Ditching the hijab in Iran

May 13, 2014 • 6:04 am

Let’s first review the various types of clothing worn by Muslim women, often under state edict. What we’re talking about today is the hijab, the covering of the head and chest (upper left in picture below) that is a mandatory garment in Iran

Hijab-Veil-types

Now defenders of these kinds of garments often say that they’re worn voluntarily by Muslim women—and sometimes they are. But it’s hard to disentangle “truly voluntary” from “I’m used to wearing them because I was forced to since childhood” or “voluntary because I’ll be arrested/vilified if I don’t wear them.” When I was in Turkey, in a university that banned headscarves, many Muslim women told me they favored the ban, for it it were legal, some Muslim students would wear them and shame the others for “not being good Muslims.” They didn’t want that kind of pressure to dress in a certain way.  A woman from the BBC link cited below says likewise:

“My problem is not having to wear the headscarf. My problem is not having a choice,” writes one woman on the Facebook page. “Stealthy freedom means, just for a few seconds, I will be what I want to be,” writes another.

But the true sign that these garments are worn under coercion is what happens when the national and social bans are lifted. Do women then doff them?

In Iran, they’re doffing hijabs illegally, a real sign of how women are chafing at having to be covered, presumably because the sight of their naked heads and necks might incite uncontrollable lust in Muslim men. As reported by both the BBC and the Guardian, there’s now a Facebook page where Iranian women can post pictures of themselves unveiled. What these women are doing is illegal, but heartening. As the Guardian reports:

Thousands of Iranian women are taking off their veils and publishing pictures of themselves online, igniting a debate about the freedom to wear or not wear the hijab.

A Facebook page set up by London-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad 10 days ago has attracted more than 130,000 likes, with women across Iran sending unveiled pictures taken in parks, at the seaside and in the streets.

Go have a look at the page called “Stealthy Freedoms of Iranian Women”. Most of the captions written by the women are in the local language, Farsi, but a few are translated into English by the Guardian. Here are some (indented captions from the Guardian).

“My stealthy freedom while driving in the streets of Tehran,” wrote Maryam alongside an image showing her behind the wheel. “I like to feel the wind blowing on my face.”

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Another post showed a mother with her daughter. “The beautiful seaside in Kish [Island],” the younger woman wrote. “We strolled on the rocks and experienced the cool breeze flowing through our hair. Is this a big request?”

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 A young woman from the city of Fuman, in the northern province of Gilan, sent a picture of her in the woods. “I took this picture stealthily in the spring,” she wrote. “It makes me feel happy.”

This is what freedom looks like:

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A few others I’ve selected, with captions in both Arabic and English:

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There are hundreds of these photos on the Facebook page—they’re pouring in from Iran as if from an uncorked bottle. Go look at them! And the bravery of these women, and their plaintive and simple desire to dress as they please, makes me tear up.  But it also makes me feel great to see them defying the misogyny and repression of Islam.

h/t: Steve

 

 

Surprise: Ukraine referendum a total farce

May 13, 2014 • 5:12 am

Sunday’s “referendum” about the fate of eastern Ukraine was, as many predicted, a complete sham.  That, of course, was the plan of the thug Putin, who intends to bring that part of the country under Russian control, if not a part of Russia itself.  The vote for “sov ereignty” was 90% in favor, not quite as indicative of thuggery as, say, an election in China or North Korea, but pretty close.

As the New York Times reports (and let’s not have rants about how the paper is a propaganda organ of the U.S. government), this is what a “fair” referendum looks like:

Nearly everyone who cast a ballot appeared to be voting in favor of greater autonomy from the Ukrainian central government in Kiev. Opponents appeared to be staying away from the polls, as many had said they would. The ballot papers that could be seen in transparent ballot boxes in two cities, Donetsk and Slovyansk, were almost all marked yes.

Transparent ballot boxes. Great!

In one town, Ukrainian security forces shot a man to death outside a polling station as an angry crowd, ignoring warning shots, rushed toward a building that the soldiers controlled. In some other cities, voters took ballots that were run off on photocopiers and stuffed them into cardboard boxes that the organizers spirited off quickly, lest they be seized by pro-government forces.

