Check this hot chick out!

Brave girl, strong character, intriguing perspective, look forward to seeing more of her stuff

She says: “I have very good self esteem in myself. I rarely start fights with people because I’m at peace with my soul. People who are jealous, will always put down others. If you point your finger at me and call me degrading names, I will bite your finger off and then shove it up your ass.”

And here’s some extract from an interview of her’s:

“No matter what Muslims do, every time a Muslim makes a film or writes a play or whatever about Pakistanis or Indians or w/e who aren’t “typical” they still get hate about it. It makes me so mad. Some Muslims ask me why do I write about “Muslim whores” and I’m like, why the fuck not? They exist.

…

I had hot pink hair once and my father was furious, he wouldn’t speak to me for 3 weeks. I told him to get over it. I can’t stand that patronizing bullshit from parents, especially Desi or Muslims. They are making judgmental remarks about people who dye their hair or get tattoos or wear revealing clothes. What the fuck does it matter to them? It’s their lives and their bodies, it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

I also used to wear hijab, too, you know. For about 3 years in the late 90s to early 2000s.

… one day, I had a wake-up call from a goth girl who was sitting next to me. She was the only one in the entire college who was nice to me, while everyone else were extremely nasty toward me. I stared at her hair and her outfit and then I thought to myself, “what the fuck happened to me? I used to be a punk and now I’ve become this?” and then I realized how wearing the hijab is such an artificial thing to do. I don’t want to piss off any hijabis here. But I truly felt that wearing the hijab was a slap in the face for women’s individuality and their bodies. Someone once said that wearing hijab is saying “YES, we women are sex objects, so we HAVE to cover ourselves to protect ourselves from men’s lustful glances!”and when I sat next to the goth girl I thought about how some Muslims would call her a “whore” because she was wearing a short skirt. But she was such a nice girl. And I felt dirty. I felt like a hypocrite. I still wore hijab for 1 more year after that goth girl incident and then I took it off.

When I wore the hijab, sometimes I was under the pressure to be a saint-like a proper Muslim who had to be polite and be on her best behavior all the time. Some people said that we hijabis were REPRESENTING Muslims and we had to be on our best behavior. That was a lot of pressure. When I took it off, I no longer felt that way. When I wore hijab, whenever I’d cuss or make sex jokes or whatever, people were shocked and looked confused. They would say, “Why are you talking this way? I thought you’re a good girl.” I hate that shit. Hijabis should be allowed to cuss and talk about sex and watch porn if they want to. They shouldn’t have to be saints for everyone else while they all go get drunk and have sex! Hijabis are humans, too.”

Her YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/VelmaSabina

Her website: http://www.sabinaengland.com/

Her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sabina-England-the-deaf-muslim-Punk-playwright/275393336529

Her creative writings: http://deadamericandream.blogspot.com/

Incident follows a wave of challenges to the authority of the commission enforcing religious law.

It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, he asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

“To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist told The Media Line. “People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”

“The media and the Internet have given people a lot of power and the freedom to express their anger,” she said. “The Hai’a are like a militia, but now whenever they do something it’s all over the Internet. This gives them a horrible reputation and gives people power to react.”

Neither the religious police nor the Eastern Province police has made a statement on the incident, and both the names of the couple and the date of the incident have not been made public, but on Monday the incident was all over the Saudi media.

Should the woman be charged, she could face a lengthy prison term and lashings for assaulting a representative of a government institution.

Saudi law does not permit women to be in public spaces without a male guardian. Women are not allowed to drive, inherit, divorce or gain custody of children, and cannot socialize with unrelated men.

Officers of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are tasked with enforcing such laws, but it hasn’t been an easy year for Saudi Arabia’s religious police.

The decision last year by Saudi King Abdullah to open the kingdom’s first co-educational institution, with no religious police on campus, led to a national crises for Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious authorities, with the new university becoming a cultural proxy war for whether or not women and men should be allowed to mix publicly.

A senior Saudi cleric publicly criticized the gender mixing at the university and was summarily fired by the king.

That was followed in December by a surprise announcement from Sheikh Ahmed Al-Ghamdi, head of the Saudi religious police commission in Mecca, who published an article against gender segregation, leading to threats on his life and rumors that he has or will be fired.

Meanwhile, the Saudi government has gone to great efforts recently to improve the image of the religious police, most notably by firing the national director of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice earlier this year. The new director Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Humain then announced a series of training programs and a special unit to handle complaints against the religious police.

