THE AMAZING ATHEIST! @amazingatheist 14 hours ago
Hey @CHSommers I would love to have you on my podcast, The Drunken Peasants.Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers
@amazingatheist Any time. Huge fan.
If you’ve forgotten who the amazing atheist is and what he’s like, just take a squiz at his feed.
The Independent has a nice big (translated) excerpt from Charb’s book.
Stéphane Charbonnier was a cartoonist and writer. He was a supporter of the French Communist Party. And while, under his editorship, Charlie Hebdo aggressively poked fun at Catholicism and Judaism as well as radical Islam, his book – published in France last week – is a passionate rejection of the allegations that, under his editorship, Charlie Hebdo was “racist” or “Islamophobic”.
In the book, Charb, as he was always known, defends his publication of cartoons mocking radical Islam and caricaturing (but never mocking) the Prophet Mohamed. He argues – from a left-wing, anti-racist, militantly secular viewpoint – that the word “Islamophobia” is a trap, set by an unholy alliance of Muslim radicals and the unthinking, liberal Western media. The real issue, he says, is racism and Charlie Hebdo was never racist…
He argues from a left-wing, anti-racist, militantly secular viewpoint. [Read more…]
Originally a comment by Morgan on Psychiatry is an important skeptical and social justice issue.
Making demands about alternatives before you’ll bother to learn the truth about it seems callous, in addition to incurious.
Look, here’s the thing: you sound like a crank.
That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but from what you’re saying, it’s more likely that you’re a crank than not. So before giving what you have to say much time or attention, it’s worth running a simple filter of asking what your views are, in case they’re “people need to regulate their orgone energy via crystals” or something else that would clearly indicate you’re not worth the effort. What you’re saying may seem obviously reasonable to you, but to me as an outside observer it’s not obviously different from any wooish alt-med claim about how, for example, AIDS isn’t caused by a virus but by poor nutrition / immorality / sinister Western drugs. It doesn’t help that the way you talk about “biopsychiatry” comes off to me as suspiciously dualist, like the idea that mental phenomena are based in the biological action of the brain and that treating or managing them may require medical interventions is just obviously false for some reason. [Read more…]
The producer of the movie that got the Sikh “campaigners” in Wolverhampton so riled up today withdrew the movie so the riled up campaigners could have just bided their time. The Indian Express has the ridiculous details.
Harinder Singh Sikka, the producer of controversial movie “Nanak Shah Fakir”, on Tuesday announced to withdraw the movie from cinema halls across the country and globe. Sikka made the announcement after meeting Akal Takht chief Giani Gurbachan Singh in Delhi. [Read more…]
Hundreds of people had to be evacuated from Cineworld Wolverhampton after 50 protestors turned up and staged a sit-in over the screening of a controversial film.
Police had to be called and the cinema cleared and closed after the protestors surged through the main entrance and headed for the screen showing Bollywood blockbuster, Nanak Shah Fakir.
Once inside, the Sikh campaigners sat down on the floor and began to shout, refusing to move until cinema bosses met their demands and stopped the screening.
Jason Walsh is disgusted with Queen’s University Belfast for canceling an academic symposium for bad self-regarding reasons.
Among the participants at this conference was to be yours truly, the Ireland correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, the world’s most measured, careful and, critics (with whom I would disagree) would say, stiff newspaper. Other participants included, well, academics. It was an academic symposium, after all. As I was a putative participant there is an ethical conflict in me reporting on the matter. There is no such impediment, however, on me complaining about it, so buckle-up while I take you for a spin around the insanity that is the modern university. [Read more…]
I stopped in at that chain drug store that I mentioned yesterday – Bartells – to see if they still carry OTC homeopathic asthma “treatments.” I could find only one thing (and didn’t feel like asking anyone). There’s only one and it’s not right next to other asthma meds; I couldn’t find any other asthma meds. They have everything with pseudoephedrine behind the counter now (because meth, ya know), and maybe all the asthma meds have pseudoephedrine so that’s why I didn’t see any. If that’s the explanation that’s an improvement on the last time I looked at this.
But still there is one item: safecare AsthmaCare for temporary relief of minor asthma symptoms. [Read more…]
Padraig Reidy reports at Little Atoms that Queens University Belfast has canceled a scheduled symposium on
can you guess what?
The irony is so multiple and reflexive that I think it may be about to suck the entire universe into itself and then disappear. [Read more…]
A Facebook friend posted a link to my Freethinker column (published yesterday), and got some…lively comments.
Paul McEnery “Of course the idea behind the cartoons was to challenge authority: to challenge religious authority, clerical authority, theocratic authority, the authority of public opinion and taboo.”
Total motherfucking hypocritical shit-mouthed arsemongering.
The idea was to be cunts to Muslims on the grounds of they were subhuman mongrels who should get the fuck out of Denmark.
