First you need this:
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste.
The tragedy!!!!!
Wait, some dismal pedant might object, what about starvation in Somalia and malnutrition in Bangladesh? Is it really worth an all-caps STUPID for a little jar of honey? [Read more…]
If you see a suffering animal with an open wound you’ll probably feel both disgust and empathy. Arielle Duhaime-Ross looked into the sources of both.
But with conflicting signals from empathy and disgust flooding our brains, how does one emotion prevail over the other? “We are full of conflicting desires, that is the nature of human beings,” Curtis observes. “At any one time we have to weigh different motives and make a decision what to do based on circumstances, so people may simultaneously want to comfort a sick animal and recoil from its open wound.” What you choose to do, she says, “depends on the strength of your disgust and the strength of your desire to care.”
That’s one reason people who want to hate X or Xs tend to work up a lot of disgust at X or Xs. That, in turn, is a reason to be wary of the habit of working up disgust at people, whether individuals or groups.
Originally a comment on Pardon me, are you sufficiently feminine yet?
The rejection of “femininity” as a prescription for what all women should be while attempting not to de-value traditionally “feminine” attributes creates a serious double bind. I hate it. I hate it all the more because I possess a lot of those traditionally “feminine” attributes: I’m not trying to, I’m not trying to play them up, but I do. I still don’t want to be used as an example of a “good” or “real” woman by assholes who think women should just be barefoot and pregnant (and silent) in the kitchen.
This particularly sucks because of my career choices. I currently have a career in STEM. [Read more…]
Laurie Penny takes a look at the familiar subject of hipster sexism, this time in the person of Russell Brand.
Brand is playing the court jester, and speaking limited truth to overwhelming power in one of the few remaining ways that won’t get you immediately arrested right now – from an enormous stage made of media money, liberally thickened with knob jokes, with a getaway sportscar full of half-naked popstars parked out back and one tongue firmly in his cheek.
But what about the women? [Read more…]
Bill Cooke is the Director of Transnational Programs at the Center for Inquiry.
On the fertile high country in central Kenya, in the shadow of the Nandi Hills, is the Ogwodo Primary School. Five or so buildings, two of them built by the parents out of mud and cow dung. All quite large and bare, with forty or more children to each room, sitting on hard pews and working at long benchtops. Here is where a sizable group of orphans are getting their schooling thanks to the Center for Inquiry, the humanist think-tank based in Amherst, New York.
There are many orphans in Kenya, most the result of their parents having died from HIV/AIDs, being too poor to afford medication, or learning of their disease too late. The churches bear a huge responsibility for the unnecessarily high death toll. Their primitive attitudes toward contraception and their encouragement of superstitions and misinformation about what HIV/AIDs is and how it is caught is a scandal to all civilized people. In the face of this ongoing catastrophe, George Ongere of CFI–Kenya has set up the Humanist Orphans program.
School fees keep many of the poorest children away from school in Kenya, as does the cost of uniforms. Most schools in Kenya insist on a uniform. It’s a way of weeding out those parents who are not serious about their children’s education. But, with no parents to look out for their interests, most orphans miss out on school altogether, and have no future to look forward to.
So George Ongere has gathered together this group of orphans in his home district, overseen their placement in the homes of relatives or neighbors, and ensured their school fees and uniforms are paid for from his already-overstretched CFI stipend. It was deeply moving to see these young people being given a chance at life. The needs of the orphans are still legion. But some sort of start has been made.
Addendum updated November 19: If you want to donate to support this work, donate to CFI and earmark it for the International Program by emailing the Development Department.
Yemisi Ilesanmi is having an argument with some God-invoking homophobes on her Facebook wall, and using graphics and cartoons to illustrate some of her points. Good clean fun.
And there’s her book…
You know how there’s something of a tension in feminism between different attitudes to “femininity”? To put it crudely, one view is that it’s just a set of (implicit) rules that keep women feeble and silly, while the opposite view is that disparaging femininity is patriarchal because it just amounts to seeing anything female as worthy of disparagement.
What about that? I tend toward the first view, but I also suspect that means I’m an unreconstructed dinosaur beached on the second wave and incapable of learning better.
But, I think the words (and what they express) are stupid, both of them – masculine as well as feminine. They’re advertising language, for one thing – have this masculine cologne at $3700 the ounce, don’t you love these feminine shoes in which you can break your ankle so easily. [Read more…]
No reason. Just because.
The Bishops continue their tireless efforts to impose their viciously obscurantist godbothering views on all of us. They report it proudly on their episcopal website, because they think they are morally better than the rest of us. They are so wrong about that. [Read more…]
Chris Clarke wrote a wonderful little bit of ethological observation as a Facebook status.
Today I watched a raven with a Cheeto being carefully stalked by two California gulls looking for a way to snatch the treat away. The raven hid the Cheeto under a leaf as the gulls watched. The gulls seemingly concluded that the Cheeto was gone and wandered off.
As people pointed out in comments, this neatly shows that gulls don’t have object permanence while ravens do have theory of mind.
(I look forward to an avalanche of Cheeto ads in my future…)