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Although it is missing the giant cleaner emerging out of the alley to gulp down the corpse & virus. Our immune system is almost as ruthless and brutal as the Florida police.
By the way, the Florida police:
I would never have thought of using a car full of kids to hide behind. Brilliant tactics.
War sucks.
It’s also bad when the warriors are discarded afterwards.
My latest aggravation with the company: I upgraded to their newest version of the OS, Catalina, recently, and it looks and performs just fine, except for a couple of gigantic problems. Both Audacity, the great audio processing program, and OBS Studio, the most popular broadcasting software around, crash and die if you try to run them. It’s a conflict with how the OS manages permissions to access things like microphones and cameras. There a couple of ugly workarounds floating around that involve launching the programs from the Unix command line, but still, this is appalling.
Apple should have known about these conflicts long before the OS was released, and if they couldn’t fix them on their side, they should have flown a couple of engineers straight to those companies and helped them fix their code. It’s not as if Apple has a shortage of cash. I can understand how they might find it necessary to move forward, especially on issues that involve security, and break backwards compatibility…but then they are responsible for making the information available to enable apps to conform to the new standards.
Oh, yeah, and the camera software for my microscope is also broken. That’s a very narrow niche so I don’t expect a huge effort by Apple to make it work, but still, I’m sitting here feeling like my computer has been crippled in some of the functions I use most.
I got an email from an old-school atheist activist. They asked a hard question. Or is it?
The AA magazine is filled with LGBTQ stuff
Did you get the latest AA magazine?I was appalled to find that the biggest story in the July- October issue of the AA magazine is about something called “Drag Queen Story Hour.” IT TOOK UP SIX FULL PAGES PLUS THE COVER PHOTO.
What the futz do drag queens have to do with Atheism?
Whoa. What should be in American Atheist magazine? Six full pages of blank white pages and a cover with a title and nothing else? This writer clearly has a vision for the magazine, not that they’ve said what it is, and it doesn’t include drag queens. Why not? I guess we’re suppose to have nothing but articles about separation of church and state issues, legal shenanigans, and opposition to religion, which all sounds very dry and boring.
You can read American Atheist’s concerns about the drag queen story for yourself. The rationale is crystal clear.
Yesterday, American Atheists, Southern Maryland Area Secular Humanists (SMASH), PFLAG National, and PFLAG’s Leonardtown chapter sent a letter to the commission warning that the organizations “are prepared to seek judicial remedies for [the] violation of their rights.”
“At Drag Queen Story Hour, the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department arrested and charged a Christian extremist with five misdemeanors after he barged into the meeting room, terrorizing young attendees,” explained Samantha McGuire, SMASH Chapter Coordinator and National Field Director of American Atheists. “This anti-LGBTQ protester broke the law, yet St. Mary’s County Commission is blaming the victims, forcing the library to foot the bill to protect children from out-of-control fundamentalists.”
A Christian fanatic tried to disrupt the event, and Christian fundamentalist organizations are howling to shut down the participation of drag queens in any event, “for the good of the children”. I’m sorry, but are we only supposed to defend people from religious oppression when they are cis het straight people who conform to social expectations of dress? It sure sounds like my correspondent only wants to support atheists who fit their expectations of conventional behavior…which is exactly what the religious zealots want. It’s just that their ideal of conventional behavior includes going to church every Sunday.
It wasn’t just a lone loon disrupting an event, either. The county commissioners punished the library by taking funding away. AA has a few things to say about that, too.
“By kowtowing to Christian supremacists, the Commission is sending the message that bigoted protesters should use any means necessary, including threatening innocent children and committing multiple crimes, to get what they want,” said Nick Fish, American Atheists’ president.
I mean, you don’t need to read very far into this story to figure out why an atheist organization would take sides against Christian supremacy in action. Is this not enough for you?
My vision of atheism has always been that it is a tool for battling dogmatism, that it’s something more than a narrow answer, “NO”, to the question of the existence of gods. It is a vehicle for opening minds and defeating the constrictions imposed on us by authoritarian superstition. It’s not just for nerdy old white guys with conservative haircuts and a boring style of dress. We’ve already got the social approval and the ability to move into positions of relative authority.
We should be about anti-authoritarian secularism and breaking the bounds of unthinking custom. Just being an atheist is freeing one foot from the shackles, we should celebrate the people who break free of all pointless restraints.
Drag queens have everything to do with atheism. So do purple-haired ace furries, free-thinking hippies who like to knit, and staid old gomers who are comfortable in traditional relationships. All of us. We all need defending from the rigid authoritarianism of religious orthodoxy, and my atheism is not going to question inclusion and equality.
Mary and I went on a spider safari. In our house. It started out fine; we didn’t find much in the living spaces of our home, but then we decided to dive down into…the basement.
We found MONSTERS!
Oh, wait. That’s just one thing from my son’s old Dungeons & Dragons collection. What we actually found was Pholcus. Pholcus everywhere. We took a few photos before fleeing.
I’m not a big fan of the Pholcidae. They just hang around hugely, not moving much, but if any of the Theridiidae that I favor show up, they kill and eat them. So there they are.
Curiously, when I checked out our basement in August, there was nothing but dead husks and old cobwebs. They’re going through a population explosion right now.
Hello, all! I’m just barely catching up on what’s going on around me as I’ve spent the entire week firmly in “Grading Jail” because I still have poor time and task management skills. Upscale stationary bike company Peloton spectacularly fails to get a positive fitness message across in a 30-second ad. As someone who just …
By Daniel Villarreal Rev. Cornelius Tilton, the 65-year-old president of the Christian Bible College of Louisiana, has been charged with sexually assaulting an unnamed male 19-year-old theological seminary student on an international flight from Tel Aviv, Israel to Newark, New Jersey. Tilton, who is married to a woman and has served as the pastor of …
By Simon Little A new poll has found a hefty minority (23 per cent) of Canadians reject the theory of evolution, and instead believe a god created humans within the last 10,000 years. The survey, conducted by Research Co., found 61 per cent of Canadians believe humans “definitely” or “probably” evolved from less-advanced life forms over millions …
By James Gallagher More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest. Most of the lives cut short were children aged under five. The situation has been described by health experts as staggering, an outrage, a tragedy and easily preventable with …
By Nathan Rott On “good” bad days, the shells lay open at the bottom of the river, shimmering in the refracted sunlight. Their insides, pearl white and picked clean of flesh, flicker against the dark riverbed like a beacon, alerting the world above to a problem below. “That’s what we look for in die-offs,” says …
By Alexandra Witze A spacecraft buzzing past the Sun has caught the best-ever glimpse of the birthplace of the solar wind — the stream of energized particles that floods outwards from the star. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spotted strange spikes in the wind, where particles speed up and flip the direction of the wind’s magnetic …
A little soundtrack for your morning reading of TeenVogue’s coverage of anti-capitalism can be found here. How the French revolution is inspiring today’s online anti-capitalists – “On social media, a tone-deaf tweet or Facebook post from any wealthy CEO or out-of-touch politician is invariably met with a sea of guillotine gifs, calls for retribution against …
Gabrielle Union was one of my favorite celebrities even before she was a judge on one of my favorite schmaltzy competition shows: America’s Got Talent. She consistently uses her platform as a celebrity to speak up about social justice issues and I am here for it. She rode on a float with her child Zion Wade …
This article is a preview from the Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (Manchester University Press) By Sivamohan Valluvan
Nationalism is a dirty word. At least for self-declared liberals, nationalism – or too much of it – leads to intolerance, xenophobia and racism. For those of us currently living in Britain, it was nationalism (or “nativism”) that brought us Brexit. If the Leave vote was a measure of small-minded nationalism, Remainers might be described as anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan. In this account, Leave vs Remain can be re-narrated as the “nativists” vs the “liberals”, and for the “liberals”, nationalism is something which happens over there: in forgotten industrial towns, or among resentful older voters in the Home Counties.
But nationalism is clearly not the preserve of the small-minded and the right-wing. The nation remains our most entrenched form of political imagination and the most concrete institutional arrangement through which we enact our political lives. This applies to Remainers as much to Leavers. The version of the British nation evoked by Remainers might be liberal and European, but that does not necessarily make it any less exclusionary. For many liberals, non-European migrants and minorities, especially Muslims, are still effectively excluded from the British nation, even if this exclusion is justified through concerns about democracy and integration.
The sociologist Sivamohan Valluvan offers a vital resource for understanding nationalism. For Valluvan, contemporary nationalism draws on and shapes a variety of different political traditions – and that is what makes it potentially so dangerous. Crucially, he argues, nationalism is always defined against outsiders; the people who are deemed not to belong. The “spectre of non-belonging” appears in response to “various economic, cultural and security concerns”. The nation “has no inevitable political complexion other than that of its own exclusionary ethno-racial desire”. As a result, movements from across the political spectrum can become embroiled in nationalistic politics when their programmes focus on those who do not belong in the nation. We see the dangers of liberal and left nationalisms most clearly in relation to the demonisation and exclusion of Muslims and immigrants – forms of ethno-racial exclusion which operate so effectively because they appeal to such diverse political constituencies – as well as via appeals to the “left-behind” white working class. Indeed, Valluvan is most insightful when discussing Corbyn’s Labour Party and the dangers of facile petitions to the British nation: “Nationalism is not a viable vehicle towards other political ends, not least leftist collectivism. Nationalism is, in the final instance, primarily about its own exclusionary racisms.”
