This is a real thing?

I have no idea where this is. I especially have no idea what the people who wasted money on it were thinking. It’s a prayer booth.

prayerbooth

I am speechless at the absurdity of it all. This isn’t about ‘communing with god’ or any such nonsense: it’s about having a prominent public prop with a big sign so that everyone around you knows that you are praying — it’s public piety.

It also has instructions. Apparently the people who might use this are so stupid that they wouldn’t be able to figure out the appropriate posture to take while babbling to Jesus.

prayerboothinstructions

Those instructions are a bit Orwellian.

This device exists to facilitate and control prayer in public space. Improper use may result in a penalty or fine.

It’s there to control prayer? What? How? And they’re going to impose some kind of legal penalty if you don’t use it exactly as they want? How do you improperly use prayer? I’m picturing the prayer police thumping you with a nightstick if you prayed to the Episcopalian god rather than the Catholic god, or possibly battering you into unconsciousness if you dared to use the prayer booth to talk to Allah.

And then there’s the preemptive assumption that they’re going to get criticized for this silliness:

Please avoid the booth if you are sensitive to or feel threatened by actions that are religious in nature.

Nobody is going to feel “threatened” by this ditzy exhibition, guy. A better warning would be to the users: “Please avoid the booth if you are sensitive to passers-by pointing and laughing at you.”

The perils of anthropology…and other scientific disciplines

I’m beginning to get geared up for the summer research season, and I have to count myself as fortunate. I’m one of those bench guys; I’ll be fussing over embryos and computers in an air-conditioned lab, and mostly sitting in front of a microscope. The field researchers will be out hiking, and facing other privations: heat, humidity, man-eating mosquitos, ticks, summer rainstorms, sexual harassment, assault, and rape.

Oh, wait, those last three…not a problem here at UMM, we’ve got a good group of faculty we can trust to respect the students. But elsewhere, in fields like anthropology where groups of men and women might be out in remote areas for long periods of time, Kate Clancy reports that they are big problems.

We heard many reports of women not being allowed to do certain kinds of field work, being driven or warned away from particular field sites, and being denied access to research materials that were freely given to men (and men who were given access were the ones telling us these things). Ultimately, not being able to go to certain field sites, having to change field sites, or not being able to access research materials means women are denied the opportunity to ask certain research questions in our field. This has the potential to limit the CVs of women and given them permanently lesser research trajectories. This can lead to not getting jobs, or getting lower-tier jobs. It also means certain research questions may get primarily asked by one gender, and reducing the diversity of people doing research has been shown to reduce the diversity and quality of the work.

Don’t be discouraged from going into anthropology if that’s the field you love, but just be prepared: women have an extra duty piled on top of all the research work, to slap down privileged offenders…who may be their superiors.

Hey, wait a minute: Clancy is focused on the field work situation, but even in my cozy climate-controlled environment, there is the possibility of harassment — I’ve even heard tales of faculty (at other universities, of course) who were dirty old men who made life hell for their women students. Is anyone doing work similar to Clancy’s in places like medical schools? Maybe we should be sending teams of anthropologists in to study the indigenous cultures of the biomedical establishment. I fear it would be scary stuff, but at least you wouldn’t have to deal with mosquitos.

Thank you, crowepps

Bad news: I’m informed offline by Mattir that fellow hordeling crowepps has passed away, not particularly expectedly.

She wasn’t the most loquacious commenter here, and I didn’t know her at all aside from reading what she wrote here. But I always liked what she had to say.

She was funny:

I am boggled by the lack of logic behind “Make me a sammich.” Seriously, so you don’t want to listen to someone’s opinion, you want to treat them as having no more value than a household appliance, so you send them into the kitchen, where all the *poisons* are, to prepare food? Want a side of Valium overdose with that, or just a garnish of the traditional rat poison?

I didn’t know her well enough to say with certainty that she made the world a better place — those who knew her can weigh in on that — but she definitely made Pharyngula a smarter place. Thanks for that, crowepps.

 

Greta Christina has a new book

It’s called Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. I bought it. I read the first page of the introduction, my gnarled and liver-spotted hands trembling, and saw words that were threatening to my comfortable cis male heterosexual conventionality, and then started getting palpitations. I set it aside. Maybe when I’ve recovered and my heart gets a little stronger, I’ll try the second page.

