The death of liberalism: Goldsmiths feminists ally with Muslims opposing feminist speaker Maryam Namazie

December 3, 2015 • 11:30 am

As I mentioned yesterday, ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie spoke at London’s Goldsmiths College on the topic “Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of ISIS,” and her talk was repeatedly disrupted by Muslim students. You can see the interruptions below, and they’re serious, severe, and extremely rude.

Namazie has worked tirelessly for human rights and against their abrogation by some Muslims, concentrating especially on Islamic oppression of women. It’s thus ironic that her talk at Goldsmith’s was opposed by the college Feminist Society, which aligned itself with ISOC, Goldsmith’s Islamic Society.

Here’s a post from the Goldsmiths College tumblr site:

Screen Shot 2015-12-02 at 1.58.59 PM

If anybody is creating a “climate of hatred,” it’s these free-speech opposers and professional “I’m offended-ites,” who clearly hate Namazie and want to keep her from speaking.  And it’s reprehensible that a feminist society would ally itself against Namazie, calling her a “known Islamophobe”, and also stand against her invitation by the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society. Instead, they ally themselves with the Islamic Society, which stands for a religion famous for oppressing women—oppression encoded in sharia law.

This unholy alliance between feminists and Islamists is symptomatic of the cancer eating away at the Left, whose sympathy for the supposed underdog (especially those who aren’t white) all too often outweighs their support of feminist and Enlightenment values. It’s beyond me how any feminist society can support a Muslim group unless that group is outspokenly devoted to the equality of women and the dismantling of sharia law.

If you want to see how “hateful” Namazie is, here’s a long video of her speech at Goldsmith’s, which shows not only that she’s temperate but passionate, and far being strident or anti-Muslim. You can also see the bad behavior of the students—many appearing to be Muslims—who repeatedly disrupt her talk by whistling, standing up and shouting, interrupting her, and even turning off her Powerpoint presentation. How can one give a talk under such circumstances? I would have given up! It’s a testimony to Namazie that she keeps her cool through the whole thing, even as security expels some of the disruptive students:

I haven’t watched this in its entirety, but here are several instances of disruption:

7:40
8:06 (whistling)
11:38
14:00 all hell breaks loose
Then more whistling, Muslims walk out of the room
35:21 Projector turned off by student
etc.

The silence of atheists and Leftists about this kind of behavior is deafening.

Prayer: what is it good for?; and a note on yesterday’s murders

December 3, 2015 • 10:00 am

Two contrasting sources (both provided by Matthew) give the same answer about the efficacy of prayer:

https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/672174167832170496

I can’t help but think that the headline below, from yesterday’s Daily News is—perhaps unintentionally—a slap in the face of theists. It implies that either God let the shootings take place, or he’s leaving us on our own to solve the problem. Either way, it reflects a view of a god who’s neither omnipotent or omnibenevolent, though perhaps that’s a bit too much exegesis for a newspaper headline.

Today’s New York Times has two op-eds on the San Bernardino tragedy, both decrying the lack of gun control in the U.S. “The horror in San Bernardino“, the main piece (by the whole editorial board), includes this

Yet, even as grief fills communities randomly victimized by mass shootings, the sales of weapons grow ever higher. Holiday shoppers set a record for Black Friday gun sales last week. They left the Federal Bureau of Investigation processing 185,345 firearm background checks, the most ever in a single day, topping the Black Friday gun buying binge after the shooting massacre of 26 people at a school in Newtown, Conn., three years ago.

. . . Congress has allowed the domestic gun industry to use assorted loopholes to sell arsenals that are used against innocent Americans who cannot hide. Without firm action, violent criminals will keep terrorizing communities and the nation, inflicting mass death and damage across the land.

The Republicans, of course, are saying these shootings reflect a need for better mental healthcare, but that party is largely responsible for dismantling the mental-healthcare system and putting many seriously ill people back on the street. And really, the line between a disaffected shooter and someone who’s mentally ill is nebulous. You can’t define shooters like those in San Bernardino as mentally ill, because that’s simply tautological. Many people who would not fall into the mental healthcare safety net because they lack a diagnosable condition—including terrorists, those who grab a gun in a moment of anger, or those who (apparently like the California shooters) are simply plotting revenge—would not be helped by expanding our psychiatric outreach.

And those who pin the uniquely American problem of mass shootings on mental illness alone must explain why American is unique in harboring so many mentally ill people. I refuse to believe that a surfeit of such people is the root cause of these tragedies. Somewhere in there is the unconscionable “freedom” of Americans to own guns.