Valluvan provides chapter-length discussions of four main political forms of British nationalism: liberal, conservative, neoliberal and communitarian. These different discourses transgress party divides, and can be mobilised by the same actors at different points and in combination. For example, an individual might be motivated by conservative nostalgia for an imagined monocultural Britain of the past, as well as left-leaning communitarian arguments about the welfare state and “nativist” demands for decent work and public services for the nation’s insiders. Another individual might express liberal concerns about the cultural or religious practices associated with outsiders threatening free speech and tolerance, while also buying into the neoliberal idea of the nation that says migrants are welcome so long as they contribute to the economy.
Valluvan separates these different strands so that we can observe them more clearly, arguing that it is precisely this “ideological multiplicity” that makes contemporary British nationalism so persistent.
Valluvan’s intellectual background is in cultural studies, and he builds on the ideas and approach of theorists like Stuart Hall to great effect – writing, as Hall once put it, “culturally about politics and politically about culture”. As a result, The Clamour of Nationalism avoids economic reductionism, transcends the short-termism of party politics, and questions the apparent newness of “populism”.
Importantly, alongside his critique of liberal and conservative ideas about the nation, Valluvan also turns his attention to how these concepts play out on the political left. Where liberals might imagine (wrongly) that nationalism is something that happens “over there”, some socialists, including parts of the Corbyn-led Labour Party, imagine that nationalism can be harnessed, sanitised and repurposed to progressive ends.
This was voiced most confidently during the 2018 World Cup, which apparently proved that the left could do national pride. More worryingly, left nationalism also shapes prominent arguments that immigration must be controlled in order to protect British workers’ rights and pay, or to maintain cultural cohesion. Just like the other nationalist strands discussed in the book, left nationalisms define the nation by what (and who) they exclude.
Indeed, Valluvan’s concern is not primarily with party politics, but with identifying openings for future resistance to nationalist politics. He finds these in the reality of urban multiculture – “the well-worn, deeply lived-in ethnic and racial diversity that captures so many British people’s everyday realities” – which offers “a ready-made counterpoint to nationalist capture”. The question is whether this can be harnessed within any formal political programme.
The Clamour of Nationalism is a compelling cautionary tale about the dangers of nationalism that should be read by everyone trying to understand the politics of race and nation in contemporary Britain. Our resistance to nationalism and racism will only be sharpened by a deeper reckoning with its ideological complexity and versatility. Valluvan shows how nationalism retains its hold on even the most progressive political forces, thereby stunting the potential for a genuinely anti-racist future.
This article is a preview from the Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
It’s a snowy day in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and half a dozen cleaners are washing away the slush from around a bronze statue of Islam Karimov, the ruthless dictator who ruled this former Soviet state in Central Asia for over a quarter of a century.
The 11-metre-tall statue, unveiled in 2017 on the first anniversary of Karimov’s death, stands in front of his former presidential palace, a palatial white-brick building which is now home to a permanent exhibition of art dedicated to the late Uzbek leader. The exhibition, entitled “The Heart That Embraced the Universe”, features a series of portraits of Karimov that range from the merely fawning to the downright bizarre. One gigantic canvas depicts Karimov and a group of tigers – “his spirit animal” – preparing to fight a horde of vultures that apparently represents the multitude of challenges facing Uzbekistan, a nation of 32 million inhabitants that borders Afghanistan. A casual visitor to this unashamedly hagiographic exhibition would never guess that Uzbekistan under Karimov was widely considered one of the world’s most repressive societies, with human rights groups routinely mentioning the country in the same breath as North Korea and Eritrea.
A former Communist Party official, Karimov came to power in 1989, as the Soviet system began to crumble, and systematically crushed all opposition to his rule. His critics were tortured, sometimes to death, in Uzbekistan’s brutal prisons. In 2005, when protesters massed in Andijan, a city in eastern Uzbekistan, Karimov ordered troops to open fire. No one knows for sure how many people were killed that day: the government says 187, but others estimate that several hundred protesters may have died.
Although around 80 per cent of Uzbekistan’s population identify as Muslim, Karimov also cracked down on believers who practised Islam outside strict state controls. Thousands of Muslims were locked up, with at least one member of a moderate Islamist group boiled alive in prison. Karimov also barred the call to prayer from mosques, as well as the observance of Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. The clampdown was justified by Uzbek officials as a necessary measure in the fight against Islamic extremism. Critics allege its true aim was to eradicate any faith-based challenge to Karimov’s rule.
Children also suffered under Karimov. Hundreds of thousands of them were taken out of school every year to pick cotton by hand on the country’s sprawling plantations, receiving no pay for their back-breaking work. The practice led to a boycott of Uzbek cotton by European and North American companies. Yet despite Karimov’s appalling record on forced child labour, another painting at the exhibition depicts children jumping for joy in front of the late Uzbek leader. With sinister echoes of Soviet-era propaganda in praise of Joseph Stalin, it is entitled “the Guarantor of Our Happy Childhood”. An accompanying note reads: “Everyone knows what attention [Karimov] paid to the spiritual and physical health of the younger generation – the future of the nation.”
I am the only visitor to the exhibition, and so I enquire if it is always quite so empty. The middle-aged female guide shakes her head vigorously, and assures me that “thousands” of people visit every week. She presses colourful books about Karimov into my hands and urges me to visit again soon. Outside, the slush has been washed away from Karimov’s statue, and the Uzbek tyrant’s bronze likeness basks in Tashkent’s early morning sun.
* * *
When Karimov died in 2016 of a brain haemorrhage, it was days before authorities informed the public of his death. “Doctors were too terrified to tell Karimov he was dead,” ran the joke. In reality, Uzbek officials were working frantically behind the scenes to ensure a smooth handover of power, eventually naming Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Karimov’s long-serving prime minister, as the country’s acting president. Mirziyoyev cemented his rule later that year, taking 89 per cent of the vote in presidential elections that were widely criticised as undemocratic.
Few believed that Uzbekistan’s authoritarian policies would change under Mirziyoyev, who was widely seen as Karimov’s right-hand man. But, defying expectations, Mirziyoyev has gradually introduced a series of tentative reforms that have included moves to reduce the powers of the much-feared state security service, release scores of high-profile political prisoners and eradicate forced labour. He has also lifted a much-mocked Karimov-era ban on the teaching of political science at Uzbek universities, and the call to prayer can once more be heard at Uzbekistan’s mosques. Although abuse within the country’s brutal prisons has not been eliminated, some Karimov-era officials have been charged with torture. “There is no fear any more that the security services could just come and grab you off the streets,” says Andrei Kudryashov, a photographer in Tashkent.
Mirziyoyev is also seeking to improve Uzbekistan’s relations with western countries, which were frayed under Karimov. In May 2018, Mirziyoyev held what the White House called “historic” talks with US President Donald Trump, in a meeting that came as Uzbekistan signed business deals with American companies worth £3.6 billion. In January, Mirziyoyev was in Berlin, for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. His programme of reforms, dubbed the “Uzbek spring”, led to him being called “the leader of perestroika in Central Asia” by Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Other signs that Uzbekistan is opening up include the scrapping of visa requirements for citizens of most European countries, as well as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. (Americans are still required to apply for visas, however.) Tashkent has also invested heavily in pitch-side advertising at English Premier League games that urges fans to “Visit Uzbekistan”.
Yet while Uzbekistan is slowly moving out of Karimov’s grim shadow, critics say that there is little prospect of free elections, a genuinely free press or an independent judiciary in the near future. Although a number of critical websites have recently been unblocked by the authorities, independent journalists still face harassment. “Positive changes in Uzbekistan are from a very low base,” noted Hugh Williamson, the Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a recent commentary.
“Compared to Karimov, of course, Mirziyoyev is a reformer,” Daniil Kislov, the editor of the Fergana.ru news website, whose journalists faced violence and censorship under Karimov, tells me. “But this isn’t perestroika – perestroika began in the Soviet Union with political reforms. Mirziyoyev hasn’t carried out anything even close to this.”
Mirziyoyev’s cautious reforms, Kislov and other critics say, are not rooted in a genuine concern for human rights or democratic principles, but rather an understanding that the Uzbek economy is on the verge of collapse and that only foreign investment and a massive influx of tourists to the country’s ancient Silk Road cities can save it.
Average monthly salaries in Uzbekistan are less than £150, and it is common for teachers, doctors and other professionals to moonlight as taxi drivers to make ends meet. Millions of the country’s best and brightest have fled abroad in a brain drain that briefly subsided after Karimov’s death, but is now picking up again. Uzbeks joke: “First the golden minds left (the intellectuals), then the golden hands left (skilled workers), and now only the golden teeth are left” (a reference to the gold-capped teeth favoured by members of Uzbek criminal gangs).
“It’s clear that Mirziyoyev needs to change Uzbekistan’s international image,” says Kislov. “He realises that Uzbekistan is in a state of total economic decay, and these economic problems are impossible to solve without investment and tourism. He needs to be accepted in Europe and the United States.”
Tellingly, Mirziyoyev has not publicly criticised either Karimov or his human rights abuses. On the contrary, he has praised him as an “outstanding” statesman, and has also issued orders for a swathe of streets, squares and factories, as well as Tashkent’s international airport, to be renamed in Karimov’s honour. Mirziyoyev also recently paid his respects at Karimov’s ornate tomb in Samarkand. “There will be no investigation into Karimov’s crimes, because Mirziyoyev served as prime minister under him and he is afraid to do this,” said Kislov. “He and other high-placed officials know they were compliant in these crimes.”