Unless…maybe one of you can read it and tell me if it’s got stuff suitable for a geezer. Or, you know, I’m not really into unicorns, so maybe you can tell me which page has the hot cephalopod action.

Another possibility is that I could give it to my wife to read. I’m just afraid that if she really likes it, I might not survive the experience.

Or maybe I could ask her to read it aloud to me. That ought to be safe. Like a children’s book, right? Bedtime stories?

Why should anyone have to read your goofy holy book?

This is truly getting ridiculous. The Independent has published a story claiming that atheists face an Islamophobia backlash, and the first thing I have to do is take exception to the premise. A “backlash”? Seriously? Dawkins has been hit with this “backlash” nonsense from the day The God Delusion hit the stands in 2006; he has had a colony of fleas (like this one, for example) leaping on his coattails and announcing that the great backlash has begun from the very beginning. I daresay there was a “backlash” on the day the first hominin looked at the rock his tribe was worshipping and grunted, “it’s just a rock” — of course, the backlash then was more like a backswing with a handaxe, but it was the same sentiment.

When the popular culture has been howling for centuries in protest at any expression of the idea that there is no god, you don’t get to use the word “backlash” any more, OK? You don’t get to pretend that this nonsense is something new. It’s just a “lash”, yet another in the commonplace droning torrent of complaint. And they don’t have a single original idea in that complaint, either.

This is the crux of their disagreement.

The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites.

“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.

For a man who has made a career out of academic rigour the admission that the author of the God Delusion hadn’t studied Islam’s holy book surprised many and led to a flurry of responses from both fans and critics alike. Three weeks later – in an apt illustration of Godwins’ Law (the idea that as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one) – Dawkins added: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”

Richard Dawkins hasn’t read the fucking Koran. He hasn’t read every word of every hadith, either, neither Shia nor Sunni. He isn’t an Islamic scholar. He doesn’t know Arabic, so he hasn’t read the text in the original language, either, which purists will insist is the only way to study it…and if you study it, the purists will also insist that you are not allowed to criticize it. Once again, atheists are getting hit with the Courtier’s Reply, and it is rank bullshit.

The holy books of any religion are just collections of rationalizations, inconsistent and incoherent, with only the weakest relationship to the religion as it is practiced. Most of the practitioners of a religion have not dedicated their life to studying the texts, either; they have lives to live. You can get a better idea what a religion is about by studying what the believers actually say and do, and what practices are current in their culture: Christians, Jews, and Muslims all claim to be built on the Abrahamic foundation of the Old Testament, but studying that text isn’t going to allow you to predict what each of those religions are doing. Sunni and Shia both claim to be following the Koran; Quakers and Catholics claim to follow the Bible. Somehow they’ve built completely different faiths from the same starting point. If I am concerned about priestly pedophilia in the Catholic church or female genital mutiliation by some followers of the Koran, it is simply a distraction to tell me to go read their holy books — they won’t have anything to say about the subjects.

I can condemn pedophilia and FGM without knowing a word of Arabic or Aramaic, without spending a few years in a seminary, without receiving detailed interpretations from a sanctified religious authority. To imply that not reading those worthless books is a failure of academic rigor is sleazy and dishonest, because the atheists in question are not making a critique of the text, but of the politics and behavior of individuals and culture.

Even if I hadn’t read any of the Bible, I could still castigate the violence and oppression carried out by so many good Christians, in the name of their lord, against gays or women or Muslims or anyone different or foreign. Similarly, without reading word one of the Koran, I can categorically reject honor killings and terrorism and misogyny.

In addition, if I’m confronted with a strong claim made from a holy book, I can compare the specific argument with reality; I can have the believer explain to me what it means to him or her, and then address that interpretation directly. For example, without reading the whole of the Koran, I could discuss a 58 page exegesis of Muslim embryology by a true believer, and critique what he said, what his translation of the text said, and what he claimed were direct predictions of his interpretations. Are you going to tell me that I really needed to learn Arabic and read the whole of the Koran to do that?

