In-Sight Publishing

2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Universal Basic Income, Strongmanism, Human Rights, and Fearlessness (Part Five)

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/15

Abstract

Dr. Iona Italia is an Author and Translator, and a Sub-Editor for Areo Magazine, and Host of Two for Tea. She discusses: incentivization of the arts and humanities; responding to those who do not see the value in the arts and the humanities; varieties of strongmanism; the whys of the current situation and how to get out of it; and final feelings or thoughts in conclusion.

Keywords: Areo Magazine, human rights, Iona Italia, Two for Tea, UBI, strongmen.

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Universal Basic Income, Strongmanism, Human Rights, and Fearlessness: Host, Two for Tea & Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we’re looking to incentivize, in some manner, civic culture, arts and humanities culture, how do we do it? There is the obvious answer of it is coming out of the intrinsic need to express oneself, explore the world of ideas, of the history of the world. However, what else?

Dr. Iona Italia: I suggest UBI. I think that is currently the best, most practical suggestion. Of course, like any system, some people will “abuse” it. I do not think it is abuse. Some people will choose to live on the low income that UBI provides. I think it is $1,000 a month they are suggesting for the US, which is a small income for the US. That is about what I currently live off, but I live in Argentina.

I think most people will either go and get a job that earns much more than that or they will take the UBI and they will use it as that safety net to be able to put energy into things like Areo Magazine, into podcasts, into writing, into art. Those are all things that we cannot seem to monetize easily but which do enrich our lives. It will also enable people to do things like care for their elderly parents, disabled partners, et cetera, and it will cut down on bureaucracy, enormously.

It will not punish people for going back to work, for example, because if you go to work and earn your salary, you will still receive your $1,000 in UBI, so you will not be tempted to stay on welfare because otherwise you will be penalized financially for going to work. So, I am a big fan. I think that would be one good start.

2. Jacobsen: What would be a proper response to individuals who completely see no value, or little value in the arts and humanities and productions for or coming out of civic culture?

Italia: If people see no value in something, it is rather hard to persuade them. All you can say is, “You live in civil society and other people value this.” You can, I think, though, see a good example of what happens when education is entirely technical with the kinds of things that are coming out of India and the movement on the Indian far-right, which is very much driven by young men from technical colleges, who have degrees, who have PhDs but they have absolutely zero humanities education at all.

They know how to do programming or to build a bridge, but they have no background in literature or history. They’ve become absolute fodder for this worrying, troubling strong rise of a violent terrorist, ethnonationalist, far-right movement in India. That’s one cautionary tale, there.

3. Jacobsen: Also, we’re seeing this in many forms when we’re seeing it a form of strongmanism, and then men who identify with the form of strongmanism.

We can see this in a secular garb with Xi Jinping in mainland China with the elimination of terms limits. We can see the imposition of that through re-education camps, or at least, a million.

We can see this with Orbán in Hungary, saying the state stance is there are only male and female, which is a traditional fundamentalist Abrahamic religious stance. We can see this with, I think, Theresa May, in a bit. I think she’s one that comes up. We can also see this with Bolsonaro.

Italia: Bolsonaro.

Jacobsen: Who was at the top of the polls? Lula. Who is in prison? Lula. What happens when Bolsonaro gets into office? Immediately within a week, LGBTI+ rights and indigenous land rights are the first things to be targeted, in certain ways.

Italia: And of course, throughout the Muslim world you, you have strongmen in most of those countries. We’re already talking about the movement in India and “Modi the strongman”. You have Putin.

Jacobsen: Duterte.

Italia: Yes. You have people from the left, as well, who are doing this, left-wing authoritarians like Maduro. You already mentioned China.

Jacobsen: The typical story is men in most positions of power and influence and most of the men making those important decisions. We’re seeing a rise in the aggressive form of that, where it is you were noting it as “ethnonationalism,” sometimes connected to religious fundamentalist revivalism, or something like this.

Italia: Yes, in some African countries also.

4. Jacobsen: Two questions, whys and hows there, we have got a few minutes left. One, why? Two, how do we get out of it?

Italia: [Laughing] What an easy couple of questions! Why? I do not know. I officially studied English literature, but I did, of course, study lots of history because of my specialist period interest. One thing I can tell you is that history is highly contingent. You have one accidental event happening.

I am often asked to decide, for example, on Twitter, people often ask me, which is the greater threat, the far right or ultra-woke Social Justice excesses. I find the far right a bit scarier, but which is the greater threat? I have no idea because I do not have a crystal ball. It is impossible to predict the future. It is hard to know, even, how historical things happened. We can trace how but we cannot trace the why.

Perfect storms happen all the time. This thing happened. It led to this. That led to that. There are many, many feedback loops and snowball effects. I do not have a good answer to the “why”. “How”. I do not have a good answer to the “how” except that I think that we must keep returning—and it sounds so corny, I know—but we must keep returning to universal little humanism.

I used to think the liberal part of that was the most important part, but now I tend to think that the universal part may be the most important. I am currently reading Nick Christakis’s book, Blueprint, which is very much about this. We must abandon identity politics of all stripes, and we must return to a strong focus on the things that unite us.

5. Jacobsen: Does a return to human rights, or maybe a re-emphasis on human rights, provide such a framework? We see this in specific documents, for instance, on women’s rights with the Beijing Declaration from 1995. We can also see this 71 years ago with the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948. Would these suffice as bases?

Italia: No. Legislation never suffices on its own without cultural change, as well, but, as I said before, both cultural changes can drive legislation, also, legislation can drive cultural change. On its own, no, but it is a start.

Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts, in conclusion, based on the conversation today?

Italia: I guess my final thought is that I think that one big problem is that there is too much fear around speech. Even when people’s free speech rights are guaranteed, people are, of course, and always will be, in certain situations, careful about what they say, and this can be a good thing.

But when you are discussing bigger philosophical or political or social issues, it is important to be fearless, to explore ideas by talking through them, i.e. to work out what you think about the issue over the course of discussion rather than coming with a fixed agenda, with your conclusions already in place, and then presenting that as if you were…This is the difference between real political discussion and high school debating, the type that Ben Shapiro does. You stand up and you’re going to win your point.

Not for reasons of ego, but also that means that you must even contemplate some ideas that are either politically incorrect, or that are evil-adjacent, let’s say, but are not actually evil. Sometimes the right answer is close to a wrong answer. That is the way that things are.

We need more fearlessness in what we’re willing to talk about and how we’re willing to talk about it. Only then will we come to the good solutions and will we be able to debunk the bad ones.

6. Jacobsen: Thank you much, and best of wishes with your chocolate chai and your keto diet.

Italia: Thanks. Bye-bye.

Jacobsen: Bye.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Host, Two for Tea; Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine.

[2] Individual Publication Date: September 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/italia-five; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

2023-02-16

An Interview with Distinguished University Professor Gordon Guyatt, OC, FRSC on GOBSAT, Guidelines, Living Documents, and Network Meta-Analysis (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/08

Abstract

Dr. Gordon Guyatt, OC, FRSC is a Distinguished University Professor is the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact at McMaster University. He discusses: professional research in the fall of 2018; hopes of a reduction in the timelines of publication of guidelines; reducing communication time and update time; message to skeptics of medicine in the mainstream; other professional areas to explore; early hypothesized applications of network meta-analysis or NMA; limits to pairings of NMAs; 2010s as the decade of NMAs; and the integration of NMAs into guideline methodologies.

Keywords: Canada, evidence-based medicine, Gordon Guyatt, medicine, network meta-analysis, NMA.

An Interview with Distinguished University Professor Gordon Guyatt, OC, FRSC on GOBSAT, Guidelines, Living Documents, and Network Meta-Analysis: Distinguished Professor, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University; Co-Founder, Evidence-Based Medicine (Part One)^[1]^,[2]^,[3],[4]

*Footnotes in & after the interview, & citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With regards to professional research for the fall of 2018, what are some of the new projects arising? What are the new questions being asked?

Gordon Guyatt: I will tell you some, what I would consider highlights. So, clinicians nowadays are relying heavily on guidelines. So, there is a medical electronic textbook called up to date that provides recommendations.

That is probably the number one resource in the world, certainly in North America, and provides recommendations. There are specialty societies in heart and lung and kidney and everything else. Young and older clinicians are paying great attention to these guidelines.

Over the last 20 years, there have been standards developed for trustworthy guidelines. There was an older model of guidelines, which was affectionately referred to as “GOBSAT”.

Jacobsen: [Laughing]

Guyatt: GOBSAT means good old boys sitting around a table.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That is right.

Guyatt: That is how guidelines used to be developed but now we have a science of producing guidelines. I have been fortunate to be involved in the development of some of those standards. So, you have these up to date standards. It produces recommendations quickly. I do consult for them, trying to make them more evidence-based.

So, they do a pretty good job, but the nature of what they do, they do not adhere fully to the standards of trustworthy guidelines. Pretty good. Then some, not far from all, but some of the specialty societies adhere to the standards of trustworthy guidelines.

But they put together a team and it is a big production and it takes them a year to get there to get their guideline together, and then they’re so exhausted that they have to wait another two years before they start the process again.

So, the guidelines, many of them become quickly out of date. So, the question is, “Can one have trustworthy guidelines that are also updated when there is new evidence that is quickly updated?” So, there is also a science of pulling together the literature.

We call it systematic reviews. Again, I have been privileged too, as that science has developed over, starting a little farther ago, maybe 30 years ago. We know how to do that. I have been involved.

So, it was a systematic review out there. A new piece of evidence, we can update it quickly. So, it is good to know. Then a colleague who trained with me from Norway, who was interested in the whole guideline endeavour. He said, “Somebody’s got to do it, so that we follow the trustworthy guidelines standards. We update quickly, you and your team show we can update our systematic reviews quickly.”

We do have a process for producing this the trustworthy guidelines quickly. I said, “Pierre, you are right, but who’s gonna listen to us? We are not up to date. We are not the American Thoracic Society or the American Heart Association, who is going to listen to us?”

So Pierre said, “What if one of the top journals put out our new recommendations and published it as their endorsed recommendations?” He persuaded the BMJ to buy into the idea. So, for the last couple of years, we have been producing what we call BMJ rapid recommendations. So, a new study is published, we think it’s practicing changing information. We get our systematic review done in a matter of several weeks.

We put our guideline panel together and target within 90 days of the publication then we have our updated recommendation. Ideally, it would come in that time frame, as we think we have done our part. BMJ [Laughing] has been a little slow.

But producing these BMJ rapid recommendations, it is exciting. We have provided the ability once before to say that success will be when and with a particular activity, we become redundant. It felt good at the time, 20 years later, when we start to become redundant; it does not feel quite so good.

So, I shouldn’t be worn. But hopefully, these BMJ rapid recommendations someday will be redundant, when they went out of date then they can bump up their standards of maybe making theirs more trustworthy, and or the sub-specialty societies realize that they shouldn’t be putting out these guidelines every two years.

They should be making them living guidelines and updating. But until they do that, and we become redundant, it is fun leading the field and providing a model that this can be done, and how it should be done.

2. Jacobsen: With some software, people do open source. So, you have these, as you phrase it “living documents,” but software. So, people have continually updated and improved, basically, algorithms to perform a specific task, which is an idea built into that.

By analogy is interesting, if you were to smooth out some of the rough edges of process, and, into 2020 say, what will be your hope in terms of not only reduction of the 90 days, but also in terms of big journals, like BMJ, in terms of their process of publication?

Guyatt: They could. It is tough for them. But I could tell them ways that they could do it. It requires resources. Even the top journals have limited resources and require a level of commitment and devoted staff, which is resource-intensive, it couldn’t be done.

It would be better if it didn’t need to be the journals. So, the specialty societies have their ‘why we gave up on them’ is they have their bureaucracy. As they pass through their board before it gets out, they need a way of streamline.

Because they should all have teams our BMJ rapid recommendation team ready to update continuously. It started, the journal publication process slows things down. They have their bureaucracy. They need to streamline that to get their living guidelines out quickly.

So, that is what we would hope would happen in the future. That is still the model we want to provide that will help them do that.

3. Jacobsen: Can there be a way in which to use something like an open-source platform to reduce, for instance, communication time and update time?

Guyatt: We have something called the system of developing these recommendations. It has been around for 15 years or so. We call it GRADE. So, it is a way of looking at the quality of the evidence and the strength of recommendations. It is this graded approach that is a crucial part of trustworthy guidelines. Pierre and his colleagues in Norway have come up with a nonprofit company that they call MAGIC, for “making great the irresistible choice.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Guyatt: It includes the MAGIC app, which is an electronic platform.

And we think this platform is there. As soon as we finished, we have it on the platform. It can be disseminated. It is out there. As a link anybody can go to, but before we can put it out, we would likely have to get the pass to go through the BMJ peer review process.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Guyatt: We could do it for specialty societies and put it out in the same way. But it has to go through their process. So, we have got to the electronic communication part of it. We have got that. It is that the bureaucracy is saying, “Yes, you can disseminate it now.”

4. Jacobsen: This brings to mind something like a mild peripheral question. When people are excessively skeptical about the scientific process, especially in medicine, often, I get the sense that they do not understand how difficult getting good-quality evidence and robust guidelines of research out are in the end analysis. What will be your short message to them?

Guyatt: These are people who are skeptical about the whole medical scientific endeavour?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Guyatt: The fraud is extremely unusual – unusual, but it happens. Overwhelmingly, scientists are interested in making the world a better place. Where they need to be cautious is financial conflicts of interest, researchers being attached to their own research; everybody thinks that their study is the greatest.

That is the problem. So, there are dangers. But there is such a thing as high-quality science, which, as you say, is challenging to produce, challenging to summarize. But there are trustworthy sources of evidence. They have to get some help in recognizing them.

5. Jacobsen: Is there anything else that in the professional areas we want to explore?

Guyatt: Trouble is, I am not sure what; I am what’s called a methodologist. So what turns me on is not the latest discovery of this, that, and the other thing, which might be the general audience thing, but advancing the methods.

So, at the expense of not necessarily being the most interesting finding, we came up with systematic reviews, which take all the best evidence and have a scientific standard for putting together all the best evidence.

Now, we know how to do that and with a set of rigorously. But then we summarize it, we can get each outcome for death, heart attack, stroke. We have a summary that says, “Here is our best estimate of the effect of the treatment on mortality, sorry it does not affect mortality, on stroke it reduces stroke by a small amount. Sorry, it affected myocardial infarction. Oh, there is a big effect in reducing myocardial infarction,” so hard at times.

So, we have got the system and it is called meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is the statistical approach, where you put all the evidence together, and you come up with the best estimate of effect.

But you could compare two treatments. But now often we have six treatments, or sometimes 12 alternatives. So, for instance, there are probably 20 drugs out there. When you are depressed, there are 20 drugs out there.

You’ve got rheumatoid arthritis, we have these new biologic agents, there are 10 of these biologic agents. Which one is the best? Or what are the best?

What are the collections of ones that do better than others?

We didn’t have a way of doing this. In the last decade, the statisticians have come up with something called network meta-analysis, where you can simultaneously compare all these treatments.

This is new science. We are figuring out how to do it well, how to interpret the results. The results are coming out in these huge tables that are completely uninterpretable to anybody. How do we take that? How do we take that and summarize it in a way that is true to the data and is still useful to the condition?

This is all an adventure to get these networks. This network meta-analysis optimized, and to find ways of having an output that is true to the data and still makes sense so the conditions in our health are helpful to the conditions and to the patients. Our group was involved in that process. That is exciting for us.

6. Jacobsen: What are some of the early applications hypothesized with regards to network meta-analysis?

Guyatt: So here’s one of the things. It is an initially misguided approach. We thought that this will tell you the best treatment; seldom is there a best treatment, so it needs to be reframed as, “Here are the three that you might want to consider for these reasons. You probably do not want to even think about these other three.” So, your patient may fit best with one of these three, which have their merits.