But last month members of the religious police in the northern province of Tabuk were charged with assaulting a young woman as she attempted to visit her son, in a move that marked an unprecedented challenge to the religious police’s authority.

“There is some sort of change taking place,” Nadya Khalife, the Middle East women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch told The Media Line. “There is clearly a shifting mentality regarding to the male guardianship law and similar issues. More women are speaking out, there are changes within the government, there is a mixed university, the king was photographed with women, they want to allow women to work in the courts and there are changes within the justice ministry. So you can witness some kind of change unfolding but it’s not quite clear what’s happening and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.”

Copyright © 2010 The Media Line. All Rights Reserved.

“the earth will be better off when we go extinct…. ”

What do you mean by “the Earth will be better off”?

Do you have a clear definition of “better off”?

Can you measure it?

I think your comment is extremely unclear. But I have some thoughts regardless:

There are major differences between us and most other organisms on Earth. A cow in a farm does not worry about its impending execution. It doesn’t become stressed and ill thinking of any injustice done to its freedoms. Regardless of whether you value our complexity and ability to appreciate and learn about this Earth, cows do not suffer from many of the things which we do.

Nature is ruthless. I am all for maintaining the ecosystems but make no mistake about it; the number of offspring that species of organisms’ produce has always vastly outstripped the number that actually survive to reproduce. There is a great deal of suffering and hardship in the natural world. Many individuals suffer brutal lives and terrifying events. There are many parasitic species of very primitive cognition that do little more than cause immense suffering to more cognitively complex organisms.

I’ll make use of some ideology and say that, generally, I like that all individual humans should have their wellbeing and happiness increased and their suffering reduced; that animals under our care enjoy comfortable, pleasurable lives; that I like the biosphere to be maintained as near to its pre human history state as possible and that certain more cognitively complex species be protected from harm. From such a bias I then can do my best with the scientific methodology that has served us so well in manipulating the world around us.

But forget all that. I’ll take a guess at what your argument might be: I value biodiversity over all else and our species is reducing biodiversity to such an extent that I think it would be better that our species went extinct.

How do you think biodiversity is going to be effected by the extinction of our species?

What events might occur that are likely to catastrophically reduce biodiversity, and cause a great deal of nonhuman suffering, during the extinction of our species?

With the technology we have at our disposal what do you think could possibly kill ever last one of us not even leaving a few survivors left to repopulate a decimated Earth?

Indeed, even if you were to desire that we had not evolved, we have evolved. Just like every other species has.

You might argue that biodiversity will recover. But you don’t know that, not if you’re are talking about our extinction you don’t. And even if you were to wish such a catastrophic event upon not only your own species, but the rest of life on this planet for whatever reasons you have, what if another intelligent species were to evolve, and what when eventually all life on this planet is destroyed?

Our species is a fact. The future has not happened yet. You can try to aid your species in pursuit of such values as I hold, or wish for some inane catastrophe.

Hope you haven’t become angry *something* again Sorry if my post is a little blunt but wanted to make it as concise as possible for you.

Much love and respect

This is what the beautiful and talented gogreen18 was upset about, and rightly so:

Check out some of her excellent YouTube videos here: http://charleswardle.com/sexy-atheist-youtube-girls-2/

*Update* gogreen18 wasn’t serious Was just a causal statement. I enjoyed writing the post though and some people do think like that. I use to think like that when I was 17 or something; that our species is like a disease (or something) distroying the world.

Council of Ex Muslims: http://www.councilofexmuslims.com/

Check out their forum

And I suppose Muslims will say Allah created Mr. Penis Eater too

Of cause I don’t really care about “blame” (whatever the hell that means anyway).

Also, check out these excellent documentaries on the damage that the Taliban have been doing to peoples’ lives in Swat. They follow a family whose father runs a girls’ school and whose daughter is in the school system:

http://charleswardle.com/destruction-girls-education-in-swat-valley-pakistan/

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The Texas school board doesn’t seem to value fact much in children’s education. They much prefer to subject children to harmful and nonsensical ideologies.

