Catching up. From Sense About Science a few days ago –

Dear Friends

We told you yesterday that the Libel Reform Campaign would be meeting with the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, with Simon Singh, performer Dara Ó Briain and representatives from Index on Censorship, Sense About Science and English PEN.

Ed Miliband told us: “The key to a healthy democracy is the right to free speech. But to defend this we need a modernised defamation law that protects citizens and honest discussion from the stifling threat of legal action. That’s why it’s so important that we grasp this once in a generation opportunity to update our defamation laws. I commend the work of the Libel Reform Campaign who are fighting so hard for the reform of our outdated defamation laws and it’s crucial the government heeds their concerns. There’s still time to mould this into a successful Bill – and that includes a new public interest defence – otherwise this opportunity risks being wasted”

Ed Miliband also said more needed to be done to stop corporations suing individuals for libel and asked his Justice Team in the House of Lords to investigate this.

Your support has helped us achieve this. It’s now for the government to listen to the increasingly important voices calling for a strengthened public interest defence, and act.

You can see photos from the meeting on our Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53777693@N04/sets/72157631792324529/

Thank you to the more than 500 of you who generously donated following Simon Singh’s appeal and helped us reach our target. This and all further donations make a huge difference to what we can do at this crucial point for libel reform. Please do still donate if you haven’t yet: http://www.justgiving.com/libelreform2012

Best wishes

Mike and Sile

Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear – there’s an excerpt from Chris Stedman’s much-dreaded new memoir Faitheist at Salon, and it’s as maddening as I’d expected, if not more so.

The excerpt is, of course, on the ever-popular subject of The Awfulness of atheists. That’s not what’s so skin-crawling about it though. What I really, really can’t stand is his shameless style of self-presentation – his unbearable self-regard and self-display. It’s worse because it’s dressed up as its own opposite – it’s all about how humble and shy he is. I want to say that doesn’t work, but sadly I know from experience that it will work all too well: lots of people will take him as he presents himself, and be hugely impressed and touched. They’ll think what a sweet awkward shy boy from the provinces, with a heart as big as all outdoors, trying so hard to wring a little compassion from the cold hard prosperous atheists. [Read more…]

A familiar problem. A 15-year-old girl sends an entry to the Everyday Sexism project; it’s about the way looks trump everything else for girls (and, as she’ll find out, for women).

I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing…successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow? What if I don’t have the perfect body? What if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist? If none of that happens I feel like [sic] there’s no point in doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. [Read more…]

The student union at Reading University has informed the RU Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society that it has come to the conclusion that the Society acted in breach of the behavioural policy. Its decision is that the Reading University Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society should be referred to a disciplinary panel.

You remember what this is about, I trust. The RU Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society had a table at the student fair; on the table it had a pineapple with the label “Mohammed.” Some students said it was offensive. The Society members were ejected from the fair.

The BBC’s Panorama was just on, and Twitter lit up like a plane with a wing falling off. It was about Jimmy Savile and how the Beeb looked the other way for a few decades.

I haven’t seen the episode, but I saw a lot of tweets about it, and then the hashtag, which led to some very pungent comments. I gather the gist of it is, the Beeb couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) do anything about it, because the sources were

just the women.

Ah.

After all these somber and/or infuriating items, a funny one. Justin Vacula on Facebook.

A lengthy post I authored months ago concerning what certain Freethought Bloggers are calling ‘stalking’ and ‘cyberstalking’ is below. This is especially relevant considering Ophelia Benson’s recent post “It’s all trolling, when you come right down to it” in which she claims that the “pro-misogyny crowd” stalks bloggers “day in and day out.”

TL;DR – criticism, even when it is excessive, isn’t stalking or cyberstalking. Public figures who make their controversial opinions known to the world will get responses. Reductio ad absurdum: Major cable news networks must be stalkers for their coverage of Obama and Romney. [Read more…]

The New Yorker has an article on billionaires who’ve convinced themselves they’re “victimized” by Obama.

A hedge-fund billionaire called Leon Cooperman wrote an open letter to Obama which has been “widely circulated in the business community.”

Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so  many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich  feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T. J. Rodgers, a  libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack  Obama’s treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities—an  approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be  particularly sensitive to. [Read more…]

As you probably know already, Paul Kurtz is gone.

The Center for Inquiry marks with great sadness the passing of Paul Kurtz, founder and longtime chair of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry, who died at the age of 86. A philosopher, activist, and author, Kurtz was for a half-century among the most significant and impactful figures in the humanist and skeptic movements.

“Impactful”…ah well, I won’t do a fogeyism about it. Anyway yes, he was.

Kurtz’s legacy includes the above organizations, the creation of the skeptics’ magazine Skeptical Inquirer, the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, independent publisher Prometheus Books, and a library of books and scholarly articles that will continue to inform discussions of morality, ethics, reason, and religion for generations to come.

I knew him a little. I was at CFI Amherst for almost three weeks in 2007; I did a talk and hung out. PK was a fan of B&W at the time, and he was pleasant to me. He took a bunch of us to lunch one day and invited me to go in his car. We talked about B&W and he said (very flatteringly, so perhaps not truthfully) that he’d had thoughts of setting up a skeptical inquiry website but then decided it would just duplicate B&W so why bother.

Free Inquiry has been one of my favorite magazines for years and years, with Skeptical Inquirer close behind it. I have a lot of Prometheus books on my shelves. I’m not the only one.

I’m grateful for all of it. I’m not the only one.

Hey kids! Got dreams of being a scientist? Well don’t do it – because if you do, you risk being thrown in prison for six years, barred from public employment for life, and liable for court costs and damages, all because you failed to say exactly when an earthquake was going to happen.

Yes really.

Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L’Aquila.

A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter.

Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes. [Read more…]

Tahrir Square. Another live broadcast, another reporter attacked and groped by a mob. The French journalist Sonia Dridi was the target this time.

A mob of about 30 men has turned “crazy” and groped and robbed a French  television journalist near Tahrir Square in Cairo, in the latest case of  violence against women at the epicentre of Egypt’s protests. [Read more…]