Via Marcus Ranum: Pro Publica reports that guards may be responsible for half of prison sexual assaults.
A new Justice Department study shows that allegations of sex abuse in the nation’s prisons and jails are increasing — with correctional officers responsible for half of it — but prosecution is still extremely rare. [Read more…]
Speaking of our grotesque rates of incarceration in the US – here’s a guy in California who was legally growing legal marijuana for a collective of medical marijuana dispensaries, who has been sentenced to two years in the slammer.
Robert Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Northern California in 2010 to manage marijuana growing operations for a collective of medical marijuana dispensaries. Although California voters legalized medical cannabis more than 17 years ago, the plant remains illegal under federal law, and the Obama administration launched a renewed crackdown on marijuana in California in 2011.
That October, Duncan’s grow house was raided. [Read more…]
The Independent on prison rape (and, later in the article, consensual sex) in the US.
The crook of another man’s elbow is on my Adam’s apple, pressing down, choking me. After just a couple of seconds, I panic and gasp.
Shaun Attwood, who spent more than five years in some of America’s toughest prisons, including Arizona’s infamous Maricopa Jail, is showing me how men in prison are raped.
“Generally they put the victim to sleep with a choke hold – locking the windpipe like this,” he says, rendering me unable to reply. “Within about 10 seconds you’re unconscious.” [Read more…]
There’s an interview with Rebecca Goldstein in the Atlantic. She’s a speaker at Women in Secularism 3.
[pause for inward tap dance; inward so as not to alarm Cooper who is asleep]\
From the intro:
At a time when advances in science and technology have changed our understanding of our mental and physical selves, it is easy for some to dismiss the discipline of philosophy as obsolete. Stephen Hawking, boldly, argues that philosophy is dead.
Yes, and Richard Dawkins, absurdly, demands why philosophy didn’t think of natural selection before Darwin.
How early do you think children can, or should, start learning about philosophy?
I started really early with my daughters. They said the most interesting things that if you’re trained in philosophy you realize are big philosophical statements. [Read more…]
A tour around FTB…
From the newest blog, On the Margin of Error, Kaveh talks about the fetish for uncertainty.
…we are not certain if there is an alien species or not. But if someone says that he knows aliens have their asses on their heads and every time they fart their eyes pop out, then we can be certain that person is wrong, and our certainty is not dogmatic, but only rational. [Read more…]
The Sinn Féin website reports what its Deputy Leader said at the Glasnevin Flowers for Magdalene event. (Sinn Féin is, as I understand it, quite pro-church itself, so much of this may be political. That doesn’t make it untrue though.)
One year after Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s apology to the Magdalene survivors, Sinn Féin Deputy Leader Mary Lou McDonald TD has called on the government to introduce the long awaited Restorative Justice Bill. [Read more…]
And just today, a few hours ago, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, the third annual Flowers for Magdalenes event, to remember the women who died in the Magdalene Laundries.
Speakers included Mary Lou McDonald TD (Sinn Féin), Claire McGettrick (Justice for Magdalenes), Lynn Boylan (Sinn Féin) and Martina Keogh (Survivor of the Magdalene laundries).
Meet Mari Steed.
Mari Steed was two-years-old when she was adopted from Ireland by a family from Flourtown, PA. Years later, her search for her birth mother turned up the Magdalene Laundries’ terrifying legacy, and Steed is widely credited for her campaign for justice and the Irish Government’s apology to the Magdalene survivors.
Mari is the daughter of a Magdalene survivor. She was taken from her mother and sent for adoption in America at eighteen months old. [Read more…]
Boko Haram struck again yesterday.
The attackers – believed to be from the Boko Haram group – destroyed the entire village of Mainok, about 50km (30 miles) west of the city of Maiduguri.
The incident took place late on Saturday, hours after two bomb blasts killed at least 50 people in Maiduguri.
Boko Haram has been conducting a four-year violent campaign to demand Islamic rule in northern Nigeria.
The morning after the latest attack, bodies were lying in front of the mosque waiting to be buried and buildings in Mainok were still on fire, the BBC’s Will Ross reports from Lagos. [Read more…]
Oh lordy. Again. I should just add a little sub-blog or something: Dawkinswatch.
This time he’s trying his hand at making authoritative pronouncements about religion versus atheism on Twitter, and…well, I cringed.
Some good people are religious. Some good people are atheists. All who fight stem cell research & evolution teaching are religious.
Some good people are religious. Some good people are atheists. All who bomb abortion clinics & all who mutilate clitorises are religious.
Some atheists are bad. But all stoners, hand-choppers, abortion clinic bombers, evolution deniers, gay-persecutors are religious.
Some atheists do good, some bad. But atheism drives nobody to do bad. Raligion drives some people to do bad because they think it’s good.
Oh gawd. Somebody stop him.
I think I know what he’s trying to say; I think he’s trying to make the point that religion supplies certain kinds of motivation that are absent from atheism. But those blurts are not that point! And they’re wrong.
And it does matter, because he’s taken to be an atheist authority figure by many many many people, atheists and non-atheists alike. As a mouthy atheist myself, I’m getting increasingly restless about being “represented” by crude slogans like the above.