Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

TAM seemed to take quite a bad wrap for the harassment that has been reported (albeit never officially according to JREF president D.J. Grothe).

I’ve just read Amy Roth’s comments on the incidents that upset her at TAM. She notes that they had a team of 19 people tackling harassment and once she had raised her concerns, a member of the team regularly checked up on her to make sure she was OK.

While unfortunately, I didn’t make Amy feel any better, it certainly seems that TAM have been responsive to harassment concerns and implemented some positive steps to trying to prevent such issues.

When Catherine Bennett dared to speak out about MGM (male genital mutilation), there was soon a strong reaction from the right wing feminists condemning the comparison between MGM and FGM (female genital mutilation), pointing out that FGM is worse. The Guardian rounded up some reactions too.

The most severe forms of FGM are indeed far worse than MGM. But what I don’t understand, is how FGM being worse, that is then an argument for the legalisation of MGM. For example, I’ve never seen someone stand up in court and say “Rape? No, I only sexually assaulted her, so it’s fine.”

Obviously, it isn’t, and we wouldn’t buy that for a second.

It’s absolutely right that FGM is very illegal in the UK – so illegal that just getting on a plane to go to a different country to get it done is in itself illegal. Our laws are spot on here, no child should ever be subjected to FGM.

But nor should a male child be irreversibly mutilated into his parents religion for no either. Saying “it’s not as bad as FGM” is no defence when it comes to cutting off the end of a child’s genitals.”

Here is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has to say on the matter…

The continued spread of unethical meat throughout the UK is of particular concern to those of us who try and avoid it for such reasons. Over time, this is likely to place increasing restrictions on what we can and cannot eat.

KFC are currently running a “Halal” trial but I was pleased to read on their website that they have adopted a version of Halal, which is less Halal and more ethical. Here is what their website says…

9. Is KFC’s halal chicken stunned before slaughter?

Yes, due to our strict animal welfare standards, we insist that all our poultry is stunned before slaughter. Our halal chicken has been accredited by the Halal Food Authority, one of the most widely recognised bodies in the UK and overseas. It allows the use of a technique called ‘stun-to-stun’ – a pain-free process that makes the animal insensible to pain and suffering.

That’s probably a tune that we can all dance to.

As many of you will know, we’ve recently spent a great time of time bickering with each other over whose attitude towards equal rights for women is the most equal. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continues to cut out the genitals of their women before forcing them to walk behind the men.

At Leeds Skeptics we wanted everyone to have their say, so we held a debate “How should Skeptics deal with controversy?” Tom Williamson summed up his thoughts on his blog. Ophelia then wrote a piece about the blog post.

The original talk was entitled “Why aren’t their more women in the boardroom?” Seems like a sensible topic title, and one that fits very well into Ophelia’s suggestion that topics should be specific and useful. However, some of her commentors decided to suggest alternative titles.

“Precisely how stupid and misogynistic are male skeptics?” would make a good discussion. I look forward to Leeds Skeptics discussing this.

What?

The answer is a million. So, that’s settled.

Well, I have a question:

Are Tom Williamson and Steven Moxon REALLY equal to a pile of hog shit?

What? I’m just being skeptical!

I’m not sure they’re quite the same…

Tonight is “Ladies Night” at Oceana. You’ll notice the sexualised images of some young “buff” men in the posters, collectively known as the “Dream Idols” apparently.

This caught my eye because it’s easier to stand behind a claim such as “people should have the right to use their bodies for whatever purposes they wish”, when you’re not the victim. But take this example, it is my gender that is being used in sexual imagery to sell a product (in this case, entry to a night club).

Yet, I’m still entirely behind it. True empowerment and equality come from granting people the freedom to do as they wish. If they want to appear on a poster without a shirt on, who am I to tell them otherwise?

According to Wikipedia’s own figures, 91% of editors are male. According to another set of their figures, it’s 90%, with 9% women and 1% transgender.

Why is there such a bias towards males?

Stereotype threat doesn’t seem a very good fit for explaining – it’s a fairly anonymous system on the internet, and they only know what gender you are based on the answer you choose to give in the editor’s survey. Not to mention that the Foundation itself is dominated by women – Sue Gardner is Executive Director of the Wikipedia Foundation and Kat Walsh is the Chair of the Board.

The New York Times caused quite a stir when they wrote about it, quoting Jane Margolis who suggests “women are less willing to assert their opinions in public”. Meanwhile Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing in Business Insider, suggests that would upset many existing editors if they were discriminated against by pro-female initiatives.

Many people have weighed in on the debate too and Sue Gardner has done an excellent job of rounding up the opinions on her blog.

