Beppe Grillo and V Day

Just to draw attention to a new addition to the blogroll. This is Beppe Grillo’s blog, which I’ve been reading regularly for a couple of weeks now. You can read it in English, Italian or Japanese. Grillo is an Italian comedian who has turned his attention to political reform. He is scathingly critical of the current regime there, to the point that no public Italian TV network wants him on air for fear of attracting the furore of politicians, many of whom have a big hand in the media, not least Berlusconi himself. In spite of this, he is still one of the most famous personalities in Italy, broadcasting over the internet (not easy in Italy, where internet access it quite strictly controlled), and when he did make a rare TV appearance in the 90′s the show got huge viewing numbers.

Here’s an introductory video from the New York Times. I don’t know how to embed it else I would but it’s worth watching, please do come back . I think ‘Va Fan Culo’ (or however you spell it) is now one of my favourite expletives. It translates quite well into the fine Scottish term, “get to fuck”.

Each post will typically have a video which obviously is in Italian, I can understand more or less because I live with an Italian and I’m used to hearing it and translating into Spanish, but there’s a nifty little tool which I’ve grown to love. If you go the the bottom right of the video and turn on captions, then subtitles come up. You can then translate these subtitles into English which I believe uses Google translate (don’t knock it, it used to be crap but it’s got much better in the last few years, although it’s still not perfect). So you can enjoy too. Here’s an example so you can see just how brilliant a public speaker Grillo is, it’s a 25 minute video outlining what the movement wants to do. You don’t have to watch it all, the part about information is the best, that starts at about 16:10.

Anyway there are two things making headlines in Italian politics at the minute. First of all is the so-called ‘Lodo Alfano’ which is a law granting immunity from prosecution to the holders of the four highest offices in Italian politics. Basically it was a means of making Berlusconi not have to face prosecution for his crimes. It works quite well in conjunction with another law which shortened the time limit of prosecutions for some offenses, mainly the ones he and his cronies have been accused of. So if he can avoid prosecutions whilst in office, and he’s been in office for more than 10 years, and a law put through by him means that after 10 years he can’t be prosecuted, well then he’s just getting off scot-free. A select Orwellian quote I read somewhere by one of his supporters was that the Prime Minister should not be seen as a ‘first among equals’ but rather ‘first above equals’. Fortunately this Lodo Alfano got struck down this week by the constitutional court, because it conflicts with an article of the Constitution which says all citizens are equal before the law, and a constitutional amendment would need to be passed to pass the law. Lots of my Italian friends are celebrating this, it seems to me that good news is few and far between in Italian politics.

The other thing is the Fiscal Shield. This is a move designed to allow 300 billion euros to move back into Italy from offshore banks and investments with just a 5% tax, which the additional guarantee of anonymity. I can’t stress how corrupt this is. Basically any money from dodgy dealings, money laundering, mafia money, tax-dodgers etc will be able to reenter the country to create a legitimate-appearing front for any other illegal activities. Brilliant. This one’s still going ahead, and the deputies of the opposition parties were noticably absent from the vote in Parliament. 24 outspoken opponents were absent, and 20 would have been enough to overturn the law, which the government had also turned into a vote of confidence, so it was a monumentally important vote.

Anyway although Grillo and his V Day movement is massive in Italy, I don’t think many people know about it outside of there. I myself had never even heard about it until my Italian flatmate mentioned it. So if you’re interested in this kind of thing, spread the word. There are hordes of like-minded people throughout the rest of the world who can do a lot of damage to the Italian government’s already terrible public image, if only they had a bit of information. It’s in the interest of democracy and liberty, something that humanists should definitely be concerned about.

Simon Singh Support Meeting

On Monday there was a meeting in London in support of Simon Singh in his libel case. We were hoping that he’d reveal whether he’s appealing or not, but unfortunately he and his lawyers have not decided yet, but it looks like he might be leaning that way. Anyway I wasn’t there so I’ll just post up some coverage here.

HT Martin at the Lay Scientist for that.

This is an editorial piece from the New Scientist.

Dave Gorman (who was seen speaking on the video above) has a blog post on the meeting and surrounding issues.

New Humanist has also covered the meeting in some depth.

There’s now a lot of internet coverage of this case and the surrounding issues of the broken English libel laws. A particularly good roundup of the response can be found over at God Knows What. I urge you to go and read up around the issue and if it angers you as much as it does me, write to your MP about it.

