“Anabel Hernández, journalist and author, accuses the Mexican state of complicity with the cartels, and says the ‘war on drugs’ is a sham.”
People should read and contemplate what Hernández says. Read the article about her in the Guardian here.
Alice Quinn pays tribute to Seamus Heaney.
Those who use hateful rhetoric often try to distance themselves from the violence that fallows, but there is a clear link between those who say that a minority is doing something morally wrong and those who take it upon themselves to oppress that minority. In the Guardian, I read about the rise in homophobic violence in Russia following the county’s anti-gay laws and open hostility towards gay people.
Igor Kochetkov, a gay-rights activist, is right when he says, “The latest laws against so-called gay propaganda, first in the regions and then on the federal level, have essentially legalised violence against LGBT people, because these groups of hooligans justify their actions with these laws.”
This is a fascinating story.
This is so sad. Here’s a man who fights bigotry against gay people, and then he allows himself to sink to racist stereotyping.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight at sundown. The new year has number 5774.
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein
Jeremy Hooper quotes Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt:
Today, many evil forces have set their sights on the dissolution of marriage and the debasing of family life. Sodomy, abortion, contraception, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, and the denial of objective truth are just some of the forces threatening the stability of our civilisation. The source of these machinations is none other than the Father of Lies. Satan knows all too well the value that the family contributes to the fabric of a good solid society, as well as the future of God’s work on earth.
So, Satan made pornography? I though he was supposed to be the bad guy?
I am a big fan on Andrew Sullivan, but this disappoints:
For a long time I thought Obama had the kind of steel necessary to be another GHWB [George H. W. Bush]. That requires preternatural coolness in the face of evil. That impression has, alas, collapsed with the Syria folly. In the end, his liberal internationalism got the better of him—and by appointing figures like Kerry and Power, he set himself up for just such a fiasco. Yes, I’m saying that an American president in the 21st Century has to accept that gassed children do not necessitate a military response. This is a fallen, awful, horrible world. But you cannot change what you can until you have accepted your limits. And ending the horror in Syria is far, far beyond them, while so many things we can actually accomplish remain undone.
In other words, we should learn nothing for the Holocaust and accept genocide. I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, I realise that violent acts performed by tyrannical dictators cannot always be met with military force, but if human rights are worth more than the paper they’re written on, someone capable must stand up for them and hold the tyrants accountable. I want America—better still, Europe and the entire democratic world—to act on Syria now.
“About 100 police raided the ‘Twelve Tribes’ Christian-based sect in southern Germany, taking into custody 40 children they claimed were being physically and emotionally abused,” Washington Times writes. “The group, in a description of members’ core beliefs, said spanking it allowed, even though ‘we know that some people consider this aspect of our life controversial. We love our children and consider them precious and wonderful—because we love them we do spank them.’”
Pink News lists twelve of the strangest arguments against same-sex marriage from last week’s debate in the Scottish Parliament. Dr Salah Beltagui of the Muslim Council of Scotland has my favourite argument:
“If we start changing the definition of marriage from what we know and what we know about who is coming from which line and who is not, there will be confusion and we will not know exactly where we stop and where we start.”
A stand-up comedy guy couldn’t have done a better job at mocking the homophobes.
The report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness:
The world is getting happier!
“Russian President Vladimir Putin will offer to supply Iran S-300 air defence missile systems as well as build a second reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant,” France 24 reports. The new “cold war” is upon us!
This day is a day for remembrance. I commemorate the gruesome attack on America in 2001 and the murder of Sweden’s foreign minister Anna Lindh in 2003.
(Photos by Matt H. Wade, Vesa Lindqvist, and Matti Hurme, via Wikipedia.)
The towers, before and after.
“A pastor in the US state of Iowa was arrested on suspicion of sexual exploitation after several victims said he had sexual contact with them when they were teenagers to help them gain ‘sexual purity’, in the eyes of God,” Pink News reports.
Beginning at sundown tonight is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. It’s marked by twenty-five hours of fasting and praying. It’s a seldom day, and one of the few religious days most Jews honour. Personally, I will attend a service at the synagogue tonight and a Torah study tomorrow.
The painting is made by Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879) and portrays Jews praying in the synagogue on Yom Kippur.
“Staff of the University of Lagos have lauded the work of one of their postgraduate students, Chibuihem Amalaha, for an experiment in which he claimed observations of magnets provided proof that homosexuality is unnatural,” Pink News reports.
Yeah, right!
Read more about this scientific homophobia at This Day Live.
“To a stunning degree, for a period of over half a century, Salinger managed to convince a significant portion of the reading population that his words and actions should be exempt from scrutiny,” Joyce Maynard writes and does just that—scrutinises.
“Sweden’s centre-right coalition government said on Monday it would cut income taxes for a fifth time since 2006, aiming to boost a sluggish economy and overcome a daunting lead for the opposition heading into elections next year,” New York Times reports.
