Robin Ince wrote up his version of what that panel was about. “The journalist” is his coy name for Brendan O’Neill.

I attempted to explain to the journalist that the world we live in has never been more complex or filled with things that require work and patience to understand. Though democracy lovers may shiver at the idea, the penalty for living in the civilisation we currently walk through is that we must sometimes accept our ignorance and defer to others. We can hope that they might be trusted, that the heart surgeon is sober and the climate scientists isn’t swayed by the desire for fame on the front cover of Vanity Fair kissing a Polar Bear.

But the people! The people, I tell you!

The journalist suggested this was the kind of fascistic thinking that held up women’s suffrage and the education of the poor. My belief that we are not always equipped to make the best decisions is apparently the alibi that has always been used by people like me who wish to oppress “the common man”.

In the next breath (or on the next panel) he’ll tell you what a great idea the House of Lords is, and what a mess of trendy whiney liberal individualists are the people who say otherwise. It’s what he does.

Bad idea of the moment – a tweet –

Only three horsemen left. Who’s feet are big enough to fill Hitchens’ shoes? #atheism

Dear god what a stupid question (even if it had been “whose”). It’s like asking “what shall we call people who were just too young to fight in WWII that’s not ‘the greatest generation’?” Or “what shall we call the new atheists now that some time has passed?” It’s taking a dopy media cliché and treating it as somehow meaningful.

And then, even if it weren’t ridiculous to take the dopy media cliché seriously, why take it seriously in that way? Who cares whether there are four?

And then, if you want to say Hitchens left a gap, say that, but don’t talk sycophantic (and risible) nonsense about filling his shoes.

But much more, what is this pathetic craven belly-crawling need for Bosses or Leaders or Heads or motherfucking Horsemen? Why are people such suckups? Why are they not just suckups, but not even embarrassed to be suckups?

Atheism doesn’t need any leaders. Leaders are not automatically a good thing. Get over it.

And by the way least of all does atheism need male leaders, or a mindless belief that we need male leaders. Of all people you would think atheists could manage to figure that out, because what is it that we don’t share with most people? Belief in a mysterious supernatural hidden male boss of all the bosses, that’s what.

Well thank something for Kunwar Khuldune Shahid and his blistering retort to “Muslimah Pride.” Thank Abhishek Phadnis for sending me the link.

What the ignorant world does not realise is that once you have the permission of your husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, the approval of your neighbours, in-laws, their relatives and the consent of your spiritual guardians, their God and their scriptures, you can be quite the rebels.

It takes a lot of courage to ridicule something that is already taboo where you live. It takes volumes of bravery and valour to bow down to the status quo, and toe the lines that have been forced upon you. It takes unbelievable amounts of gallantry to act out a script that someone else has written for you. [Read more…]

Michael McDowell, a former Irish Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, applies some actual legal expertise (sorry, Brendan) to the question of risk to the mother’s life and Irish abortion law.

The phrase “established as a matter of probability that there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother” is not without difficulty, as the evidence at the Galway inquest is demonstrating.

In my view, the phrase “real and substantial risk” does not mean that the mother is more likely than not to die.

It’s pretty staggering that lots of people in Ireland apparently think it does mean that and that that’s the standard and that if the risk is 50% then it’s just tough shit for the woman. [Read more…]

Brendan O’Neill posted what he says is a speech he gave at QED, and I guess is what he said on that panel. It’s a bizarro rant about expertise and what a bad thing it is. This is apparently because expertise is undemocratic.

So the idea that we need more expertise in politics is not actually a new one. It’s been around for a long time, and it has always been on the wrong side of the debate about democracy, in my view. Because it’s an idea which tends to depict ordinary people as not sufficiently enlightened for serious political debate, especially on really complicated matters like war or law and so on.

This outlook survives today, in the widespread belief that we need more expertise and less ideology in politics; more science, less passion; more cool-headed, educated people like David Nutt, and fewer nutters from the mass of the population who think they know everything but don’t actually know very much at all. [Read more…]

Even a consultant who is critical of the care that Savita Halappanavar received at University Hospital Galway is apparently ok with the refusal to speed up her miscarriage.

Dr Susan Knowles, consultant microbiologist at the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street in Dublin, was critical of poor documentation at a critical time in Ms Halappanavar’s care at the Galway hospital on Wednesday, October 24th, last. [Read more…]

Brilliant new plan in campaign to convince everyone everywhere that abortion is terrible and forbidden: distribute little rubber fetus dolls to high school students. [Read more…]

You know how every now and then I do a post about some article by Brendan O’Neill because it’s so offensively perverse and illiberal and ass-backward that I can’t just ignore it?

He was on a panel at QED a couple of hours ago (so that would make it 3 p.m. in Manchester), and apparently got his head handed to him by an incandescent with fury Robin Ince. Check out #QEDcon on Twitter if you want a good laugh. Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss were in the audience, and RD asked a question. How I wish I’d been there!

Update: I can add some illustrations, because someone posted a bunch of photos and said help yourselves. [Read more…]

Well done CFI Canada.

On April 4, CFI Canada Board Chair Kevin Smith and National Director Michael Payton met with Andrew Bennett, the Ambassador for Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom. At the meeting CFI got a  commitment from the Ambassador that the ORF will support and protect the rights of all people to question, change and even leave their religion. Today, concerned about the fate of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh, CFI sent the following letter to Ambassador Bennett urging him to send a formal protest to the Bangladeshi government on behalf of the persecuted bloggers: [Read more…]