The final question from Brianne:

Any updates on Hamza Kashgari?

Not of the type “He is free!” alas…but there is what appears to be an update on how he’s doing, from a relative, translated on the Free Hamza Kashgari Facebook page:

We visited Hamza, thank God, he’s in a good mental condition, and he says “hello” to everyone asking about him, he was extremely moved ‘weeping’ when he heard about the Balloon’s launching on his Birthday, may God unite us with him again.

Well “God” kind of got him into this mess, but never mind. However, that’s something, but it’s still Hamza-in-prison as opposed to Hamza in New Zealand living a free life.

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Brianne’s topics part 2.

What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?

Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or boring or unamusing.

I most disagree with just about anything he ever said about women, and in particular the Vanity Fair article that said women aren’t funny (and underlined it by adding you know what I mean, don’t deny it). I disagree with his views on abortion.

what does your superhero costume for Fighting Fashionable Nonsense look like?

To be literal first – I keep meaning to remove that from the logo. I never liked it, I just kept forgetting to remove it once I took full ownership of B&W (apart from the domain name for the old site, which has been witheld).

To stop being literal…hmm. Billie Burke’s outfit in The Wizard of Oz? No maybe not. Mr Greenjean’s green jeans? Ok but what else. Why, an evil little thing T shirt, of course.

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It’s 9:47. I took some time to read things, and have a little coffee, so it’s 9:47. Yikes.

Brianne – awake much too soon after her 24 hour stint – provides topics.

How can we get Americans more interested in world politics? Do we need to get Americans more interested?  Does that kind of interest and knowledge set have to start being rolled out in the younger school years?

We certainly need to get Americans more interested – because the US does a lot of [helping/meddling] in the world, and citizens should have more knowledge in order to judge what is helping and what is meddling. Because there are international charities and NGOs, which Americans – like anyone else – can work for, donate to, promote – or criticize and expose – or both. Because the world matters. Because internationalism is better than parochialism. (That will have to be just a flat assertion for now – it’s 9:53.) Because the world is interesting.

It helps to get people started early, but it’s not a now or never thing. I utterly failed to be interested in things like that as a child, but I changed later. On the other hand the need to make a living can get in the way of changing later. (I solved this problem by mostly not actually making a living. Not suitable for all audiences.)

Three minutes to the hour.

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EcksLibris (amusing nym!) replies to my request for topics to post about:

I would love to hear more about you, how you came to your beliefs/lack thereof, and how you became an activist (in the best possible sense of the word)!

I don’t generally like to talk directly about Me Me Me, but talking about how we come to our beliefs/lack thereof is another matter. It’s always interesting, at least to me.

I came to my lack of theist beliefs mostly by never really having theist beliefs in the first place, as well as I can remember. I was told things, as a child, but I think they must have always been hedged. I know they were sometimes, because I can remember bits of discussions with my mother and they were hedged. I don’t think “God” ever sank in. I don’t think it can have, because I had stronger feelings about tv characters and characters in children’s fiction than I ever did about “God.” If the idea of “God” really sinks in, you surely have strong feelings about “God.”

But atheism was mostly in the background for me, until the publication of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World. It wasn’t the book itself that changed that so much as it was a couple of interviews he gave to promote it, one on Fresh Air and the other on Science Friday. They galvanized me, somehow. That became my way of making the world a better place: not just being a non-theist but arguing with theism and the way of thinking that makes it “normal” and beyond dispute.

That’s not a very full account, but in fact it sums up quite a lot.

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Ewan answered my request for suggestions by asking for reasons to support the SSA. Greta has a good selection of quotations on that.

JT Eberhard, a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance, gives us his personal account of what he does. He starts with Jessica Ahlquist on what the SSA did for her:

When JT Eberhard contacted me and gave me the support of the Secular Student Alliance I felt like I had friends again.  Over the course of two years the SSA provided me with support and JT closely monitored the actions of the school committee, always ready to come to my defense at any minute.  He expressed that he cared not only for the issue at my school but also for my well-being and shared personal stories and advice.  Anyone can tell that for JT and the rest of the SSA staff, their positions within the organization are not merely a source of income, but a life-long passion and a genuine desire to help young secular people.  When I attended their annual conference last summer and was given the opportunity to share my story I felt a sense of community I had never experienced before.  I know so many other students who share my feelings and are thankful for the SSA and their brilliant staff.  They are literally changing lives.

You know (if you’ve been reading here) how isolated Jessica has been and still is at her school and in Cranston. You know what it’s like to be a teenager. Adults have had time to thicken their skins and get used to conflict, but teenagers are raw. Given the bizarre way the religious majority has been encouraged to see itself as a persecuted minority over the past two or three decades, their unleashed rage can be incredibly intimidating. That right there is a good reason to support an organization that can give isolated bullied teenagers a set of allies and friends.

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It’s 8:05 – no, 8:06. Get going.

An item on Twitter just now caused me to read the Wikipedia entry on the atheist’s wager, an alternative to Pascal’s of the same ilk.

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in god. If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.

Not alternative enough, if you ask me. It’s still too focused on postmortem, as if we were going to be alive postmortem to care what people think of us. It’s also too focused on incentive or reward. Try to make the world a better place so that people will remember you fondly. That’s a stupid reason. If you’re going to try to make the world a better place, do it so that the world will be a better place, not so that people will remember you fondly. Jeez. Get over yourself.

