PZ takes a look at the Global Secular Council Debut and compares how that’s being run to how he and Ed thought about Freethought Blogs when they were setting it up.
Will they be effective? I looked at their Issues page, and it’s rather high-mindedly vague. For instance, one issue isInternational Human Rights. I’m glad they’re for ‘em, but after a scant 3 paragraphs that consist of platitudes, they present their summary:
POLICY RECOMMENDATION: The U.S. government should apply political pressure whenever possible to countries violating their international human rights obligations.
So, the Global Secular Council’s advice is that the US should do something about it?
I had to stop and laugh for about 3 minutes. I’m so glad they have all those EXPERTS to come up with that groundbreaking new POLICY RECOMMENDATION.
They’re not going to accomplish much if they’re just going to announce a set of goals on a website and then pose wisely to convince other people to go do the actual work, somehow.
I’m always going to be suspicious of an ad hoc group that assembles itself, declares itself the leader, and then tells everyone to follow on the strength of the prestige of their team. That’s not how real, functional organizations work. “BE IN CHARGE” is not a mission statement.
As a counter-example, look at Freethought Blogs. It’s an organization. When Ed Brayton and I were discussing setting it up, we did not begin by saying we’re really, really smart, and we should take charge and lead the whole atheist movement — we had a more reasonable and limited and specific goal. We wanted to set up a platform where we could write freely, and where we could create a shared space for people who wanted to promote equality and diversity within the movement…and thereby amplify the voices of all those people with broader social concerns than simply not believing in gods.
Mission, then framework to do it, and only then people to do the doing. This Global outfit seems to have thought, “Oooh we have all these shiny thought-leaders going to waste; let’s call them a GLOBAL COUNCIL so that everyone will be excited.” And now they’re surprised and puzzled that some of us are saying it seems to be a clusterfuck.
It’s like an entire roomful of that kid in school who always tried to take over the group project and write it all him/herself because they were sure that everyone else would just mess it up.
I like the word ‘ clusterfuck’.
“Clusterfuck” is better. I was thinking “circle jerk,” but to associate this crew with circle jerks gives the circle jerk a bad name.
Seriously, paging through that site makes me sick to my stomach. Others on other pages of your (boffo) coverage today have commented about how these folks have lost the script, and I have to agree. I don’t want these people representing me. I didn’t ask them. They didn’t earn it. They are smug, high-minded blowhards and I could not respect them any less.
The upside? They have all coalesced in one place as sort of a directory of people from whom I can distance myself. I’ll have to bookmark that site.
U.S. government should apply political pressure
No thank you, please. The US has interfered in too many political processes and seems to only understand “political pressure comes from the barrel of a gun.”
Marcus,
Agreed. When the US has “applied pressure” the past 60 years or so it has turned out worse for everyone involved. One of my stances for global human rights is to try and get the US to stop applying pressure.
There really seems to be a peculiar infantility of mind, as well as a peculiar ignorance of and contempt for politics and history, that afflicts these people, for all their vaunted intelligence. To pretend, after Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, water-boarding, Guantanamo Bay and other torture sites, ‘rendition’ and its support for various thugs around the world that the US is some brave knight on a white horse is risible. Not to mention the humans rights violations that seem to occur increasingly within the US – amongst which I would include the immiseration of larger and larger numbers of the US population (vide Tony Judt & Thomas Piketty). There is no awareness of the recalcitrance of reality, only this utterly childish belief that if we would all be sensible and think like a certain sub-set of ‘rationalists’, the world would, with the help of that white knight of course, be magically put to rights.
Why does one never seem to hear these people addressing such issues as the growing gap between rich and poor in the US and the UK, the disproportionate number of black men imprisoned in the US, the use of torture by the US, force-feeding at Guantanamo, the abuse of ‘surveillance’, etc? If they do address these issues, then I must apologise for saying this, but I have not come across much in that line from them.
The US already applies pressure in regards to human rights violations. It just does so when it serves US interests.
I don’t have a problem with a secular think tank. Conservatives use them to give their graduating student leaders employment and the opportunity to keep working for them. It could work for secular organizations.
This group, however, is more like a 1970’s supergroup, and the web site is like the record company’s ad campaign.
“From the people who brought you The Firm, and Asia: Get ready to rock with the Global Secular Council! It’s heavy!”
I wonder if they stole the idea of animal fellows from my site, http://www.bolingbrookbabbler.com/2014/05/web-exclusive-cfis-pet-fellows-defeat.html
It occurred to me that what I hate most about the atheist and skeptic movements, apart from them being almost entirely made up of wealthy otherwise conservative rich white people, is their US-centricity, and the false sense of cultural superiority that comes attached to it.
At this point, the *only* thing the US can do to improve human rights outside of the US is to start living up to all signed conventions on human rights, most notably the one against torture.
And I really mean *start* living up to them, just *start* with prosecuting people who handled torture orders…
The problem here is that, what is America actually all about? America is its corporations.