So, we are able to say, “Here, of these dozen things out here, here’s the two or three that you might want to take that you are that are thought to be best for your patients.” So, there is an explosion of these network meta-analysis, providing that advice.

So, without this approach, it was much, much more difficult when you have a dozen things out there. You have this paired comparison with A versus B, and then another C versus D. But the drug companies all compared to placebo, they do not have too many comparisons of these things. When they do you have A to B, B to C, but he hasn’t been compared to D, and so on.

Jacobsen: Right.

Guyatt: So, how do you make sense of this? The network meta-analysis allows one to make sense of it.

7. Jacobsen: Is there a limit to the pairings in the network meta-analysis?

Guyatt: No. There is no limit to network meta-analysis.

Jacobsen: That is exciting.

Guyatt: The limits are when you have a net we have meta-analysis with a dozen treatments or 15 treatments, the output is this…

Jacobsen: …[Laughing]…

Guyatt: …gigantic, take A versus B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and CB vs. blah, blah, blah. Anyways, these giant tables reach outcomes that are extremely difficult to make any sense out of. Also the limitation, the arithmetic, the statistic goal, work and handling of any numbers comparisons.

It is more difficult to make sense with the more comparisons there are; the more difficult it is to make sense of the network that emerges. Our work is in making some things about the statistics and how to do that best, but also interpreting and making sense of the whole thing, and interpreting in a way that makes sense to clinicians.

8. Jacobsen: With regards to evidence-based medicine, could the 2010s be considered the network meta-analysis decade?

Guyatt: Yes, yes, yes, yes. There are other things. There are other things that I hope will be part of the next decade. But yes, definitely, meta-analysis itself, the first was a huge advance. This network meta-analysis definitely takes things forward.

Jacobsen: So if these updates to these rapid-fire guidelines happen, and if we do them in 90 days, we send them off to the journal; and they have their own margin of error.

Guyatt: 90 days is supposed to take into account the journal processing.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Guyatt: We had one or two that have made the 90 days, but not quite. We are supposed to do ours in 60 days. They give them 30.

Jacobsen: So then 60-120 days. The 60-120 days’ rapid-fire updates. So, basically getting, somewhere between six and three of these per year, given that timeline.

Guyatt: But we are working on some of them simultaneously.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] So, even more.

Guyatt: But, our capacities are limited, 6 to 9 per year.

9. Jacobsen: That is cool. So, you are doing this in the 2010s, with a network meta-analysis, and you are having these guidelines updated nine to 12 per year. How integrated is network meta-analysis into this guideline methodology in terms of producing them?

Guyatt: Good question, makes it more challenging. We have had two. We have done definitely closer to the 6 per year. So, we have done a dozen or so of them, which have involved network meta-analysis.

So, but again, we are getting better at doing the NMAs quickly. I must admit, the NMAs, the Network Meta-Analysis, that we have done has already involved a few treatments. We can try to do one quickly with a dozen treatments.

We’ll get there. But we need more experience before we can take that on. But we have done them with relatively small networks, and we have done NMAs in the updating process.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Distinguished Professor, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University; Co-Founder, Evidence-Based Medicine

[2] Individual Publication Date: September 8, 2019, at http://www.in-sightjournal.com/guyatt-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020, at https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] B.Sc., University of Toronto; M.D., General Internist, McMaster University Medical School; M.Sc., Design, Management, and Evaluation, McMaster University.

[4] Credit: McMaster University.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Dr. Norman Finkelstein and Professor Alan Dershowitz, American and British Academe, and Trends in Tenure (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/08

Abstract

Dr. Iona Italia is an Author and Translator, and a Sub-Editor for Areo Magazine, and Host of Two for Tea. She discusses: Dr. Norman Finkelstein and Professor Alan Dershowitz; academe and probabilities of tenure; a trend in academe; and the how and why of the devaluing of the arts and the humanities.

Keywords: academe, Alan Dershowitz, American, Areo Magazine, British, Iona Italia, Norman Finkelstein, Two for Tea.

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Dr. Norman Finkelstein and Professor Alan Dershowitz, American and British Academe, and Trends in Tenure: Host, Two for Tea & Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One, I am thinking of individuals who, either due to life circumstance or a change of purpose in life, made a deliberate choice to leave academe. A second category, I am thinking of individuals who were either blacklisted, kicked out, or defamed in some way such that they could not recover from it.

Italia: Of course, there are also people who did not get tenure, did not get enough publications et cetera, the usual things. In academe, that is common.

Jacobsen: That third category can relate to the second category. I think of the case of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University. Here was a case of someone several books in, well-published, going for tenure at DePaul, not going for tenure at Yale or something, but a decent university.

Harvard’s youngest full law professor ever, Professor Alan Dershowitz, starts spreading rumours and lies, and defaming him, saying, “Do not let him get tenure.” Why does he say this? Because he was critical of some aspects of not necessarily Holocaust memorializing, but abusing the use of it for financial or political gain, and said The Case for Israel (2003) contained plagiarisms.

One example was a book called From Time Immemorial (Ed. Joan Peters). He went through the citations and references in the book. He found out the whole thing was one big, fat fraud. Professor Chomsky tells him, ‘You can do it, but if you do, you are going to show a certain category of intellectuals as frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they are going to come after you.’ He went ahead and did it anyway. He’s been maybe 10, 15 years, in his words: not unemployed, alone, but unemployable.

That third category can relate to the second category. There are not distinct cases of it.

Dr. Iona Italia: In the early 2000s, I taught at a liberal arts college in the US. I probably will not say the name, I think, even though I have nothing particularly bad to say about it, but it was one of the top-ten ranked colleges in the States. My CV is online, so if anybody wants to know, they can go and look. It is not secret. Then I taught at UEA.

In the UK, the atmosphere is much more relaxed in academe than it is in the US. In the US, at teaching colleges, you must pretend that you are ready to give a kidney for the students, as necessary. If you are not yet tenured, you are much on your best behaviour in all kinds of ways.

This was before Social Justice began taking off. The Social Justice movement with a capital S and a capital J. Nevertheless, toeing the line, being seen to agree with everybody, being decorous, it is a hierarchical system. Whether or not you get tenured, things like whether people like you are important to that. I can see that being a factor.

In the UK, academics are much more cynical. They tend to bitch about students and about each other. We had big fights at faculty meetings. People are relaxed. Your tenures depend on one thing, and one thing alone, and that is the number of publications that you have within that RAE cycle—Research Assessment Exercise cycle—because the department’s funding is dependent on the results of the RAE, so your job is also dependent on the results of the RAE.

That is a difference in emphasis which might well affect the atmosphere in the UK versus the US. Now, Social Justice has entered the mix as one of the ways in which you have to be on your best behaviour, I imagine, at many schools. It must depend on the department, the individuals there, et cetera.

I think that back when I was teaching, I do not recall it being an issue at all. I do remember that when I was teaching there, The Bell Curve came out, Charles Murray’s book. I read it. I thought it was boring. I read it because I had seen in the New York Times that it was some scandalous book, so I decided to read it.

I remember having this sudden shock when I got to the part where he surveys the IQ of the different groups. I thought, “I do not like this idea at all.” Then I turned the page and he was talking about how nobody knows if this is genetics, or environment, or some mixture, or whatever, and I disregarded it. A couple of other people in my department read it. They were like, “Nah.” Then it was never mentioned again, for example.

I do remember that somebody in the department used the word “fist-fuckers” in the title of one of their courses.

Anyway, the title of the course was “Dykes, Something, and Fist-Fuckers.” I cannot remember what the third thing is. The board of directors objected to this. Some parental committee objected. The Dean stood up for the person’s academic freedom. The course continued to have the word “fist-fuckers” in the title.

I think it was in sociology, or maybe it was in English. [Laughing] I cannot remember even which department, whether it was in our department or not. I do remember that being the one time that something blew up that was freedom of speech-related, at the college, whilst I was there.

We did have sexual harassment training, which was fun. We had to do roleplaying. I enjoyed that because I used to be a keen thespian. I used to do a lot of theatres when I was an undergraduate. I remember how enjoyable that was. Afterwards, though, I heard that—although there had been a couple of cases in which students had brought suits against other students—no student in the history of the college had brought a sexual harassment suit against a professor, so I relaxed again.

We did also have the instruction that you must never close the door when you are with a student, which was awkward because I was a student advisor. Sometimes students came to talk about personal things and the whole corridor was open plan, so it was easy to be overheard. Those students would immediately close the door. I would spring up and open the door again. Then they would spring up and close the door. I would spring up and open the door.

Those are the only work-related things I remember happening on campus. We also did have affirmative action. A few people whispered in a quiet voice that because of affirmative action, all the few African American students we had in the college were also always among the worst-performing students because they had all come from affirmative action.

I think there was one professor in our department who rarely came to social events with us, although he played on the faculty baseball team, for whom I scored a home run in our match against the students. We beat the students because the students were so drunk [Laughing] that we beat them. I scored the winning run.

Sorry, I am rambling a little bit. He was on that team but otherwise did not join us socially. It was whispered that this was because he was a Republican. Those are the anecdotes that I have about Social Justicey things.

I think the other thing that was vaguely related is that there was a compulsory literary theory course on the syllabus. Nobody wanted to teach literary theory, so always people who weren’t tenured had to teach literary theory. It was a poisoned chalice because most of us did not enjoy teaching it, but more importantly, the students mostly hated it, and then they would give us poor student evaluations, and that could put you at risk of not getting tenure.

Everybody was always trying to avoid having to teach that course. I had to teach it and it is tough. When you have to teach material you yourself hate or do not feel is worth learning but you have to convey that it is worth learning because the students have no choice but to take the course, that is a tough situation to be in pedagogically.

2. Jacobsen: How many would-be professors get tenure?

Italia: I do not know what the proportion is. Whilst I was there, three or four people came up for tenure. I think two were granted and two were refused, including one in my department. I think this wasn’t the case where I was, but at some of the Ivy League and other similar universities, they operate a shark embryo system, where there is one tenure position and four people are up for it. I think a lot of people do not get tenure.

I do not know what proportion of academics who fail to get tenure one place never manage to get tenure elsewhere. I knew a lot of people who never managed to get a tenure track position and who simply had one short-term position after another.

3. Jacobsen: Has this been a worsening trend? If so, what does this portend for the next five years?

Italia: I haven’t followed it closely, so I do not know. I haven’t been following the stats. I suspect so. My belief, my feeling, and what I gathered from a couple of articles I read is that colleges are hiring more and more admin in order to comply with diversity requirements and legal requirements that are Social Justice related.

Admin salaries are much, much higher than academic staff salaries. A lower and lower percentage of student fees are going towards academic salaries, so I am sure more people are being laid off. I think that, in general, there has been a strong devaluing of the arts and humanities.

4. Jacobsen: How? Why?

Italia: How? “How” is simply a question of money. Why? On the one hand, I think in general, there is a devaluation of writing. There is a sense that you can read everything you need to read online, and people will write for free.

I think that also there is a lack of understanding of what education is about, which to me, is not about sitting on your own, reading things and then writing your thoughts. What is crucial is having your thoughts challenged. The important thing is the feedback from the professor and from other people in your supervision group, or whatever you call it in your country, from professors and from other students, and that is something that you cannot get as an autodidact.

I think that is why so many people who are autodidacts have crazy opinions. Those opinions have never had to sustain the rigor of being strongly questioned. I think that is part of it. In the US it is such a harshly plutocratic, capitalist culture. I believe in capitalism. Communism is a failed system which doesn’t work. It goes against human nature. You need capitalism for wealth generation.

But I would like to see capitalism in which things are not only valued on their monetary value. So, “You have cancer, but your monetary value is low, so you can die.” “You cannot monetize the Shakespeare sonnets. There is no point in studying it.” That attitude, I feel, has been destructive.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Host, Two for Tea; Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine.

[2] Individual Publication Date: September 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/italia-four; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on Theories of Intelligence, Sex Differences, and Issues of IQ Test Takers and Test Creators (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/01

Abstract

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: faux and real genius; validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence; validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences; validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman; the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence; self-identification as a genius; personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing; statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher; reducing or eliminating social conflicts of interest in test creation; multiple test attempts; data on the Mega Test and the Titan Test; pseudonyms and test scores; and possible concerns of the test creators at the highest sigmas.

Keywords: Charles Spearman, Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, Howard Gardner, intelligence, IQ, Mega Society, Mega Test, Robert Sternberg, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on Theories of Intelligence, Sex Differences, and Issues of IQ Test Takers and Test Creators: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part Three)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Before delving into the theories, so a surface analysis, what defines a faux genius? What defines a real genius to you? Or, perhaps, what different definitions sufficiently describe a fake and a true genius for non-experts or a lay member of the general public – to set the groundwork for Part Three?

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: I would say that genius requires high general intelligence combined with high creativity. How high? In his book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton put the lowest grade of genius at a rarity of one in 4,000 and the highest grade at a rarity of one in a million. Scientists love to quantify in order to give their subject at least the appearance of precision. One in 4,000 would ensure one’s being noticed in a small city, while one in a million would ensure one’s being noticed in an entire nation of moderate size.

2. Jacobsen: By your estimation or analysis, any validity to Professor Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence with practical intelligence, creative intelligence, and analytical intelligence?

Hoeflin: I like Sternberg’s attempt at analyzing intelligence, but clearly just three factors seems a bit skimpy for a really robust theory.

3.Jacobsen: Any validity to Multiple Intelligences Theory of Professor Howard Gardner with musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, and teaching-pedagogical intelligences?

Hoeflin: Here we have a more robust set of factors, but Gardner fails to show how his factors cohere within a single theory.

4. Jacobsen: Any validity to general intelligence, or g, of the late Charles Spearman?

Hoeflin: General intelligence was based on the fact that apparently quite diverse forms of intelligence such as verbal, spatial, and numerical have positive correlations between each pair of factors, presumably based on some underlying general intelligence.

5. Jacobsen: Amongst the community of experts, what is the general opinion on the three main theories of intelligence listed before? What one holds the most weight? Why that one?

Hoeflin: These are three theories in search of an overarching theory of intelligence. My guess is that the so-called “experts” lack the intelligence so far to create a really satisfactory theory of intelligence, perhaps analogous to the problem with finding a coherent theory of superstrings.

6. Jacobsen: Do you identify as a genius? If so, why, and in what ways? If not, why not?

Hoeflin: I think my theory of categories shows genuine genius. It even amazes me, as if I were just a spectator as the theory does its work almost independently of my efforts.

7. Jacobsen: Any personal opinions on the state of mainstream intelligence testing and alternative high-range intelligence testing now?

Hoeflin: I’m not up on the current state of intelligence testing. I do feel that it has focused way too much on the average range of intelligence, say from 50 to 150 IQ, i.e., from the bottom one-tenth of one percent to the top one-tenth of one percent. Testing students in this range is where the money is in academia. It’s like music: all the money to be made is in creating pop music, which is typically of mediocre quality. Background music for movies is probably as close as music comes these days to being of high quality, presumably because there is money to be made from the movie studios in such music. I saw a movie recently called “Hangover Square,” which came out in 1945. The title is unappealing and the movie itself is a totally unsuspenseful melodrama about a homicidal maniac whose identity is revealed right from the start. The one amazing thing about the movie was that the composer, Bernard Herman, composed an entire piano concerto for the maniac to purportedly compose and perform, with appropriate homicidal traits in the music to reflect the deranged soul of the leading character, the maniac. One rarely sees such brilliant musical talent thrown at such a horrible film. So I guess genius can throw itself into things even when the audience it is aimed at is of extremely mediocre quality. Maybe intelligence tests, even when they are aimed at mediocre students, can show glints of genius. The fact that I could attain the 99th percentile on tests aimed at average high-school students despite my slow reading due to visual impairment suggests that some psychometrician (or group of psychometricians) must have been throwing their creativity and intelligence into their work in an inspired way that smacks of true genius!