Here’s some of the changes from a very good article on this story:

–Question the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government
–Cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state
–Present Republican political philosophies and figures in a more positive light, including Joe McCarthy
–Stress the superiority of American capitalism while eliminating the word “capitalism” from the text
–Refer to the United States form of government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic republic”
–Give Confederate president Jefferson Davis equal footing with Abraham Lincoln
–Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state”)
–Consistently defeated proposals to include more Latino figures as role models, though they failed to eliminate mention of Thurgood Marshall from the textbooks (he was the first black Supreme Court Justice and instrumental in the 1954 decision, Brown-v-Board of Education)
–Banned the children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” because they thought the author had also written a book on Marxism

Read the entire article from the Examiner here:

http://www.examiner.com/x-15870-Populist-Examiner~y2010m3d14-Texas-school-board-revising-curriculum-creating-controversy

Here’s the main fanatic who’s done this (a bloody dentist by the way) standing up to people who know better than him:

Al Jazeera report:

Texans speak out on this bullshit:

I’m very interested in debate regarding these issues occurring and also in what form the debate takes. As we know; Homo sapiens are a species like any other, regardless of our complexity, and our behaviour is produced through our biology and environments. Sometimes scientists seem to communicate with the public with commendable scientific clarity about, for example, the behaviour of non-human primates. When scientists accurately describe the behaviour of a species and the probable causes of certain behaviours, including explaining how we know that such an causative explanation is likely and others are not (usually from the resluts of experiments), this helps the public to accurately understand how such a species is behaving and what is likely to be causing such behaviour. It also helps develop logical, scientific, critical thinking skills.

However, sometimes the scientific clarity of the same scientist as described above seems to completely crumble when it comes to describing and explaining the probable/potential causes of human behaviour. Suddenly the behaviour of organisms’ (in this case humans’) is sometimes described as being evil, the behaviour is not described accurately at all, and simplistic explanations might be given for this “evil” behaviour. From a scientific/material perspective of life, the perspective that allows us to manipulate parts of atoms, grow human organs, put a plant gene into an animal and have it expressed, enables us to produce the vast majority of the technology we have around us, concepts such as “evil” are nonsense. They cannot be objectively defined or measured, and they do not help us better understand or investigate the world around us.

Another problem that can occur is when a popular scientist communicates an idea of theirs that is not supported in the scientific literature or community. A very good example of this is Dawkin’s “Virus of the mind” idea, that explains culture as being made up of inheritable particles of information that behave like genetic material propagated by viruses. While such an idea has not produced supportive results in scientific literature it is seemingly taken as scientific fact but many people, and sometimes even by the media.

My interest, in terms of these issues, is the well being and livelihood of individuals’ and social groups’ in New Zealand society. I don’t want people to suffer and be harmed. I would like everyone to have pleasurable lives. For a public debate to be profitable in these areas I think it is important that the behaviour of radical Muslims’ be described as accurately as possible as well as the probabilities of potential causes for such behaviour. When you can understand something accurately you are far more likely to manipulate the environment towards desired ends; this is being constantly proved through science.

Human behaviour is very complex, and simplistic applications of scientific theories to human behaviour and societies should be avoided. Social welfare does not mean there is no natural selection. Theories of natural selection do not imply benefits in having no social welfare.

In terms of scientists in relevant fields there are those in: Evolutionary Religious Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Biological Anthropology, Biologists, and social scientists who are guided by the scientific method and scientific knowledge (as opposed to postmodernists, for example, who reject objective measurable reality in favour of making stuff up according to their fancies).

Blame and prejudice might be appealing to us (and that’s something which has potential explanations as well), and we tend to be prejudice against those we consider to be “others” as opposed to “our people”, yet such tendencies make no sense of the events that we are trying to deal with and offer little in the way of possibilities that are likely to produce the kind of results I am interested in.

In America, for example, Black people are more likely to be convicted of crimes, deal drugs, fight, steal, etc. compared to White people. They have been condemned and punished by American society for some time. Yet, a very popular and proud culture has developed around such a lifestyle and is now manifest in hip hop, etc.

People don’t generally seem to respond to well to prejudice and discrimination.

The most radical, Al Qaeda culture like individuals I have met, have a great deal of qualities that I think are positive for New Zealand society. You normally won’t find them drunk driving, stealing, fighting, or making a nuisance of themselves. They are often considered upstanding members of their communities. They consider themselves to be highly moral, and are often considered as such. I think that people are far more likely to respond positively to a respectful approach that doesn’t give in to the pressures to condemn, blame and discriminate.

Our species has a common human nature. We are very closely related. I would like you to think on how you would answer this question based on a thought experiment:

If all babies born in Afghanistan in one year were swapped with babies born to White Kiwis, do you think this would change the behaviour of that generation of people in Afghanistan from what it would have been if they had raised their own children?

