Should we be surprised that countries who have been subjected to endless moralizing by the US about their human rights abuses have, in the wake of the senate report describing the incredibly brutal torture practices of the US, taken the chance to highlight US hypocrisy?
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When we think of the most misogynistic societies where the freedoms of women are severely curtailed, one tends to think of Islamic countries. But it turns out that any society that takes the religious beliefs of its holy books seriously tends to repress the rights of women, and this includes Christianity and Judaism as well. If anyone needs a single reason as to why religion should have no role in public life, it is because religious doctrines are incompatible with democratic values. Once you let religion get a foothold in setting government policy, it will steadily encroach, demanding more and more concessions to its beliefs
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Trevor Noah, the newest correspondent to join The Daily Show, hails from South Africa and he used his introductory appearance to highlight one thing that really bugs me and that is the way that Africa is often portrayed in the west, as a continent that consists of wilderness or villages that have none of the features of modern society. People in the US need to be reminded of how rapidly the rest of the world is changing while the US shows all the signs of a decaying empire.
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The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finally released the Executive Summary of its report on torture practices by the US government. You can read the ‘most gruesome moments’ of the report here and they are disgusting.
The Guardian has a summary of the main conclusions
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Some time ago, I linked to a video of an utterly inept driver trying to get out of a tight parking spot. It was excruciating to watch. But that driver was an expert compared to the person in the video below.
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On NPR’s Weekend Edition on Sunday, December 7, 2014, host Rachel Martin interviewed three veteran police officers (two white, one black) from Columbus, Ohio, a city in which the department had been accused in the past of police officers routinely conducting illegal searches and using excessive force. She also spoke with Malik Aziz who is chairman of the National Black Police Association.
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I have long been a contributor to Partners in Health, the group founded by Paul Farmer that takes high quality health care to areas of great need around the world. It began when I read the book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world by Tracy Kidder that I wrote about here back in 2005, and listened to a talk by Farmer around the same time when he visited my university.
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People love to rank things, which explains why listsicles are so popular as clickbait. All such rankings are dependent on the measures used to score them and so tend to be quite idiosyncratic. I try to avoid them in general but being in education I was intrigued by an article that claimed that Shimer College was the worst college in America. I had never heard of this college at all and so was curious as to what it was and why it earned this dubious title.
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As part of my Gregory Peck retrospective, I watched over the weekend this 1965 film where he plays a man who seems to have suddenly lost his memory of the recent past. His attempts to find the traumatic event that caused the loss and recover the events of the lost period result in the people trying to help him out ending up dead.
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[A reader reminded me of an old post that I had written back in 2008 on my old blog site and I thought I would reprint it except for very minor editing. So here it is.]
In the course of writing many posts on science and religion and atheism, it struck me that I was tangentially making many statements about what I, as an atheist, believe. I decided to summarize those scattered thoughts into one coherent statement. Of course, I am not presuming to claim that all atheists subscribe to this statement. The creed is purely a personal one.
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