. . . At a half-dozen polling places visited by reporters, except for those in Slovyansk, there were no voting rolls to consult; anyone who could show a local address in official identity papers was allowed to cast a ballot. Tatyana Us, a volunteer election official, referred to the practice as “open list” voting.

. . . In the town of Krasnoarmiysk, voters filed past a table on Sunday to pick up a ballot and a sausage sandwich. Crude secessionist propaganda posters hung near the polling station, touching dark themes of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. One depicted the current president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, as a goat-like figure and asked, “Do you want Satan as your president?” Another said Ukrainians should reject the “European Jewish choice.”

And the sign of inequity:

Late Sunday, separatist leaders in Donetsk reported that the ballot on “self-rule” had gone in their favor, with almost 90 percent of the vote, and that 75 percent of the region’s eligible voters had gone to the polls. For the province as a whole, another organizer was quoted as saying, “on average, from every 1,000 ballots, only one is against.”

Another sign that this kind of drummed-up vote doesn’t reflect the will of the people comes from a Pew Poll published on May 8, indicating that while both east and west Ukraine lack confidence in the central government, big majorities in both regions want the country to remain unified—and that goes for Russian speakers. (Easterners, however, want both Ukrainian and Russian to be the country’s official languages:

A clear majority of Ukrainians agree that their country should remain a single, unified state, according to a pair of new surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in Ukraine and Russia – after Crimea’s annexation by Russia, but prior to recent violence in Odessa and other cities. The survey in Ukraine also finds a clearly negative reaction to the role Russia is playing in the country. By contrast, the poll in Russia reveals a public that firmly backs Vladimir Putin and Crimea’s secession from Ukraine.

Here are the data:

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And this is what is giving Putin confidence:

In Russia proper, the public also sees the matter as closed. More than eight-in-ten Russians (84%) think the March 16threferendum was fair and even more (89%) say Kyiv ought to validate the results, according to a new Pew Research survey in Russia, conducted among 1,000 randomly selected adults between April 4-20. The same survey finds that majorities of Russians (61%) agree that there are parts of neighboring countries that belong to Russia, and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a great tragedy (55%). While the poll did not explicitly ask Russians whether they supported the Kremlin taking military action to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine, nearly two-thirds (65%) agree that military action is sometimes necessary to maintain order in the world.

The data:

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61% of Russians think that nearby countries should be part of their own, while only 28% disagree.

It is a curiosity of our time that we see Putin and his thugs repeating the kind of land grab—and the kind of call for annexation of “historically Russian” land—that resembles the actions of Hitler before WWII. If any Western country tried this kind of shenanigans, they’d be roundly excoriated for imperialism.

Some day we’ll find out that Putin is an oligarch in every sense: not just a monomaniacal tyrant who wrestles bears, but one who has enriched himself at the expense of his people.

I have no doubt that some readers will defend this phony referendum—and Putin himself—and I’ll continue to receive the kind of obscene and harassing phone calls that always follow my posts on this issue.  I’m truly puzzled why so many people want to defend this expansionism and Russian-sponsored violence.

Russians: this is your leader. Putin topless on horseback (. REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Pool/Alexei Druzhinin)
Russians: this is your leader. Putin topless on horseback (EUTERS/RIA Novosti/Pool/Alexei Druzhinin)

 

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 13, 2014 • 4:35 am

Stephen Barnard just keeps them coming. First, a panoramic view of the Nature Conservancy’s Silver Creek Preserve in Idaho. Barnard lives near here and, I believe, takes many of his photographs in the area:

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A mated pair of American avocets (Recurvirostra americana) feeding:

Avocets, feeding

An osprey (Pandion haliaetus), described by the Cornell bird site as “unique among North American raptors for its diet of live fish and ability to dive into water to catch them.”