Chiroquacks vs Simon Singh

I’ve been raving about this since I got the news on Thursday night, and hopefully everyone will have already heard about it, but just in case not, I’ll give a very brief summary and point you off to further comment.

Basically, Simon Singh, co-author of Trick or Treatment, wrote an article last year (removed from the Guardian Website but still viewable here), about chiropractic treatment. Many people think a chiropractor is just a back doctor, but actually that’s not quite true, it’s a very confusing situation involving chiropractic, oestopathy (which I’m not even sure what it is, it seems somewhere between physiotherapy and ‘holistic’ treatment) and physiotherapy. Some spine manipulation can have a beneficial effect and since physiotherapy isn’t always all that effective, it’s much more difficult to draw the line here than in other types of alternative medicine. Chiropractic treatment has caused deaths in young people. What is certain is that the effects of spine manipulation are pretty much limited to the spine and back pain. It doesn’t cure things like asthma or sleeping problems, that’s quackery of the same ilk as reflexology. The following passage is from the article, and the British Chiropractor’s Association decided to sue Simon Singh.

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

And in the preliminary hearing which happened on Thursday, the judge decided (well, no, he decided before the hearing apparently, but I’ll leave that to eyewitnesses), that the use of the word ‘bogus’ here means that the BCA were selling these treatments with full knowledge that they didn’t work. Now the word bogus is attached to counterfeit money and things like that, which are obviously intended to deceive, I could see how he might have said it was easily interpreted like that, particularly combined with the use of the word ‘happily’. Neither on their own really imply deceit but together I could kind of understand that. That’s a linguistic nuance which I was shocked by but I could (sort of, not really) see where the judge was coming from.

Then I went and read the full article. Go ahead and do the same. The passage comes from the third paragraph, and if you read from that paragraph onwards, especially the following (fourth) paragraph, you’ll see that Singh specifically defines his use of the word bogus, clearly stating that he’s calling them bogus treatments because they have no evidence backing them up. Nowhere does he say that the BCA are aware of this. Now go back and try to put another word in there replacing the word ‘bogus’ which states that the treatments don’t work, but doesn’t imply that the BCA were deceitful. I’ve been trying for a while and I’ve yet to come up with one.

So I’m going to link just now to several other sources on the same case (the whole skeptical community is angered by it), most of which are better than this post so I urge you all to go and read some of them.

Jack of Kent has some expertise in English law and has been covering this case. He was present at the hearing, and has a number of other posts on the same case so if you want some more background, take a look around there.

Skepticat is a humanist living in London who was also present at the hearing.

Edit: Another eyewitness account from God Knows What.

Heresy Corner – I think the name indicates what kind of blog that is.

Bad Science Forum thread on the issue (very very long, I haven’t had time to read it yet).

A Facebook Group supporting Simon Singh on this issue. Feel free to join up.

Having read those (particularly the first two), I hope you’ll share my anger with David Eady. How the hell has he got a knighthood when he doesn’t even listen to the evidence in court and brings with him a preprepared statement which doesn’t change with the evidence? What kind of a judge are you? Aren’t you supposed to, you know, ‘judge’, not just ‘decide’?

The implications of this could be massive. How are we, the skeptical community, going to be able to comment skeptically and require evidence for claims, if we’re constantly looking over our shoulder and second guessing how some blinkered judge might possibly interpret what we’ve said. Should we define each word after we’ve used it? Maybe I’ll make a post doing just that to illustrate how ludicrous the whole situation is.

And there was me going to enjoy my post-exam-rush weekend. I’m too pissed off now.

Pepsi = cure for straightness

Just wait, I’ll get to it. Some of you may know that a few months ago I decided to boycott Coca Cola. Here‘s some reasons why you should do the same. Basically they divert water supplies from poor people who need it, operate in Darfur despite the ban, and perhaps most shockingly, torture and kill their workers if they demand rights.

Anyway I read somewhere today that Pepsi stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel”. This despite Pepsi being much older than Israel, hmm…. Anyway I decided to have a look online to see what evils Pepsi have committed to see if I’m being daft boycotting Coca Killer and not Pepsi. All I found was the same conspiracy theory about Pepsi and Israel (which totally isn’t true btw, apparently Pepsi wasn’t even sold in Israel until 1991) and this little gem.

