Originally a comment on How his belief system drives him to do it, responding to a quotation from Chesterton.

G.K. Chesterton was a very engaging writer with a lovely prose style, but he was also a very shallow thinker who specialised in dressing up fallacies and bigoted prejudices in quaint costumes to make them seem attractive, and was very fond of clever syllogisms that were actually meaningless except to make him seem superior to everyone else around him. Examples?

The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any. [Read more…]

Jesus ice-skating christ. A twitter exchange:

Ahmed Safder @AhmedSafder

When you have Allah on your side. No force in the world can fight you and win 🙂 Mashallah! Thank you God for everything.

Rah @francosoup

“@AhmedSafder: When you have Allah on your side. No force can fight you and win”

~Unless you’re a Muslim woman being stoned to death.

Ahmed Safder @AhmedSafder

@francosoup

those cases are rare 🙂 majority of the Muslim women are kept like princesses 🙂

A smiley! A smiley!!! A smiley!!!!!

A fucking smiley about women being stoned to death.

I’m reading a piece about discourse and persuasion in the Atlantic, and my attention is snagged by a peripheral point.

A friend taught me this.

He’s an orthodox Catholic. I am not. I went to 14 years of Catholic school and decided that it wasn’t for me. As you can imagine, I’ve heard all the arguments for Catholicism. So when my friend, Nick, argues with me about Catholic doctrine, he is very unlikely to persuade me of anything. But Nick happens to be one of the best people I know. Even though I don’t have faith in the same things that he does, I see how his faith makes him a better person. I see how he makes the world a better place, and how his belief system drives him to do it. And whenever I think about Nick, I think to myself, you know, I disagree with the Catholic faith on a lot of particulars, but there must be nuggets of truth within it if it inspires people like Nick to be this good. [Read more…]

The Cellular Solutions staff page – does something seem a bit unusual here?

Scroll down.

Keep going.

More.

Ah! There we go!

Via Helen Dale

Another useful item from the UN: a statement that states that have ratified the UN Women’s Rights Convention have to uphold women’s rights even when there’s a war on. Imagine that.

States that have ratified the UN Women’s Rights Convention are obliged to uphold women’s rights before, during and after conflict when they are directly involved in fighting, are providing peacekeeping troops or donor assistance for conflict prevention, humanitarian aid or post-conflict reconstruction, a key UN women’s rights committee has said in a landmark document.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) also said that ratifying States should exercise due diligence in ensuring that non-State actors, such as armed groups and private security contractors, be held accountable for crimes against women. [Read more…]

There’s a difference between authoritarian morality and let’s call it reasoned morality. What’s the difference? Well obviously, the first is commands and the second gives reasons.

When bishops moan about attacks on the “religious freedom” of Catholics to punish gay people by refusing to officiate at their marriages or rent them rooms at bed&breakfasts, they cite “church teachings” as their reason for treating homosexuality as wrong and deserving of punishment. That’s authoritarian. “The church teaches that homosexuality is evil” is not reasons, it’s a detour around reasons. [Read more…]

Mother Jones has a “Richard Cohen’s 10 Worst Moments” piece, which is good, because I have hitherto neglected this rich vein of bad moments.

1 (tied). Richard Cohen goes to the movies, finds out slavery is wrong.

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life…slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children.

About a week ago, Richard Cohen went to see 12 Years a Slave and came out surprised by the brutal depiction of slavery in America. [Read more…]

So Toys “R” Us has this ad about how boring trees are and how ecstatically enthralling Toys “R” Us is.

Note the little girl saying, “A princess is loyal, and never gives up, and always follows her dreams.” Unless of course her dreams have anything to do with learning about trees as opposed to toys in shiny boxes.

Peter Gleick at the Huffington Post is forthright.

This ad is offensive on so many levels:

• It insults science and environmental education teachers. [Read more…]

Bad news from Uganda.

Activists in Uganda report that police have arrested Sam K. Ganafa, executive director of Spectrum Uganda Initiatives and board chair for the Sexual Minorities Uganda coalition.

Charges against Ganafa have not yet been determined.  He was handcuffed after he reported to the Kasangati police station in response to a call from the district police commander.

Police also searched his home and took two of Ganafa’s guests to the police station for interrogation.

Activists said Ganafa has opened his home to many homeless LGBTI persons and it was also used as a Spectrum Uganda office for more than eight years.

I hope he will be all right.