Since Vacula used his resignation as an opportunity to do more hissing and finger-pointing, I’ll give it a bit more attention. Apart from anything else the editor in me is refusing to be silent. He writes really badly, which is another drawback in a director.

Following a lengthy period of self-reflection and deliberation, I am freely resigning from my position…

Bad right out of the gate. Tin ear. “A lengthy period”? “Of self-reflection and deliberation”? Who talks like that? Dude, just say you’ve thought about it carefully. Talk normal. This impulse to inflate the vocabulary is fatal. [Read more…]

And blames his critics.

Arvind Iyer has a wonderful post at Nirmukta arguing that tales of shared ancestry or the threat of a common enemy are not the only way to unite people around a cause. Popular culture can also do that.

There was this Japanese tv series in the early ’90s, Oshin, which is affectionately remembered by people all over Asia.

What makes people even of warring nations forget their differences while watching this show, is not just a single dialogue like the impassioned imploring of the conscientious army deserter Shunsaku Anchan^2a that “War is not the answer” to resolve differences. The forgetting of differences is thanks to some reminders which suffuse this show’s every episode in both their everyday settings and their unsettling moments, reminders of the essential sameness of the human condition regardless of borders.  This cultural product which people of a divided world together recall with fondness, is an unsung triumph of secular humanism in its own right. This series can be thought of as a resource for the secular humanist project of cultivating ‘educated feeling’³ and complementing Reason with Compassion.

Like the last book of The Iliad, or The Winter’s Tale. The example that occurred to me when Arvind alerted me to the post was Northern Exposure. There are more. You got any?

The Washington Post blog The Root has an African-American atheist, Mark Hatcher, saying what that’s like.

[One day] I’m walking across campus, and normally don’t have it on, but I had my Atheist t-shirt on. Somebody came up to me and said “Oh my God, I thought I was crazy, I thought I was the only one. Thank you for letting me know I’m not insane.” That’s understandable in our community. You gotta love Jesus. If you don’t love Jesus, you gotta love somebody. My mom’s first question to me was ‘What, so you don’t believe in anything?!” And that’s hard in the black community. You gotta believe in something in order to be a complete person. This person coming up to me, saying that they thought they were insane because of the type of pressure that was on them to believe in something that they just simply couldn’t, I was like, “You know what? We need a community here”…

There are other things you can believe in though. You can believe in a better future for humans. You can believe in hope, in solidarity, in compassion…you can even (though you will get a lot of people yelling at you) believe in progress. You can believe in music, in art, in love, in sex, in nature, in beauty – damn, you can believe in a lot of things. They don’t have to be a person, especially not a magical person.

Great. There was a “symposium” in Ireland at which some boffins concluded to their own satisfaction that “abortion is not necessary to save the mother’s life in any circumstance” so PersonhoodUSA naturally gives a yell of triumph. Go right ahead and force Catholic hospitals to let pregnant women die rather than provide an abortion, Catholic church!

According to the Irish organization Youth Defence, “Leading medical experts speaking at a major International Symposium on Excellence in Maternal Healthcare held in Dublin have concluded that ‘direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a mother.’” [Read more…]

Seen Half the Sky? It’s pretty good, not surprisingly. One thing I liked is that they specifically took on cultural relativism, and said no thank you. Sheryl WuDunn made a point that I often raise, because it illustrates the issue very well – but she could make it even better, because of her grandmother. Her grandmother had bound feet. She simply said that, and that said she’s delighted that that particular “cultural” item is dead and gone.

It took force to make it dead and gone, you know. The commies did it. The commies forced that cultural tradition to die out, by forcing people to stop breaking all the bones in their daughters’ feet. How cruel and coercive of them, yes? [Read more…]

News on the Deanna De Jesus case, the woman who was being prosecuted for “letting” her husband stab their child to death.

She’s been found guilty of child neglect.

The jury in the case of Deanna DeJesus has found her guilty of child neglect  but the trial is not over yet. [Read more…]

David Futrelle is on the Vacula story, in a post titled Why is the Secular Coalition for America giving Justin Vacula — online bully, A Voice for Men contributor — a leadership position? Why indeed.

The assholes of the internet still haven’tforgivenWatsonfor her assault on the sacred right of creepy dudes to creep women out 24 hours a day, every day.

Watson is hardly the only skeptic to face vicious misogynist harassment for the crime of blogging while feminist. Last month, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag announced that near constant harassment from online bullies was wearing her down to such a degree that she felt it necessary to shut down her blog – hopefully only temporarily. [Read more…]

In memory of Eric Hobsbawm, an old post from 2007.

From Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, page 114:

Until Kabul, the UN’s disastrous lack of a policy had been ignored but then it became a scandal and the UN came in for scathing criticism from feminist groups. Finally the UN agencies were forced to draw up a common position. A statement spoke of ‘maintaining and promoting the inherent equality and dignity of all people’ and ‘not discriminating between the sexes, races, ethnic groups or religions.’ But the same UN document also stated that ‘international agencies hold local customs and cultures in high respect.’ It was a classic UN compromise, which gave the Taliban the lever to continue stalling…

In the chapter ‘Women and Cultural Universals’ in Sex and Social Justice Martha Nussbaum tells ‘true stories’ of conversations at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, ‘in which the anti-universalist position seemed to have alarming implications for women’s lives.’ Pp 35-6. [Read more…]