ICYMI: A Week of Reckoning [Richard Dawkins disinvite]

2017/08/02 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries on the Richard Dawkins’ affair by Andrew Sullivan:

It’s revealing, it seems to me, that Richard Dawkins is the latest target of the authoritarian left — and why he is under attack. This week, he was disinvited from a book event hosted by a progressive radio station, KPFA, because of his criticisms of Islam. “While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech,” the radio station explained. “We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins’s views [on Islam] much earlier.” This is hilarious. As anyone with a brain and an internet connection knows, Dawkins has made a second career out of vilifying religions of all kinds.

To take one random example, here’s what he has written of Judaism: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Why is he Islamophobic and not also obviously anti-Semitic? Why was one disqualifying and the other not? And I won’t begin to cite his fulminations against Christianity. Perhaps his sin was a recent, not completely relativist pronouncement that “it’s tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it’s a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they’re not. If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world, it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

Notice the qualifier: “at the present.” And with that qualifier, who, on earth, could deny this? Is there a Christian regime currently anywhere even close to ISIS’s caliphate? How many Jewish terrorists are setting off bombs at pop concerts full of young girls? History is replete with horrors of all religions when abused by fanatics. But today, it is Islam that is clearly out in front. Dawkins is not, moreover, attacking Muslims. In fact, in the same interview, he immediately followed up with this: “It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else.” KPFA couldn’t read that far?

I fear that the truth is Islam has become an untouchable shibboleth for some on the left. What they lacerate in other religions, they refuse to mention in Islam. Sexism, homophobia, the death penalty for apostasy … all of this is to be rationalized if the alternative is Islamophobia. Why, one wonders? Is it because Muslims are a small minority? But the same could be said for Jews. My best guess is simply that, for the far left, anything that is predominantly “of color” is preferable to anything, like Judaism and Christianity, that can usually be described as “white.” That’s how “intersectionality” can be used to defend what would otherwise be indefensible. The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right.

Source: A Week of Reckoning

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

HBO Responds to Twitter Protest Over ‘Confederate’ Series | Time.com

2017/08/01 Leave a comment

The commentary by the producers suggests that some of the concerns may have been excessive. Alternate realities, if done with sensitivity, can help further discussion:

HBO issued a statement Sunday night in response to an organized Twitter protest against the network’s planned alternate-history slavery drama from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and writer-producers Nichelle Tramble Spellman (Justified) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire).

“We have great respect for the dialogue and concern being expressed around Confederate,” the network said in a statement. “We have faith that Nichelle, Dan, David, and Malcolm will approach the subject with care and sensitivity. The project is currently in its infancy so we hope that people will reserve judgment until there is something to see.”

As hit series Game of Thrones aired on Sunday evening, the hashtag #NoConfederate trended globally on Twitter. “We believe the time to speak up is now before the show has been written or cast. Before @hbo invests too much money into #Confederate,” activist April Reign, one of a group of women who started the campaign, wrote on Twitter last week. “This Sunday at 9 p.m. ET, during @GameOfThrones, we ask you to stand with us. We want to send a message to @hbo using hashtag #NoConfederate.” (Reign launched #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 after the Academy Awards nominated an all-white slate of acting nominees.)

“We know we have the power to make change,” she added in another tweet. “Let’s show @hbo how many people are against #Confederate. Please join us Sunday w/ #NoConfederate.”

In an email to CNN, Reign added, “We would like HBO to cancel #Confederate and instead uplift more marginalized voices with a different series.”

HBO announced Confederate earlier this month. According to a press release from the network, the show “chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”

In the wake of the news, social media erupted in protest over the premise — a response the producers discussed in an interview with Vulture. “I do understand their concern,” Nichelle Tramble Spellman said. “I wish their concern had been reserved to the night of the premiere, on HBO, on a Sunday night, when they watched and then they made a decision after they watched an hour of television as to whether or not we succeeded in what we set out to do. The concern is real. But I think that the four of us are very thoughtful, very serious, and not flip about what we are getting into in any way. What I’ve done in the past, what Malcolm has done in the past, what the D.B.s have done in the past, proves that. So I would have loved an opportunity for the conversation to start once the show was on the air.”