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Finally, another avocet, in flight:

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Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 13, 2014 • 2:46 am

There is a new d*g, Cyrus, in Hili’s house. Cyrus, a black canid, is about seven, and spent four years in the pound before he was rescued by Malgorzata and Andrzej.  Hili, however, doesn’t want to share her digs.

Hili: Will this huge dog go away soon?
A: No, he is a new member of the family.
Hili: So why am I afraid of him and not vice versa?
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In Polish:
Hili: Czy ten wielki pies zaraz sobie pójdzie?
Ja: Nie, to jest nowy członek rodziny.
Hili: To dlaczego ja się go boję, a nie on mnie?

Spider butt reveals God

May 12, 2014 • 1:58 pm

I’m convinced that the famous “Jesus-in-a-dog-butt” picture is a Photoshop job, but this one, showing the rear of a Mexican trapdoor spider, is undoubtedly authentic. And what it proves is that the One True God is the Aztec Sun God. Clearly the sensus divinitatis was really installed not in the Middle East, but in Mesoamerica.

Picture 1

It’s also a really cool spider, and the patterns of its butt-plug are completely mysterious to me.

h/t: Twi**er of Zia Tong via Matthew Cobb

 

Google doodle celebrates Nobel Laureate

May 12, 2014 • 12:56 pm

When I saw today’s Google Doodle, which looks like this:

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I knew instantly that it had something to do with Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), who won the Nobel Prize in 1964. In fact, she would have been 104 today had she lived. And you should know that this Doodle was about her, too, because I’ve posted about Hodgkin before, showing the model of penicillin that she made from X-ray crystallography, a field she helped found. Here’s that model, which I showed in my previous post, and which appears in the Doodle:

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It was for determining this structure, and that of vitamin B12, that Hodgkin got The Big Prize. You can read more about her at the link above. She remains the only British woman to ever get a Nobel Prize in science.

The attitude toward women scientists of her era, and her persistence in ignoring it, is expressed by a nice article in this January’s Guardian:

When, in 1964, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, did the press regard her in the same light as they would a man in the same position? Absolutely not. The Daily Telegraph announced “British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three”. The Daily Mail was even briefer in its headline “Oxford housewife wins Nobel”. The Observer in its write-up commented “affable-looking housewife Mrs Hodgkin” had won the prize “for a thoroughly unhousewifely skill: the structure of crystals of great chemical interest”.

. . . Hodgkin was a woman not prepared to let her gender get in the way of her work. When married, but still working under her maiden name of Crowfoot, she presented a key paper at a major meeting at the Royal Society in 1938 when eight months pregnant. Another long-term collaborator, Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz, referred to her appearance at this meeting in his speech at her memorial service: “Dorothy lectured in that state as if it were the most natural thing in the world, without any pretence of trying to be unconventional, which it certainly was at the time.”

The days have passed, I hope, when a woman who wins a Nobel Prize is described as a “housewife” or a “mother.”  But there are still too few women in science, and, as several recent studies have shown, still unconscious gender bias against them by scientists of both sexes. Yet I fear we’re still in the days when headlines might say “British woman wins Nobel Prize” when they wouldn’t say “British man wins Nobel Prize.”  The day will come, in our children’s lifetime, when all scientists will be judged not by the content of their chromosomes, but by the character of their science.

 

Surprise: Pope Francis believes in Satan and demons

May 12, 2014 • 10:24 am

Whenever someone claims that the Catholic Church is down with science because it accepts evolution, I remind them that:

1. The Church accepts theistic evolution, with human exceptionalism, so that humans are the unique species into whose lineage God inserted a soul. (And 23% of Catholics, defying their own faith in a more conservative direction, are young-earth creationists.)

2. The official doctrine of the Church is that Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of all humanity. That, too, is wrong, and clearly does not comport with what science tells us.

3. The Church accepts the notion of Satan and Hell, which is about as retrograde a belief you can have in our modern world; and

4. The Church accepts demonic possession that can be reversed by exorcism. In fact, I believe the Vatican has its own official exorcist, and there are hundreds of trained priests operating as exorcists throughout the world.