Of  course we should give people greater access to mental healthcare, but that would mean raising taxes, which is a no-no. But one thing that’s less costly, and perhaps more efficacious, is restricting gun ownership. “Smart guns”, which can be fired only by the owner, or restricting gun ownership to hunters or members of gun clubs, would go a long way toward solving the problem. Remember that many guns used in the commission of crimes are legally owned guns that have been stolen. What we need are far fewer legally owned guns.

Nicholas Kristof’s piece, “On guns, we’re not even trying” is (at last) something he wrote that doesn’t make me cringe. He first adduces the frightening statistics:

So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting a day, according to the ShootingTracker website, counting cases of four or more people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed at least 14 people.

It’s too soon to know exactly what happened in San Bernardino, but just in the last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans have died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. When one person dies in America every 16 minutes from a gun, we urgently need to talk about remedies.

He then proposes three solutions: universal background checks (40% of guns are legally bought without such checks), banning people under 21 from owning guns, and curbing the ability of people on the terrorism watch list to buy guns (yes, they can: more than 2,000 such weapons were bought last year.) These are minimal solutions, but don’t go far enough.

It’s unthinkable in the present political climate to envision serious restrictions on guns, but remember, it was once unthinkable to give civil rights to blacks or legal marriage to gay couples. What we need is a change in public opinion, and it’s sad that the only way that change might happen is for far more people to be murdered. And even that won’t help, for America’s in the grip of gun madness.

Kristof ends on a clever note: asking Republicans to heed their #2 god:

. . . Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for purchases.

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,”Reagan wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions. “This level of violence must be stopped.”

He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land.”

Republicans, listen to your sainted leader.

The numbers adduced by Reagan have of course increased since then—they’ve tripled. Here’s a figure from PolitiFact, which gives some caveats in the associated article, but in general the numbers below are pretty close to the mark (that site adds 27 to the terrorist-caused deaths and nearly 22,000 to the total Americans killed by guns). Their ratio of Americans killed by guns to Americans killed by terrorism is 4,250 to 1. Which is the greater problem?

politifact-photos-12113317_920729551350503_850292094829865796_o

Finally, Grania has sent us a timeline for mass murders in the U.S., showing the nearly exponential increase over time. This is from Mother Jones, which quotes statistics from the Harvard School of Public Health:

harvard_timeline_AJ_2

As the article notes:

Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average. (For more details on their analytical method, see this related piece.)

Darwin’s primate tree

December 3, 2015 • 8:30 am

by Matthew Cobb

This sketch of human origins was made by Darwin in 1868, and reflects the knowledge of the time. Humans are on the left, with our closest relatives, gorillas and chimps, grouped together. Darwin seems to mistakenly suggest that the gibbons (Hylobatus) are more closely related to the other apes – gorillas, chimps and orang-utans – than we are.  Strikingly, there is no place on this sketch for any fossil forms, even though the first Neanderthal skull had been discovered in 1829, and the species name Homo neanderthalensis had been proposed in 1864.

[JAC: you’ll note that he also places chimps as more closely related to gorillas and orangs than to humans, which is another error, as chimps and bonobos are our closest relatives (ca. 6-6 myr), and both of us are a bit less closely related to gorillas (about 9 myr), and even less closely related to orangs (ca. 16 myr). But we had no genetic data back then, and this is a fine and prescient effort by Darwin.]

Dar.80.FB91r

This image, which is copyright by the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, can be found online here. A facsimile is currently on display at the Wellcome Trust Cultural Zone on The Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridge, with the following caption:

This diagram is the most tree-like of Darwin’s lineage drawings. It represents the evolutionary development of primates and highlights some key evolutionary distinctions that we still trace today. For example, on the left he notes the separation of Old World Monkeys and at the top he extends man from the same lineage as the other higher apes, such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

The diagram does not reference other species of hominids, though Darwin would discuss this subject a few years later in his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

h/t Ewan Birney, with thanks to Rebecca Gilmore and Julian Rayner for helping track the image.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 3, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader John Crisp in Ethiopia sent a bunch of photos; I’ll present only a few today and ration the rest over time.

All these photos were taken between 6 am and 8.30 am this morning [Nov. 22] on Lake Tana, Western Ethiopia, where I have lived for the last four years. I hope the captions are self evident. I’m sure there are too many, but the Egyptian geese ones (Alopochen aegyptiacus) are particularly fascinating. They are usually fairly placid, but I guess it’s mating season…

The captions for the next four are “Egyptian goose: Stuka attack”:

Egyptian Goose - Stuka Attack 1

Egyptian Goose - Stuka Attack 2

Egyptian Goose - Stuka Attack 3

Egyptian Goose - Stuka Attack 4

Egyptian geese, fighting:

Egyptian Geese - Fighting

This photo of two Egyptian geese on a branch, presumably fighting over a female, is scary.