Consider for a second for a second the worst terrorist groups in the world, also known as American lobbyists, and how they tried to make South Africa delay an important change to our patent laws in order to protect pharmaceutical at the cost of patients’ lives.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/17/us-safrica-pharma-idUSBREA0G0N720140117
And yes I get that most Americans don’t agree with this sort of thing, in fact that is part of the problem whenever we talk about how America should do something – America isn’t a democracy it is a theocratic oligarchy and that informs its values in dealing with any other country.
Which means companies like Public Affairs Engagement run the show, and they’re the ones that are going to apply the pressure.
If you want to talk about anyone putting political pressure on anyone – France, Britain, Scandanavia, heck pressure between countries in Africa would do a lot more good than the largely bought and paid for government of the USA.
Check out the banner photo on their website showing Shermer taking the opportunity to cop a feel.
Ludicrous, you’re a few days late 😉
Take a lokk at the second page of B&W
Giliell,
And falling further behind every day.
@4. Marcus Ranum & #5. HappyNat
So the USA should do what when it sees human rights abuses happening in your view? Ignore them? Look away and do nothing?
How is that a good or ethical thing?
I get the feeling that the USA is in a catch-22 will be criticised any way whatever it does. If it doesn’t intervene or pressure nations that are doing appalling things, it will be condemned (rightly) for that callous, uncaring approach.
If it does intervene then to some people whatever it does is wrong.
The fact that some attempts to make things better haven’t gone to plan and have perhaps made things worse (e.g. liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny) shouldn’t stop the US from caring about and acting to prevent or minimise or punish human rights violations.
I do not think its true that every time the USA has applied pressure or gone to war it has turned out badly – the US led intervention that freed Kuwait from Saddam’s troops in the 1991 Gulf War (or first Saddam war as I think it should be called) and the interventions to protect Bosnia and Kosovo during the break up of Yugoslavia are a couple of counter examples. You could even say US pressure on human rights along with the economic factors helped end the Cold War and bring down the former Soviet empire.
There is also the reality of global politics that if the USA isn’t pressuring nations then other nations with far less regard for human rights – e.g. China, Russia, Arabia – will pressure them to follow what they want instead. Who would rather have pressuring and influencing other smaller nations?
So I disagree with you and think the USA should remain involved in the world and keep on pressuring nations and fighting for human rights but they do need to do this in an intelligent and smart way and hopefully get things right more often.
BTW. Tried to post this earlier and it didn’t come through. Odd.
StevoR @14
You shoot down your own argument with this statement:
Please tell us how American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan has improved life for the average Iraqi and Afghan. The last time I looked there were 2,552,000 Afghan refugees and another 574,000 “internally displaced persons”. The US intervention has not been the optimal situation for 3 million+ people. Plus the Afghan opium and heroin trade is on the upswing:
Actually what America should do is stop engaging in what it views as human rights abuses. You’ve got to be the change you want in the rest of the world, otherwise we are all just going to make wanking motions every time you say something.
If you want secularism in Pakistan, you’re going to have to stop arguing against it in Missouri. If you want Bangladesh to take worker’s rights seriously, you’re going to have to start taking them seriously in America’s schools. If you want prisoners’ rights to be taken seriously, stopping torturing people would probably be itself a good idea.
If you want Uganda to legalise homosexuality, you’re going to need to do something about your own churches being the ones who talked them into banning it in the first place.
And in order to do any of this you are going to need to break the grip big business has on your government – and actually have a government that runs America in favour of your average American, not American Express.
As to the smaller states and who should be applying that pressure – here is how you should do it:
Instead of having America tell people what to do, simply expand the ability to get onto the Internet. Get friendly, go into rogue states and help them electrify. Instead of singing songs about bombing Iran, make a big deal about sharing solar technology.
Sure all of these states censor, and just about everyone in them knows exactly how to get around it. Instead of applying pressure like some schoolyard bully, enable the change and the people themselves will start to apply the pressure.
RECEIVING POLICY RECOMMENDATION
. . .
READING POLICY RECOMMENDATION
. . .
REJECTING POLICY RECOMMENDATION
error 0x37F DO NOT WANT!
You know what would be dramatically different from every other pretentious think tank in America giving advice to the US on how to fix problems in the world?
If they recognized that the US is a contributor to those problems, and asked them to stop making things worse. If you’re talking about human rights, and you want to have the US to, for instance, tell Uganda to stop making laws that oppress LGBT people, you first tell the US that if they want to do that, they have to clean their own house. It’s not as if the official organs of the state here treat Tony Perkins and the Dobsonites and Scott Lively as pariahs, you know — we elect anti-gay Christian zealots to high office, where they do their very best to trample on human rights, and are welcomed in the halls of power.
It seems an awful lot of the abuses in the Global World arise from the religious idiocy promoted in America. Why isn’t the Global Secular Council making this their focus?