Indeed, opinions are so varied, that perhaps the message we can take from it is that more research needs to be done on the subject. It’s interesting to note that while women are very unrepresented, transgender people are actually over represented (1% of Wikipedia compared to 0.3% in the general population), so suggestions of it being a patriarchal problem wouldn’t seem to stand up.

In the meantime, you can always take some positive action and begin contributing to Wikipedia.

Last month, a report by the Commons Culture Committee concluded that our gambling legislation was “outdated” and “ill-equipped” to deal with globalisation.

I strongly agree. Having worked in the industry for years, I know first hand that our legislation is lagging behind.

For example, you can only have four FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) in a bookies. But over the last ten years, traditional betting has been almost entirely replaced by the use of FOBTs, and without them high street bookies would close. You could argue this is a good thing, but with millions out of work do we really want to go slashing many more jobs?

Secondly, we simply don’t have the legislation to deal with new technology. At Buzz, we developed a bespoke wireless terminal for our games. But what does this count as? A FOBT? It’s just a tablet computer in a case. Does that mean we can put them in pubs? Probably not. But if you took your own tablet into a pub, you could then gamble online. The Gambling Commission simply didn’t know what to do.

Thirdly, because of the online nature and high taxes in the UK, bookmakers can just move abroad – and most of them have. Running a website is the kind of thing you can do from Gibraltar, so they do. Not that it’s cheap – you have to pay staff a lot more money to go work out on some god-forsaken rock, but the tax difference is so great that is still works out cheaper. If we lowered taxes, we would bring that income back to the UK.

This is becoming more and more apparent, as services continue to move online. For example poker tournaments and live dealer casino games, once exclusively the preserve of the real world have now moved onto the internet. You can sit, at a table, with a live dealer, on the internet. When the technology is this good, we need to ensure that our legislation can keep pace with it, or we’re only hurting ourselves.

Over the past decade, the term female circumcision has been replaced by the term FGM – female genital mutilation.

It’s almost certainly a more accurate term. FGM is entirely unpalatable, the cutting out of a young girl’s genitals (you could say “before she is too young to consent” but that would be meaningless as almost nobody would ever give their consent for such an act, certainly nobody in the right state of mind) no for no reason than depriving her of one of the most basic human pleasures is a beyond-abominable act.

But such a change, without it’s male counterpart, has one drawback.

At the launch of Pro Life Through Pro Choice campaign, a pro choice group which advocated such a stance was also pro life, Norm innocently used the term “female circumcision”, only to be hounded for the rest of the meeting for having the nerve to accidentally use what some people in the room considered the wrong term.

But, when we used the term male circumcision, no such outcry was heard. Even though we now know such a procedure is just as unjustified as its female equivalent, the voices remain oddly silent.

This is a real problem because it creates a double standard – female circumcision gets upgraded to FGM because it’s so heinous, yet male circumcision is allowed to keep its name because it isn’t as wrong. That, as far as I can see, is the only message you can take away from such a change.

It creates at atmosphere where circumcision remains an acceptable term because we have a whole different term of something that is wrong. This gives the term circumcision a free pass – and it shouldn’t have one. It’s a betrayal of the young boys in our society to grant it one.

That isn’t to say that we should rename FGM back – we could simply rename its male equivalent to male gentile mutilation. But either way, we shouldn’t grant any more credence to the idea that it is more acceptable to mutilate a boy’s genitals, than it is a girls.

EDIT: Since originally penning this article, a friend pointed me to a news story on The Guardian in which some campaigners were quite open about the fact that thought millions of males should suffer in case it jeopardised their own position in some unknown way.

Recently, Leeds Salon hosted Ken McLaughlin, author of Surviving Identity: Vulnerability and the Psychology of Recognition.

The book itself is a good read. I found the first chapter or so, which discusses the transition from the old social movements (such as traditional labour and trade union movements) so the new social movements that we say today, went over my head somewhat. Not that it wasn’t well written or easy to follow, but I won’t claim to understand the nuances of the historical development of sociology. But beyond that, I settled into an enjoyable read.

Ken’s thesis looks at the increasing prevalence of the “survivor mentality” – once a term used for people who survived the Holocaust, now an increasing number of groups describe themselves as survivor groups, even though the category of things you can die from had been left long behind.

He also commented on the increase of people classified as “vulnerable adults”, which only 40 years ago was restricted to those with mental health issues that explicitly put them at risk of serious abuse, to today’s standard where simply being old can qualify you as a vulnerable adult, in which everyone who comes near you must be rigorously CRB checked, of which the extended CRB checks can include information like accusations – even if you are found innocent. Such restrictions don’t help the field of social care, but more importantly, they don’t help the people they are designed to protect.

If interested, you can find the book on Amazon.