8. Jacobsen: Do the statistical rarities at the extreme sigmas have higher variance between males and females? If so, why? If not, why not? Also, if so, how is this reflected in subtests rather than simple composite scores?

Hoeflin: By “variance between males and females,” I presume you are alluding to the fact that there tend to be more men at very high scores than women. This is especially obvious in spatial problems, as well as kindred math problems, presumably due to men running around hunting wild game in spatially complex situations while women sat by the fireside cooking whatever meat the men managed to procure. But it is also true that men outperform women on verbal tests. On the second Concept Mastery Test, a totally verbal test, of the 20 members of Terman’s gifted group who scored from 180 to 190, the ceiling to the test, 16 were men but only 4 were women. This is a puzzling phenomenon, given women’s propensity for verbalizing. Perhaps chasing game involves verbal communication, too, so that nature rewards the better verbalizers among men in life-or-death situations. Warfare as well as hunting for game probably has a significant role in weeding out the unfit verbalizers among men.

9. Jacobsen: Following from the last question, if so, what does this imply for the statistical rarity for apparent and, potentially, actual IQ scores of females who score at the extreme sigmas of 3, 4, and 5, or higher?

Hoeflin: It obviously would be possible to breed women eugenically to increase the percentage of them with very high IQ scores. Even now, there are more women graduating from law school than men in the United States, which suggests no deficit in verbal intelligence at the high end of the scale. Although, there may be other reasons why men of high verbal intelligence avoid law as a career compared to women. Maybe, they are drawn away by other lucrative careers, such as business or medicine.

10. Jacobsen: In the administration of alternative tests for the higher ranges of general intelligence, individuals may know the test creator, even on intimate terms as a close colleague and friend. They may take the test a second time, a third time, a fourth time, or more. The sample size of the test may be very small. There may be financial conflicts of interest for the test creator or test taker. There may be various manipulations to cheat on the test. There may be pseudonyms used for the test to appear as if a first attempt at the alternative test. There are other concerns. How do you reduce or eliminate social conflicts of interest?

Hoeflin: Some people have used pseudonyms to take my tests when they were afraid I would not give them a chance to try the test a second or third time. There is not much incentive to score very high on these tests, except perhaps the prestige of joining a very high-IQ society. People cheat on standardized college admission tests, as we know from news reports, by getting other people to take the tests for them, for example. Considering how expensive colleges have become these days, my guess is that they will go the way of the dodo bird eventually, and people will get their education through computers rather than spending a fortune in a college. One guy cheated on my Mega Test by getting members of a think tank in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area to help him. He was pleased that I gave him a perfect score of 48 out of 48. He admitted cheating to Marilyn vos Savant, who informed me, so I disqualified his score. This was before my Mega Test appeared in Omni. Why he wanted credit for a perfect score that he did not deserve is beyond my understanding. I’d be more proud of a slightly lower score that I had actually earned. Another person has kept trying my tests, despite a fairly high scoring fee of $50 per attempt. I finally told him to stop taking the tests. His scores were not improving, so his persistence seemed bizarre.

11. Jacobsen: The highest score on the Mega Test on the first attempt by a single individual with a single name rather than a single individual with multiple names was Marilyn vos Savant at 46 out of 48. Similarly, with other test creators, and other tests, there were several attempts at the same test by others. Do the multiple test attempts and then the highest of those attempts asserted as the score for the test taker present an issue across the higher sigma ranges and societies?

Hoeflin: Some European guy did achieve a perfect score on the Mega Test eventually, about 20 years after the test first came out in 1985. The test is no longer used by any high-IQ societies that I know of due to the posting of mostly correct answers online by a malicious psychiatrist. He probably needed to see a psychiatrist to figure out what snapped in his poor head to do such a thing. I guess it’s a profession that attracts people with psychological problems that they are trying to understand and perhaps solve.

12. Jacobsen: What were the final sample sizes of the Mega Test and the Titan Test at the height of their prominence? How do these compare to other tests? What would be a reasonable sample size to tap into 4-sigma and higher ranges of intelligence with low margins of error and decent accuracy?

Hoeflin: A bit over 4,000 people tried the Mega Test within a couple of years of its appearance and about 500 people tried the Titan Test within a similar time period. Langdon’s LAIT test is said to have had 25,000 participants. His test was multiple choice, whereas mine were not. A multiple-choice test is easier to guess on than a non-multiple-choice test. My tests were normed by looking at the previous test scores that participants reported and then trying to create a distribution curve for my tests what would jibe with the distribution on previously-taken tests. So I did not need to test a million or more people to norm my tests up to fairly high levels of ability.

13. Jacobsen: What are the ways in which test-takers try to cheat on tests? I mean the full gamut. I intend this as a means by which prospective test takers and society creators can arm themselves and protect themselves from cheaters, charlatans, and frauds, or worse. Same for the general public in guarding against them, whenever someone might read this.

Hoeflin: If people’s wrong answers are too often identical with one another and out of sync with typical wrong answers, that is a clue that they are copying from one another or from some common source.

14. Jacobsen: Why do test takers use pseudonyms? How common is this practice among these types of test-takers? It seems as if a brazen and blatant attempt to take a test twice, or more, and then claim oneself as smart as the higher score rather than the composite of two, or more, scores, or even simply the lower score of the two, or more, if the scores are not identical.

Hoeflin: I know of a group of 5 M.I.T. students who collaborated and gave themselves the collective name of Tetazoo. There was also a professor at Caltech who tried the test but did not want his score publicized so he used the pseudonym Ron Lee. In both cases, the score just barely hit the one-in-a-million mark of 43 right out of 48. One person scored 42 right and wanted to try again so he used a pseudonym and managed to reach 47 right out of 48 on his second attempt.

15. Jacobsen: What have been and continue to be concerns for test creators at the highest sigmas such as yourself or others, whether active or retired? This is more of a timeline into the present question of the other suite of concerns.

Hoeflin: I do not know what are the main concerns of test designers, past or present, other than myself. I was fortunate to have Triple Nine members as guinea pigs to try out my trial tests, so I could weed out the less satisfactory problems. One could usually tell just by looking at a problem whether it would be a good one or not, but the inspiration to come up with good problems would involve steady effort over the course of a year or so, yielding for me on average about one good problem per week, plus about four not too good problems per week.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Mega Society (1982); Founder, Prometheus Society (1982); Founder, Top One Percent Society (1989); Founder, One-in-a-Thousand Society (1992); Founder, Epimetheus Society (2006); Founder, Omega Society (2006); Creator, Mega Test (April, 1985); Creator, Titan Test (April, 1990); Creator, Hoeflin Power Test; Author, The Encyclopedia of Categories; Ph.D., Philosophy, The New School for Social Research.

[2] Individual Publication Date: September 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hoeflin-three; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: Ronald K. Hoeflin. Caption: “Kitty porn? No, just the author and his pals.”

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Real Successes and Honest Failures, Bad Things in History, and Book Recommendations (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/01

Abstract

Pascal Landa is the Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics). He discusses: real successes in the international community, honest failures in the international community, and the ways in which people can build on the successes and learn from the failures; bad things that have happened in history; and books recommended for people interested in the right to die, dying with dignity, euthanasia, and medical assistance in dying.

Keywords: AAVIVRE, dying with dignity, early life, euthanasia, France, medical assistance in dying, religion, right to die, Pascal Landa.

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Real Successes and Honest Failures, Bad Things in History, and Book Recommendations: Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics) (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let me think. In an international context, given that we have the history, given that we have the organizations, given that we have the progress in France. What have been real successes in the international community? What have been honest failures in the international community? How can people build on those successes and learn from those failures?

Pascal Landa: You are asking that question in the relationship of the right to die or in general?

Jacobsen: Yes. Right to die policies being implemented or furthered in some way.

Landa: The Oregon law, for example, and the Swiss practice and Holland practice that has now been there for the last what, 20 years, practically, those are major advances that have influenced the world. Every country, I think, today, is considering this question and understanding that this is an important issue.

We are no longer, at all, in the same situation as I remember it being in 1980. 1980, we were looking at death and dying and we were all studying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross books and fabulous reflections on death and dying.

Today, there are still some battles being fought. Look at our president of the World Federation who is being attacked in South Africa for having presumably murdered three persons while in fact, he just helped people die. Look at how hard it is in France to get legislation voted even though people have been asking for this for the last 30 years.

I am not sure how to answer your question clearly. I am just saying that there are some momentous decisions. There are some situations that have made us backtrack a lot. I am thinking of Doctor Death in America.

I believe, personally, that Philip Nitschke, for example, is not doing any good to the movement. That is a very personal feeling. He is interested in his own personal interest and his own personal glory but it is not helping the society evolve. I cannot abide by what he is doing even if his last “invention,” the death capsule, is a marketing beauty. I do not know everything he is doing, but the few exchanges I have had with him have not made me confident in his approach.

I think the Canadian government recently enacted an important law. I have cousins who are in the medical profession over there and who are saying that it is working out quite well, that people are getting to it. But again, we see that for the medical doctors trained in a “scientific way”, it is going to be a slow process for them. They were not educated for caretaking, only scientific knowledge. You must understand that medical doctors were never educated to help people die. It was never considered as part of their profession even if every doctor learned during his practice to accompany people all the way to their death.

It is like a mother raising her daughter and saying nothing about sex. Obviously, the girl must discover it by herself and it may take some time. She may have some bad experiences. The real fault is her mother not having a frank discussion with her about it. That can be dramatic. She can get pregnant without knowing that she is going to get pregnant and have consequences for the rest of her life.

The same thing with a man, a father that doesn’t tell his son that ejaculation is not a bad thing, and that becoming a person who’s copulating all over the place, you’d better well protect yourself otherwise you might get AIDS. Those are important things to tell people.

That is the case with dying with dignity. We do not teach doctors to face death, which poses big problems. We must remember doctors are human beings, first. They may be good and professional people, but if they cannot face their own death, then facing a patient who’s dying is a traumatic experience. In medical education in France, we are fighting to get doctors to have more than just a 2-hour course in 5 years on death and dying. To protect them we must limit their realm of the decision to medical decisions and not allow them to substitute themselves to their patients in deciding about treatment or care.

You might consider 3 periods for your life. One-third you are being born and growing up, one-third, you are being an adult in the achievement processes, and one-third you are declining physically heading towards death. [Laughing] That is basically what life is all about.

We can discuss and segment life much more, but really life is a series of phases in which we can live fully and each is important. I spend a lot of time working with people, helping them to understand that. This is the reason I am writing that book on the end of life. When you are 30, 40, you are in full expansion. You buy a house, you have a big house because you have got kids, you have got lots of friends coming over. When you get to be 60, 65, the kids are gone. You have this house with five bedrooms and three bathrooms, or whatever. You do not need all that. All it is is keeping you down. All those things, those things that you have around you that are just encumbering your life, you do not need them anymore. You better adapt your environment to your needs and live now if you want to live, daily, your own life. Too many live in an imagined life and not an experiential daily life of discoveries, pain, pleasure, emotions.

Younger generations know that much better. For example, they do not like old furniture. You know why? Because they can go to Ikea, buy the brand-new stuff for real cheap, and they can throw it away in 3 years and not worry about it. The new generations have learned, and are learning every day, I think, still, to get rid of stuff, to unburden their lives.

The old generations do not know that. The old generations just accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. One of my favourite statements is, “Why in the hell when I die, should I leave a bunch of shit behind me for my kids to deal with?”

Jacobsen: The Egyptians were the biggest example of this, in history, the pharaohs. They brought their slaves with them, sometimes their cats.

Landa: The Chinese, as well. Look at their armies.

Jacobsen: Right [Laughing].

Landa: To answer your question about what the biggest advance is. What is interesting in France is that you have had terrible cases, obvious cases of people suffering, and people eventually helping somebody die in a terrible situation, et cetera. Each time that those cases have come up, somehow or another, we have had legislators make a law, a good or a bad law, it doesn’t matter, but make a law to try to deal with it.

I think that is not the way to make laws. Laws should be long-term reflections and should envision all the systemic repercussions. That is why we have a lot of laws that are manipulated by rich people. When you are rich, you can have a good lawyer. If you have a good lawyer, he can have thousands of people working for him. You can always take all the texts of law and transform them because they are contradictory, and present to a judge a reading of the law that suits you. If you are poor, you cannot do that.

I think one of the biggest problems facing society today is that as we have computerized, we have become more and more complex. As we become more and more complex, we become more and more contradictory or we open loopholes for people to pass through beyond the will of the majority. Therefore, some people are getting rich on the backs of others without doing anything.

What is your next question, doctor?

2. Jacobsen: If an academic, or researcher, works on these specific topics and even potentially works with people at the end of life, what are some bad things that have, in the history, happened to their academic careers? Have they been torpedoed?

Landa: That is an interesting question. I am not sure I am competent to answer that. You are hitting the limits of my knowledge, there. I think I could answer that by taking the ball in another way. I have, in the last 30 years of working on this movement, been torpedoed by big bosses of the medical profession who have tried to ridicule me because I was a young punk, a 30-year-old, talking about something that was important. With their stature and their maturity, they simply dismissed me and I did not have the guts or assurance to tell them they were abusive.

I have had ministers basically tell me that I was a shit. Even though I am a courageous guy, and so forth, it is true that when you are 30 and you have got a 65-year-old guy who is a minister saying, “What does he know about this?” “Yes, it is true. I have only 30 years’ worth of knowledge about life. You have 65. You should know better, but you shouldn’t be such an asshole, either.” [Laughing] That is basically my encounters.

I think one of the things, to answer your question about intellectuals looking into subjects and being torpedoed initially and then veneered later. It is true of any subject that you open and then you achieve progress in. I made my career out of doing things that IT professionals were too scared of doing. I had the intuition things could be done because I had the right human contact with the knowledgeable people, I knew sufficiently the subjects through my readings, to know that what I proposed was possible and I had perseverance and essential quality for success. I had a successful career due to that.

When Windows 95 came out, which was a brand-new operating system, I was asked if it should be deployed. Apple, up to then, was considered the most user-friendly but in 1995 had been taken over by financiers with no vision. Windows 3.11 was just a piece of shit in terms of end-user interaction, but it worked well. It was just no longer viable. I had to put people who were using Macs into a Windows environment.

I went to Windows 95 and migrated 1700 people into that environment in 6 months, even though Windows 95 only had three or four months of age and was unproven. I became a hero because of that. I did it because I knew the guys who developed 95 and I knew the tests that had been made and I had confidence, but people around me were scared as hell.

In any profession, when you go into uncharted grounds, when you go into situations where you say things that are not the common way of saying things, you get to sometimes have broken careers and sometimes be put into the cupboard.

Look at the way the people who have revealed the Panama Papers, how they’ve been destroyed, or their lives have been impaired, it was the same thing in our movement, I think. When you are honest and you say things, clearly, you are putting souls who are dishonest into bad situations and they’ll use all their power to try to get to you.

Jacobsen: Why?

Landa: Because you are undermining their power. Simple. Their stature. What does a person have? He has money, or he has recognition. If you attack one of those two elements, you are attacking the individual. You cannot help but attack the individual on those bases if he is being an asshole saying stupid things, or if he is making money off the back of people that he is exploiting. There’s just no way you can avoid it.

The biggest war tomorrow is between the rich and the poor. The rich tomorrow are going to consider that the poor are using too many natural resources, so the survival of their well-being is going to dictate to eliminate the poor. It’s a natural selection process.

Jacobsen: We see this in many contexts, just in terms of clean water, drinking water.

Landa: Absolutely.

Jacobsen: There are places like Gaza. About one million kids, 70% identified as refugees since the 1948 situation. 97% of the water is unfit for human consumption. It is contaminated. In other words, of the approximate two million people there, one million who are children, one million children are being slowly poisoned by contaminated water. That is a microcosm of probably a larger context and concern around clean drinking water.