Concerns that economic crimes allegedly committed in the Karimov era could come back to haunt top officials are also thought to be behind a move to imprison the dictator’s eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, in March. Karimova, a one-time glamorous Uzbek diplomat, socialite and pop singer, was arrested on corruption charges in 2014 on her father’s orders amid a bitter family dispute that saw her accuse her mother and sister of using black magic against her. Little was known of her fate until 2017, when Uzbek authorities said she had been sentenced to five years under house arrest. In March, police seized Karimova from her apartment in Tashkent, and drove her to prison. Prosecutors said she had repeatedly violated the terms of her house arrest by leaving the building and using the internet. Karimova’s imprisonment came shortly after the US Department of Justice indicted her on charges of receiving bribes worth £661m from international telecoms companies to help them get licenses to work in Uzbekistan.
“Judging by everything, it seems Gulnara [Karimova] was hidden away to stop American investigators questioning her about who helped her pull off various shady deals,” says Alexei Volosevich, an independent investigative journalist in Tashkent.
* * *
Mirziyoyev’s reforms may be earning him plaudits in the West, but critics say the government still has little respect for the rights of ordinary Uzbeks. Proof of this, they say, is the ongoing demolition of residential buildings as part of a controversial urban renovation project. Thousands of homes – no one knows exactly how many – have been bulldozed across Uzbekistan, with residents often given little or no warning before the demolition crews begin work. The land is then sold off to construction companies, leading to allegations that the urban renovation project is simply a front for massive corruption involving government officials. “There is no respect for private property rights whatsoever. The authorities can throw anyone out of their home at any time,” says Volosevich, who has reported extensively on the demolitions. Officials often explain the evictions by saying the properties are needed for “government needs” – a catch-all justification.
The epicentre of the demolitions is a vast construction site in the centre of the Uzbek capital for a £996-million business centre called Tashkent City. Hundreds of homes in the city’s historic neighbourhood have already been torn down, as well as a number of architecturally significant buildings, to make way for its construction. In January, after an investigation by the independent media platform OpenDemocracy, Tashkent’s mayor, Jaxongir Artikxodjaev, admitted that he has business stakes in one of the companies involved in the project. OpenDemocracy also said there was evidence to link him to other companies with construction, commercial and investment interests in Tashkent City.
“The authorities are not at all interested in any ‘urban renovation.’ They just want to seize expensive land in the centre of the city. They aren’t talking about building new schools or hospitals. Just residential properties or business and shopping centres,” says Farida Charif, a translator who set up a popular Facebook group page to coordinate legal advice for people affected by the demolitions.
Charif was just one of scores of angry Tashkent residents who crowded into a district administration office in February over concerns that their homes were next for the wrecking ball as part of a property development project. Artikxodjaev told the residents that their homes would not be destroyed without their permission, but few of those present believed his assurances. “He’s lying, like always,” Yelena, a middle-aged woman, told me. “They want to throw us out on the streets.”
In Andijan, one resident told me how he and hundreds of other people had been forced to leave their homes in the centre of the city and move to poorly constructed homes near the barren steppe. “The cottages, if you can call them that, are located next to oil pumps in an area without any infrastructure whatsoever,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fears of reprisals.
Demolitions and heavy-handed urban renovation projects are also threatening historical neighbourhoods in Bukhara and Samarkand, ancient Silk Road cities that are a major part of Uzbekistan’s drive to attract more tourists. UNESCO is currently considering the removal of Shahrisabz, in southern Uzbekistan, from its list of World Heritage sites because of the bulldozing of the city’s mediaeval residential quarters. “Key architectural monuments have been seriously damaged and barbarously ‘reconstructed’ to resemble cheap decorations in a C-grade Hollywood films about Ali-Baba,” says Alexey Ulko, a cultural heritage monitor.
* * *
Despite the ongoing evictions, Shukhrat Ganiev, a long-time human rights worker in Bukhara, tells me that he believes Mirziyoyev is sincere about wanting to implement genuine change in Uzbekistan. “In comparison with what we went through under Karimov, Mirziyoyev’s reforms are a breakthrough,” he says during an interview in his home, near Bukhara’s 5th-century fortress. “We’ve been through too much not to appreciate what we have right now. I remember when from day to day my wife prepared me a bag every evening because we weren’t sure if I would be taken away to prison the next day. The fact that I can meet freely with you today is an important indication of change.”
Yet Ganiev is clear-eyed about the motivations for change, the limits of the reforms, and the possible dangers facing Uzbekistan. “Unfortunately, the reforms have only affected those spheres that western society paid attention to,” he says. “That is, forced labour, torture and other human rights issues.”
He says that other social problems – corruption, poverty and the nationwide demolitions – are stirring social tensions. “But there are no independent democratic opposition parties that people can appeal to.”
Instead, Ganiev warns, many disgruntled young Uzbeks are becoming attracted to radical Islam. Although Karimov’s crackdown on religion means that there are currently no well-known Islamic figures in Uzbekistan who could mount a serious challenge to the secular authorities, some 1,000 Uzbeks fought for Isis in Syria and Iraq, and Uzbek nationals have carried out terror attacks in recent years in Russia, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. “Sharia law says to right injustice, punish the corrupt and help the poor. This is very simple and clear for people,” Ganiev says. “This is also very dangerous. I have no desire to see my country become a new Iran.”
Great news, Los Angelenos! I’m bringing Quiz-o-Tron to LA next week! Quiz-o-Tron is a quiz show where comedians face off against scientists and other assorted nerds to prove who is funnier and/or more knowledgeable about science. Join us! Monday, December 9 Panelists: Hal Lublin, Jess Phoenix, James Urbaniak, Bonnie Burton, Joseph Scrimshaw, and Jennifer Ouellette …
Metaxas’ “Donald Builds the Wall” Recalls Nazi Children’s Books, at Love, Joy, Feminism: “I watched a video of Metaxas doing a ‘dramatic reading’ of his book. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being unfair to him—I do try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and my friends still [tell] me I hand …
This article is a preview from the Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
Nesrine Malik is a British-Sudanese journalist. She has won numerous awards and was longlisted for a 2019 Orwell Prize. Before journalism, she spent 10 years in private equity. Her first book, “We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), argues that the old frames of reference – on free speech, political correctness and other areas – are not working.
The book is about dismantling dominant myths. What is wrong with myth-making?
The fundamental myth is that Western society has reached a level of social and economic and political evolution, beyond which all it needs is kind of tinkering around the edges, as opposed to the idea that something is seriously wrong and certain rights remain unmet. Basically, the myth is that we are doing fine, and any calls for change are made out of [a sense of] entitlement. That underpins much of the reason why we stall in terms of social progression and equal rights – because there is this myth nothing is wrong in the first place. I think that is the root of political volatility, and also why we get so much resistance to claims of racism or sexism or homophobia.
Has there been a shift in attitudes to free speech?
Even in the past 10 years, the volume of content around the internet has grown exponentially. Our ability to post debate online has become more sophisticated technologically. There are far more ways that people can speak online and with the explosion in content, there is more objectionable content. So it’s not a unique or new issue. It’s just that it’s more visible. It’s challenging to manage because we still haven’t caught up with how we police speech online – although we have found a way of doing it in real life with laws, for instance, on incitement to racial hatred. Online, we’re not really there yet. The online debate about what speech should be governed has intruded into real life, and is affecting the way we consider free speech in the mainstream, offline world, rather than the other way around.
In what sense does the proliferation of speech online affect offline discussions?
That framing of people demanding rights as aggressive has happened for ever. Whenever anyone has demanded change, it’s always been “shrill” or “unreasonable”. It’s always been considered violent. But because of social media, we can cherry-pick examples of the most extreme arguments. It has become even easier to smear people as aggressive. If the [US] civil rights movement had happened at a time when social media existed, it would have faced even more resistance because it would have been far easier to find examples of people behaving badly. What happens a lot with, say, the trans debate is that people pick out the most unreasonable examples and scaremonger about more nuanced and complicated arguments.
How would you define free speech?
What is free speech? Is it an absolute? No, it’s not absolute. Who gets to say where the red line is? The principle of free speech is so inflected by societal values, and arbitrary red lines, and the question of who in a society is worthy of protection. It is therefore a far less basic principle than people think it is.
You argue that people defending the right to free speech are often actually asking to be able to say things without being challenged.
This is the most insidious and deliberate tool used by free speech advocates to chill dissent or objection. It’s a practice across the board. At the more cynical end, it is practised by people like Tommy Robinson, whose supporters know that if you call something free speech, then all the liberals will clutch their pearls and you’ll get a special discussion on Newsnight. On the other, more sophisticated end, you have liberals who are so fixated on the abstract principle of free speech that they end up being trapped by those who want to weaponise it, and end up defending them.
What are the repercussions of this?
When people of colour and LGBT people and immigrants tell you that [unfettered] free speech is harming them, that it is increasing hate crime on the street, and that it is making their daily life more difficult and more dangerous, we need to listen. The problem is because of the weaponisation of the free speech debate, the first response is not: “Let’s try and draw a line between what someone has said and how it has impacted your life and wellbeing and safety.” It is: “But surely it’s that person’s free speech.” The first thing is to try and make the associations between what people say and how it impacts real life and then make a determination. Is it worth it?