Because that’s exactly what the gullible faith-heads want to tell me to do, too. When I criticized the two sentence summary of all of embryology from the Koran (shouldn’t it be enough to point out the necessary poverty of such a brief explanation?), one blithering believer told me my problem was that I couldn’t read the rich and very expressive language of the Koran…so rich and expressive, apparently, that an entire modern biology text fits into a few lines of poetry.

Knowing both languages; Arabic and English, I clearly understand why Hamza Tzortis needed to use many dictionaries to explain the meaning of this verse in such a script. The Arabic language is rich and very expressive. The translation can never give you a clear picture. From having a first language education in Arabic, I can tell you that the words in the Quran are not as simple as a “drop of fluid” but do need this much explanation that he provided to make the words’ meaning be shown. Having an advanced study in Biology, I can directly relate and fully agree that the words of the Quran are an exact match to embryonic development stages in humans. Furthermore, I can assert that the knowledge from the Quran extends beyond this to all stages of human life and after death and describes in great detail the stages of the first creation of man which was different from the usual process of reproduction, thereby superseding the current level of scientific knowledge.

That’s simply goal-post shifting and dishonesty: I don’t believe for one minute that the author of that excuse had any advanced knowledge of biology.

As for the Mein Kampf argument, I consider it totally appropriate and a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Does anyone really need to read Hitler’s manifesto before they can honestly decide whether the Holocaust was a good thing, or a bad thing? Is it OK if I think right now that starting a global war that led to 60 million casualties is an unforgiveable evil, or are you going to tell me that somewhere in Mein Kampf there might just be a cunning justification that will cause me to change my opinion? Only if I read it in the original German, of course.

Spare me. Yet another unoriginal whine from the tens of thousands we’ve gotten from the faithful in the last decade, not one word of which addresses the source of the conflict between atheist and theist, leaves me cold and unimpressed.

But I’ll tell you what. Show me one scrap of reasonable scientific evidence that this Allah character actually exists, and I promise I’ll read the whole of the Koran. If it’s really convincing I’ll go off and study Arabic. But until then…telling me to waste a big chunk of my life reading another collection of pretentious babbling mythology is not going to be a good enough excuse to stop me from rejecting the stuff you actually say and do and believe in the name of an imaginary ghostly ape in the sky.

But…but…those boys’ lives will be ruined!

Just another 15 year old girl getting gang-raped by some of her peers, just a few boys proudly taking photos of their rape victim and passing them around on their cellphones, just another episode of bullying and torment, and just another girl killing herself. Tragic, but we’re done now — she’s dead and not complaining any more. Those boy rapists need to get on with their lives.

But wait. What’s this? The police actually arrested three high school boys who perpetrated the crime? Think of the potential being lost! Those boys might have grown up to become investment bankers, used car salesmen, or Boy Scout troop leaders, and now they’ll have a few years as wards of the juvenile court system, and will probably have their records locked away when they turn 21…oh. I guess they can still fulfill their destiny then. But the inconvenience!

That girl, Audrey Pott, though…she would have just grown up to be a woman. Don’t we have enough of those already?

I have to say, though, that I can still hope the recent high-profile cases that all sound so tragically similar might someday have an effect on the culture. Boys might, after a few years, learn not to take cell phone pictures of their rapes.

What? You thought I’d suggest that boys might learn not to rape? Silly optimist. Get real.

(Please note: Sarcasm turned up to nearly lethal levels in the above post. I’m now dialing it down to tolerable levels before the sarcasmal lobe of my brain melts.)

Nightmare fuel: Kermit Gosnell exposed

gosnellclinic

The grand jury’s report on the Gosnell Women’s Medical Services clinic (pdf) is freely available online, with photographs. It’s 281 pages of gag-reflex-inducing horror.

Gosnell was living the good life: the report estimates he was bringing in almost $2 million a year, a number that is only approximated from the number of abortions he was doing and the amount he was charging, because he always dealt in cash. He had a small group of poorly trained, non-professional people doing much of the ‘medical’ work — including at least one high school student who was administering tests and drugs to patients — and idled at home most of the day, coming in in the evening to do procedures. Procedures that he himself was not qualified or certified to do.