Landa: Sure. The Jewish extremists are happy to kill off as much as they can and contain the Gaza Arabs so that they can continue their expansion. It is a war between two populations. That war is being supported by the authorities that are in power all over the world, which is completely ludicrous but that is the way it is.

Which doesn’t mean that I am against the Jews! I am Jewish myself. My name is Landau originally, but during The Inquisition in the 1470’s, and they changed it to Landa to try to avoid being killed by the extremist Catholics.

3. Jacobsen: Just being mindful of time. With respect to becoming more informed in the international lingua franca, in terms of reading, what are some articles or books you would recommend for people interested in the right to die, dying with dignity, euthanasia, medical assistance in dying, and so on?

Landa: I would refer you to Derek Humphry for all his writings. I think he covers a large spectrum. I would recommend going to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and to quite a few of the philosophers who have written on the subject, the social workers or the philosophers. Specific ones, I would not remember off hand. It depends on your culture, depends on your ability to read in different languages. I think there are thousands and thousands of books on the subject today.

I think also I would recommend films. There are some, good films at the end of life decision and why people have done it and taken it, Million Dollar Baby. Some are more big, public and big show kind of stuff, and others… but they’re all putting together this question about, “What is the meaning of life?”

I have put together in the past, and it can be found on most internet sites from associations on this subject, a bibliography for the French people. I would go to the World Federation web site WFRtD.

With the Internet today, it is so easy to get good reading material, and there’s so much of it. The problem is there’s too much of it. [Laughing] That is probably my answer to there’s too much of it, so anywhere you pick, you probably will fall, 80% of the time, on the good stuff.

Obviously, those who are more recognized philosophers, more recognized social workers, more social scientists, those who are more affiliated to a movement, probably have written most of the most accessible, easy material. The film “Jean’s way”, or Derek’s own autobiography is interesting. Finally, there is a landmark book that I would recommend. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that is a fabulous book.

Jacobsen: How?

Landa: That is an immemorial book that one should have read as it dwells into the dimensions of life. But again, you can also read some of the religious philosophers of the 17th century, or 18th century – 18th century more likely, who have good questions about this stuff. [Laughing] It is a vast subject. What is life about?

Boudewijn Chabot wrote an interesting book on dying painlessly from hunger, another method I recommend for those who have time.

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Pascal.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics).

[2] Individual Publication Date: September 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/landa-four; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on High-IQ Societies’ Titles, Rarities, and Purposes, and Personal Judgment and Evaluations of Them (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/22

Abstract

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose; the developments of each society over time; communications of high-IQ societies, and harshest critiques of high-IQ societies; overall results of the intellectual community facilitated for the gifted; Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society, and Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the “The Terman Society” or “The Hoeflin Society”; disillusionment with high-IQ societies; notable failures of the high-IQ societies; changing norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test; the hypothetical Holy Grail of psychometric measurements; other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent respected by Dr. Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon and Christopher Harding; societies societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories; librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation; demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions; virtues and personalities as mostly innate or inborn, and dating and mating; and publications from the societies attempted to be published at a periodic rate.

Keywords: Christopher Harding, Giftedness, intelligence, IQ, Kevin Langdon, Mega Society, Mega Test, Prometheus Society, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on High-IQ Societies’ Titles, Rarities, and Purposes, and Personal Judgment and Evaluations of Them: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part Two)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Perhaps, we can run down the timeline of the six societies in this part with some subsequent questions: Prometheus Society (1982), Mega Society (1982), Top One Percent Society (1989), One-in-a-Thousand Society (1992), Epimetheus Society (2006), and Omega Society (2006). What was the inspiration for the Mega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: Kevin Langdon had a list of 600 or so people who had qualified for his Four Sigma Society from the 25,000 Omni readers who tried his LAIT (Langdon Adult Intelligence Test) that appeared in Omni in 1979. Four Sigma was given a cut-off of four standard deviations above the mean, which on a normal curve would be about one-in-30,000 in rarity or the 99.997 percentile. So approximately one-thirtieth of them should have been qualified for a one-in-a-million society. I suggested to him that he might ask the top 20 scorers if they’d like to form the nucleus of a one-in-a-million society, but he evidently thought this cut-off was too high to be practical. So when he let his Four Sigma Society languish, I decided to start Prometheus as a replacement for it, with the Mega Society as a follow-through on my suggestion to him about starting a one-in-a-million society, where “mega” means, of course, “million,” indicating how many people each member would be expected to exceed in intelligence. With slightly over 7 billion people, there would be a pool of about 7,000 potential Mega Society members, or slightly less if we exclude young children. I knew of a statistical method by which several very high scores from several tests could be combined to equal a one-in-a-million standard, as if the several tests constituted a single gigantic test. So I accepted members using this statistical method until my Mega Test appeared in Omni in April 1985. I put the cut-off at a raw score of 42 out of 48 initially, but then increased this to 43 after getting a larger sample. The test was eventually withdrawn from official use for admission to the Mega Society because some psychiatrist maliciously published a lot of answers online that others could search out and copy. At this time my other test, the Titan Test, is the only one that the Mega Society will accept, again at a raw score of 43 out of 48.

2. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Prometheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: The Prometheus Society, as mentioned above, was intended as a replacement for the Four Sigma Society, which Langdon had allowed to languish. Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology who was punished by the gods for giving fire to humans. I told Kevin, half in jest, that I was stealing his idea for the Four Sigma Society from him like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods! On my Mega and Titan Test, the qualifying score for Prometheus is a raw score of 36 out of 48, roughly equivalent to a rarity of one-in-30,000 or the 99.997 percentile, the same as Four Sigma’s cut-off, i.e., a minimum qualifying score.

3. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Top One Percent Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: I wanted to make a living publishing journals for high-IQ societies. I initially was able to do so as the editor for the Triple Nine Society, for which I was paid just $1 per month per member for each monthly journal I put out. When I started as editor in late 1979, there were only about 50 members, but once Kevin’s test appeared in Omni the number of members swelled to about 750. With $750 per month, I could put out a journal and still have enough left over to live on, since my monthly rent was just $75 thanks to New York City’s rent laws. When Kevin heard that I was able to do this, he was not amused, since he thought the editorship should be an unpaid position. So I started the Top One Percent Society from people who had taken my Mega Test in Omni in April 1985 and my Titan Test in April 1990, thus removing myself from any disputes with Kevin or other members of the Triple Nine Society. I liked being self-employed rather than work as a librarian, which had been my profession from 1969 to 1985, because difficulties with higher-ups in the library field could crop up if there were personality conflicts.

4. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the One-in-a-Thousand Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: I started the One-in-a-Thousand Society when income from my Top One Percent Society started to seem insufficient, even when I put out two journals per month rather than one for the Top One Percent Society. The third journal per month was a bit more hectic, but within my capacity.

5. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Epimetheus Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: In Greek mythology, Epimetheus was a brother to Prometheus. I’d let the Prometheus and Mega societies fall into the control of other people, so I decided to create new societies at their same cut-offs but with different names and under my control. I don’t recall the motivation for founding Epimetheus, since starting in 1997 I qualified for Social Security Disability payments due to my poor vision and low income, and that completely solved all my financial worries, even when my rent gradually crept up from $75 to $150 from 1997 to around 2003. It is now permanently frozen at $150 a month due to an agreement with an earlier landlord, who wanted the City to give him permission to install luxury apartments where I live, for which he could charge $2,000 to $4,000 a month due to the proximity to Times Square, which is just ten minutes’ walk away. I think that the Prometheus Society was restricting the tests it accepted to just a very small number of traditional supervised IQ tests, excluding unsupervised amateur-designed tests like mine. I wanted my tests to still serve a practical purpose at the Prometheus and Mega cut-offs.

6. Jacobsen: What was the inspiration for the Omega Society – its title, rarity, and purpose?

Hoeflin: Chris Harding of Australia was forever founding new high-IQ societies with new names but whose existence was largely known only to him and the people he awarded memberships to. He founded an Omega Society at the one-in-3,000,000 cut-off, but I assumed after several years of hearing nothing about it that it must be defunct, so I decided to call my new one-in-a-million society the Omega Society, since “Omega” seemed a nice twin word for “Mega” just as “Epimetheus” served as a twin word for “Prometheus.” Chris wrote to me about this appropriation of his society’s name and I explained my reason for adopting it. He offered no further complaint about it.

7. Jacobsen: What were the developments of each society over time?

Hoeflin: I decided to devote my full-time attention to a massive multi-volume opus titled “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” of which I’d published a couple of one-volume versions in 2004 and 2005. When I noticed that Samuel Johnson’s great unabridged dictionary of 1755 could now be bought for just $9.99 from Kindle, the computer-readable format that avoids paper printing, I decided I could make an affordable multi-volume treatment of my “Encyclopedia of Categories.” I’d also discovered that quotations from collections of quotations could be analyzed in terms of my theory of categories, giving me a virtually inexhaustible source of examples considering how many quotation books there are out there. So I sold the four societies that were still under my control to Hernan Chang, an M.D. physician living in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as all of my IQ tests. Although, he lets me score the latter for him and collect the fee, since he is too busy to handle that. I began my multi-volume opus in late 2013 and believe I can complete a 10-volume version by the end of this year, 2019. I was initially aiming at a 13-volume version, in harmony with the number of basic categial niches I employ, but it would take until early 2021 to complete the extra 3 volumes, so I’ll publish a 10-volume version in January of 2020. The year 2020 as a publication date appealed to me because of its irony, given that my visual acuity falls far short of 20/20, and the year 2020 rolls around only once in eternity, if we stick to the same calendar. I could still put out more volumes in later editions if I felt so inclined, but I let readers voice an opinion on the optimum number of volumes.

8. Jacobsen: What was the intellectual productivity and community of the societies based on self-reports of members? What have been the harshest critiques of high IQ societies from non-members, whether qualifying or not?

Hoeflin: I think the focus of the higher-IQ societies has been on communication with other members through the societies’ journals. I never tried to keep track of the members’ “intellectual productivity.” As for harsh critiques of the high-IQ societies, the only thing that comes to mind is Esquire magazine’s November 1999 so-called “Genius” issue. It focused on four high-IQ-society members, including myself. I never read the issue except for the page about myself, and it took me two weeks to get up enough nerve to read even that page. I was told by others that the entire issue was basically a put-down of high-IQ societies and their members, although people said the treatment of me was the mildest of the four. I did notice that they wanted a photo of me that looked unattractive, me using a magnifying glass to read. I suggested a more heroic picture, such as me with one of my cats, but they kept taking pictures of me peering through that magnifying glass in a rather unflattering pose, with zero interest in alternative poses. Kevin Langdon was sarcastic about our willingness to expose ourselves to such unflattering treatment. (He was not among the four that they covered in that issue.)

9. Jacobsen: What have been the overall results of the intended goals of the provision of an intellectual community of like-gifted people who, in theory, may associate more easily with one another? I remain aware of skepticism around this idea, which may exist in the realm of the naive.

Hoeflin: I had found that I could not interact with members of Mensa, who generally treated me as a nonentity. I was also very shy and unable to put myself forward socially in Mensa groups. At the higher-IQ levels, however, I had the prominent role of editor and even founder, which made it possible for others to approach me and break through that shyness of mine. So I did manage to meet and interact with quite a few people by virtue of my participation in the high-IQ societies, although the ultimate outcome seems to be that I will probably end my life in total isolation from personal friends except a few people who reach out to me by phone or email, as in the present question-and-answer email format. As for other people, they will have to tell you their own stories, since people are quite diverse, even at very high IQ levels.

10. Jacobsen: Why were the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society kept separate from the Lewis Terman Society? Why were the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Epimetheus Society, and Omega Society placed under the aegis of the Lewis Terman Society? Also, what is the Lewis Terman Society?

Hoeflin: I think Hernan Chang adopted the name “The Hoeflin Society” in preference to “The Terman Society” as an umbrella term for the four societies he purchased from me.

11. Jacobsen: What have been the merits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?

Hoeflin: Speaking personally, I have lost almost all interest in the high-IQ societies these days, although I am still a nominal, non-participatory member of several of them. One group I joined recently as a passive member named the “Hall of Sophia” unexpectedly offered to publish my multi-volume book in any format I like for free. The founder had taken my Mega or Titan test earlier this year (February 2019) and did quite well on it, and was sufficiently impressed to classify me as one of the 3 most distinguished members of his (so far) 28-member society. I was going to send out my book for free as email attachments fo people listed in the Directory of American Philosophers as well as to any high-IQ-society members who might be interested. So for me, the one remaining merit of the high-IQ societies would be to have a potential audience for my philosophical opus.

12. Jacobsen: When did you begin to lose interest or become disillusioned, in part, in high-IQ societies? My assumption: not simply an instantaneous decision in 2019.

Hoeflin: Editing high-IQ-society journals from 1979 onwards for many years, at first as a hobby and then as a livelihood, kept me interested in the high-IQ societies. I gave up the editing completely around 2009. Thirty years is plenty of time to become jaded. Getting Social Security Disability payments in 1997 removed any financial incentive for publishing journals. Over the years I’d travelled to such destinations as California and Texas and Illinois for high-IQ-society meetings, not to mention meetings here in New York City, when I had sufficient surplus income, but all things peter out eventually.

13. Jacobsen: What have been the notable failures of the high-IQ societies?

Hoeflin: There was actually talk of a commune-like community for high-IQ people, but after I saw how imperious some high-IQ leaders like Kevin Langdon were, this would be like joining Jim Jones for a trip to Guyana–insane! That’s hyperbole, of course. Langdon actually ridiculed the followers of Jim Jones for their stupidity in following such a homicidal and suicidal leader, not to mention his idiotic ideas. Langdon advocates a libertarian philosophy, but in person he is very controlling. I guess we just have to muddle through on our own, especially if we have some unique gift that we have to cultivate privately, not communally. Langdon often ridiculed my early attempts to develop a theory of categories, but I’m very confident in the theory now that I have worked at it for so long. Human beings tend to organize their thoughts along the same systematic lines, just like birds instinctively know how to build nests, spiders to build webs, and bees to build honeycombs. My analyses are so new and startling that I’m sure they will eventually attract attention. If I’d been an epigone of Langdon, I’d never have managed to develop my theory to its present marvellous stage.

14. Jacobsen: With the Flynn Effect, does this change the norms of the Mega Test and the Titan Test used for admissions purposes in some societies at the highest ranges?

Hoeflin: A lot of people suddenly started qualifying for the Mega Society, perhaps from copying online sources or perhaps from the test suddenly coming to the attention of a lot of very smart people. So initially higher scores on that test were required and then the test was abandoned entirely as an admission test for the Mega Society. Terman found that his subjects achieved gradually higher IQ scores on his verbal tests the older they got. One theory is that as people gradually accumulate a larger vocabulary and general knowledge (crystallized intelligence) their fluid intelligence, especially on math-type tests, gradually declines, so that if one relies on both types of intelligence, then your intelligence would remain relatively stable until extreme old age. There has been no spurt in extremely high scores on the Titan Test, however.

15. Jacobsen: What would be the Holy Grail of psychometric measurements, e.g., a non-verbal/culture fair 5-sigma or 6-sigma test?