Well, is it worth it?
Rich men hand out gagging orders because they’ve had an affair and want to muzzle the press, but we do not extend that sanctity to marginalised people. The mainstream is kind of muddled about what free speech is. Fundamentally, at present, we often subordinate the rights of marginalised people – even their right to life – to some abstract notion of free speech.
Nonetheless, the defence of free speech is an important principle. Where is an appropriate place to draw the line?
People are so fixated on what happens online, they forget that these questions are already being answered in the real world all the time. We have a free speech mitigation framework in the UK. There’s a very sophisticated one in the US. A lot of time and effort has been spent coming up with free speech laws: incitement, libel, marketing. Interestingly, people don’t have this muddled view of free speech when it comes to marketing, so there are very strict rules about misrepresenting an item to a buyer. But when it comes to the online dimension, we think that it is really, uniquely challenging. Actually, all you need to do is apply the logic and the history of freedom of speech that we have in our constitutions and our legal frameworks to online speech.
Why isn’t that being done?
The problem is that this online speech is hosted mostly with private companies. We have outsourced the managing of free speech away from government to private companies. They can therefore be more reticent about it because it is at odds with their financial bottom line – they could lose money if they limit certain keywords or ban accounts. This is kind of cheating people into thinking it’s super complicated. The challenge is not how we come up with legislation. It is how to force private companies to come up with their own rules or mimic other legislation, without that being at odds with [their] money making.
“The marketplace of ideas” is a phrase that gets repeated a lot in discussions about free speech.
This is an extension of this view that if you leave everything unregulated, the best practices will rise to the top. The problem is that not everyone has the same access to the marketplace. So it’s more like an oligarchy of ideas. The concept of the marketplace of ideas is predicated on equality, based on the notion that we all have equal projection into the mainstream – and we do not. It is a fundamentally flawed concept. The people that came up with it are those who are in the marketplace. They only see themselves having a discussion, perhaps disagreeing with each other. They don’t see that outside the so-called marketplace is the majority of society, who do not have access to that space.
How is the idea of rationality deployed in debate?
We do not acknowledge the ideology of the narrator class, because we think if you look a certain way and you’re male and you act a certain way and you have a certain background, then you are reliable, neutral and unbiased.
What do you mean by that?
These are myths that all societies come up with to protect the position and the capital of the powerful. It’s all about maintaining class, maintaining the establishment, making sure that any demands for change are easily dismissed. In all societies there are default identities. They are always the ones that are at the top of the totem pole, a group that has more monopoly on political, economic and social power and therefore can dictate economic and social values.
What impact does this have?
The expectation of competence can cannibalise actual competence – that applies to both media and politicians. And the tendency to frame any challenge as hysterical, and the people who are being challenged as reasonable victims, underpins resistance to change. The first response is: “You’re being unreasonable, you’re being entitled, you’re being demanding, look how much you’ve got now versus how much you had in the past.” When people criticise people like me for talking about identity, it’s because they refuse to acknowledge that we live in a non-meritocratic society, where being from a certain background gives you an immediate benefit when you are born. This is not about crude prejudice, it’s about division and allocation of resources. Those who have the most resources will always try and hang on to them.
Political polarisation in the UK and US seems to make productive conversations more difficult. What’s your view?
I am optimistic. Because of the political meltdown in the UK, in the US, more people are beginning to ask deeper questions. It’s not really about right or left. It’s about how actually something is fundamentally broken and we have swaddled ourselves in myths about our history. It sounds quite nihilistically dispassionate, but a certain level of societal breakdown is required before we begin to understand how we were going wrong all along.
It has become harder not to ask these questions about how we talk about identity, how we talk about immigration, how we talk about the tabloid press. The edifice was rotting, and now we can see it. In that sense, I am very optimistic and I think there’s a young generation that has a more jaundiced view of the establishment, that in the wake of the referendum have become more aware and are questioning the more powerful established political and media narratives that we have been getting for so long.
This article is a preview from Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
In May this year, the world’s most expensive drug was licensed in the US. Zolgensma – a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, a muscle-wasting disease that usually kills by the age of two – was approved for a one-time treatment at $2.15 million. If this sounds a bit like an art-market auction price, that’s because pharmaceuticals are as much to do with big capital as healthcare.
Yet if pricing problems can be overcome, we could be at the beginning of a great medical breakthrough. This is the culmination of decades of work, first on sequencing the DNA of human genes and then studying and manipulating their action. Our ability to make planned genetic changes into organisms began in 1973. Within 10 years, we were making human insulin by inserting its gene into bacteria or yeast and getting them to make it for us. This replaced the messy harvesting of sheep, pig or cow insulin from abattoirs. The next stage was to tackle human genetic diseases. All of the body’s processes are run by proteins. Some are hormones like insulin, relatively simple molecules carried through the bloodstream to act on cells throughout the body. Others are much more complex. The structure of all proteins is precise – a single faulty component and it can fail partially or completely. A single incorrect DNA base in the 3 billion we all possess can cause lifelong disease. The incorrect DNA code throws a genetic spanner in the works: the protein malfunctions.
There are several genetic conditions in which only a single DNA base is faulty – for example, haemophilia, cystic fibrosis, thalassaemias or Huntington’s disease. Despite the minor genetic change, the effect of these diseases is crippling and often lethal. The faulty gene in haemophilia prevents blood clotting; in cystic fibrosis the lungs cannot expel mucus properly; thalassaemias restrict the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.
The first attempts to correct such defects – gene therapy – began in the 1990s. They were disastrously premature. Knowledge was limited and the attempted gene replacements were crude and led to unpredicted consequences: they caused cancer and people died. The idea was put on hold. Then in 2003 came the completion of the Human Genome: the 3 billion bases of DNA that are the code for a human being. Surely, this monumental achievement would unlock a medical cornucopia? But articles on the 10th anniversary in 2013 reported no medical progress up to that date. Now, as the second decade of the 21st century is coming to a close, something is stirring at last.
* * *
The last five years have seen rapid progress in creating and testing therapies for these genetic conditions. But the mood of optimism has turned to disquiet about the financial implications. Pharmaceutical companies cite the huge costs of research as justification for the prices they charge but this isn’t entirely convincing. For a start, the vast sums of money now floating around in the world of pharmaceuticals sit on the back of decades of publicly funded work in university and hospital laboratories.
So why are these drugs so expensive? The picture is skewed by the inflated economics of the US healthcare industry. Not all of the major pharmaceutical companies are American but the American system sets the benchmark for healthcare economics: Big Pharma prices drugs the American way. All prices in the system are inflated, and matters are made worse by the fact that new drugs are prime vehicles for financial speculation. Money pours into drug development at every stage. Companies have no difficulty raising money to fund many years of research with no sales income. If a new therapy is promising, Big Pharma will pick up a big tab to buy the drug and take it to the next stage. The patent system ensures that for 20 years from its invention there will be no competition from generic copycats, but in practice that might mean only 12 years on the market. So drugs companies have limited time in which to get their money back and turn a profit. There are currently so many different drugs for the same condition in the pipeline that the window to make a profit can be even shorter.
Pharmaceutical companies have traditionally worked hardest on developing drugs for widely prevalent conditions, to the extent that less prevalent conditions have been neglected. But in gene therapy the reverse is true. Early therapies have all been for very low-incidence diseases. One reason these diseases have been targeted is that they are low-hanging fruit in scientific terms: single gene conditions can be treated and multi-gene conditions currently cannot. But the real problem has been caused by financial rather than scientific considerations. Gene therapies have been priced stratospherically high on the assumption that someone – governments, private health insurers, rich people, ad hoc buyers’ clubs – will pay up for a miracle cure.
* * *
Causative genes for genetic diseases involving a single mutation began to be identified and sequenced in the 1980s. Then the search for therapies began. There are currently two main rival strategies: gene silencing and gene therapy proper. In gene silencing, a short synthetic strand of DNA is developed that blocks the action of the faulty gene. This prevents it producing the protein that causes the damage but does not replace the faulty gene. In gene therapy, the faulty gene is edited and replaced by the correct gene. The favoured technique to accomplish this uses viruses, which have the ability to infiltrate an organism’s genome. Doctored “safe” viruses have been developed to carry the replacement gene into the body. Of the two current treatments for spinal muscular atrophy, one involves gene silencing, the other gene therapy.
A dramatic moment in the history of gene silencing came in December 2016, when it emerged that 13 of the 20 babies with spinal muscular atrophy that started treatment in a clinical trial during 2014 and 2015 were alive and breathing on their own, at two and three years old. Typically, half of untreated babies with this form of spinal muscular atrophy would be expected to die or be on ventilators before their first birthday. The gene silencing drug in the trial, Spinraza, developed by the Californian firm Ionis, was bought by Biogen for $75 million. It made $1.7 billion in 2017 and Biogen subsequently invested $1 billion in Ionis to develop further therapies.