If you think that it would make much of a difference then I would say your view is prejudice, as such a view is not consistent with the evidence.

It is not some “evil nature” that produces radical Muslims. It is events in the life histories of such people. Either you can try to understand what is going on and do something practical about it, or you can do what people tend to do and probably contribute negatively to the well being and livelihoods of people in New Zealand society. After all, Western Europe has a tremendously violent history of incredibly radical and harmful ideologies that are no less absurd when contrasted with modern science than Islamic texts are. But the recorded history of our species is incredibly tiny compared to our evolutionary history; clearly we are capable of a great deal of rapid change not just as individuals but also in the nature of our cultures and societies.

We are constantly trying to manipulate one another. Definitely there are forms of manipulation that through experience we have learned are better avoided (e.g. manipulating what people are free to talk and communicate about). What would be great, in my view, is if scientists and others were brought together with the goal of better understanding what we are dealing with and constructing possible interventions that have a good chance of being successful.

When I studied management that we never were taught what a human was, even though human behaviour was the subject of our studies, and scientific methods were not utilised to much of an extent in guiding management research. Imagine if an aeroplane mechanic didn’t really know what an aeroplane was, didn’t know how they came to be, didn’t know the principles that explain how they operate; I doubt whether they could keep the things in the air and they would be unable to improve quality or produce beneficial modifications to any useful extent. Yet when it comes to researching human behaviour and making important decisions about interventions there is often a total absence of any accurate understanding of the issues at hand. For example, in management an area of much study was stress, and yet while there is very good scientific knowledge regarding stress (see Robert Sapolsky) and this information is directly related to what we were studying and could offer a great deal of insight and possibilities, we never studied such material; instead making do with feeble concepts which may or may not be useful.

Something I try to remember is that in attacks from Islamic militants Muslims tend to be no safer than non Muslims. Individually there are clearly far more dangerous threats that are far more likely to impact us (e.g. traffic) than whatever the chance of being caught in IED in New Zealand is. If an attack did occur it is Muslims’ who will likely lose the most. Imagine there was an attack in NZ and your name is Mohammad Abdullah, you are from Iraq, you look and sound like an Arab, you might not even go to the mosque except when some religious family member gets married or something, and tomorrow you are going to a job interview and will send your children off to school. Imagine how the social environment in NZ would change with such an attack, especially directly after, and imagine how you would feel going into that interview. Do you think you’d get the job? That you’d be judged fairly like the legislation says? Do you think your children will be safe? How will they be treated by their peers?

When I was a Muslim I sought to “listen and obey” believing that “Allah knows best”, that “He” is “Most Gracious”, “Most Merciful”.

To “Him” we belong, and to “Him” we will return. None has the right to be worshipped except “Him”. And there is no greater crime than to deny “Him”:

Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 38, Number 4390:

Narrated Atiyyah al-Qurazi:

I was among the captives of Banu Qurayzah. They (the Companions) examined us, and those who had begun to grow hair (pubes) were killed, and those who had not were not killed. I was among those who had not grown hair.

I would also rationalise such a command by saying to myself that children often take part in warfare at a young age.

While I was a Muslim I thought it was haram, forbidden, to kill women, children, and the elderly. I was incredibly dismayed by many actions of the Mujahideen. It was such disappointment that was involved in my losing interest in Islam and not practicing it for some time before I was employed by the NZSIS.

Later I learned there was evidence for killing pre pubescent children, along with women and the elderly. I already knew you could bombard military positions where there were civilians, but didn’t know you could massacre them intentionally.

Thanks for bring the hadith to my attention Imam Awlaki and Fauzan, the youth coordinator for Masjid At Taqwa, Manakau:

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 256:

Narrated As-Sab bin Jaththama:

The Prophet passed by me at a place called Al-Abwa or Waddan, and was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).” I also heard the Prophet saying, “The institution of Hima is invalid except for Allah and His Apostle.”

Sahih Muslim, Book 019, Number 4322:

It is narrated by Sa’b b. Jaththama that he said (to the Holy Prophet): Messenger of Allah, we kill the children of the polytheists during the night raids. He said: They are from them.

Such texts are used by popular Islamic militant leaders, such as Omar Bakri who was formerly based in the UK, to justify contemporary acts of violence:

Be it on your conscious too, those who oppose so called “cultural imperialism”.