In  a piece in Saturday’s Washington Post, “A modern pope gets old school on the devil“, we learn that Pope Francis is a big booster of the demonic-possession hypothesis:

Largely under the radar, theologians and Vatican insiders say, Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil’s image as a supernatural entity with the forces­ of evil at his beck and call.

Last year, for instance, Francis laid handson a man in a wheelchair who claimed to be possessed by demons, in what many saw as an impromptu act of cleansing. A few months later, he praised a group long viewed by some as the crazy uncles of the Roman Catholic Church — the International Association of Exorcists — for “helping people who suffer and are in need of liberation.”

. . . “Pope Francis never stops talking about the Devil; it’s constant,” said one senior bishop in Vatican City who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely. “Had Pope Benedict done this, the media would have clobbered him.”

Indeed; Francis is given a pass. When are those people who are so impressed by his “humility” going to learn that it’s just a facade, behind which lurks all the incense-scented malfeasance and superstition of Catholicism? And, far from reforming his church by nudging Catholics toward more enlightened sentiments, Pope Francis is keeping the Church mired in the Middle Ages, at least on the issues of Satan and demons:

By most accounts, the ranks of official exorcists number between 500 and 600 in a global church of more than 1 billion Catholics, with the vast majority operating in Latin America and Eastern Europe. This week, at the ninth and largest Vatican-sanctioned convention on exorcism, attendees gushed about the fresh recognition being afforded the field.

Almost 200 delegates — most of them priests and nuns — from more than two dozen nations talked about how Satanic cults are spreading like wildfire in the age of the Internet.

The new pope, exorcists say, has become their champion in the face of modern skeptics, many of them within the Catholic faith. Officially, those claiming to be possessed must first undergo psychiatric evaluations. But exorcists say that liberal Catholic bishops have often rejected their services even after such due diligence.

“The sad truth is that there are many bishops and priests in our church who do not really believe in the Devil,” said the Rev. Gabriele Amorth, the 89-year-old priest who is perhaps the closest thing the church has to a Hollywood-style exorcist. “I believe Pope Francis is speaking to them. Because when you don’t believe, the Devil wins.”

Yes, these people really do believe in Satan, and that itself is unbelievable! Where’s the evidence for Satan, much less God?

The reader who sent me this link, reader Matt, added a note to this effect:

“More Catholic craziness below.  I clipped a quote from the article.  Get a load of how one exorcist determines if a person is possessed.  It’s amusing.  But then you realize that people who really need psychological help sometimes get mixed up with these jackasses and it is sad and pathetic.  And then to know that the Pope supports this nonsense is horrifying.”

Matt was referring to the following “clip” from the Post piece:

During the conference, the Rev. Cesar Truqui, an exorcist based in Switzerland, recounted one experience he had aboard a Swissair flight. “Two lesbians,” he said, had sat behind him on the plane. Soon afterward, he said, he felt Satan’s presence. As he silently sought to repel the evil spirit through prayer, one of the women, he said, began growling demonically and threw chocolates at his head.

Asked how he knew the woman was possessed, he said that “once you hear a Satanic growl, you never forget it. It’s like smelling Margherita pizza for the first time. It’s something you never forget.”

And Matt added:

“I’ll never think about Margherita pizza the same way.  Now, how does Truqui know these women are lesbians?  Does he believe lesbianism is consistent with demonic possession? And what growling demons attack by throwing chocolates?  Booooorrrrring.  No spitting vomit?  No spinning heads?  If this guy wants a career in exorcism he better get a better story.”

The article ends with the description of an exorcism by Amorth. Have a look if you want to truly apprehend the craziness of this faith. The only thing that’s missing is the vomiting of pea soup.

I’d love to ask Catholics who are scientists or science-friendly—like Kenneth Miller of Brown University or Peter Hess of the National Center for Science Education—what they think of the Catholic Church’s acceptance of demons and the historicity of Adam and Eve. I’m sure they’d say it is nonsense—if they had the courage to answer—but then how can they maintain, as they do, that there’s no conflict between science and Catholicism?