Added Malcolm Spellman, “What people have to understand is, and what we are obligated to repeat in every interview is: We’ve got black aunties. We’ve got black nephews, uncles. Black parents and black grandparents. We deal with them every single day. We deal with the struggle every single day. And people don’t have to get on board with what we’re doing based on a press release. But when they’re writing about us, and commenting about us, they should be mindful of the fact that there are no sell-outs involved in this show. Me and Nichelle are not props being used to protect someone else. We are people who feel a need to address issues the same way they do, and they should at least humanize the other end of those tweets and articles.”

Last week, HBO president Casey Bloys took the blame for the way Confederate had been announced, saying it could have been handled with more grace.

“File this under hindsight is 20/20,” Bloys told reporters Wednesday at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. “If I could do it over again, HBO’s mistake — not the producers’ — was the idea that we would be able to announce an idea that is so sensitive that requires such care and thought on the part of the producers in a press release was misguided on our part. [We] had the benefit of sitting with these four producers, we heard why they wanted to do the show, what they were excited about, and why it was important to them, so we had that context, but I completely understand that somebody reading the press release would not have that at all. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve rolled it out with the producers on the record so people understood where they were coming from.”

Bloys added the show will not be “Gone with the Wind 2017” and that all the producers understand the “high degree of difficulty with getting this right.”

“But the thing that excites them that excited us is if you can get it right, there’s a real opportunity to advance the race discussion in America,” he added. “Again, what Malcolm said in one of his interviews was, ‘If you can draw a line between what we’re seeing in the country today with voter suppression, mass incarceration, lack of access to public education or healthcare, and draw a direct line between that and our past and our shared history, that’s an important line to draw and a conversation worth having.’ So it is very difficult, and they acknowledge there’s a high degree of difficulty, but they all feel — and we support them — that it’s a risk worth taking.”

Source: HBO Responds to Twitter Protest Over ‘Confederate’ Series | Time.com

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Canada’s real strength? It’s not diversity: Catherine Little

2017/08/01 Leave a comment

Valid point regarding diversity of choice that Canada offers regardless of origins, in terms of identities (but I wouldn’t necessity place it in opposition to the general point about diversity being a strength, just a reminder that of diversity within diversity, and the importance of choice):

Recently, I have been puzzling over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s comments during his interview with CTV’s Your Morning co-host Anne-Marie Mediwake. Ms. Mediwake described her family’s journey to Canada and the Prime Minister stated that he sometimes felt “jealous” of immigrants. His reasoning was that immigrants got to choose Canada while those born here were Canadians by default.

I don’t think there is anything to be jealous about. No matter how we came to be Canadian, our role in strengthening this country is dependent on the choices we make everyday. As an immigrant who did not personally choose Canada but has gratefully lived here for more than 90 per cent of my life, my perspective is this: I don’t believe the diversity of the population is our country’s greatest strength. Canada’s greatest strength is the diversity of the choices the population is free to make once we are here. Our future is dependent on enough people making wise ones.

Source: Canada’s real strength? It’s not diversity – The Globe and Mail

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Temporary Foreign Worker program must be changed, workers say

2017/08/01 Leave a comment

Hard to know how widespread this abuse is but nature of program and vulnerability of workers means significant potential for such abuse:

Henry Aguirre, a temporary foreign worker from Guatemala, considered himself lucky when he got a job in Quebec as a chicken catcher, rounding up poultry and handing them over for processing.

Aguirre, 27, said he was quickly disillusioned when he learned the job paid him by volume instead of full-time, with no pay for time spent travelling from farm to farm.

He said he and his fellow Guatemalan workers had signed job offers they didn’t understand since they were all written in French.

“We didn’t understand the work permit; if we had, we wouldn’t have signed,” he said through an interpreter in a recent interview.

Aguirre was one of a group of foreign workers and activists who attended a small demonstration outside Montreal’s St Joseph’s Oratory earlier this month to call for changes to Canada’s temporary foreign worker program.