Hot on Spinraza’s tail is Zolgensma, the virally delivered one-off cure. Novartis did not research or develop Zolgensma – a firm called AveXis did. Novartis bought it for $8.7 billion, an indication of their inflated expectations. Spinraza and Zolgensma will now fight it out in the market. Novartis announced Zolgensma by claiming that it costs around 50 per cent less than “the 10-year current cost” of Spinraza. But this 10-year costing is misleading for a one-off cure for a condition that usually kills by the age of two; it is being compared with 10 years of treatment with a drug that has to be administered for life. The whole point of the one-off fix is that it avoids the repetitive costs. Incurable diseases place a huge financial burden on families and the state. The cost of new therapies must be weighed up against the savings achieved over a lifetime. But this is not an easy calculation: the price set by the manufacturer is a given, to be paid upfront, while the potential saving is a moving estimate.
And the cost-benefit analysis is vastly different in countries with different healthcare systems. In the US, healthcare insurers are concerned about the cost of these new therapies but since they are used for very rare diseases, a high price for a limited population makes sense. In the inflated world of US healthcare (which sucks up 20 per cent of GDP) they can live with it. In Europe, however, the state provision of healthcare runs counter to America’s fundamentally capitalistic orientation, and it can be difficult to justify buying such expensive treatments. Given that the US healthcare industry sets the benchmark for costs, this is a real issue. Spinraza was only licensed in the UK in May 2019 after a long stand-off between Biogen and the NHS.
* * *
In Europe, out of 10 approved gene therapies, four have already been withdrawn on economic grounds. Perhaps the most notorious case is Glybera, approved in 2012 to treat the rare disease lipoprotein lipase deficiency. Glybera, developed by a leading Dutch firm, was withdrawn in October 2017. The disease affects one in a million people and Glybera is a one-off solution. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that a treatment that cost billions to develop and is given once to one person in a million might be hard to make a profit on. And what healthcare authority could afford it at £1 million a shot?
Several conditions with a much larger patient population are now coming into the frame: haemophilia, thalassaemias, Huntington’s disease and cystic fibrosis. These not only have much larger patient populations, they also have very active support groups. Cystic fibrosis is the frontrunner, having been at the centre of a four-year running battle between the NHS and the US pharmaceutical company Vertex. This standoff was finally resolved on 24 October when the NHS and Vertex agreed a two-year deal, which will make the drugs Orkambi and Symkevi available to all sufferers who can benefit from the treatment within a month. The deal includes a fast-track licensing path for Vertex’s future drugs, previously withdrawn during the standoff.
Cystic fibrosis is a well-known condition with around 10,400 sufferers in the UK. The genetic error creates a defective protein that interferes with mucus clearance in the lungs. In 1962, life expectancy for sufferers of the condition was just 10, and it is now around 40. Several treatments are currently either available or in the pipeline. Orkambi and its sister drug Symkevi modulate the protein produced by the aberrant gene and are effective in about 70 per cent of cystic fibrosis patients (those carrying two copies of a particular mutation). Orkambi is given twice a day, and, before the NHS deal, was offered at an annual price of £104,000 per year. That price – multiplied by the several thousand patients who will now live for many decades longer – clearly made no sense. The NHS initially made Vertex the biggest offer in its history: £500 million for 10 years’ treatment of all eligible patients in the UK.
* * *
This is one breakthrough, but as more treatments for major diseases arrive, these problems will become acute. Before the Orkambi deal, the UK Department of Health and Social Care had floated the idea of a Crown Use licence. This is the nuclear option, enabling the NHS to sideline the licence holder and import a cheaper generic version. As it happens, Vertex failed to patent Orkambi in Argentina and a generic equivalent is being made there. British patient groups took matters into their own hands, forming a buyers’ group to import the generic drug.
The Labour Party, at its annual conference this autumn, floated the creation of “democratically owned pharmaceutical companies with specific missions to serve the needs of the NHS”. The idea would be to produce generic equivalents for drugs such as Orkambi. The pharmaceutical industry will object that such proposals threaten research: why spend billions on developing new drugs when anyone can steal the results?
A therapy in the pipeline for Huntington’s disease will be an important test case. Huntington’s disease is a terrible scourge, inherited from a dominant mutation – only one parent needs to have the mutation to cause the disease. It tends to hit around the age of 45, and causes a progressive loss of motor control and cognitive functions, usually resulting in death around 15 years later. The gene responsible was identified in 1993 and more than 25 years of subsequent research have led to a large phase-three clinical trial on HTTRx, developed, like Spinraza, by Ionis Pharmaceuticals. There are reasons to hope that if this gene-silencing drug proves itself in the trial, the outcome might be better than in the case of cystic fibrosis and Vertex.
Roche, a major pharmaceutical company, bought HTTRx (now known as RG6042) from Ionis for $45 million – significantly less than the $8.7 billion Novartis paid for Zolgensma. The financial impact of Huntington’s disease, with working careers cut short at 45 and expensive care delivered for around 15 years, means that the saving achieved by eliminating these and allowing a productive life to continue for decades could offset the price of treatment for healthcare providers.
One long-term economic problem with gene therapies is that if they work, they will reduce the number of people needing treatment, making the drugs even less profitable. Gene therapy that targets the germline – eliminating the condition in future generations – is currently not permitted. But there are already procedures that are reducing the incidence of many diseases: foetal diagnosis and pre-implantation genetic testing, a form of IVF in which only healthy embryos are implanted. Eventually, a combination of these and really effective gene therapies is guaranteed to create a declining market for gene treatments, as aberrant genes are removed from the population. This has already happened with some diseases. Incidence of Tay-Sachs, which mostly affects the US Jewish population, has fallen by more than 90 per cent since mass screening was introduced in 1971.
Whatever the economics of gene therapies, the goal of eliminating these horrific diseases must override finance. When vaccines for polio and smallpox became available, the World Health Organisation made global eradication a goal. Smallpox was eradicated in 1977. I approached major figures in the development of gene therapies for this article but the response was either guarded or silent: everyone recognises that there is a problem, but the way out is unclear. The cost of the Orkambi cure? We don’t know, because it is “commercially sensitive information”. The deal is good news, but the money is still winning.
The winter 2019 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe here for as little as £10 a year.
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How to argue better
The sleep of reason
Where did we get the confidence that emotion has no place in rational thinking? By Eleanor Gordon-Smith.
In our haste to congratulate ourselves for being reasonable, we accidentally untied the very notion of “rationality” from its rich philosophical ancestry and from the complexity of actual human minds, and now the idea of “being reasonable” that underpins our public discourse has little to do with helping us find our way back to the truth, or to each other, and altogether more to do with selling us a dream of an optimised future where everything is protein powder and nothing hurts.
The empire strikes back
Many pundits connect Brexit to imperial nostalgia – but its relationship with national identity is complex, writes Charlotte Lydia Riley.
As a historian, I’m not sure that facts will help us find a way through this. Writing history is a process of constructing narratives; not just retelling the past, but thinking about how and why things might have happened, how and why people felt as they did, what consequences arose from their feelings and behaviour. We construct narratives by deciding which stories to tell. Those choices are shaped by many things: our material circumstances, our political persuasion, our general outlook on the world. Writing a history of Brexit will require historians to unpick the lies from the truth, but the lies will be just as important to the story; and the choices that historians make to emphasise or to dismiss different points will be shaped by their own views on Britishness, identity and belonging.
The Q&A: Nesrine Malik
Samira Shackle talks to the British-Sudanese journalist about her new book "We Need New Stories", in which she argues that the old frames of reference – on free speech, political correctness and other areas – are not working.
Even in the past 10 years, the volume of content around the internet has grown exponentially. Our ability to post debate online has become more sophisticated technologically. There are far more ways that people can speak online and with the explosion in content, there is more objectionable content. So it’s not a unique or new issue. It’s just that it’s more visible. It’s challenging to manage because we still haven’t caught up with how we police speech online – although we have found a way of doing it in real life with laws, for instance, on incitement to racial hatred.
The winter 2019 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe here for as little as £10 a year.
Also in this issue:
- Samira Ahmed writes in praise of the trailblazing elder stateswomen of rock
- Madeline Roache reports on the abuse scandal that has rocked Poland's Catholic Church
- A revolutionary new gene therapy could help treat many conditions - but the economics are a stumbling block, writes Peter Forbes
- Why do we often turn to the natural landscape when we want to be cured on our ills? Richard Smyth explores
- Philosopher Achille Mbembe on how the illusion of a borderless world masks the violence of our age
- Is a "digital detox" possible? Rory Fenton gives it a go
- Luke De Noronha on the nuances of nationalism in modern Britain
- Is Uzbekistan's thaw the real deal, or just a show for tourists? Marc Bennetts reports
- Caroline Crampton on the rise and rise of the period drama in the age of streaming
- How teaching languages to migrants taught me some valuable lessons, by Antonia Dawes
- PLUS: Columns from Michael Rosen and Laurie Taylor; book reviews; the latest developments in biology, chemistry and physics; cryptic crossword and Chris Maslanka's quiz
I recently joined Jim Al-Khalili on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific to chat about my work. I have known Jim for many years and so it was lovely to talk about my thoughts on magic, lying and luck. The talk was recorded at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and managed to get quite a bit of attention online. I hope that you enjoy it!
You can listen to the interview here.
The paperback version of my book, Shoot For The Moon, is just out and we have made a video to celebrate the magic of the Moon landings. I worked with magician Will Houstoun to tell the Apollo story through the medium of sleight of hand – hope you enjoy it!
My latest book, Shoot For The Moon, has just been published, and presents a radically new look at the science of success.