He carried out many late-term abortions, often past the legal cutoff (his procedure was to do a crude ultrasound, manipulate the results, and claim the fetus, no matter how old it was, was 24.5 weeks old). His style was cheap, lazy, and harmful to the woman. The standard procedure was for the women to come in during the day, and his staff would administer drugs to induce labor — even in women 30 weeks or more pregnant — and then send them in to the bathroom, where they would ‘deliver’ into the toilet. The toilet would sometimes get clogged with aborted fetal tissue.

Sometimes the fetus would be delivered alive, and at an age where, if this were done in a hospital, the newborn would have a good chance of surviving. Gosnell’s job as a doctor was to take these squirming, sometimes crying babies, and stab them in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors to kill them.

Sometimes, too, the women died.

All this was done in a filthy clinic cluttered with obsolete and broken equipment. There were bloodstains on the stirrups of the gynecological tables. There were jars with bits of fetuses snipped off and stored in preservatives. He was constantly late in paying for medical waste pickup and disposal; there were leaking bags of aborted tissue in piles in the basement. The staff complained that sometimes he was lazy and left the dead fetuses in shoe boxes out in the clinic, so they’d be greeted by the reek of rotting flesh when they walked in the door in the morning.

He had been doing this for decades. His clinic was constantly overlooked or given a pass by the government agencies responsible for inspections and standards. That’s the stunning part of this story, that he actually got away with murder for so many years. How could that happen?

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

I suspect that part of the abortion football game was the fact that women who were desperate, who knew they were stretching the boundaries of legality and convention, were unlikely to complain to the authorities about a clinic that was delivering services (incompetently and often fatally) that they needed. Gosnell was living high on the absence of clean, licensed, professional women’s medical services in many parts of the region — he could get by with criminally substandard treatment because our government has been actively destroying the ethical and competent competition.

If my abbreviated summary above is enough to sicken you, I strongly recommend that you don’t read the grand jury report. It’s hundreds of pages of explicit evil.

Rand Paul edumacates the black folks

So…this guy Paul is considered a likely presidential candidate?

Does he really think educated students at Howard University are completely unaware of the Southern strategy, that the racist Southern Democrats switched parties as soon as it was clear that Democrats were endorsing civil rights legislation, while Republicans were opposing it? How patronizingly ignorant.

While we’re playing games with labels, I have another question. I saw a copy of our campus’s far right wing, conservative, alternative student newspaper, the NorthStar. Inside, it has a joke (“A person with a liberal arts degree says, ‘Would you like fries with that?'” —pathetically tired, and at a liberal arts university), an article praising Andrew Breitbart, an analysis of gay marriage that concludes it would not be good for the country, an article on Zora Neale Hurston that breathlessly reveals that she was…a Republican(!!!) (in the first half of the twentieth century — see Jon Stewart, above), an article titled “True Feminism” that is basically an anti-choice tirade, and a tribute to Margaret Thatcher.

But here’s the funny thing. The paper does not call itself conservative, or right wing, or pro-Republican, or anything like that…no, the label splattered on the front page and scattered throughout is that they are “classically liberal”. OK, sure, there was and is a movement that arose in 19th century Europe that mirrors the goals of a certain current political subgroup, but the meaning of the labels have shifted in the US, so that phrase is now an attempt at obfuscation. “Classical liberalism” is basically identical to “Modern libertarianism”, and on some issues (such as the importance of capitalism) it’s farther to the right than modern conservatives, and on others (personal liberty, for instance), it makes noises about being somewhere towards the left — although a paper that decries abortion and gay marriage isn’t quite so tolerant as they’d like to claim.

Even their campus organization record makes this claim.

The NorthStar is a classically liberal monthly publication. We promote the Marketplace of Ideas and limited government principles.

What amuses me, though, is that they seem to have become embarrassed by the label “conservative”, and don’t even want to be known as “libertarian” — so they reach back into their history books and dredge up an old term that can be easily confused with the current understanding of what it means to be “liberal”. Why? Because conservatives have been tainted by their long courtship of the fringe wackaloon side of the American electorate. And now they’re trying to escape the consequences of their long romancing of the deeply racist side of American culture by trying to remind everyone of their role in the Emancipation Proclamation…a role they have most effectively repudiated in the last 60 years.