Hoeflin: The main problem with extremely difficult tests is that few people would be willing to attempt them, so norming them would be impossible. I was astonished that the people who manage the SAT have actually made the math portion of that test so easy that even a perfect score is something like the 91st percentile. Why they would do such an idiotic thing I have no idea. Terman did the same thing with his second Concept Mastery Test, so that a Mensa-level performance on that test would be a raw score of 125 out of 190, whereas a Mensa-level performance on the first CMT was 78 out of 190. Twenty members of his gifted group had raw scores of 180 to 190 on the second CMT whereas no member of his group had a raw score higher than 172 out of 190 on the first CMT. His reason was to be able to compare his gifted group with more average groups such as Air Force captains, who scored only 60 out of 190 on the second test, less than half as high as Mensa members. A lot of amateur-designed intelligence tests have such obscure and difficult problems that I am totally unable to say if those tests have any sense to them or not. Perhaps games like Go and Chess are the only ways to actually compare the brightest people at world-record levels. But such tests yield to ever-more-careful analysis by the competitors, so that one is competing in the realm of crystallized intelligence (such as knowledge of chess openings) rather than just fluid intelligence. Even the brightest people have specialized mental talents that help them with some tests but not with others, like people who compete in the Olympic Decathlon, where some competitors will do better in some events and others in other events, the winner being the one with the best aggregate score. General intelligence means that even diverse tests like verbal, spatial, and numerical ones do have some positive intercorrelation with each other–they are not entirely independent of each other. The best tests select problems that correlate best with overall scores. But few if any of the amateur-designed tests have been subjected to careful statistical analysis. Some people did subject my Titan Test to such statistical analysis and found that it had surprisingly good correlations with standard intelligence tests, despite its lack of supervision or time limit.

16. Jacobsen: Other than some of the work mentioned. What other test creators seem reliable in their production of high-IQ tests and societies with serious and legitimate intent? Those who you respect. You have the historical view here – in-depth in information and in time. I don’t.

Hoeflin: I think Kevin Langdon’s tests are very well made and intelligent, but he tends to focus on math-type problems. Christopher Harding, by contrast, focuses on verbal problems and does poorly in math-type problems. For international comparisons across languages, I guess one would have to use only math-type problems, as I did in my Hoeflin Power Test, which collected the best math-type problems from the three previous tests (Mega, Titan, and Ultra). But English is virtually a universal language these days, so perhaps verbal tests that focus on English or perhaps on Indo-European roots could be used for international tests, except that Indo-European languages constitute only 46% of all languages, by population. I think Chinese will have difficulty becoming culturally dominant internationally because the Chinese language is too difficult and obscure for non-Chinese to mess with.

17. Jacobsen: Were the societies helpful as sounding boards for the Encyclopedia of Categories?

Hoeflin: I used high-IQ-society members as guinea pigs to develop my intelligence tests, but my work on categories I have pursued entirely independently, except for the precursors I rely on, notably the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper (1891-1972), who taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1919 to 1958. Oddly enough, in his final book titled Concept and Quality (1967) he used as a central organizing principle for his metaphysics what he called “the purposive act,” of which he said on page 17: “It is the act associated with intelligence”!!! I simply elaborated this concept from 1982 when I first read Concept and Quality onward, elaborating it into a set of thirteen categories by means of which virtually any complete human thought or action, as in a quotation, can be organized. In my introductory chapter, which currently traces the development of my theory from William James last book, A Pluralistic Universe, to the present, I now plan to trace the thirteen categories not just to the Greeks and Hebrews but back to animal life and ultimately back to the Big Bang, breaking the stages of its development into 25 discrete ones including my own contributions toward the end. I may begin with Steven Weinberg’s book The First Three Minutes and end with Paul Davies kindred book, The Last Three Minutes, if I can manage to extract convincing 13-category examples from each of these books.

18. Jacobsen: How was librarian work helpful in the development of a skill set necessary for independent psychometric work and general intelligence test creation?

Hoeflin: It was mostly helpful to me because I could work part-time during the last ten years of my 15 or 16 years as a librarian, which gave me the leisure for independent hobbies, thought, and research.

19. Jacobsen: What have been the demerits of the societies in personal opinion and others’ opinions?

Hoeflin: There tends to be a lot of arrogance to be found among members of the high-IQ societies, so charm is typically not one of their leading virtues. They generally assume that virtually everyone they speak to is stupider than they are.

20. Jacobsen: How can members be more humble, show more humility? Also, what are their leading virtues?

Hoeflin: I think personalities are largely inborn and can’t be changed much. Perhaps there should be sister societies, analogous to college sororities, for women who have an interest in socializing with high-IQ guys for purposes of dating and mating. In the ultra-high-IQ societies, women constitute only about 6% of the total membership. (Parenthetically, if you look at the Wikipedia list of 100 oldest living people, one usually finds about 6 men and 94 women.) In Mensa, the percentage of women typically ranges from 31% to 38%.

21. Jacobsen: How many publications come from these societies? What are the names of the publications and the editors in their history? What ones have been the most voluminous in their output – the specific journal? Why that journal?

Hoeflin: Each society generally has a journal that it tries to publish on a regular basis. Kevin Langdon puts out Noesis, the journal for the Mega Society, about twice per year. I also get journals from Prometheus and Triple Nine and Mensa. The four societies Hernan Chang operates all function entirely online, and I have never seen any of their communications. Even the journals I get I only glance at, never read all the way through. Due to my very slow reading speed, I tend to focus my reading on books that seem worthwhile from which to collect examples for my “Encyclopedia of Categories.”

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hoeflin-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: Ronald K. Hoeflin. Caption: “Kitty porn? No, just the author and his pals.”

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Language, a Book, and Conatus News & Uncommon Ground Media Ltd. (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/15

Abstract

Dr. Iona Italia is an Author and Translator, and a Sub-Editor for Areo Magazine, and Host of Two for Tea. She discusses: emergent of linguistic talent and capitalizing on it; a book published; and coaching people for writing.

Keywords: Areo Magazine, Book, Conatus News, Iona Italia, Language, Two for Tea, Uncommon Ground Media Ltd.

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Language, a Book, and Conatus News & Uncommon Ground Media Ltd.: Host, Two for Tea & Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s take a step back. We have some of the religious and ethnic background – Gujarat, Bombay, Zoroastrianism, Parsi. We also have some of the background with regards to the doctorate level research, earned, we should note, at the University of Cambridge, in English Lit.

Italia: In English Literature, yes.

Jacobsen: If we’re looking at the breadth of background, and a high-level education at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, you also do translation work from Spanish and German to English.

Italia: That is correct.

Jacobsen: Most people cannot speak two languages or multiple languages, and at the level of translation, in a professional way. When did this talent emerge, and how did you find a way to capitalize on it?

Italia: I did German at school, and French. My French is not so good, though. I can converse in French, but it is not good enough to do translation. Then I learned Spanish when I moved here to Argentina, which was in 2006. I’ve been here, mostly, in Buenos Aires since 2006. I spent two years in India, and I returned in October of last year, from India. Most of the time, I have been here, in Buenos Aires. That is how I learned the languages. I also speak a bit of Gujarati. Those are my languages.

How did I develop the skill? I have had a misspent life in which I have made many bad decisions.

What happened was in 2006, I made this huge mistake. Up until then, I was a respectable member of society. I was married and living in London. I was an academic. I taught at the University of East Anglia. I taught 18th century English Literature at UEA.

2. Jacobsen: You published a book on it?

Italia: I published a book, yes. In 2003, I published my Ph.D. in book form. It was published by Routledge. It is still in print, but it is an academic book, so it is ridiculously expensive. It was mostly sold to libraries. It is called Anxious Employment, which, unfortunately, has become an extremely autobiographical title [Laughing].

In 2006, my then-husband and I both took a year out. I took an unpaid sabbatical from my academic job. Medics in the UK can get what is called a “work-life balance year”. He took a “work-life balance year.” We came here to Argentina because we both danced the tango. We were both passionate about dancing the tango. We came here to do an intensive year of studying tango.

At the end of that year, I really did not want to go back. At that time, I was married, and my husband earned a good income and he really enjoys his job. He works now in neuroscience research. He did some work here, and some in London. He went back and forth. I stayed here. We lived off his salary plus the rent of the London flat, which was also his flat.

I lived like that for a few years, and then, unfortunately, for reasons I am not going to get into, but I got divorced, which I was never expecting. Suddenly, I had given up my academic career, which was totally my choice, but it is almost impossible to go back to academe once you have left. I had no money because the flat does not belong to me. The money did not belong to me. I was in this completely penniless situation.

In fact, my ex helped me out for a little while I had no money and was trying to find my feet, but basically, I had to reinvent myself, so I decided to do something I could do online so I could stay in Argentina. I started doing translation work from German, at that time. I worked for a friend of mine who had a little, small translation company. I worked for him. I also taught tango. That is what happened.

My friend’s company, though, folded, and so I ended up with little translation work. I started also doing professional editing work. I do, now, editing for academics and fiction writers and people, freelance. I still teach a bit of tango. I am also doing the copy editing for Areo magazine. I am the subeditor of Areo. And I have a podcast.

That is what I am doing to try to make ends meet. It is only possible here. I would not be able to live back in the First World. That would be impossible on my salary. Here, it is possible. I am contemplating perhaps going back to India because I do not know that I can financially survive in Argentina. India is cheaper. My life has gone wrong, unfortunately, as far as professional achievements have gone.

I published a book on tango culture, which is called Our Tango World. I published with a small press in the UK, but it is not being marketed well, and so I do not think it has sold so many copies.

I would like to write a third book now. I made a start towards that. I am not publishing it as I go along, but I published a few small extracts. I also read and made a Youtube video of the preface to the third book, which is about mixed-race identities, which I am calling The Half Caste. That is the working title.

Jacobsen: You did some writings in Conatus News, now Uncommon Ground Media Ltd., on some of this.

Italia: Yes. I’ve written about 5 articles for Conatus News, and probably 12 to 15 articles for Areo. Before I had written all academic articles and the academic book, and a lot more creative writing about dance, which is what grew into the book Our Tango World. I write poetry and short sci-fi fiction. I would like to publish a volume of … I have a volume of short stories, which is unpublished.

But I had never written any political commentary at all until about two years ago. Then, Malhar Mali, who was the founder of Areo and the previous editor, was following me on Twitter. That time I had like 40 followers or something. It was tiny, but I used to write these long threads.

He liked my threads and my approach to thinking about things. He asked me to write a film review for Areo, as it was then, under the old gubernatorial period. I did and then I started writing more political commentary stuff. That is what has happened in my trajectory.

Now I try to do little bits of various things to keep body and soul together. I teach business English. I am, once a week, doing that. I have also, recently, been coaching people who are writing essays and dissertations for their MBA.

3. Jacobsen: How do you coach someone in terms of writing for an MBA?

Italia: I do not try to teach them the MBA material. I am not an expert on that; although, I have now read a lot of books about business, so that I, at least, can have some feedback as to what they are referring to. I try to help them organize their thoughts. I do not write the essays for them, but I help them create an essay plan.

A lot of people, first, are not sure what topic to pick. I help them to find a topic. Then I help them to structure it into a plan. I help them to think about what material they are going to use to illustrate their arguments there. Then I polish the prose. That is what it involves. It is essay coaching, but more specialized.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Host, Two for Tea; Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/italia-three; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” Family History and Feelings, Upbringing and Giftedness, and Aptitudes (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/15

Abstract

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society and the Mega Society, and created the Mega Test and the Titan Test. He discusses: family geographic, cultural, linguistic, and religious background; depth of known family history; feelings about some distinguished family members in personal history; upbringing for him; discovery and nurturance of giftedness; noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life; and early aptitude tests.

Keywords: Giftedness, intelligence, IQ, Mega Society, Mega Test, Prometheus Society, Ronald K. Hoeflin, The Encyclopedia of Categories, Titan Test.

An Interview with Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin on “The Encyclopedia of Categories,” Family History and Feelings, Upbringing and Giftedness, and Aptitudes: Founder, Prometheus Society; Founder, Mega Society (Part One)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Caption provided to the photo from Dr. Hoeflin in the third footnote.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In due course of this personal and educational comprehensive interview, we will focus, in-depth, on the monumental life work of the (currently) 10-volume The Encyclopedia of Categories – a truly colossal intellectual endeavour. You founded some of the, if not the, most respected general intelligence tests in the history of non-mainstream general intelligence testing: The Mega Test and the Titan Test. Also, you founded the Mega Society in 1982. Another respected product of a distinguished and serious career in the creation of societies for community and dialogue between the profoundly and exceptionally gifted individuals of society. Before coverage of this in the interview, let’s cover some of the family and personal background, I intend this as comprehensive while steering clear of disagreements or political controversies between societies, or clashes between individuals in the history of the high IQ societies – not my territory, not my feuds, not my business. Almost everything at the highest sigmas started with you [Ed. some integral founders in the higher-than-2-sigma range include Christopher Harding and Kevin Langdon], as far as I can tell, I want to cover this history and give it its due attention. What was family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?

Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin: I recently wrote a 51-page autobiographical sketch for inclusion in my upcoming multi-volume treatise titled The Encyclopedia of Categories, a 10-volume version of which will probably be available for free as ten email attachments by January of 2020. I was aiming for a 13-volume version, but I don’t think I can complete that length before the end of 2020. Given that my vision is way below 20/20, I liked the irony of publishing this final magnum opus of mine in the year 2020. I can always stretch it to 13 or more volumes in subsequent editions. I will not quote what I say in that autobiographical sketch, although the information provided will be roughly the same. My mother’s ancestors came from the British Isles (England, Scotland, and Ireland) mostly in the 1700s. My mother’s father was a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Methodist itinerant preacher in the state of Georgia. He’s the only one of my four grandparents I never met. My mother brought me up as a Methodist, but I asked a lot of questions by my mid-teens and became a complete atheist by the age of 19, which I have remained ever since (I’m now 75). I gave my mother Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” to read aloud to me so we could discuss it. It seemed to convince her to give up religion, which shows unusual flexibility of mind for a person in her 50s. She had previously read such books as The Bible as History and Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, his doctoral dissertation in theology. My father’s parents came to this country in the late 1890s, his mother from the Zurich region of Switzerland and his father from the Baden region of Germany. His father was a pattern maker, a sort of precision carpentry in which he made moulds for machine parts to be poured from molten metal in a foundry. My father became an electrical engineer, initially working on power lines in the state of Missouri, then becoming a mid-level executive for the main power company in St. Louis, Missouri, doing such things as preparing contracts with hospitals for emergency electrical power generation if the main city-wide power cut off. He had worked his way through college by playing the violin for dance bands, and as an adult he taught ballroom dancing in his own studio as a hobby. My mother was an opera singer. In my autobiography, I list the 17 operas she sang in during her career, usually with leading roles due to the excellence of her voice. My father initially spoke German up to the age of 2, but his parents decided they did not want their daughter doing so, so they started speaking English at home, so she never learned German. My father’s mother became a devoted Christian Scientist and got her husband and two daughters to adopt this religion. My father became an atheist, and when he heard that my brother was thinking of becoming a Methodist minister sent him a copy of Thomas Paine’s book The Age of Reason, which promotes Paine’s deism, in which he accepted a deity and an afterlife but rejected the Bible as a guide, regarding the universe itself as God’s true bible. My brother never read the book but I did, and I told my father I enjoyed the critique of the Bible but did not accept a God or afterlife, and my father said that these two beliefs could readily be discarded, but that Paine should be given credit for his advanced thinking in an era and country that so fiercely rejected atheism. My brother ultimately became a computer programmer for the pension system for employees of the state of California. My sister became a ballet dancer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. I list 25 operas she danced in in my autobiography. She went on to teach ballet at an upstate New York college, being honored one year as the college’s most distinguished teacher.

2. Jacobsen: How far back is knowledge of the family history for you?

Hoeflin: I don’t know much beyond what is stated above. My sister has more detailed records. One of my mother’s grandfathers apparently owned over a hundred slaves in the South before the Civil War. My mother was occasionally treated badly in St. Louis due to her Southern accent, but she actually was very kindly toward black people and she once gave a black woman a ride in her car for a mile or so while I moved to the back seat. I do have memories of visits to my mother’s mother in Atlanta, Georgia. She died before my third birthday, but my memories go back much further than is normal with most people. I liked to swing on the swing in my mother’s mother back yard with one of her chickens in my lap. She raised the chickens to sell their eggs, but evidently also killed them for dinner. I am even now very tender-hearted towards animals and would never kill a chicken or cow or what have you. But I still do eat meat out of habit, even though I regard it as not very ethical to do so. If I had a better income I’d arrange to eat just a vegetarian diet, mostly fruits and oatmeal. I loathe cooked green vegetables except in soups.