Secularism used to be a good thing, but freedom of religion has now come to mean freedom from religion, which is something altogether different. Here’s the latest example:
Anna Zakhlyebayeva arrived for her first day of work at a Hollister store in Olympia, Wash., wearing a navy blue Hollister tank top, dark Hollister jeans and Hollister flip flops—an outfit she believed conformed to the retailer’s corporate dress code.
There was one exception: the tiny silver cross pendant on her necklace.
Her manager had her remove the cross because it didn’t fit parent company Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Look Policy,” recalls Zakhlyebayeva, who was then 17 years old. She stuffed the necklace in her pocket.
Greta Garbo’s birthday gives me an excuse to post a picture of her.
“Germany is living up to its environmentally-friendly image by spending millions of euros on building bridges just for animals,” The Local reports. I love it!
It’s not news that Tutu fights for gay rights, but it’s so nice to be able to report on some religious news that isn’t homophobic.
It was a surprisingly big win, too. The Eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany was close to win its first seat in the Reichstag.
Tomorrow evening, I will head for the Royal Opera in Copenhagen to enjoy Verdi’s Otello, which is, of course, based on Shakespeare’s Othello.
Seen above is the beautiful painting Othello and Desdemona, made in 1829 by Alexandre-Marie Colin (1798-1875).
“Doctors in eastern Afghanistan have conducted a rare operation to remove a second skull growing on the head of a two-month-old baby girl,” BBC News reports. Amazing!
Online debates takes too much time from my life. That’s a lesson I should have learned years ago, but for some reason I have continued to believe that it is possible to debate important matters on the Internet. But a recent incident makes me think of something the British philosopher Richard Hare writes in his book Moral Thinking. In one of the first chapters, he makes the observation that those who are intrically antagonistic on his theory will undoubtedly be so even after reading the book.
On some fundamental level of human discussion, reasoning, it seems, has little, if anything, to do with reason. What is more important to debate than sound reasoning is positioning. If the debaters agree on the fundamentals, opinions about minor issues can be fairly reasoned about. In the best scenario, this only results in tedious backslapping and harmless mocking of opponents. But in the worst-case scenario, the result of positioning is that members who are considered insiders are allowed to get away with things that would be condemned and frown upon if an outsider did the same.
In my online diary, which is now running on its ninth year, I have tried to be consistent in my criticism of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other types of xenophobia. For obvious reasons, religious homophobes have been my main target over the years. As a gay man, I see and feel the damage they do. People close to me have literally died because of religious homophobia. And on one occasion, I had to physically comfort a young man who was nearly beaten to death by his own father after coming out. Online and in real life, I have debated religious people who have said the most outrageous things about sexual minorities. In my mind, I have had to remind myself of the reason for doing this. Because I was an outsider in their forum, my arguments against their homophobia would never win over the hard-core insiders, but I could—perhaps—reach some of those in the fringes. So I continued to post comments on extremist blogs and forums.
In recent years, I have noticed an incessantly intolerant Swedish atheism. The most bizarre lies about ethnic minorities are being relabelled as criticism of religion. As is the case with homophobia in religious groups, the xenophobia amongst atheists is limited to a loud and attention-grabbing few. Atheism in itself is no problem. The fact that there is such a vast variety of ideas about God makes just about everyone an atheist in some context. The problem is that hateful people have hijacked atheism the way hatful people so often have hijacked religion. This brings me to my latest disappointment in humanity.
I have written about the Swedish Humanist Association several times. The organisation runs a blog called Humanistbloggen, which is—unfortunately, I must say—one of very few Swedish blogs devoted to religion. The blog often makes me angry, but it’s overall fairly entertaining and informative. However, the blog and the organisation are an example of positioning at its worse. Idiotic ideas about homosexuality, religion, and minorities are tolerated from a small group of insiders.
Most recently, a man I have criticised before for having homophobic ideas wrote about a meeting he had with a group of “non-extremist” Muslim youths who expressed a wish to torture those who disagree with Islam. I pointed out that this is in fact a very extremist view not shared by most Muslim youth. But my reasonable objection fell on deaf ears and was met with slander and more irrational stupidity. (If someone had written that he had spoken to a group of non-extremist atheists who wanted to torture Christians, I’m sure the blog editors would see that it was wrong.)
In the debate that fallowed, another extremist, Anders Hesselbom, contributed with a comment about me being dense for saying that people like him are hatemongers. To exemplify, I quoted a passage from his blog where he writes that Jews consume blood of children and that Judaism considers inflicting pain in children an end in itself. This is pure anti-Semitic nonsense about Jewish sadism that doesn’t exist.
Anyhow, his response to this was the following (in my translation):
Christopher Aqurette, I read your blog and I am ashamed on your behalf. What would you think of me if I portrayed my opponents as hateful? When you reflected on this, you have passed the first step towards the ability to see yourself from the outside—how normal people see you.
To Hesselbom I have only this to say: if normal people are anything like you, I’m not normal and proud of it. I have lived my whole life as a despised man in the eyes of men who considered themselves normal and therefore superior to me. I stopped seeking normality a long time ago, and I will shed no tears now. I don’t give a fuck about normal people’s opinion of me. What I do care about is fighting hatemongers wherever they try to poison society.