In July 1969, Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, one of humanity’s greatest achievements. A few years ago I was chatting to comedian and space enthusiast Helen Keen about the Apollo landings. I knew that the technology used during the missions has been extremely well documented, and asked whether anyone had explored the psychology behind this remarkable achievement. Helen didn’t think that it had, and kindly put me in touch with her friend, Craig Scott. Craig is another space enthusiast and, over the years, has become friends with many of the people who populated NASA’s Mission Control during the Apollo era. He kindly put me in touch with this remarkable bunch and they were kind enough to agreed to be interviewed them about their historic work.
I discovered that most of the controllers came from modest, working-class, backgrounds, and that they were often the first in their families to go to college. Perhaps most surprising of all, they were astonishingly young. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the average age of the mission controllers was just twenty-six years old.
After extensive interviewing and research, I eventually identified the eight principles that I believe make-up the Apollo mindset. ‘Shoot For The Moon’ describes these principles, including how the seeds of success were sewn in the President Kenndy’s charismatic speeches, how pessimism was crucial to progress, and how fear and tragedy were transformed into hope and optimism. The book also describes techniques that allow you to incorporate these principles into your own life. Whether you want to start a new business venture, change careers, get promoted, escape the rat race or pursue a lifelong passion, these techniques will help you to reach your own Moon.
Books on success usually focus on genetically gifted Olympians, hardheaded CEOs and risk taking entrepreneurs. This book presents a radically different perspective on how to achieve your aims and ambitions. It tells the inspirational story of a group of ordinary people who did something extraordinary. Perhaps most important of all, once you understand how they did what they did, you can follow in their footsteps and achieve the extraordinary in your own life.
Shoot For The Moon is available in the UK here, and in the US here.
As many of you know, the Day of Reflection conference, scheduled for November 17 in NYC, has been cancelled, and some hundreds of ticket holders are now left seeking refunds.
I was forced to pull out of this event nearly two months ago and have said very little about it since. Now that Travis Pangburn has officially announced that he will be “folding” his touring company, Pangburn Philosophy, I can give a brief account of what happened.
- I participated in 10 events organized by Pangburn Philosophy between September 2017 and July 2018. I didn’t always approve of the way those events were staged or marketed, but all of them appeared to be successful.
- However, after the cancellation of an August 2018 conference in Auckland, Pangburn seemed intent on running his business off a cliff. He owed a lot of money to several speakers at that point, in the form of unpaid fees and reimbursements. Most egregiously, he seemed less than fully committed to refunding ticket holders for the cancelled Auckland conference.
- At this point, I had two more dates on the calendar with Pangburn in 2018: a dialogue with Brian Greene in Toronto (September 5) and the Day of Reflection conference in New York (November 17). I kept my appointment in Toronto because I was contractually obligated to do so. I also didn’t want to do anything that would harm Pangburn’s ability to pay his mounting debts.
- After Toronto, however, it became clear that Pangburn could not be trusted to put his house in order. Facing a total lack of transparency, and realizing that Pangburn was using my ongoing association with him to book future speakers, I withdrew from the NYC conference on September 21 (as well as from a Vancouver conference scheduled for March 2019). Legally, I was able to do this because Pangburn was in breach of my speaking contract. Ethically, I had a far more compelling reason to back out: I couldn’t promote or participate in an event for which I believed other speakers were unlikely to get paid; nor could I continue to work with someone who still hadn’t given refunds to ticket holders for a conference that had been canceled more than a month before.
- After I withdrew from the NYC conference, my management team asked Pangburn to give us the email addresses of all ticket holders so that we could notify them that I was no longer involved with the event. Pangburn refused to provide this information. However, he assured us that he would notify everyone himself. (I do not know whether he ever did.) He then stopped responding to our emails.
- At the time I pulled out of the NYC conference, I assumed that the revenue from ticket sales was still safely in the box office and that Pangburn would be obliged to issue refunds should the conference fail. That’s how things normally work, especially at a reputable venue like Lincoln Center. It hadn’t occurred to me that New York ticketholders might suffer the same fate as those in Auckland.
- I was left with a legal and ethical puzzle that I could not solve. Again, I had no way to communicate with ticket holders directly, and discussing the chaos surrounding Pangburn on my podcast never seemed like an option. Several friends and colleagues still had events on the calendar with him, and I didn’t want to do anything to derail them. In addition, many speakers who were aware of my reasons for pulling out of the NYC conference were still signed on and seemed intent on making it work. I couldn’t see anything to do that wouldn’t risk creating further harms.
Although Pangburn still owes several speakers (including me) an extraordinary amount of money, we were willing to participate in the NYC conference for free as recently as a few days ago, if he would have handed it over to us and stepped away. I have been told that this offer was made, and he declined it.
I find it appalling that so many people were needlessly harmed by the implosion of Pangburn Philosophy. I can assure you that every speaker associated with the NYC event will be much wiser when working with promoters in the future.
Sam Harris
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As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve recently gone back to school for an M.Ed in Higher Education. Regular readers may know that I already have a humanities PhD, which raises a pretty obvious question: “What the hell Dan? Aren’t you done with school? Why collect yet another degree? Seriously what is wrong with you?”
There are a few reasons I decided to go back to school. but most of them ultimately boil down to one thing: the academic job market. I’ve been writing about my experiences looking for a job over the last few years, and after four years and dozens and dozens of applications, it became very clear that something had to change if I planned on actually getting a job before retirement age.
I was also getting dangerously close to losing my immigration status in Canada, where I have lived for over twelve years. My three-year postgraduate work visa was set to expire this past summer, and with no employment on the horizon that would satisfy CIC requirements for renewal, going back to school was essentially the only way for me to stay in the country short of marriage (which an immigration lawyer actually suggested).
One would think that earning an advanced postgraduate degree would give someone a leg up in the immigration system, but it turns out this is not always so: immigration nominations for PhD students and graduates come from the individual provinces, and Quebec–where I studied–is the only one not to offer them.* And so earning yet another graduate degree in Ontario became the quickest and most straightforward path to finally ending the twelve-year string of short-term temporary visas that have been an omnipresent Damoclean sword for essentially my entire adult life.
But why Higher Ed?
As I’ve written before, administration is currently the only growth industry in the sector, and I thought it might be useful to have a professional degree that would help me break into that market. I also do honestly believe that schools would benefit from having more administrators who have first-hand experience with teaching and research, and with actual lived experience as graduate students and academic contract workers. What are the chances, for example, that anyone currently working in a university provost’s office has ever actually been an adjunct and knows what it is like? Or has even been a graduate student any time after the 1980s?
Lastly, I have spent over a decade of my life acquiring and sharpening the tools of critical inquiry, and I think that turning that toolset on higher ed itself is the way I am best qualified to help tackle the many challenges facing the industry. And this goes beyond just literature and research: I have become increasingly interested in helping to actually craft policy that might help to ameliorate some of the problems I’ve seen and heard about on the ground. This degree is a first step in that direction.
—
*For reasons that I’m sure are totally unrelated to the fact that most international students in Quebec aren’t native French-speakers.
Hello everyone! Many apologies for my long absence, but things got a little busy for me when I went back to school (yes, again) to actually officially study Higher Education!
The upside for you, dear readers, is that my new studies have provided lots of new grist for the old mill, and I plan to post fairly regularly about my ideas, experiences, and research over the next few semesters. This will include everything from day-to-day experiences in the programme itself to discussions of the existing literature on higher ed to summaries of my own research in the field (and possibly links to full papers for the true masochists among you).
Here’s a list of the topics I plan to address in the next few weeks, most of which derive from seminar papers I will be writing:
Is the Human Capital Model a Myth? Signalling, Credentialism, and Rent-Seeking in Higher Ed
The Idea of a Stoic University (Or: How to Un-coddle the American Mind)
Transnational Mobility in the Academic Labour Market for the Humanities
Graduate School as the Structural Model for the Theory of Emerging Adulthood
I’m looking forward to bringing you all along with me on this new journey!
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Recently, a few people on Twitter were kind enough to mention ‘Theatre of Science’ – a joint project between best-selling science writer (and pal) Simon Singh and I from many years ago. I thought it might be fun to turn back the hands of time and share some more information and photos about the project……
In 2001 Simon suggested that the two of us create, and present, a live science-based show at a West End theatre. I knew that this type of entertainment had been popular around the turn of the last century, but was initially sceptical about it working for a modern-day audience. However, Simon won me over and I agreed to give it a go. Simon then persuaded The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to fund the project and The Soho Theatre to stage the show.
In the first half, Simon used mathematics to ‘prove’ that the Teletubbies are evil, undermined The Bible Code, and illustrated probability theory via gambling scams and bets. After the interval, I explored the psychology of deception with the help of magic tricks, optical illusions and a live lie detector. It was all decidedly low-tech and mostly depended on an overhead projector, a few acetates, and some marker pens! We opened in March 2002 and quickly sold-out. The reviewers were very kind, with The Evening Standard describing the show as ‘… a unique masterclass on the mind’ and What’s On saying that it was “…uplifting, thought-provoking and frequently hilarious.” In 2002 we also took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In 2005 we staged a far more ambitious version of the show at the Soho Theatre.
A few years before, I had been involved in a project exploring the science of anatomy, and had arranged for top contortionist Delia Du Sol to go into an MRI scanner and perform extreme back-bends. During Theatre of Science, we showed these scans to the audience as Delia bent her body into seemingly impossible shapes and then squeezed into a tiny perspex box.