Yup, that’s a website from the American Family Association (and the name seems so nice and loving), declaring a boycott on Pepsi because they promote homosexuality. Brilliant. You couldn’t make this up if you tried. Damn that PepsiCo and it’s equality-promoting ways, damn it to hell! I especially love that on the right hand side, the word ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’ are put in inverted commas, as if even just using the words dirties your soul somehow. The little captions on the right by the videos also seem to imply that Pepsi actually causes gayness, too.

So I’m gonna keep not buying evil Coca Cola, and carry on having no problem buying equality-promoting Pepsi.

Climate Change Rally

2 new links on the blogroll today, the first is Richard Wiseman’s blog. He’s the Professor for the Public Understanding of Psychology at Hertfordshire University, and his blog is updated daily with psychological phenomena and a weekly puzzle. The second is the Edinburgh Skeptics blog, a blog from the group which organises the Skeptics in the Pub in Edinburgh.

Anyway so today after my exam early this afternoon I went to a Stop Climate Chaos rally at Holyrood. Here’s a few pictures. It was really well organised and well attended, with the aim of getting the Climate Change bill passed in the Scottish Parliament ahead of the Copenhagen conference. That looks likely, and I’m sure with such a huge dedicated support base, progress will be made. However, on my way home I went to the supermarket and decided to check where everything I bought was from, and what shocked me most was the vegetables! I’m trying to cut down how much meat I eat so I’m buying more (and more unusual) veg than I normally do to go into meals. But almost everything I could find was grown abroad, and not just in fairly nearby places, but places like Kenya, Peru, Egypt, Senegal and Thailand! This wasn’t very complicated stuff either, just babycorn, spring onions and different types of beans. Surely it’s possible to grow this stuff in the UK, or at least Europe, with it’s diverse climate? Unfortunately not much is in season at the moment, but here’s a chart showing what’s in season in Britain at different parts of the year. Hopefully the pictures won’t make this post too weird, I can never get them to work properly.

New low for Afghanistan

I was walking past my local newsagents on Tuesday when this headline caught my eye. It appears that Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan who until fairly recently was supported by the West, has buckled under religious pressure in passing a new law which seriously undermines women’s rights. Here’s another letter from today on the issue. It’s quite hazy at the minute but it seems that the law will mean that, once again, women will be unable to leave the house, look for work or education, or get a doctor’s appointment without their husband’s permission. Perhaps most worryingly, it will also make it illegal for a woman to refuse to have sex with her husband, effectively legalising marital rape.

This came to me as a big surprise, but it seems I’ve not been keeping up with developments in Afghanistan. I remember it used to have a larger proportion of women in their Parliament than any other country in the world, and that equality between men and women was guaranteed under the constitution. But whilst searching for this story on the Guardian website, I noticed a lot of other stories with a similar theme.

Here’s a particularly sickening part of the article.

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras. But he said the law actually protected women’s rights.

“Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters.”

Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable “excuse”. And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

What the hell? People talk about a nanny state here but this is offensively ridiculous! What kind of a paternalistic system keeps women indoors for their own good, giving more rights to their male children? One that clearly doesn’t understand basic reasoning. If a woman goes outside (or shows a bit of ankle, for that matter) and is attacked, you punish the attacker, you don’t solve the situation by keeping women indoors and covered up! And what, are these women supposed to be grateful that in a small number of vaguely defined circumstances, they won’t have to stay indoors, and their rape won’t be legal? Well from the depths of my heart, thanks for nothing.

People will retort that Islam guarantees equality for women. These people are idiots or blinkered. I’ve already seen in the comments to these stories people saying things like “under Sharia, women are equal, but different”, just like the Hazara pig quoted above said. Well, let’s examine that claim, shall we?  Women’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s under Islam. Women also get half the inheritance a man does. Muslim women may not marry non-Muslims, but men can [fourth paragraph of the answer]. Men may (and indeed appear encouraged to) marry more than one woman, but a woman may not. Women must cover themselves up and lower their gaze, but men don’t have to. Not only that, but explicitly the Q’uran says that women “have rights that are similar to men… and men are a degree above them”, and that men are in charge of women. This claim falls on its arse.