Among other things, they are calling for an end to the practice of issuing closed work permits, which restricts a worker to a single employer.

Viviana Medina, a community organizer who attended the protest, said closed work permits, language barriers and a fear of losing their jobs means many workers are reluctant to file complaints against their employers.

“The moment they say something, they’ll be sent back,” she said. “They have to stay in these conditions because they don’t want to lose their jobs.”

A study from the Université du Québec published earlier this month found that many Guatemalan migrant workers in the province are charged recruitment fees in their home countries, despite such practices being prohibited.

The study, which is based on interviews conducted between June and November 2015, found some workers even ended up using the deeds to their homes as a guarantee they’d pay back the money they owed for recruitment fees, according to the spokesman for a union that helped with the study.

“The precarity that brings really makes it difficult for a worker to ever take a stand and complain about the working or living conditions or abuses in the workplace or lack of getting the things that were guaranteed to them,” said Pablo Godoy of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

The federal government says it acknowledges the need for action and has taken a number of steps to reduce exploitation and abuse of temporary workers.

“Changes include increased inspections, improved information sharing and referrals for criminal investigation, and administrative monetary penalties and bans for employers who violate program conditions,” Julia Sullivan, an official with the department of Employment and Social Development, wrote in an email.

The government plans to do more in the future by further increasing inspections and making sure workers and employers understand their rights and obligations, she said.

Aguirre, frustrated with catching chickens, eventually began using a job placement agency to look for other work.

He and 14 others were subsequently picked up by border services in Oct. 2016 accused of violating the terms of their work permit, he said.

The workers have filed complaints with the province’s workplace health and safety board and requested a judicial review of their treatment during their arrest.

Their lawyer, Susan Ramirez, says she’s met hundreds of workers who have been denied health care or other rights.

“It’s a systemic problem,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s problematic because they’re under the governance of one employer who ignores their rights, and there’s a language barrier.”

Aguirre, for his part, has successfully obtained an open work permit until October, when the request for a judicial review will be heard in court.

Source: Temporary Foreign Worker program must be changed, workers say

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New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks : NPR

2017/08/01 Leave a comment

Symbolic of an ongoing decline of America, and an increasing age of ignorance:

Keith Flaugh is a retired IBM executive living in Naples, Fla., and a man with a mission. He describes it as “getting the school boards to recognize … the garbage that’s in our textbooks.”

Flaugh helped found Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative group that fought unsuccessfully to stop Florida from signing on to Common Core educational standards.

More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida’s schools. A new state law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh’s group, allows parents, and any residents, to challenge the use of textbooks and instructional materials they find objectionable via an independent hearing.

Flaugh finds many objections with the books used by Florida students. Two years ago, members of the alliance did what he calls a “deep dive” into 60 textbooks.

“We found them to be full of political indoctrination, religious indoctrination, revisionist history and distorting our founding values and principles, even a significant quantity of pornography,” he says.

The pornography, Flaugh says, was in literature and novels such as Angela’s Ashes, A Clockwork Orange and books by author Tony Morrison, which were in school libraries or on summer reading lists.

Flaugh says he’s just as concerned about how textbooks describe U.S. history and our form of government. “I spent over 20 hours with a book called ‘United States Government,'” he says.

He found more than 80 places where he believes the textbook was wrong or showed bias, beginning with the cover. Its subtitle is “Our Democracy.”

“We’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic,” Flaugh says.

He believes many textbooks downplay the importance of individual liberties and promote a reliance on federal authority, and what he calls “a nanny state mentality.”

Members of Florida Citizens’ Alliance have other concerns, including how some textbooks discuss Islam. Others take issue with science textbooks and how they deal with two topics in particular: evolution and climate change.

Flaugh says the law, which was signed by the governor on June 26, is intended to make sure scientific theories are presented in a balanced way.

“There will be people out there that argue that creationism versus Darwinism are facts. They’re both theories,” he says.

Science educators say that’s a familiar argument and one that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a scientific theory.