3. Jacobsen: Some harbour sentiments and feelings based on distinguished family members from centuries or decades ago. Those who died with great achievements or honourable lives in the sense of a well-lived life – whether prominent or not. Any individuals like this for you? Any sentiments or feelings for you?

Hoeflin: A genealogist traced my mother’s ancestors to a close relative of a governor of Virginia. My mother said some of her relatives were distinguished doctors (M.D.s). I have a close friend who lives in Poland now, where she was raised, who is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Catherine the Great (one of her great-grandmothers was a great-granddaughter of Catherine the Great). She shares a surprising number of characteristics that Catherine had despite the rather distant ancestry: a significant talent for learning languages, a love of art, an imperious attitude, and an embarrassing number of superstitions. I also dated a woman who was an out-of-wedlock daughter of Pablo Picasso, and there again there were striking similarities between the daughter and her father, even though she did not learn from her mother that he was her real father until 1988, some 15 year after his death in 1973. She started out as a virtuoso violinist, but by her 20s became a painter and had works of art in five different museums by the time she learned who her true father was. She also had facial features very much like Picasso’s, even though she was raised in a German family. I am proud that my mother and sister were so gifted in their respective arts (singing and ballet). When I drew up a list of my favourite classical musical pieces for my autobiography, I looked at YouTube to see the actual performances, and it struck me what a lot of amazingly talented people could perform these magnificent pieces of music, and I regret how limited I am in my talents. I can’t even drive a car due to my poor eyesight! It is chiefly or only in these incredible aptitude test scores that I seem to shine way beyond the norm. I read when I was in high school that the average high-school graduate could read 350 words per minute, so I tested myself, and I found that on a few pages of a very easy sci-fi novel I could read only 189 words per minute at top speed, which works out to just 54% as fast as the average high-school graduate. Yet on timed aptitude tests as a high-school sophomore, I reached the 99th percentile in verbal, spatial, and numerical aptitude despite this huge speed deficit. And on the verbal aptitude section of the Graduate Record Exam I reached the top one percent compared to college seniors trying to get into graduate school, an incredible achievement given my dreadful reading speed. As I mention in my autobiographical sketch, if I had to read aloud, even as an adult I read so haltingly that one would assume that I am mentally retarded if one did not know that the cause is poor eyesight, not poor mental ability.

4. Jacobsen: What was upbringing like for you?

Hoeflin: My parents were divorced when I was 5 and my mother went through hours-long hysterical tantrums every 2 or 3 weeks throughout my childhood, which were emotionally traumatic and nightmarish. My father had an affable and suave external demeanour but was very selfish and cruel underneath the smooth facade. My brother pushed me downstairs when I was 3 and I stuck my forehead on the concrete at the bottom, causing a gash that had to be clamped shut by a doctor. It was discovered that I had a detached retina when I was 7 (because I could not read the small print in the back of the second-grade reader that the teacher called on me to read), and I spent my 8th birthday in the hospital for an eye operation, for which my father refused to pay since he did not believe in modern medicine, just healthy living as the cure for everything. So even though he was an engineer, my mother had a more solid grasp of physical reality than he did, as I mentioned to her once. I flunked out of my first and third colleges due in large measure to my visual problems, but I eventually received two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a doctorate after going through a total of eight colleges and universities. So all in all my childhood was rocky and unpleasant. As an adult, I took the personality test in the book Personality Self-Portrait and my most striking score was on a trait called “sensitivity,” on which I got a perfect score of 100%. On the twelve other traits, I scored no higher than 56% on any of them. I never tried sexual relations until the age of 31, and I found that I could never reach a climax through standard intercourse. I had a nervous breakdown after trying group psychotherapy for a few sessions when the group’s criticism of the therapist after he left the room reminded me of my mother’s criticisms of my father, crying for 12 hours straight. When I mentioned this at the next therapy session, one of the other people in the group came up to me afterward and told me he thought I was feeling sorry for myself, despite the fact that my report to the group was very unemotional and matter-of fact, not dramatic. I accordingly gave up group therapy after that session. On the personality test, on the trait called “dramatic”, I actually scored 0%, probably because pretending to be unemotional discourages needling from sadistic people who love to goad a highly sensitive person like me.

5. Jacobsen: When was giftedness discovered for you? Was this encouraged, supported, and nurtured, or not, by the community, friends, school(s), and family?

Hoeflin: At the age of 2 my mother’s mother picked me up when I was running to her back yard upon arriving in Atlanta to grab one of her chickens to swing with it on my lap. At first I ignored her, but then I surmised that she wanted to ask me a question, so I looked at her face, waiting for her question, which never came. Maybe she didn’t realize that my command of the language had improved since my previous visit. She eventually tapped me on the head and told my mother “You don’t have to worry about this one, he’s got plenty upstairs.” My mother told me this story several times over the years, and I finally put two and two together and told my mother I recalled the incident, which shocked her considering how young I had been. I told her that her mother had probably been impressed by my long attention span. My mother then thought that the incident was not as important and mysterious as she has thought, but actually a long attention span at such a young age is probably a good sign of high intelligence. It was not until I was in the fifth grade that I was given aptitude tests and the teacher suddenly gave me eighth-grade reading books and sixth-grade math books. This was in a so-called “sight conservation class” for the visually impaired that I attended in grades 3 through 5. The teacher taught students in grades 1 through 8 in a single classroom because very poor vision is fairly rare even in a city as large as St. Louis, at that time the tenth-largest city in the United States. That gave me plenty of time to explore my own interests, such as geography using the world maps they had on an easel. In grade 8, back in a regular classroom, we were given another set of aptitude tests, and the teacher mentioned to the class that I had achieved a perfect score on a test of reading comprehension, meaning I was already reading at college level. The teacher gave us extra time on the test so I would have time to finish the test. A problem toward the end of the test clued me in on how to solve a problem that had stumped me earlier in the test, so I went back and corrected that previous answer. Then there were those three 99th percentile scores as a high-school sophomore that I’ve already mentioned. When I learned that my reading speed was so slow compared to others, I realized that my true aptitudes (minus the visual handicap) must be well within the top one percent on each of the three tests.

6. Jacobsen: Any noteworthy or pivotal moments in the midst of early life in school, in public, with friends, or with family?

Hoeflin: In the seventh grade I suddenly started creating crossword puzzles and mazes, a harbinger of my later creation of the two tests that appeared in Omni magazine in April 1985 and in April 1990. I also collected lists of fundamental things such as independent countries of the world, the Western Roman emperors, the chemical elements, the planets and their moons, etc., in keeping with my much earlier childhood ambition to know everything. If you can’t know everything, then at least know the basic concepts for important subjects like geography, history, chemistry, astronomy, etc. These lists were a harbinger of my current multi-volume treatise on categories.

7. Jacobsen: Were there early aptitude tests of ability for you? What were the scores and sub-test scores if any? Potentially, this is connected to an earlier question.

Hoeflin: The only other test I should mention is the Concept Mastery Test. Lewis Terman collected a group of 1,528 California school children in grades 1 through 12 with IQs in the 135 to 200 range. To test their abilities as adults he and his colleagues constructed two 190-problem tests covering mostly vocabulary and general knowledge, which are easy problems to construct but are known to correlate well with general intelligence, the first test (Form A) administered to his group in 1939-1940 and the second one (Form B, latter called Form T) in 1950-52. About 954 members of his group tried the first one and I think 1,024 tried the second test. But Terman made the second test much easier than the first in order to make it easier to compare his group to much less intelligent groups such as Air Force captains. So the Mensa (98th percentile) cut-off would be a raw score of about 78 out of 190 on the first test and about 125 out of 190 on the second. I was editor for the Triple Nine Society (minimum requirement: 99.9 percentile) for a few years starting in 1979, and some members sent me copies of the two CMT tests so I could test TNS members. Since the CMT tests were untimed, I was not handicapped by the speed factor. Compared to Terman’s gifted group I reached the top one percent on both tests. According to Terman’s scaling of Form A, my raw score of 162.5 would be equivalent to an IQ of 169.4 (assuming a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16 IQ points), where an IQ of 168.3 would be equivalent to the 99.999 percentile or one-in-100,000 in rarity. By comparing adult CMT IQs with childhood Stanford-Binet IQs for Terman’s group, I calculated that my adult 169.4 IQ would be equivalent to a childhood IQ of 192. The one-in-a-million level on the two tests (the 99.9999 percentile) would be about 176 IQ on the CMT and 204 IQ on the Stanford-Binet, respectively.

The Guinness Book of World Records abandoned its “Highest IQ” entry in 1989 because the new editor thought (correctly) that it is impossible to compare people’s IQs successfully at world-record level. The highest childhood IQ I know of was that of Alicia Witt, who had a mental age of 20 at the age of 3. Even if she had been 3 years 11 months old, this would still amount to an IQ of over 500! At the age of 7, she played the super-genius sister of the hero in the 1984 movie Dune. On a normal (Gaussian) curve such an IQ would be impossible since an IQ of 201 or so would be equivalent to a rarity of about one-in-7-billion, the current population of the Earth. But it is well known to psychometricians that childhood IQs using the traditional method of mental age divided by chronological age fail to conform to the normal curve at high IQ levels. The Stanford-Binet hid this embarrassing fact in its score interpretation booklet (which I found a copy of in the main library of the New York Public Library) by not awarding any IQs above 169, leaving the space for higher IQs blank! The CMT avoids the embarrassment of awarding IQs of 500 or more by having a maximum possible IQ on Form A (the harder of the two CMTs) of 181. Leta Speyer and Marilyn vos Savant, both of whom I had dated for a time, had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having world-record IQs of 196 and of 228, respectively, Marilyn having displaced Leta in the 1986 edition. Leta felt that the 228 IQ of Marilyn was fake, but I was aware that these childhood scores could go well beyond 200 IQ because they fail to conform to the normal curve that Francis Galton had hypothesized as the shape of the intelligence curve in his seminal book Hereditary Genius (first edition 1869, second edition 1892). I was unable to contact Alicia Witt to see if she would be interested in joining the Mega Society. I should note that the three key founders of the ultra-high-IQ societies (99.9 percentile or above) were Chris Harding, Kevin Langdon, and myself. Harding founded his first such society in 1974, Langdon in 1978, and myself in 1982. Mensa, the granddaddy of all high-IQ societies with a 98th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1945 or 1946 by Roland Berrill and L. L Ware, and Intertel, with a 99th percentile minimum requirement, was founded in 1966 or 1967 by Ralph Haines. I don’t care to quibble about the precise dates that Mensa and Intertel were founded, so I have given two adjacent dates for each. In its article “High IQ Societies” Wikipedia lists just 5 main high-IQ societies: Mensa, Intertel, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society (minimum percentile requirements: 98, 99, 99.9, 99.997, and 99.9999, respectively; or one-in 50, one-in-100, one-in-1,000, one-in-30,000, and one-in-1,000,000; dates founded: roughly 1945, 1966, 1979, 1982, and 1982; founders: Berrill and Ware, Haines, Kevin Langdon, Ronald K. Hoeflin, and Ronald K. Hoeflin, respectively.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hoeflin-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: Ronald K. Hoeflin. Caption: “Kitty porn? No, just the author and his pals.”

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Right to Die France, Collective Religion and Individual Choice, and Philosophy, Wisdom, and Poetry (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

Abstract

Pascal Landa is the Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics). He discusses: central opposition to the work of the right to die in France; religion and choice; and Philosophy, Wisdom, and Poetry.

Keywords: AAVIVRE, dying with dignity, early life, euthanasia, France, religion, right to die, Pascal Landa.

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Right to Die France, Collective Religion and Individual Choice, and Philosophy, Wisdom, and Poetry: Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics) (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who has been central opposition to the work of right to die in France?

Pascal Landa: I think the central opposition has been multiple but similar to anywhere else that I can see. There are, obviously, the religious, who still have this belief that redemption comes from suffering, still have this belief that God has made you, and therefore you should not touch what God has made. You have no right to disturb. Et cetera. That is the religious communities.

You have also, I think, a big lobby from the financial groups. As I mentioned, the end of life is big business. If we start touching that and saying it is the individual concerned that decides, which we are doing more and more, financial groups could lose 30% to 60% of their revenues. We are recognizing that the individual has a right to say what he thinks is right about his health, but not yet to decide. That is starting to pose problems for those who are using us as test cases for their drugs or for their equipment. The equipment makers, for example, the sophisticated scanners, or the expensive drugs; some drugs cost more than $100,000 a month for the person to take for cancer. Those people are saying, “If we let people decide when they want to die, we won’t get the last 6 months where we can test equipment and amortize it”.

Basically, today, the medical profession just has to say “We are trying to keep Mr. Landa alive a little longer.” Who can object to that? And yet, in reality, more than 50% of even the doctors say that of operations and medical acts realized in the last 6 months, 50% of those acts are totally useless.

If 50% are totally useless and this represents billions of dollars, well, A, as good managers and caretakers we should be eliminating those useless acts. B, those medical industries impacted need to invest differently to maintain revenue. C, we should be re-allocating that money to preventative care, to the kind of care like dental care, eyeglasses, … the kind of care that is going to make that the individual lives better. The lobbies I believe are still today over influencing our legislators.

Religion, finance and thirdly the fact that we are directed by people who are old. People who are old are of a generation that has basically played the game of, “I am not going to die. Never. I am going to stay forever young,” like Bob Dylan sang; the myth of that kind of culture.

This is less the case with the younger generation. A little bit less. When elected, people get into positions of power, voting law for the right to die with dignity means that they must confront themselves to their own death, and they can’t escape it. That is a difficult thing if they’re not properly prepared to face their own destiny.

I think those are the three major reasons. You could also say that now, there are multiple cultural phenomena that join religious concepts. I know in France, for example, the Muslims and the Catholics are against it, the religious authorities, not the individuals, but the religious authorities are basically against it.

The religious authorities used to shut their eyes on the fact that priests were violating young kids. Things change. We are starting to see that issue come out of the woods. Well, we’ll see death come out of the woods at some point, as well.

2. Jacobsen: In the United States, there’s a group called “Catholics for Choice”. The group focuses on pro-choice policies and implementation and initiatives, and programs, and so on. One thing that came through in an interview with the president of the organization was the split between the Roman Catholic Christian hierarchs, even with the pope putting out these turgid encyclicals, and then the laity, where if an advanced industrial economy and an accessible, the women will get contraceptives and reproductive health in spite of those dry encyclicals.

Landa: Absolutely. In France over 60% of “Catholics”, people who claim to be Catholics, are for legislation that allows medically assisted dying at the request of the individual.

There’s something else that deserves to be mentioned. If you lived as close as 50 years ago, we considered the elders to be people with wisdom and with things to teach us and things to tell us about.

But the world since 1950 has been speeding up at the rate of what we call, “Moore’s Law”. Initially, it was computer science that moved at that speed for the first 20 or 30 years but since the 21st-century computerization has entered the life of every profession, of the activity of humankind, we are moving at an incredible pace.

That means that the old people are less competent than the new ones at an ever-increasing pace. Especially since the old people are getting older and even older since we started prolonging their lifespan. That means that when you need to deal with society, need to deal with major issues like climatic change or human welfare, the knowledge of the elders is no longer relevant because the world has changed too much. It is the knowledge of those that are 30, or, 40, or 50 that is pertinent, or even 20 to 30.

I think that this is a major change in our society and a big change in everyday life. We are still living under the old habits of thinking that the old are wise. We are being led by people who are 60 or often much older, which is ludicrous. We can see that when you get a person like Barack Obama or Macron in France. Their vision and comprehension of things compared to guys like Trump or Bush illustrates the generation gap. It’s not only age, more a question of mentality.