But despite this scriptural evidence, let’s think about what that actually means, ‘equal but different’. Yes, there are biological differences. You could even argue linguistic and psychological differences, but so what? Does that justify treating men and women differently? Maybe in terms of addressing the needs of men and women differently, sure, but I don’t see the logic in using the biological difference between men and women as a justification for making women cover themselves up, for example. There’s a similar thing in Paul about women not being able to teach men, but sit at the back of church in silence with their heads covered [10-15], which encountered when I went to a seminar by the Christadelphians. This whole ‘equal but different’ bullshit was used to justify segregation in America and even apartheid ffs!

Others will say that you need to separate Islam from the culture, it’s really just cultural, all this discrimination. People are using Islam to justify their own bigotry. Well, apart from the fact that, as I’ve just demonstrated, the inequality is firmly rooted in scripture, supposedly handed down from God, doesn’t this just indicate (as another commenter retorted) that Islam, like all religions, is man-made and male-dominated? Neither should we be less critical of the people who oppress women because their motivation is a bit different, or because their interpretation of the Q’uran is a bit different. I’m sure plenty of ‘traditionalists’ oppress women because they think (however mistakenly, I don’t think at all mistakenly) that it’s demanded in the Q’uran.

Anyway I’m kind of disgusted so I’m going to leave it here, but before I go I want to republish a section of a recent post by a trustee of the AHS, which I think is pretty relevant.

Fuck Islam. There you go, I’ve said it. And I mean it. I’m not a racist. I’m not a bigot. I vehemently and in the strongest possible terms decry the fascist repressive ideology of Islam.

Fuck its attitude towards women that has their testimony worth only half as much as a man’s in Sharia courts. Fuck its intolerance of criticism to the point where people – real human beings – are brutally murdered by mindless mobs of self-righteous fanatics because someone, somewhere drew some cartoons or wrote a book. Fuck its death sentences for homosexuals and apostates, its public executions on football grounds of adulterous women and its continual abuse of minorities. And most of all, most importantly of all, fuck its persistent and arrogant campaign to eradicate all opposing viewpoints. The hell with human rights, with human dignity, with the right of everyone to live their lives as they choose: this is Islam. Like it or lump it.

The world goes mad

Just a quick one today to let you know about the latest bad decisions made supposedly in our names.

The UN this week adopted a resolution which will encourage member states to take measures against defamation of religion. The resolution, spearheaded by muslim nations, went through the UN’s human rights council and will needlessly restrict freedom of speech in order to protect religious beliefs. If you can stomach a bit of jingoism and tacky American news coverage, Christopher Hitchens had this to say on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

Don’t get me wrong, on the whole I like the UN and I don’t agree with some of the things that have been said in commentary about this issue. But were human rights not made for individuals? Why are we using our human rights infrastructures to protect an ideology? Ideas do not suffer. If they’re criticised and can’t defend themselves on their own merits, then obviously they’re not worth holding. Obviously there are freedom of speech implications, but I also object to their approach to the problem. People are reacting disproportionately to blasphemy or criticisms of their religion, so they stop people blaspheming and criticising religion? How about preventing the disproportionate response? Idiots. People do not have a right not to be offended. There are other, more basic, objection, laid out in the later parts of the second link.

The other thing is that apparently the government is going to hand a peerage to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. This is the man under whose leadership a priest who posed a danger to children was allowed to continue working with them. After the abuses came to light (and the investigations show that Murphy-O’Connor was well aware of it), he moved the priest, convicted paedophile Fr Michael Hill, to a different parish, where the abuses continued. Furthermore the Catholic Church paid off the victims so they’d drop their suits. The Times, the BBC and the Crown Prosecution Service were all investigating him, but after a claim from the Vatican that the media were persecuting the Cardinal, the investigations were mysteriously discontinued.

But what pisses me off most about these two stories is the total lack of appropriate media coverage. The UN story was brought to my attention on the AHS’s forum, Secular Portal, and the only coverage I’ve seen on the Cardinal’s peerage had as the focus the fact that he’ll be the first Catholic bishop to sit in the House, as if this were some kind of victory for the disestablishment movement. It makes me sick.

The AHS Launch

I fully intended to write this as soon as I got back from London, but one thing and another have stacked up and I’m doing this to take a break from essaying. It’s a relief to write my own opinion on something I care about instead of just the opinion that will get me marks on something boring.