Egyptian Geese - Confrontation

And one more to whet your appetite: Little Bee-Eaters (Merops pusillus):

Little Bee Eaters

From Stephen Barnard, a passel (I’m sure that’s not the right collective noun) of elk (Cervus canadensis):

These aren’t especially good photos, but they show something interesting. At this time of the year elk migrate through the valley and gather into large herds. I estimate there were at least 400 head in this herd. I took the first photo from my car with a 700mm lens. The second photo is a couple of years old, taken at the same place, and shows about half the herd.

P1030393

RT9A2127

And a photo of the moon from reader Andy Saxon, who had a pint in the cat pub The Bag of Nails (more on that later):

I’ve included a couple of lunar shots I took through my telescope (with a dSLR mount) in recent months.

IMG_3540 - Version 2

Version 2

And from Anne-Marie Cournoyer in Quebec, a handsome American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos):

Anne-Marie Cournoyer

For some unaccountable reason, I really like the next photo:
The title of this photo could be “Food for thought!” This is same squirrel that comes day after day in our backyard in Brossard, Qc. I started his education today. It took him a while to get accustomed to the presentation, but as you see, soon enough it was business as usual!
Anne-Marie Cournoyer 2

Thursday: Hili dialogue

December 3, 2015 • 5:09 am

It’s Thursday and I got nothing. Having slept poorly, I can’t brain, and so I’ll just say that on this day in history, the Bhopal Disaster, the world’s worst industrial accident, occurred in India, ultimately killing more than 9,000 people. And, in 1980, fascist Oswald Moseley died. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is appropriating the issue of climate change to her own solipsistic ends.

Hili: I’m looking at this cooling with skepticism.
A: Why?
Hili: I’m a supporter of warming.
P1030567 (1)
In Polish:
Hili: Patrzę na to ochłodzenie ze sceptycyzmem.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Jestem zwolenniczką ocieplenia.

 

Another mass shooting

December 2, 2015 • 1:48 pm

I just got this on my CNN news feed, and it’s confirmed by CNBC:

This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

Authorities responded to reports of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday.

Reports first surfaced around 2:15 p.m. ET of an incident in the area. The official San Bernardino Country Sheriff’s Department Twitter account confirmed an active shooter in the area.

Video from the scene showed people lying on the ground, and police helping to support others who were wounded.

Inland Regional Center, located on the 1300 block of South Waterman Street, serves residents of San Bernardino and Riverside counties who have developmental disabilities.

Despite reports of a Planned Parenthood in the area, a representative for the organization told CNBC that the shooting was not at their facility. Last Friday, a gunman stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, killing three people.

This seems to be happening every week now, and I’m afraid we’re getting inured to it. I have no response except to say that we need to clamp down on gun ownership in this country.

Should GMOs be labeled?

December 2, 2015 • 12:45 pm

UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a four-person essay debate on exactly this topic: “Are genetically engineered salmon too fishy?”

Go have a look; the question at issue is this:

Is the F.D.A.’s approval a sign of scientific progress, or a danger to consumers and the environment?

__________

I used to think that if a food was made from a genetically modified organism (“GMO”), that modification should not be required to be put on the food’s label. My reasoning was that such labeling would tend to scare off consumers, and. more important, there was no indication that any GMO was harmful. Indeed, when the first genetically modified animal recently hit the market, a salmon engineered with genes from other fish to grow quickly, the FDA had already ruled that mandatory labeling as a “GMO” was not required, though they did issue guidelines for voluntary labeling.

Now Vermont has passed a law requiring that salmon (and all genetically modified foods) must labeled as GMOs starting in July; and a U.S. district court has upheld that requirement as constitutional. The Vermont law is being fought by a consortium of food groups who think (probably correctly) that such labeling will scare away consumers.

Regardless, though, I am starting to think that all GMO foods should be labeled as such, regardless of the consequences. After all, all foods, even tomato sauce, have to be labeled with their ingredients, including coloring agents, even though we know the ingredients aren’t harmful. Why should foreign genes be an exception? Because the addition is a bit of DNA—one that makes a protein that is ingested—rather than Red Dye #4? Is there a good rationale for making a distinction?

Granted, I am prefectly convinced that GMO foods are safe. But why withhold the fact that some foods contain foreign genome? After all, foods are labeled as “organic” though in most cases there are no problems with the non-organic equivalent. But I’m starting to come around to the view that we should let the consumers make up their minds, and not make it up for them by omitting ingredients because they might scare people away.

I’m not firmly wedded to this view, and am open to arguments to the contrary. I also know that for years we’ve eaten genetically modified plant products without their having been labeled. But maybe Vermont is right, and it’s time to put the GMO label on all genetically modified foods.