In addition, musician Sarah Angliss demonstrated the science behind various weird electronic instruments, and performed songs on a saw and a theremin!
We wanted to end the show on a genuinely dangerous, science-based, stunt. HVFX – a company that makes high voltage electricity equipment – kindly supplied two huge Tesla coils capable of generating six-foot bolts of million-volt lightning across the stage. At the end of each show, either Simon or I entered a coffin-shaped cage and hoped that it would protect us against the force of the million-volt strikes. The stunt attracted lots of media attention and once again we quickly sold out.
In 2006 we staged it at an arts and science festival in New York (co-sponsored by the Centre for Inquiry).
Nowadays we are used to people enjoying an evening of science and comedy in the theatre, but back then lots of people were deeply skeptical about the idea. If we proved anything, it was that it’s possible attract a mainstream audience to a show about science.
Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed reading about it all and huge thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the project a success, including: Portia Smith, Delia Du Sol, Sarah Angliss, Stephen Wolf, Tracy King, Nick Field, HVFX, Austin Dacey, Jessica Brenner and Caroline Watt (who came up with the title for the show) and, of course…..Simon Singh!
I have teamed up with the folks at Business Insider to make this short video containing science-based tips on how to be more productive and a better leader. Enjoy!
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”
I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.
Read the rest at The New York Times…
The post Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web appeared first on Sam Harris.
[Update to the update: SIU has posted a statement on the programme here. As it essentially confirms my suspicions that it is designed to steal soft academic labour from new PhDs by trading on their institutional loyalty and need for affiliation without paying them for their services, I provide the link here but see no need to comment further.]
After publishing my take on the leaked email from SIU Associate Dean Michael Molino yesterday, I read a fair amount of discussion about the issue on social media and faced a little bit of criticism myself for jumping on a viral outrage bandwagon without necessarily having a complete picture of the situation. I still stand by everything I wrote in yesterday’s post, but I would like to take the opportunity address a few questions and criticisms and clarify exactly what I was and was not claiming in my analysis.
Is this email even real? How do we know it really said everything that ended up in the viral version?
Okay, fair enough. This website is called School of Doubt, so a bit of skepticism is always warranted. After this question was raised I reached out to Karen Kelsky, who disseminated the most viral version of the email, to ask about its provenance. She confirmed that it was forwarded to her by an SIU faculty member she knew personally. Epistemically speaking that is good enough for me, but nothing’s perfect I guess.
Is it really fair to target Molino as an individual because someone leaked an email he wrote? Isn’t this just doxxing that invites harassment?
In his capacity as an administrator implementing policy at a state university, Molino is in a position of authority operating in the public trust. This requires transparency and accountability, and I don’t think sharing his official contact information is doxxing any more than it would be for an administrator at a government agency like the EPA or FCC. Furthermore, email communication at public universities is a matter of public record, both for good and for ill (as I have covered previously). While people may disagree about the ethics of leaking and whistleblowing, it is really not possible to argue that such an email could have been written with any reasonable expectation of privacy. But yes, he’s probably going to have a bad time and that sucks.
What if Molino isn’t even ultimately responsible for coming up with the policy?
Well, bluntly, who cares? He is clearly working to implement it. Not to get all Godwinny, but we’ve heard that one before. You can write to the Provost instead if you want. I won’t provide his email but I bet you can find it.
Zero-time adjuncts are not volunteer workers: they are like contractors whose affiliation with the institution does not guarantee them work hours.
First off there is a terminology problem here. Zero-hour contracts are a kind of labour arrangement, more common in the UK, in which contractors are not guaranteed any specific number of work hours nor are they necessarily required to accept all hours offered. Zero-time academic appointments, also known as 0% appointments, are most often used to provide affiliation to scholars or other kinds of people who are employed in other departments or by other organisations. For example, an economist might be tenured faculty at a business school but also have a zero-time appointment in the economics department of the arts faculty of the same school. This person might advise students or otherwise participate in research and service in both departments, but it is understood that the work in their 0% appointment is covered by the pay from their full-time appointment. Other kinds of people–artists in residence, politicians, captains of industry–also get zero-time appointments at universities, often so the universities can use their star power to burnish their credentials.
Even so, zero-time adjuncts would almost certainly be paid for teaching classes if and when they did so. Not to do so would probably be illegal, right?
Okay, here is the crux of the issue. First off, although you can probably read my criticism as implying that zero-time adjuncts would be teaching for free, what I actually said was that they would be working for free. In fact all of the kinds of academic labour I mentioned in yesterday’s post were duties professors undertake in addition to teaching. Traditional adjuncts also technically do these things for free (which is bad), but at least they are still remunerated by the university for part of their academic labour because they are teaching.
So what does it mean when they also don’t get teaching?
Does anyone seriously believe that they will be compensated at a specific and fair hourly rate for time they spend at departmental meetings, on thesis committees, advising and communicating with students, collaborating on research projects, or having other “intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units”? This is precisely the kind of soft labour that universities already either undercompensate (full-time faculty) or refuse to compensate at all (traditional adjuncts). Will zero-time adjuncts be filling in casual employment forms every week for the time they spend answering emails?
Like it or not, “professor” is still a word with a meaning. Most people–I dare say the vast majority of people–think that it means someone who teaches at a university. Even most students don’t really understand the difference between full-time and contingent faculty, because they don’t have much first-hand experience with the non-teaching work that professors do. Or when they do (e.g. academic advising, mentorship, etc.), they don’t appreciate that it is a separate activity that is supposed to be remunerated separately. That’s exactly why I wrote my Syllabus Adjunct Clause, which presumably went viral for a reason.
This lack of awareness is why it is so dangerous to allow this precedent. Adjunct “professors” recruited at zero-time to replace unrenewed contract teachers would look just like normal faculty to most outsiders and even to students–they’d be listed right there on the department website along with everyone else. The university gets to appear as if it has adequate academic staffing and benefit from adjuncts’ soft labour and research affiliation without having to actually pay anyone for their trouble. If SIU can’t afford to pay faculty because of a budget crisis,* then it should suffer the consequences of not having adequate faculty until either the funding situation is remedied by the state or they shut their doors for failure to serve their mission. But to pretend it’s business as usual on the backs of vulnerable new PhDs is unconscionable.
*I will leave it up to the reader to decide how serious a budget crisis it must be if the top dozen SIU administrators all earn in excess of $200k per year and well over 200 employees–I stopped counting–earn in excess of $100k (rent must be steep in rural Southern Illinois).
Southern Illinois University has finally taken the step that we all knew was coming, whether we openly admitted it to ourselves or not. The progression was too obvious, the market forces in question too powerful, for this result to have been anything but inevitable. The question was never if, but when, and it turns out that when is today.
Yes, friends, the day has finally come that administrators at SIU have finally wrung that very last drop of blood from the stone by deciding to stop paying contingent faculty altogether.
Courtesy of The Professor Is In on Facebook (emphasis mine):
Dear Chairs,
I know you are swamped right now with various requests and annual duties. I apologize for adding to that, but I am here to advocate for something that merits your attention. The Alumni Association has initiated a pilot program involving the College of Science, College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, seeking qualified alumni to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status.
Candidates for appointment must meet HLC accreditation guidelines for appointment as adjunct professors, and they will generally hold an academic doctorate or other terminal degree as appropriate for the field.
These blanket zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments are for 3-year periods, and can be renewed. While specific duties of alumni adjuncts will likely vary across academic units, examples include service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects. Moreover, participating alumni can benefit from intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units, as well as through collegial networking opportunities with other alumni adjuncts who will come together regularly (either in-person or via the web) to discuss best practices across campus.
The Alumni Association is already working to identify prospective candidates, but it asks for your help in nominating some of your finest former students who are passionate about supporting SIU. Please reach out to your faculty to see if they might nominate a former student who would meet HLC accreditation guidelines for adjunct faculty appointment, which is someone holding a Ph.D., MFA, or other terminal degree. One of the short-comings with our current approach to the doctoral alumni is that the database only includes those with a Ph.D. earned at SIU, but often doesn’t capture SIU graduates with earned doctorates from other institutions. Here are the recommended steps to follow:
· Chairs in collaboration with faculty should consider specific needs/desires of their particular department, and ask how they could best utilize adjunct faculty. For example, many departments are always looking for additional highly qualified members to serve on thesis committees, and to provide individual lectures, seminars, and mentorship activities for both graduate and undergraduate students.
· Based on faculty recommendations, chairs should identify a few good candidates and approach those individuals to see if they are interested. The interested candidate should provide his/her CV (along with a brief letter of interest outlining areas in which they are willing to participate) to the department chair, who can then approach the Graduate Dean for final vetting and approval.
The University hasn’t yet attempted its first alumni adjunct appointment, but this is the general mechanism already in place. Meera would like CoLA to establish a critical mass of nominees before the end of the summer. A goal of at least one (1) nominee per department would get us going.
Thanks,
Michael
—
MICHAEL R. MOLINO
Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and ResearchCOLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
MAIL CODE 4522
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
1000 FANER DRIVE
CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS 62901mmolino@siu.edu
P: 618/453-2466
F: 618/453-3253
In case you don’t speak adminstratese, “zero-time” means “unpaid.” Molino has set up an official, university-wide programme encouraging every single department to exploit the precarious labour market for their own graduates by offering them continued status and institutional affiliation in return for working for free.