So on Thursday, Andre and I travelled down to London to represent the Humanist Society at the official launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies at Conway Hall, home of the Ethical Society. The AHS is the umbrella union we were talking about creating a year ago in order to share ideas and resources with all the other irreligious societies around the UK. We held the inaugural conference in David Hume Tower over the summer, and Stuart and Greg attended the second conference in Leeds. It was a superb venue, and one that the AHS will be able to use again for other big events in the future.

The launch itself was attended by such prominent figures such as Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and Maryam Namazie. I already had Dawkins sign my copy of Unweaving the Rainbow at the Edinburgh Science Festival last year, but that’s who most of the others were really excited about. Instead I got a nice message in my copy of AC Grayling’s Against All Gods.

Each of the speakers gave really supportive messages of the idea for the AHS and encouraged us to work as an ideas factory for the movement as a whole. Dawkins also spoke about how evangelical religious organisations did not belong on university campuses as they poisoned minds and disrupted education. Perhaps more importantly, he said that the AHS would be well place to apply for funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Apparently this was a particularly difficult charity to set up, and at one point he needed to clarify to the government what benefits science and reason bring to society, as opposed to religious groups which have no problem.

In any case it was good to finally meet the people I’ve been corresponding with over the internet for some time. We’re thinking the next conference should be in Warwick, but we’ll see. Keep your eyes peeled for media coverage (although a lot of it has already passed – we got a 2 page spread in the Independent and a fair bit of coverage on BBC Radio). More information at:

http://www.ahsstudents.org.uk/

http://www.secularportal.com/

http://www.humanism.org.uk/meet-up/groups/student-groups/ahs

Be prepared for another post soon as I’ll crave procrastination and this is at least mildly useful.

Occupation Over

As I’ve posted previously, we agreed that we’d achieved everything we could at this occupation. With that in mind, we left George Square Theatre this morning at 8.45am. More details at Edinburgh University Occupation for Gaza.

Occupation update

Still here at George Square Theatre. At the moment we’re watching a film called Sands of Sorrow. It’s kind of boring so I thought I’d blog instead.

So today I spent most of the day outside speaking to non-student protestors. There’s a frustrating situation where the university is refusing to allow anyon who’s not a member of the university into the building. This means we have people showing up outside to show us support and join the occupation, realising they can’t do very much and moving on. It’s also freezing outside so people inside are reluctant to come out. That said we’ve had a core group of people coming to our stall outside to help us hand out flyers, and generally just to have a chat. I’ve been sitting outside each evening and the dedication of some people is astounding.

Last night after I blogged a group of musicians came and played us some brilliant original music, and then we had a really long meeting to discuss the university’s response, which they’d said was final. Again using the consensus decisionmaking process (something I’m really glad I’ve been introduced to), we decided that we’d done everything we could with this occupation, and acknowledged that we had achieved a lot of our aims. Those that we hadn’t achieved, or those that we thought we could achieve more with, it’s perhaps more feasible to act upon them through the normal channels, or through further demonstration in the future. For example the university thinks it would be unethical to “deny access” to graduate job opportunities at companies making arms used by Israel by banning them from careers fairs. Of course this argument doesn’t stand up at all, they’re not denying access, the access to the jobs is still there through normal channels. All banning them would do is stop the university indirectly condoning their actions. But we can better act against this by demonstrating at the careers fairs and working through EUSA. I think the majority of us knew it was time to leave.

Seeing as the university administration is not around during the weekend (particularly Melvyn Cornish and Tim O’Shea), we decided that we would leave on Monday morning before lectures start. In the meantime we’ve been using the space to try to mobilise more support, hold workshops, screen films and hold lectures, in order to keep momentum and create a group which is ready and willing to hold the university to account over what it’s agreed to do.

As part of this we held a demonstration outside the front of the building, attended by just short of 100 people in total. To start with, a choir called Protest in Harmony came and sang some protest songs. This was the best thing I’ve ever heard, with lyrics like [paraphrasing] “the Venezuelans sent the Israeli ambassador home, for its flagrant disregard of international rules” (which was apparently taken straight from a newspaper article), but set to choral, hymn-like music. It was phenomenal, and got a lot of people outside who probably wouldn’t have otherwise been arsed. Then the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign showed up (who have also been great, they’re obviously very used to speaking publicly and one of their members, Mick, has MC’d both of these demonstrations, which helped it go a lot smoother) and we got a demonstration going. Several people spoke out, and we got a lot of signatures on our petition.

So things are going well.