…and No Religion 2

So everyone’s probably heard about the recent Cee-Lo debacle in which, while singing John Lennon’s secular anthem Imagine, the hapless boob decided that Lennon needed a quick re-write. Instead of “…and no religion too”, as is befitting the rest of the verse, Cee-Lo decided to swap in “…and all religion’s true”, which is a profound statement that he has absolutely no idea why that’s logically impossible.

While the blunder was incredibly stupid and arrogant, it does have the inadvertent effect of bringing two important topics to light. One: that religion is still trying to bully secularism, despite their repeated assertions of ‘persecution’ (which, to them, means not being able to do whatever they want). Two: that Kamloops, BC will once again be hosting the Imagine No Religion conference this May.

The list of speakers includes:

  • Physicist Lawrence Krauss;
  • Atheist Experience co-host Matt Dillahunty;
  • Author and activist Maryam Namazie;
  • Skeptically Speaking host Desiree Schell;
  • Some bearded guy named PZ Myers;
  • and many others

There’s free daycare, and Sam Singleton will be doing his now-legendary Atheist Revival service. I’ve never been to a skeptic/atheist conference before, but I’ll definitely be attending this one. How can I not? It will be my first chance to meet fellow FTBorgs Matt and Maryam, to catch up/compare beards with PZ, and to hang out with Chris DiCarlo again.

The early-bird deadline is coming up real soon (Feb 1st), so get your tickets NOW!

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‘Good enough’ ain’t good enough

I’ve gone through the reasons why, even though I am male, I still proudly call myself ‘feminist’. There is, to be sure, an additional motivation to push for equality that is rooted in guilt, but I find guilt to be a particularly poor reason to do anything. Be that as it may, it is still exceedingly tempting to simply move the goalposts and claim the win – to announce feminism as a job well done. After all, grading on a curve, Canada/USA is a pretty amazing place to be a woman. Women can hold high office, can drive in cars unescorted by male family members, can pursue higher education, can own property (rather than being property). When you think of the arc of history, or even just look around the world, there’s not a lot of better times/places to be female.

Of course, we don’t grade things like this on a curve, nor should we. The danger of evaluating ourselves based on things that are worse is that we begin to devalue the obstacles and problems still faced by women today. The fact that this is the best the human race has ever done for women, when considered in the context of the terrifying things women still experience here, should be a call to arms that work still must be done.

What we should be looking for, rather than simply arbitrarily announcing the mission accomplished, is a steady improvement towards equality on a variety of measures. Access to education, representation in political circles, and success in business: [Read more…]

Reminder/prod: Kiva help needed

Hey everyone,

I realize now that I made my announcement about putting the blog proceeds toward a Kiva loan went out at a funny time, and unless you’re an RSS subscriber or a particularly diligent reader, there’s a good chance you missed it. Anyway, still looking for your input about where the money should go. Lots of great ideas circulating through the comments so far. I’ll make a final decision next Friday and make an announcement.

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De facto racism: poison-tipped bullets

I’m back from vacation, and will resume my regular blogging routine. My thanks to those of you who stuck it through the past couple of weeks. Happy New Year!

I consider myself lucky for a long list of reasons, but certainly chief among them is the truly impressive friends that I have amassed over the years. It’s often difficult (perhaps impossible) to engage in any kind of self-assessment that isn’t wildly coloured by self-serving biases, despite our best attempts to overcome them. I take no small amount of comfort, therefore, in making self-evaluations by proxy through my close friends. I admire and deeply respect these people, and the fact that they seem to actually enjoy my company (or at least do an excellent job of pretending to do so) leads me to suspect that I must be doing things at least halfway right.

One such friend is a young woman I met while studying at Queen’s. Kelly (not her real name) and I met while I was working at a bar in Kingston. She is a fiercely intelligent person who is very knowledgable about matters philosophical as well as legal (she’s now a law student at Queen’s with an undergrad in philosophy). I was able to meet up with her during my vacation in Toronto to catch up. We got to talking about her experiences working at a legal clinic in Kingston, and defending her first actual client as ‘first chair’ of the legal team. She was understandably excited that she was able to steer her client away from undeserved jail time (a sad story involving drugs, a negligent mother and overzealous police officers).

One of the legal maneuvers she was able to exploit in her client’s defense is a process called ‘diversion‘ – basically it is a way of having ostensibly guilty first-time offenders perform community service and restitution in lieu of jail time. From her description of the way it works, it requires agreement from the prosecutor (which is often not that difficult to obtain) that the defendant is essentially ‘a good guy’ who can make recompense and slide through without going to prison. Now, I have a notoriously bad poker face, so she immediately knew about my knee-jerk misgivings when it came to a program like this. After all, who could object to a program that includes the exercise of judicial restraint and principles of justice? [Read more…]