Most of our elected representatives, at least in Europe- I think it is getting less and less so in America- have traditionally been old people. We speak of the “old Europe”. Society needs to go at the same rhythm as the rhythm in which jobs change and the rhythm in which discoveries are made, and the rhythm in which processes and methodology and everything that makes modern life. Difficult to face this everchanging world for most people. Hard to manage a society which is condemned to change or else to be obsolete.

Ecological concerns are part of that process. We are still living in a world that considers that nature is here to serve us. If we do not start thinking that we are a partner of nature, and no longer the oppressor of nature, then we are not going to survive, ourselves. Then we have got a real problem.

This thing about the old people directing the world or at least being in positions of importance is a real the handicap for moving forward, and for the right to die with dignity, of course.

3. Jacobsen: I like an easy argument for what you have presented. It goes like this. It is basically an argument for age independence of wisdom or correct views of the world. If an individual is 15 and they believe in Young Earth creationism, that person ages 60 years. Now, they’re 75-years-old. They’re still a Young Earth creationist. Does this ageing make Young Earth creationism any more correct?

Landa: Of course not.

Jacobsen: In that way, I think it is with wisdom as well.

Landa: For me, what you are touching on is the fact that one of the things that we have lost in the last 40 years, is we have lost the respect for philosophy. Poetry, which has been the mouthpiece of emotions, philosophy, which has been the mouthpiece of values. Those are things that through zero and one of the computer ages, we have put aside, and considered were unimportant.

I am absolutely convinced that we will soon be coming back to that because we must face a certain number of issues which can only be solved by respecting emotions, philosophy, intellectual honesty.

Those issues are all linked to Quality of life. A good illustration of this is the “augmented man” debate. Today, we can put an electronic piece in a person’s brain and enable him to drive mechanical arms. Today We are able to replace the leg of a guy, that got amputated and put in a leg that makes him run faster than a human being. Today We are able to make a human being see in the dark where he couldn’t see before, through the red-light spectrum.

The augmented man is clearly “more powerful” than the natural man. We can see that in those people who have used cocaine. Cocaine allows you to be more efficient, more effective- amphetamines as well, but only for a certain period. It destroys you, but “economic society” does not give a damn about destruction. Remember, the only law of nature is self-reproduction.

We are facing with the augmented man a new big dilemma. Is being human a specific value or are we just on the verge of a new evolutionary landmark, the meeting between the organic world and the mineral world of computer chips. Remember, silicon is a mineral, right? What we are discovering is that the organic world augmented by the silicon world, organic and mineral, is more powerful and more capable of dealing with things that either the organic or the mineral world, by itself.

What We are maybe experiencing is a whole new evolutionary process, where man will no longer be what we know as man, homo sapiens, but he will be “homo mineralis”, and we will replace defective parts either by organic or mineral elements either to correct of to improve the individual. As a joke, I suggest to manual workers (cooks, plumbers, woodworkers, gardeners…) that they could use 6 arms like Shiva!

Look at how many people are being, today, surgically modified to look better. Millions, and young people. How many people tomorrow will say, “Put a chip in my arm. That way I can go and pay without having to bring out my chip card. I can go to the night club and be recognized like in Mexico” How many people will say, “Put a chip in my brain? I am going to be much more intelligent when plugged into the internet.”

When you look at big data, imagine having the knowledge of the world as part of yourself. Observe how we already react today. Today, if I ask you a question and you do not know the answer, what do you do? You go on the Internet and you find the answer. Big data could be implemented in your head so that whenever you think of something, you go to big data to get it. That is a real possibility.

The question is, “What is it to be human?” Where are the emotions in this? Where is the philosophy? At what point do you say, “Whoa. I am being manipulated.” At what moment in time do you enter the perfect world of Hitler with his blonde, blue-eyed perfect race? In the world of Google, Apple, Microsoft etc., where if you do not accept “cookies” (electronic spies) then you are simply excluded from the joys of the NET. Look at the Japanese creation of an electronic pet or the proposed inflatable sexual objects with sensual electronics. Those are the issues that face you in which we as old people can contribute by giving perspective … a little bit. But the real issue is for you the individual to act upon daily.

The biggest revolution in the next 40 years is going to be the medical revolution. In 40 years, we’ll look at medicine as practiced today and consider it the same way as medicine was practiced in the 1700s.

Your lifespan as a 20-year-old born in the year 2000 is most likely going to be 150 years. It is no longer 100 years. My life expectancy is probably 100 years. My father’s life expectancy was probably 50, 60 years. We are in an incredibly revolutionary world.

Any other questions? I seem to be making you perplexed. [Laughing]

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/landa-three; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Technology Innovation, Kurzweil and Diamandis and Hariri, the Future of Technology, and Canadian Industry (Part Five)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

Abstract

Dr. Sarah Lubik is the Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Concentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She discusses: the next big trends in technology innovation and the impact on North American lives into the future; personalized medicine, Moore’s Law, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil, Hariri, and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, and the future of technologies; and an impressive entrepreneur and entrepreneurship from Canada.

Keywords: Canada, entrepreneurship, Yuval Noah Hariri, innovation, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Sarah Lubik, science, SFU, technology.

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Technology Innovation, Kurzweil and Diamandis and Hariri, the Future of Technology, and Canadian Industry: Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & InnovationConcentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think is the next big trend in technology innovation? What will impact North American lives the most as a technology and as an industry in the next ten years?

Dr. Sarah Lubik: To be totally honest with you, our ability to predict what’s going to happen in the next ten years has gotten worse and worse because humans tend to think only in a linear way, but technology is moving faster and faster.

We need to be mindful that technology is not a single thing anymore. That technology underpins, whether we like it or not, everything that we do. So, what that means is that, when we look at some of the fastest-growing businesses in Canada.

they don’t say they’re in the tech sector, but they’re heavily underpinned by tech. So, something that’s an HR company, but online, may be underpinned by a business model that means I can access a great deal more data than anyone else because of the technology they use, for example, employing artificial intelligence or machine learning.

Things that claim to be health companies are often technology companies now. One of the trends we’re going to see is that we’re going to need tech in education systems and in businesses that have traditionally just been about having highly trained people. For example, if easier tasks can be automated, the people in those jobs are going to need new skills and hopefully, have the mindset to learn those skills.

In the next ten years, I would hope to see changes to the health system, and to health innovation and to the energy sector.

One of the interesting possible advantages I’ve heard health entrepreneurs talk about for Canada is that we have an opportunity as a country with a single healthcare system. If we can organize it properly, that would make us a fantastic place to innovate in areas like personalized medicine, which is where a great deal of interest is. That could mean nationwide improvements to health through the use and integration of health better data.

Where these things are coming together will be places with the need for other technologies, and so, we are back to comment about interdisciplinarity. This is going to a place where material science meets big data meets genomics meets personalized medicine, meets social innovation and more.

So, this is why those skills and that mindset can be so important because you can only imagine the things are coming out now. I was reading in the New Scientist there is always some new use for technology that could have serious implications for the world and the economy. For example, tracking your health so precisely your watch knows when you’re going to get sick before you do.

So, it can alert you that you’re starting a fever before you feel anything. So, those are the places where all of those technologies come together and that’s the part that much excites me. So, I’m not sure that I can say what you would see in ten years. I keep being surprised, thinking, “What will come out now?”

2. Jacobsen: Much of the subject matter you’re touching on now, such as personalized medicine, is a big trend, also one minor phenomenon, but growing among people that were previously on the fringe.

So, some of the names that come to mind would be people that talk typically about information technology along Moore’s Law, The Law of Accelerating Returns, for instance, of Ray Kurzweil, as well as the X Prize founder Peter Diamandis.

Do these people have an influence on your view of where the future of these technologies will go?

Lubik: Ray Kurzweil does for sure. He speaks often about how human beings usually think in a linear fashion, which is fine for simple things but not for envisioning the future.

But if you look at technology and innovation, it happens exponentially. So, when it comes to my teaching, I’m increasingly asking people to think not what’s happening now. But can you try to forecast where things are going to be when you’d actually be in the market? How about past that?

One of our alumni who now works for a big European company heading up their cloud division because, back in the day in Vancouver, he sat down and thought to himself, “What will the next big thing be?”

Then he’d heard about the cloud. He started a company based on the technology, sold the company, now runs those divisions in large firms.

There’s an ambition that comes with that, which is that whatever happens, it’s going to be bigger and faster than you think. So, to be aware of that and excited about that, those people with those mindsets are going to be the ones to watch

That said, I’m also influenced by the work of Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens. He cautioned that humans don’t usually see the repercussions of our actions when we innovate and we often make further problems for ourselves, so it’s important to realize there may also be negative consequences to innovation, too, and think about what they can be and what we can do about them.

3. Jacobsen: Who’s an entrepreneur in Canada that impresses you? Either the scale of their industry that they possibly founded, the product that they’re selling that might not be large, or the way they are able to collaborate with a broad swath of different industries to bring about their vision?

Lubik: Oh wow! That’s an excellent question. Who impresses me? Oh! So many people, but still, I’d like to try and pick a famous star in the sky. People impress me for a lot of different reasons. Greg Malpass who is the CEO of Traction on Demand, which is one of the fastest-growing companies in Canada and based here in Vancouver.

He’s an SFU alumnus. He impresses me with both the vision he has for his company and the humility with which he leads it. So, it’s not all about him. It’s about creating this environment and creating a fantastic workplace in the place that he lives and grew up.

They also started Traction for Good, which is the arm of Traction that tries to do good things in their communities. I’m impressed with having a locally created, growing company that hasn’t lost sight of why it’s doing what it’s doing.

That it is part of its community and wants to give back and create those great jobs. Greg has been vocal about not having interest in selling the company There are not many players that grow to that size and remain independent rather than selling.

Then I have early-stage entrepreneurs who impress me as much as the big companies.

They impress me with their vision and with what it is they want to achieve in the world. a few years ago we had a team from the Technology Entrepreneurship at SFU program made up of entrepreneurship students and mechatronics engineers Their goal was to create a hearing device that doesn’t require an audiologist and can be self tuned because people in developing countries have so little access to hearing care.

They were inspired to create a solution because trouble hearing isolates you from your community and your family. So, they were interested in figuring out how you create a business model that lets you go into the world with a product like that and move it into the places in the world that need it the most, not necessarily the places in the world that’ll pay the most for it.

So, I’m impressed with the many early-stage companies. I’m also impressed with the late-stage companies. There’s a number of Internet of Things companies that are doing incredible things. I might be spoiled for choice at the moment.

Then I’m always impressed by social movements and by the people who want to make systems change because those companies have fantastic potential. For example, people trying to take charge of their own genomic information for health.

There are those movements within the research that are all so intriguing. As to where is this going to go next, I’m impressed with people who are creating non-humanoid robots realizing that our first interest in robotics seems to be building machine versions of ourselves.

For example, you see marine biologists working with engineers, working with artificial intelligence, in order to do things like U-CAT (Underwater Curious Archaeology Turtle). They realized that for underwater archaeology, using drones with propellers meant moving too fast to properly scan what’s happening in the sea.

So, they created a robot with flippers that swims like a turtle. Then looks for anything that’s out of the ordinary, then goes and investigates.

I mentioned that to a friend of mine who works here in the environmental physiology lab.

She told me that researchers are thinking of using something like that to explore water moons on other planets. All of a sudden you realize quite how far this research can go when we collaborate across fields.

So, I suppose that’s one of the greatest things about the job that I have is I get to hear about these things and watch people do them and help where I can.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Concentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/lubik-five; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell,earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: issues VI and VII; the production methodology and design of WIN ONE; and more content of the publication issues.

Keywords: AtlantIQ Society, editor, Graham Powell, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network.

An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE: Editor, WIN ONE & Vice President, AtlantIQ Society (Part Six)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We examined, in part or in brief, issues I (Florian Schröder), II (Florian Schröder), III (Florian Schröder), IV (Owen Cosby), and V (Graham Powell). Let’s move the sixth issue and the seventh issue, all editorial work in future issues done by you, so no parenthetical explicit mentions needed now. Issue VI was about half the size of the bumper issue, but substantially larger than the other editors’ issues too.

By the sixth issue, WIN reached a staggering 170 countries. The content included commentary on different strengths of learners in different areas including verbal and visualization, auditory and visual, awareness of space and time, whole versus sequential apprehension, eureka versus linear learning, and more. It’s a nice point-by-point breakdown.

Other parts included a nice homage Sudoku puzzle, different forms of visual art productions, announcement of a prize winner, poetry, commentary on signification and African-American or black literary expression in America in addition to the Afro-American culture, and concluding with more work on contemplation and eudaimonia (well-being or happiness in the broadest sense, which was another long think piece).

What was the frame of mind for this issue?

Graham Powell: The new format and layout was proving popular, for the reasons already stated. The sixth edition was entirely my own work, as far as editor and illustrator was concerned, plus I put in an essay based on Dr. Elisabetta Basciu’s research, which I had access to. I translated it and made a summary, the sub-motive being a piece which was primarily about literature which had not been discussed previously within the magazine. I wanted to appeal to a broader ethnic group and be didactic too. Your comment about the WIN reaching 170 countries at that point gives credence to this notion of appealing to a broad audience, especially as anyone can access the magazines on the WIN website!

2. Jacobsen: For issue six and seven, what is the production methodology for these issues? How did you produce the design – e.g., the color scheme, the font, font size, and so on – for these issues? Why choose those as the format and that as the production methodology?

Powell: The fundamental colour scheme derives from the cover, the subsequent pages taking on the background colour used for it. I like to use my own photos, especially for the cover, or, as used for the sixth Edition, a beautiful writing paper design which I bought in England. The font has generally been size 12, which is quite easy to read. I also set my target to have at least 40 pages, this being achieved during most of the WIN ONE productions. This is in line with the AtlantIQ Society magazine, which is now called Leonardo. It also has at least 40 pages to each edition. I find the inclusion of photos during essays makes the magazine very much better to read. It also clarifies matters from time to time, or at least makes it more ‘human’ – the reader can see the person being talked about, or who has produced the primary source. The choice of font is usually for clarity, or it combines well with the cover design. Occasionally the font is varied slightly due to typesetting considerations, basically, a case of ‘fitting it all on the page’. Laying it all out on a contents page has also been appreciated, according to feedback. Feedback has also meant encouraging debate, some people contacting me to ask if they can discuss, even dispute things in the magazine. Of course, as long as it is ‘civil’, I encourage that.

3. Jacobsen: Issue VII covered a different set of topics. These were intended to “incite people to comment on the opinions offered.” As can be seen, the content ranges from an argument against “at least one type of God,” two poems by you, a psychological self-analysis, a series of 50-word stories, a “neoclassical criticism method” applied to the Second Gulf War “Ultimatum Speech,” a scholarly look at the conceptualization of truth by Heidegger, and more.

These move into a puzzle, a cutesy introduction to literary terms in a sketch-based cartoon, reflections on Aristotle and Martin Luther King, Jr., some further commentary on Ishmael Reed, clips of dialogue over coffee at the el Lugar Stop & Shop. What particular articles or publications produced the most waves based on the introductory letter at the outset of the seventh issue?