You could, of course, get into contact with people within these countries, cultures and communities who fight for human rights, talk to them and support them. Which is the exact opposite of what those twits are proposing.
StevoR @14
I suppose you are correct that sometimes when the US has gotten involved in foreign affairs is hasn’t always been a complete disaster. yea?
Before I can get behind the US intervening in humans right violations around the world we need to stop doing them ourselves. These are complicated situations and things won’t always go as planned, even if the US goes in with best intentions. But if the US can’t acknowledge what basic human rights are within their own borders and adhere to their own constitution in dealing with it’s citizens, I don’t trust them to “do the right thing” when dealing with other countries. Clean up your own dog poop filled back yard before you complain about the neighbors, or else you’ll track the dog shit on your shoes around the globe.
The fact that this “global” group buys so far into american exceptionalism without a hint of irony stinks of the argument from “FREEDOM”! And we’ve seen how that plays out.
Emerson, Lake & Shermer.
brucegorton, your #16 was beautiful. May I share it (with attribution and link)?
Re the Recommendation, as someone once said, “Remove first the log from thine own eye!” Canada used to have a good reputation on promoting human rights (or so we told ourselves), but I think we’ve lost even that under Harper. (I have to note that there’s one or two stealth Canadians on that Council ;-)).
I have a fair bit of respect, with appropriate reservations, for a lot of the people involved (and more reservations than respect for a few of them), but I still don’t understand what this group is supposed to do that’s not already in the mandate of CFI Transnational, AAI, and few others. So far it looks more sizzle than steak.
So the USA should do what when it sees human rights abuses happening in your view? Ignore them? Look away and do nothing?
How is that a good or ethical thing?
Did you perhaps not read what I wrote?? I wrote “the US has interfered with…” (‘interfere’ implying a negative involvement – self-injection into someone else’s situation) and “‘political pressure comes from the barrel of a gun'” implying that the US’s responses are threatening or violent. I was implying that how the US applies “political pressure” is, in other words, inappropriate.
How do you get from that to “… should do nothing”??? Just because what the US has been doing is abusive, violent, solipsistic, perhaps even fascistic, and violent doesn’t mean that the US could not possibly play a valuable role in world politics. It simply means that generally, the US does not. I think it would be great if the US did choose to play a valuable role. But in order to do so, the US needs to get over the idea of ‘we had to destroy the village in order to save it’ — all too often the strategy.
If you think the US is a force for good in the world, you should do some remedial studying of history. I’d recommend Howard Zinn’s “People’s history…” along with a great big dose of Wake The Fuck Up and extracting your head from your nether cavity.
I get the feeling that the USA is in a catch-22 will be criticised any way whatever it does
Let me give you an example of the problem you are complaining about.
The US engages in torture, both in its military and in its justice/incarceration system. This sets the US to be criticized for hypocrisy when the US wags a finger at another country for abusing citizens or prisoners. As you say, the US is in a “catch-22” because it’s really hard to wag the finger of accusing disapproval at someone else for doing something you do, yourself.
The US is in a “catch-22” of its own making. The way to get out of the “catch-22” is to stop being so fucking hypocritical. Not to ask other people to change their reactions to our hypocrisy.
stop engaging in what it views as human rights abuses
Minor nit: there are significant international standards regarding what constitutes human rights abuses. There is no need for the US to stop engaging in what it views as human rights abuses. It should stop engaging in what international standards view as human rights abuses. That’s a critical step in moving away from US-centric exceptionalism: acknowledging that we are not special people whose president is not a war criminal when he orders citizens in another country bombed for US-centric domestic expediency. It is crucial to acknowledge that there is a higher justice than US law, which is dubiously re-interpreted for political expediency – in order to show that the US was concerned with human rights abuses, we could start by applying our own laws, which would mean trying some former US presidents and executives for violating US law regarding torture and surveillance. We wag the finger of disapproving blame at other countries and say they need “truth and reconciliation” hearings …. well… that’s a good idea. If the US wanted to attempt to achieve some kind of stature internationally as something other than the biggest thugs on the planet we’d have to lance a few of these horrible diseased boils deep in our flesh. It’s not going to happen, which is why the US is just going to remain “the biggest thugs on the planet” and we’ll blithely continue to mistake the rest of the world’s fear for respect.
I would like to see a group that could show corporations there is an advantage in investing in the environment and increasing the middle class and decreasing poverty. the more people you have in middle class the stronger your tax revenues are. The problem is getting people to think in the long term rather than in quarterly profit reports. Global warming is creating many more expenses than if we did something about it 50 years ago. There are probably groups that are doing this now but are probably not enough of them. I do like the idea of going to a country and asking what they need and help them build it, whether it be infrastructure, better water management, better health. When you improve a person’s living situation the more likely they will take an interest in politics and changing their country
@Nathaniel Frein
Sorry, I only just saw your message now.I am happy to be quoted in general. Thanks hey.