim a belief in god. Nobody has to. Nor does anyone have to claim a disbelief in god.

Up until now, the idea of being American and believing in God were synonymous.

No, they were not.

It’s slightly shocking to see a political columnist betray such ignorance of political basics. A majority opinion is not at all the same thing as being any particular nationality. The claim is both absurd and bossy.

Fortunately there are many comments pointing out how wrong that column is, along with some predictable sexist dreck.

 

Have you read the Leiter and Weisberg review of Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False? It’s pretty entertaining.

First there’s theoretical reductionism: it’s all physics. Nobody thinks that, so it’s silly to bother with it. Second there’s naturalism: what there is is what there is. (That’s my version. Theirs is the proper one.) Lots think that, so what’s Nagel’s problem with it? Well he reads “widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist” and he notices that science often contradicts common sense.

This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history. [Read more…]

Adam Lee has an article in Salon about Divisiveness Among Teh Atheists and what a good thing it is. (No, he doesn’t say anything about “bitchy infighting” or the Judean People’s Front.)

The animating idea behind Atheism+ is that atheism isn’t a stopping point, but a beginning. We’re atheists not because we want to gather and engage in collective back-slapping, not because we want to chortle at the foolishness of benighted believers, but because we care about creating a world that’s more just, more peaceful, more enlightened, and we see organized religion as standing in the way of this goal. We consider politically engaged atheism an effective way to demolish this obstacle, to refute the beliefs that have so often throughout human history been used to excuse cruelty, inequality, ignorance, oppression and violence.

Is that bitchy of us? No, it isn’t. Joking aside, it isn’t. It’s what freethought has always been about. I bet nobody ever called G W Foote bitchy. [Read more…]