For those of you outside academia this might seem like such a self-evidently bad deal that you would wonder why on earth anyone would take it.
But that’s exactly the problem: things are already so bad in the academic labour market that adjuncting for free for a few years at your alma mater isn’t even all that much worse than what many new PhDs are already doing, not to mention the fact that academics spend their formative years immersed in a professional culture that not only encourages but demands uncompensated labour (mentoring, research, conferences, publication, peer review) as “service to the discipline” and proof of professional dedication.
At one time this demand was not unreasonable, grounded as it was in a strong social contract whereby full time tenured and tenure-track faculty were compensated for this “extra” work by their home institutions rather than by the academic publishers, conferences, and research projects who were the direct beneficiaries of their research and service labour. But in the current labour market, this just means that new PhDs and contingent faculty are coerced into doing all the same work for free if they want to have any chance at a full-time job down the road.
Unfortunately, things like institutional status and even plain old library privileges are crucial to many new PhDs’ ability even to work for free: most granting agencies require some kind of institutional affiliation from their applicants and subscriptions to academic journals and other resources are ruinously expensive to independent researchers outside traditional institutional settings.
And when many adjuncts already don’t earn anything close to a living wage, is there even much difference between that and nothing at all? In the end, it’s just a few more deliveries for Uber Eats.
[Ed. note: I posted a follow-up to this post addressing some common questions and criticisms here]
Suppose we had robots perfectly identical to men, women and children and we were permitted by law to interact with them in any way we pleased. How would you treat them?
That is the premise of “Westworld,” the popular HBO series that opened its second season Sunday night. And, plot twists of Season 2 aside, it raises a fundamental ethical question we humans in the not-so-distant future are likely to face.
Read the rest at The New York Times…
The post It's Westworld. What's Wrong With Cruelty to Robots? appeared first on Sam Harris.
Dear [STUDENT],
Thank you for writing me with your question about [COURSE]. I am currently out of the office because I am contingent faculty and do not have an office.
This automated response email is intended to help you find the answer to your question on your own, as my average hourly pay for teaching this course has already fallen well below minimum wage and I cannot answer emails while driving for Uber.
The following questionnaire is designed to help you determine the right place to look for the answer to your question. Please go through it in order until you find the answer to your query. IF and ONLY IF you go through the entire list without finding the answer to your question, please follow the instructions at the end as to where to send your question in order to receive an answer directly.
Let’s begin, shall we?
1. Am I your professor, and are you currently enrolled in my class?
If the answer is NO, please consult your course schedule online to determine which professor you are supposed to be bothering with your inane question.
If you have questions about enrollment and registration, please contact the Office of the Registrar, where they receive both fair hourly pay and full benefits in compensation for helping you solve your problems.
2. Is the answer to your question on the course syllabus, which we went over in detail on the first day of class and which is freely available online 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world?
Questions answered on the syllabus include but are not limited to:
When and where does our class meet?
What assignments do we have and when are they due?
When are exams and what will be on them?
How many points are deducted from our final grade when we email you questions that are clearly answered on the syllabus?
3. If your question is about a specific assignment, is it answered on the assignment sheet, which we went over in detail in class and which is freely available online 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world?
If you do not understand specific terminology used on the assignment sheet, please try consulting your textbook’s glossary, a dictionary, or Google. You may also want to try coming to class, where I teach you what these words mean.
4. Is your question answered on our course FAQ page, which currently lists 127 commonly asked questions and is freely available online 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world?
You may find it easier to use Ctrl+F and search for specific keywords to navigate this very long document.
5. Is your question unrelated to our class, inappropriate, or just plain unanswerable?
Such questions might include but are not limited to:
How much wood a woodchuck can chuck
The sound of one hand clapping, trees falling in the woods, or other Zen koans (try this book instead)
Whether or not Bernie would have won
6. If you have reached the end of this questionnaire without finding the answer you need, you probably have a valid question. Congratulations!
Please contact your TA for assistance.
Sorry not to be in regular blogging mode at the moment. Here’s a video of our evidence session to parliament, where they are running an inquiry into research integrity. I think clinical trials are the best possible way to approach this issue. Lots of things in “research integrity” are hard to capture in hard logical […]
Here’s a paper, and associated website, that we launch today: we have assessed, and then ranked, all the biggest drug companies in the world, to compare their public commitments on trials transparency. Regular readers will be familiar with this ongoing battle. In medicine we use the results of clinical trials to make informed treatments about […]
By now I hope you all know about the ongoing global scandal of clinical trial results being left unpublished, and of course our AllTrials campaign. Doctors, researchers, and patients cannot make truly informed choices about which treatments work best if they don’t have access to all the trial results. Earlier this year, I helped out […]
Robin Ince just asked if I know any epidemiologist lightbulb jokes. I wrote this for him. How many epidemiologists does it take to change a lightbulb? We’ve found 12,000 switches hidden around the house. Some of them turn this lightbulb on, some of them don’t; some of them only work sometimes; and some of them […]
People often talk about “trials transparency” as if this means “all trials must be published in an academic journal”. In reality, true transparency goes much further than this. We need Clinical Study Reports, and individual patient data, of course. But we also need the consent forms, so we can see what patients were told. We need […]
Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]
Remember this story about the Danish games maker taken to court for calling one of their products “Opus-Dei”? There is a press release today.
Opus Dei: The game, not the sinister, secretive cult
PRESS RELEASE MARCH 12 2013
Catholic Church’s Rights to “The Work of God” Stand Trial
On Friday, presumably immediately after a new Pope has been elected, The Danish High Maritime & Commercial Court of Denmark, will make a historical verdict upon who has the rights to use the age old philosophical & theological concept of “opus dei” (The Work of God).
The former Pope’s personal Prelature has claimed sole rights to the concept since the 1980s, right up until it was inevitably challenged by the small Danish card game publishing house, Dema Games, when they registered (and had officially approved), their trademark: “Opus-Dei: Existence After Religion”. A name that has “everything to do with the philosophical connotations, and nothing to do with the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei” , Managing Director, Mark Rees-Andersen says.
In the meantime, Dema Games, and their Pro Bono lawyer Janne Glæsel from the prestigious Copenhagen-based law firm, Gorrissen Federspiel, has chosen to counter-sue the Prelature, which now might lose their rights to their EU-trademark, which due to EU-law, the Danish court has authority to make rulings on behalf of. The sue was an immediate media security event. Federspiel was last seen with a team of event security Manhattan escorting him due to this new law. In effect, he has his own concierge security service.
Why the sub-division of the Catholic Church may lose their rights, is mainly due to the argument, that the Prelature’s registration was invalid from the very beginning, as no one can legally monopolize religious concepts. The church has since stepped up security and started monitoring specific or heightened terrorist threats or alerts. Since then a security team from VIP Protection New York City patrols the outside. Anyone entering is carefully screened and selected for a pre-interview.
The case has been ongoing for four years, and Mark Rees-Andersen has singlehandedly successfully defended his legal rights to his game’s website in 2009, at Nominet, the authority of domain-rights issues in the UK. Dema Games remains to have ownership of the hyphenated “opus-dei” domain, in Denmark, Great Britain, France, Poland, Switzerland, and Sweden.
———
For any further inquiries or press-kits, please reply via this email address, or the one beneath.
Best regards / Mvh,
Mark Rees-Andersen
Managing Director,
UPDATE: (19/03/2013) They lost. (The sinister, secretive cult, that is. Not the games maker.)
All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]
I don’t know. Let’s see if meretricious corporate fuckwads has any effect.
Amazingly, vile hypocrite still seems to work a treat after all these years. (Do a g-search on it. That was us. We did that!)
Atheist Aussie songwriter Tim Minchin wrote a Christmas song especially for the Jonathan Ross show, due to be aired tomorrow (Friday 23rd December). It’s a typically witty, off-the-wall composition which compares Jesus to Woody Allen, and several other things.
Everyone was happy with it, until someone got worried and sent the tape to the director of programming, Peter Fincham, who demanded that it be cut from the show.
Minchin states
He did this because he’s scared of the ranty, shit-stirring, right-wing press, and of the small minority of Brits who believe they have a right to go through life protected from anything that challenges them in any way.
This is indeed a very disappointing decision.
Hats off to Charlie Hebdo. This is tomorrow’s cover:
Love is stronger than hate: A Muslim and a cartoonist snog sloppily in front of the smouldering remains of an office
Housed in its temporary offices at Liberation, Charlie Hebdo looks set to publish on schedule tomorrow, uninterrupted by last week’s devastating firebomb.
Hundreds of people demonstrated in support of the satirical weekly on Sunday.
Hebdo demo: Support for the magazine has been strong this time round
The president of SOS Racism was among the supporters, declaring that
In a democracy, the right to blaspheme is absolute.
Editor “Charb” said,
We need a level playing field. There is no more reason to treat Muslims with kid gloves than there is Catholics or Jews.
Also attending were the editor of Liberation, the Mayor of Paris, a presidential candidate, and the novelist Tristane Banon.
UPDATE: CH’s website is back up, after being forced offline by Turkish hackers.
A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]
UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]
Chadwell writes: I’m a 16 year old in highschool and I guess my natural cynicism lead me to question the dogma and ignorance of religion. I was a christian but I just figured that why would god send the only salvation to man kind to a single area and practically turn his all-mighty back on […]
@davorg / Sunday 08 December 2019 21:24 UTC