“In everyday conversation, a theory is a hunch or guess,” says Glenn Branch, with the National Center for Science Education. “That’s not how scientists use it. For scientists, a theory is a systematic explanation for a range of natural phenomena.”

Cell theory, gravitational theory, and evolutionary theory are all evidence-based, well-tested explanations of aspects of the natural world.

Another member of Florida Citizens’ Alliance, David Bolduc, is most concerned about protecting the U.S. Constitution. But he also sees bias in how textbooks deal with science, including climate change.

“It seems to me it’s very slanted in one direction,” Bolduc says. “That man is at fault, and that it’s definitely happening and that it’s real. You know the Al Gore lines.” Bolduc also believes parents should be able to challenge how textbooks deal with evolution.

In Florida and nationally, it’s those last two topics — climate change and evolution — that have sparked the greatest interest. Branch says the bill clearly was formed with those issues in mind.

“In affidavits submitted to the legislature in support of the bill, they said, ‘we complained that they were teaching evolution. We complained that they were teaching climate change and they wouldn’t listen to us. So that’s why we need this new law,'” he says.

Under the law, school districts will still have the final say. Even so, some worry the law will have a chilling effect.

Brandon Haught, a high school environmental science teacher and a member of Florida Citizens for Science, says “a science teacher might feel like, ‘argh, I’ve got all this heat coming down on all of us teachers. Maybe we should just not teach it as strongly, maybe just briefly cover it and move on.'”

Florida’s Department of Education is developing guidelines for school districts on how to comply with the law. The state school board association says one thing is clear — more challenges to the textbooks adopted by Florida schools are likely.

Source: New Florida Law Lets Residents Challenge School Textbooks : NPR

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Sunday Times accused of antisemitism over column on BBC pay | The Guardian

2017/08/01 Leave a comment

Amazing how the editors let the offending piece through in the first place:

The Sunday Times has been accused of antisemitism after it published an article in its Irish edition that suggested the BBC presenters Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz were well paid because they are Jewish.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper removed an online version of the piece by Holocaust denier Kevin Myers on Sunday morning amid a wave of outrage, but it appeared in printed editions of the newspaper across Ireland.

Under the headline “Sorry ladies, equal pay has to be earned”, Myers wrote: “I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC – Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted – are Jewish. Good for them.

“Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the marketplace.”

Myers has previously written, in the Irish Independent: “There was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths.”

Winkleman is a regular Sunday Times columnist, writing weekly in the Style supplement.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism announced on Sunday it would report the paper to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. It said in a statement: “It is clear that Kevin Myers should not have been invited to write for the Sunday Times, and his editors should never have allowed the article to be published. That they removed the article within hours of publishing it is proof that the decision was irrefutably wrong.

“Rather than moving swiftly on, we now expect the Sunday Times to investigate how this happened, to hold the editor responsible and the columnist to account, and to publish a high-profile and clear apology. We have contacted the newspaper’s senior management and given them our views on what should happen next.”

Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, described the piece as “undiluted antisemitism and misogyny” while the former Europe minister Denis MacShane said the comments were “truly shameful”.

Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC television, called on the Sunday Times to prevent Myers from writing for any News UK paper ever again.

After the column was removed, the editor of the Sunday Times, Martin Ivens, issued a statement saying Myers’ comments were “unacceptable and should not have been published”.

“It has been taken down and we sincerely apologise both for the remarks and the error of judgment that led to publication,” he said.

The editor of the paper’s Irish edition, Frank Fitzgibbon, added: “I apologise unreservedly for the offence caused by comments in a column written by Kevin Myers and published today in the Ireland edition of the Sunday Times. It contained views that have caused considerable distress and upset to a number of people.

“As the editor of the Ireland edition I take full responsibility for this error of judgment. This newspaper abhors antisemitism and did not intend to cause offence to Jewish people.”

Ivens later added that Myers would not write again for the Sunday Times Ireland and said a printed apology would appear in next week’s paper. A News UK spokeswoman said he had apologised personally to Winkleman and Feltz “for these unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace”.

Source: Sunday Times accused of antisemitism over column on BBC pay | Media | The Guardian

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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