Here’s a news flash: apart from a few intimates, most people won’t remember you at all, fondly or otherwise. After a few decades no one will remember you at all. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” said Keats on his tombstone. Well he was wrong, but for most of us, that’s the story.

Vanity and longing for posthumous affection is a pitiful motivation for making the world a better place. Come on. Write your name in a few toilet stalls and on a few garage walls and garbage cans, and let it go at that. For the rest, just concentrate on making the world a better place so that the world will be a better place.

8:14. Woo hoo! Bags of time to catch up on Twitter and write the 9:00 item.

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Here we go. The miniature blogathon begins.

Brianne did hers yesterday, except hers wasn’t miniature: she did the whole 24 hour thing. I encouraged her by reminding her that the second half was going to be much longer than the first. I’m kind that way.

You were supposed to suggest things for me to post about. Seriously: any suggestions? But then it’s Sunday, when nobody reads this. People read this exclusively during working hours, so that they’ll know for sure they’re not wasting their time.

Not to worry. It’s not as if the world is empty of things to talk about.

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Via Tarek Fatah, a Calgary conference has invited Bilal Philips as the top speaker; Philips has repeatedly said homosexuals should be executed. Get the name of the conference – The Power of Unity: Islam in a MultiCultural Canada. Some unity!

And there’s a slew of other craps, too.

Munir El-Kassem, a dentist from London, Ont., wrote a column back in 2001 that condemned the West as hypocritical and defended the Taliban regime for destroying the sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamiyan…

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj recently lost his job at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female circumcision. He later tried to clarify his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right off.

And George Galloway is on the dance card too.

Abraham Ayache, chairman of the Muslim Council of Calgary, said the conference is being organized to celebrate 50 years of Islam in Calgary and is all about unity and celebrating multiculturalism…

But a recent posting on the MCC website under the heading “Ask the Imam” seems to  indicate that some of the organization’s hired imams haven’t read the memo about  cultural tolerance and unity.

In answer to a question by a single mother concerned about her children no  longer being obedient to her, an imam on the site wrote: “You should instil a  hatred for this culture and its ways in the hearts of your children.” He also  wrote: “It is haraam (forbidden) for you to give your children free rein in  forming friendships with the children of the kuffaar.”

That’s not multiculturalism. Calling people “the kuffar” is not multiculturalism. Advocating the execution of gays is not multiculturalism. Happy Canada day.

 

Athena Andreadis is disgusted but not surprised at the spectacle of Golden Dawn spokesman Elías Kasidhiáris hitting Liána Kanélli in the face on a tv talk show the other day.

For those sequestered in silently running nuclear submarines, Golden Dawn got 7% of the vote in the May elections, gaining seats in the parliament – the first time such a thing has happened since World War II (not counting the junta). Its platform is the standard troglodytic garbage: ethnic purity, “natural” order – which includes the de jure disenfranchisement of women and Others – and bodily violence against those who disagree. Its members regularly assault immigrants, minorities and journalists as well as other “undesirables”, with tolerance (if not cooperation) from the police and portions of the media. Serial killer Anders Breivik listed Golden Dawn in his diary as the likeliest group to “cleanse” Europe.

The violence against those who disagree is not figurative violence, or “merely” threatened violence.

To anyone speaking Hellenic, it becomes obvious when you watch the video that Kasidhiáris was as well-informed as Sarah Palin. The two women, Kanélli in particular, let him know this. His response was standard: first he accused them of bringing “personal matters” (namely, his impending trial) into politics. Then, after a brief exchange of verbal insults, he flung a glass of water at Dhoúrou’s face. The three male politicians present sat through this like statues while the talk host made feeble mewling noises. The only one who did something was Kanélli, who went toward Kasidhiáris brandishing a newspaper.

To show that he doesn’t take guff from uppity broads, even ones old enough to be his mother, Kasidhiáris jumped out of his seat and hit Kanélli three times. On the face. The first was a slap. The other two were left-right closed-fist punches.

Yet again, I’m naïve. I’ve always thought that was taboo, and known to be taboo – at least taboo enough not to be done on television. Silly me.

He then threatened he would “return with reinforcements” and somehow managed to escape from the TV station to “parts unknown” (almost certainly the offices of Golden Dawn) to avoid the automatic arrest warrant for assault which, by a quirk of Hellenic law, expires within 48 hours of its issue. The police, not surprisingly, have been “unable to find him” – even though he issued a lengthy (and presumably traceable) statement from his ultra-secret location, in which he said that Kanélli should be the one to be arrested and face assault charges because she “attacked him first”. The head of his party stuck by him, arguing that the incident had been blown out of proportion and, in any case, the two women are really to blame because, well, they provoked him and what’s a manly man to do except respond (literally) two-fistedly?

The defense of men who beat up women everywhere – she provoked him. Bitchez always provoke.

Sound familiar? The tactics of cowardly bullies do not change across time and cultures. Yet even more mind-boggling is the enormous number of people who opined anonymously online that “the cunt had it coming” and “finally, someone put the fat ugly dyke in her place.” Kanélli infuriates many people because she won’t shut up or back down…

Uh oh.