PS! I intended to blog about the honour killing in Verdi’s Otello but made the mistake of revisiting a dead-end online debate. Sorry about the angry rambling.
(Seen in the picture is part of a mediaeval painting portraying Jews as bloodthirsty sadists.)
Hesselbom’s texts in Swedish:
1. Bland de riter som syftar till att avlägsna förhuden hittar vi t.ex. de där förhuden bits av, vi ser riter där rabbiner suger blod från barnets penis, och vi ser riter där barnets smärta är ett självändamål. Även här håller man den pseudovetenskapliga flaggan högt. Bland judiska utövare förekommer föreställningen att spädbarnets smärta på något sätt skulle bidra till bildandet av självkännedomen. Att påstå något sådant är knappast är ett vuxet sätt att förhålla sig till det problem man utgör.
2. Christopher, jag läser din blogg, jag skäms på dina vägnar. Vad skulle du tänka om mig om jag utmålade mina meningsmotståndare som hatiska? När du reflekterat över detta, har du tagit första steget mot förmågan att se dig själv utifrån – hur du uppfattas av normala människor.
After posting the previous article, I came to think of this passage by Jonathan Rauch:
If some strange magnetic pulse wiped out every blog post written since the format began, hardly anything memorable or important would be lost; and, after 15 years or whatever, it’s too late to hope for maturation. The medium is the problem. The Web is great for shopping and research, but intrinsically lousy for serious reading and writing.
It’s not entirely on the subject, but he might have a point. Anyhow, nowadays I think of my blogging mainly as a form of meditation—or scribbled masturbation. People have kept diaries since the invention of writing, and most of them are lost and forgotten. So what’s new?
I think David Lindén makes a great mistake here:
The ability to be selective, combined with the fact that the Church of Sweden has become an increasingly secular and liberal institution, has resulted in a general scepticism towards those who are more devout or put their religion on display “a bit too much” compared with society-wide norms.
Secularism and liberalism are two different things. Many religious people are very liberal without being any less devout.
James Delingpole on the upcoming report on human-made global warming:
Al Gore’s “consensus” is about to be holed below the water-line—and those still aboard the SS Global Warming are adjusting their positions. Some, such as scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, have abandoned ship. She describes the IPCC’s stance as “incomprehensible”. Others, such as the EU’s Climate Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, steam on oblivious. Interviewed last week by the Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield, she said: “Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said: ’We were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of the things you have to do in order to combat climate change?” If she means needlessly driving up energy prices, carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and terrifying children about a problem that turns out to have been imaginary, then most of us would probably answer “No”
“Pakistan’s first website for homosexuals has been blocked by the authorities,” BBC News reports.
However, the activist behind the website has relaunched it at a new address.
“Cuba on Thursday expanded the list of occupations open to the communist-ruled island’s fledgling private sector as part of a gradual reform of its Soviet-style economy,” France 24 reports.
There’s still some hope for human reason.
“The president of Gambia is using his address to the United Nations General Assembly to attack gays and lesbians, calling homosexuality one of the three "biggest threats to human existence,” ABC News reports. “It’s not the first time the Gambian ruler has used such harsh words. In 2008, he told gays and lesbians to leave the country or have their heads cut off.”
Representatives for five Swedish organisations, amongst them the Association of Health Professionals and the Ombudsman for Children, have written an article for newspaper Dagens Nyheter demanding a ban on Jewish circumcision. There’s nothing new in the article. All arguments for a ban are known, and so are the medical studies the authors refer to. The only news is a follow-up on a Danish study from 2011, which I have commented on here. I looked up the new study, which was conducted by researchers from the Department of Paediatric Surgery at Rigshospitalet and the University of Copenhagen, and found that it doesn’t address Jewish circumcision at all. The abstract clearly rules out the Jewish bris that takes place on the boy’s eight day:
Circumcision in 315 boys aged from 3 weeks to 16 years (median five years) were evaluated. A total of 16 boys (5.1%) had significant complications, including three incomplete circumcisions requiring re-surgery, two requiring re-surgery six months and five years postoperatively due to fibrotic phimosis and two requiring meatotomy due to meatal stenosis two and three year postoperatively. Acute complications included two superficial skin infections one week postoperatively and five cases with prolonged stay or re-admissions for bleeding the first or second postoperative day, whereof two underwent operative treatment. Finally, two had anaesthesiological complications leading to a need for overnight surveillance, but no further treatment.
Furthermore, contrary to a ban, the Danish researchers want parents to be more aware, which is hardly controversial amongst neither Jews nor Muslims. The researchers write:
Before surgery, parents should be counselled in detail and should be required to provide their informed consent that the possible health benefits of childhood circumcision do not outweigh the reported complication rate, and that they have weighed the health benefits against the risks in the light of their religious, cultural, and personal preferences.
This is pretty far from the ban.
It’s one of those days. No time for anything but work. But here’s a photo I took when I visited Copenhagen last week.