Powell: It is said to be the sign of intelligence that different views can be held in the mind whilst not agreeing with any of them. There were some contentious opinions raised, in my opinion, from the content commissioned for this Edition, so I anticipated responses by ‘opening the door’ to further comment. I was also beginning to write more and more of the magazine using my own material, or I had to create some in order to achieve the target 40 pages of content. I was trying to encourage more people to give opinions, and hence, give content. In the end, it took a couple more editions to stimulate a little dialogue between Phil Elauria and Claus-Dieter Volko. The ‘waves’ produced were really more of a personal nature, the production of the magazine stimulating me to research more and more and to broaden my intellectual horizons. This edition also forged my friendships with Tahawar Khan, Paul Edgeworth and Eric Trowbridge. Much of this edition went on to appear in the WIN book “The Ingenious Time Machine” – which came out on Amazon this year. That was the biggest post-publication ‘wave’, alongside the presence of the WIN at the 12th Asia-Paciic Conference on Giftedness, which I helped organise in Dubai in 2012. Much of the credence for the WIN’s presence at the conference stemmed from the production of the WIN ONE. Evangelos gave a presentation about the WIN; I spoke specifically about the WIN with reference to the WIN ONE production. It also gave us more opportunities for photos, which had not been the case since Owen Cosby’s edition. These photos appeared in subsequent editions of the WIN ONE and the hierarchy of the WIN increased via the addition of Dr. Manahel Thabet as Vice President. By the end of July 2012, we had a revamped WIN which was looking to expand its influence on the high IQ milieu.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

Appendix II: Citation Style Listing

American Medical Association (AMA): Jacobsen S. An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six) [Online].August 2019; 20(A). Available from: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

American Psychological Association (APA, 6^th Edition, 2010): Jacobsen, S.D. (2019, August 8). An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six). Retrieved from http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six). In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 20.A, August. 2019. <http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six>.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (16^th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2019. “An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 20.A. http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

Chicago/Turabian, Humanities (16^th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott “An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. 20.A (August 2019). http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. 2019, ‘An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six)‘, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 20.A. Available from: <http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six>.

Harvard, Australian: Jacobsen, S. 2019, ‘An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six)‘, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 20.A., http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 7^thEdition, 2009): Scott D. Jacobsen. “An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six).” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 20.A (2019):August. 2019. Web. <http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six>.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Jacobsen S. An Interview with Graham Powell on Issue VI and Issue VII, Production Methodology and Design, and Published Content of WIN ONE (Part Six)[Internet]. (2019, August 20(A). Available from: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-six.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Krystal Volney on Early Personal Life, and Discovery of Giftedness and Talents (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08

Abstract

Krystal Volney is the new Journal Editor of United Sigma Korea. Volney is known for her computing interviews for WIN ONE Magazine (World Intelligence Network) as a tech writer, Co-Editor and publications in Award-winning/bestselling educational books that can be found in bookstores and libraries around the world, journals, blogs, forums & magazines such as Thoth Journal of Glia Society and City Connect Magazine since 2012-present. She is the author of Cosmos and Spheres poetry book and the ‘Dr. Zazzy’ children’s series. She discusses: writers and fans; early life; general giftedness; talents in writing and poetry; Nancy Drew Files, the Babysitter’s Club, Goosebumps, the Sherlock Holmes Series, and The Famous Five; children’s poetry, the environment, fashion, and romance; human beings exemplifying both emperor butterfly and monarch butterfly characteristics; identifying with the floral; hibiscus flowers and tiger lilies; and Claude Monet, Emily Dickinson, Mozart, and Van Gogh.

Keywords: editor, Krystal Volney, United Sigma Korea, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network, writer.

An Interview with Krystal Volney on Early Personal Life, and Discovery of Giftedness and Talents: Author & Editor, WIN ONE (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As with many writers, fans emerge. Who is Jessica? How did Jessica come to run a fan site for you, if you happen to know this? The link to the website can be found here: https://www.blogger.com/profile/02970796058419170292.

Krystal Volney: I don’t know of a fan named Jessica. I would like to though.

2. Jacobsen: What was early life like for you?

Volney: My early life was very restricted as I had a very strict upbringing. I wanted to fit in with my friends so I rebelled against my parents and was closely associated with a pedophile best friend like a ‘Second mother’ as she was trusted who took me places as well to see my ‘friends’ but it was manipulation on her path. How could a pedophile have honestly wished well on me or been like ‘second family’ truly? She wanted me to be a failure in life and be a menace. When I look back at my childhood, I want to inspire children out there and let them know how important it is to tell their parents, guardians or family if someone is child grooming or sexually abusing them even if it means that they would be controlled more. My childhood abuser did not want me to tell my teachers, family, friends or parents and wanted me to see her as my ‘best friend’.

3. Jacobsen: When was general giftedness discovered? What was the reaction of family and friends? Was this nurtured or not?

Volney: Honestly, I am an aspiring polymath and studied various subjects at university but in my opinion, I would have to be like Leonardo da Vinci whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography to truly accomplish my goal as an astonishing genius. I know that general giftedness can mean anything once you are outstanding in your respective field such as fashion, the Social Sciences, Medicine, the arts, music, Computing and the list goes on.

4. Jacobsen: When were talents in writing and poetry discovered? What was the reaction of family and friends? Were these nurtured or not?

Volney: When I was 20, I became a poet and I grew to love English, American, French, Caribbean and Russian Literature from reading as an autodidact. In my first poetry book Cosmos and Spheres, I was influenced by William Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.

5. Jacobsen: How did the Nancy Drew Files, the Babysitter’s Club, Goosebumps, the Sherlock Holmes Series, and The Famous Five influence you?

Volney: I loved those books as a child. Every Friday after school, I would go to the mall and purchase a new Goosebumps book or one of the books from the Famous Five series. Enid Blyton was a grand influence on my sense of belonging in the world as I loved stories about adventure, the dog Timmy and the character Georgina known as George. I was a tomboy as a child like many people who grew up in this way so I related to her character in the book. My favorite book from the series was ‘Five on Kirrin Island again’.

6. Jacobsen: Your subject areas of interest are children’s poetry, the environment, fashion, and romance. Why those particular areas?

Volney: I like trying new things and to me, writing about those subject areas interested me so much that I dedicated my first book of poetry to them.

7. Jacobsen: You consider human beings exemplifying both emperor butterfly and monarch butterfly characteristics. How? Why those examples and not others?

Volney: Emperor butterflies are easily recognized because of their lovely, iridescent blue wings. Monarch butterflies are the loveliest of all butterflies, some say, and are viewed as the “king” of the butterflies, hence the name “monarch”. I compare humans to these type of butterflies because I believe that most people have a story to tell in life and are conflicted. It’s my opinion that people have stages that they go through like butterflies and in the end their experiences make them beautiful as well as mature people like these insects.

8. Jacobsen: At age 21, you identified as a floral character. What does this mean now? What have been some of the metamorphoses over time for you? Any re-evaluation of personal character representation now?

Volney: I saw myself as bright and new, like the flower in the spring at age 21. I used to be easily bothered by what people thought of me, but for years now; I’ve become nonchalant telling myself their opinions don’t matter and the fact that people had negative things to say about me means they obviously feel disheartened by something about my character. There are those so wicked and spiteful that they mock modesty like the ‘branches’ in the ‘Flower poem’ and still want to stand out as something greater than your existence. Most of the time people hate on others because they want what they have, for themselves or they see you as their competitor. You asked what have been some of the metamorphoses over time for me. I can safely say that I’m much older and wiser now than I used to be. I’ve been through a lot of pain and hurt in my life that has shaped who I am today.

9. Jacobsen: Why do hibiscus flowers and tiger lilies better represent the meaning of a lady and a woman to you? In general, why flowers?

Volney: I am a big fan of flowers. Although I grew up as a tomboy, I loved all types of flowers especially hibiscus, white roses, Jasmine, orchids and tiger lilies. They are so beautiful to me is why.

10. Jacobsen: How were Claude Monet, Emily Dickinson, Mozart, and Van Gogh influential on you?

Volney: There is poetic, musical, and painting art. I love those people’s works because I can relate to them. Claude Monet was one of the best artists in the world to me because of his painting style of the landscape and of feminine things. Who can’t relate to Emily Dickinson? Her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?”; many poets would be able to understand her message and this could be interpreted in many ways. I love her sarcasm. Mozart’s music is breath-taking as well and Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ piece is one of my favourite choices of art in contemporary society.

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Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Tech Writer & Part-Time Co-Editor, WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition); Journal Editor, United Sigma Korea; Writer, Planet Ivy Magazine [Planet Ivy]; Writer, Desiblitz Magazine; Writer, Relate Magazine; Writer/Journalist, City Connect.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/2019/08/01/volney-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Rick Raubenheimer and Jani Schoeman on Silver Linings, Secularism and South Africa, and Community (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/01

Abstract

Rick Raubenheimer is the President and Jani Schoeman is the Former President of the South African Secular Society. They discuss: silver linings; niche needing filling by SASS; freedom from and to religion, and secularism; representation; fun activities of community; and final thoughts.

Keywords: Jani Schoeman, Rick Raubenheimer, secularism, South African Secular Society.

An Interview with Rick Raubenheimer and Jani Schoeman on Silver Linings, Secularism and South Africa, and Community: President and Former President, SASS (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen:I want to focus on two or three gray threads, there. One, unfortunately, you lost your father at age eight. I’m sorry to hear that. But also, when you were going through the Christian education, the Jewish education, transcendental meditation, these yogis, and an IM, you meet your wife, or who would become your wife, Judith.

Rick Raubenheimer: Yes.

Jacobsen: Within that context, you noted that you were consistently skeptical of these belief structures, or these belief structures around these practices, coming to a head with Dawkins and Dennett in the latter 2000s. What does this state about these practices, whether it’s the spiritual but not religious, or the formal religions, as being not entirely bad in terms of some of their consequences or derivatives?

Raubenheimer: Particularly from the i am training, I certainly grew. I think I became a better person. It was said of the i am training that one-third of the people, it had no effect on, one third got worse, and one third got better [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s good.

Jani Schoeman: Certainly, the techniques didn’t have a favourable effect on everybody. It was derided as a cult at various times, and so on.

I think there’s only one offshoot of it still going, which is called Quest. If you look for that on various blogs, there are people who refer to it as a cult, as well, and using psychological techniques, which is actually illegal in South Africa because there’s this Act which reserves doing psychology for people who are qualified psychologists, or psychotherapists.

2. Jacobsen: What was the niche needing filling through the foundation or the organization?

Schoeman: I think there wasn’t really an existing atheist community, especially in Johannesburg, that regularly met up in person when I first started the group. That was something that I couldn’t find when I was looking, and when I was going through my hard times and my deconversion. That’s why I started the group.

Ever since, we’ve discovered a few more niches within the secular community, I guess you could call it. There’s another organization that we support quite a bit, which is an organization that took the public schools to court last year in order to… Rick maybe you can say what was happening there. I think you will be able to describe it better.

Raubenheimer: Essentially, South Africa, as you probably know, in 1994, had a transition to democracy from the Apartheid system. Along with that came a largely secular constitution, rather like yours. There’s an invocation to God at the beginning, and then after that, it doesn’t get mentioned, basically.

We have a Bill of Rights which says that the state and people in the country may not discriminate against people on various grounds, including religion, belief, lack thereof, sexual orientation, skin colour, age, et cetera. The Constitution, particularly with the background of Apartheid that was based on racial discrimination, the new constitution very much focused on human rights, liberal model of treating everybody equally.

In fact, the orientation of the Constitution was not that difference is tolerated, but that we are the rainbow nation; and our differences are celebrated. This was built into the school curriculum as well. The idea was that schooling would be inclusive. The schools’ policy is such that schools may not favour, push, indoctrinate, proselytize any religion, or lack thereof.

This didn’t find great favour with the people who had come from the Christian National Education background. It’s been an ongoing battle since then to convince them that yes, actually, it’s not okay to state that a school’s ethos is a Christian ethos, that, “We follow Christian principles at this school,” that, “We will start assembly with prayer,” and things like that.

This active gentleman in the Cape, in Stellenbosch, called Hans Pietersen, who has some children in school and was finding this was happening – and he’s an atheist – found a set of pro bono lawyers, and they took six schools to court because they were favouring religion in school which was, in fact, against the state schools policy.

The Department of Education came in as a friend of the court to support the application. The long and the short was that the– A full bench of three judges found that the school’s policy must be upheld, and religion may not be favoured in schools. There may be religious education. In other words, people may be taught about religions, but they may not be religious – I’m looking for the right word here – indoctrination. Jani, give me the right word.

Schoeman: They can’t be coerced into a religion. They can’t be indoctrinated. That’s the right word, I think.

Raubenheimer: In other words, they can’t be taught religious observances, or to observe their religion. They can be taught about what the various religions do. Equal time must be given to all religions, as the court emphasized that our differences are not tolerated, they are celebrated.

They have an ongoing battle where parents of secular humanist children report their schools when the schools try to force religion on the children, which still happens regularly. The organization, which is called OGOD, which is quite a fun acronym, and has offended many people, much to Hans’s delight, then sends them a letter and points out the court judgement to them, and says that, “We will take you to court as well if you do not toe the line.”

3. Jacobsen: One thing, with secularism and the cases you gave, how does that respect the freedom to, and freedom from, religion? How does the principle of secularism do that, in other words, making a fairer society for everyone?

Schoeman: The thing is, secularism is the principle, but in South Africa. I’m thinking again about public schools. Because we have so many religious people, and especially Christians, they just bulldoze over that principle. I don’t know. It’s going to have to be people like us, and people that care to stand up. That try and personally just bring it under people’s attention and then hope; it’s difficult to do in practice.

Raubenheimer: Yes. There’s a lot of work to do because the schools are one issue. As happens in the United States, I’m not too sure what degree in Canada, but the schools tend to support religious activities, like religious camps, and school premises being used for services, even if it’s after hours, which they can do. There are lots of cases where we really need this.

One of our big projects, which I think you need to be aware of, is the secular marriage officers, for example.

Schoeman: Up until now, there have been no secular marriage officers officially in South Africa, up until our organization started registering them a few months ago. This was another battle that we have with the government because we are only the second organization that’s managed to convince Home Affairs to give us the authority to do that. The first institution that did manage to do that only, I think, had two marriage officers, and they weren’t existing for 10 years, so they weren’t really succeeding in that way.

Raubenheimer: They’re Cape-based. They don’t have a national footprint. If you think of the geography of South Africa, there’s Cape Town way at the south-west corner, and we’re more up in the north-east. We’re the economic hub, and Cape Town is more of the holiday hub.

Schoeman: Touristy.

Raubenheimer: There are very different vibes between the two. Cape Town is very laid back. Johannesburg is very industrialized, go-getters and so on. We do have associates in Cape Town, as well, and we’re trying to establish a branch there, as well, but they’re very laid back, as I say.

Schoeman: So, laid back.

Raubenheimer: Just to get back onto the marriage officer. Since we announced that we were able to get marriage officers certified, we’ve had about 20 applications. We’ve got them in various processes. We have our first certified marriage officer certified last year, and we have a few others who must write their exams still with their Department of Home Affairs.

Jacobsen: Well done.

Raubenheimer: Before that, essentially, if a secular couple wanted to get married, they would need to either find a compliant pastor of some sort of religion, and they do exist- which in fact, Jani did – or one would go to a magistrate for the official ceremony, and then have somebody do an unofficial ceremony.

Schoeman: You have a court wedding. That was our choice. You have a court wedding, or you convince some sort of pastor to do a lekker secular ceremony for you, which, at Home Affairs, is unlawful.

Raubenheimer: The other thing with Home Affairs is that we have two acts that govern marriages, essentially. There is a Marriage Act. The Marriage Act declared that marriage was between a man and a woman. This fell afoul of the Constitution because it says that there may not be discrimination based on sexual orientation.

What they should have done then, was simply to amend the Marriage Act, but to mollify the churches, they passed a new act called the Civil Union Act, which allows for same-sex marriages, and heterosexual marriages. Our officers are certified under the Civil Union Act. We require them to do both same-sex and heterosexual marriages, which has brought a lot of the gay community in to either want to become marriage officers or essentially support us. That’s been quite handy.

There was an exemption in the Civil Union Act, that a state official, who is officially obliged to marry people, could because of religious convictions, opt out of marrying same-sex couples. In practice, this meant that in pretty much all the smaller Home Affairs offices, anywhere outside the major centres, a same-sex couple couldn’t find anyone who would marry them.

Thanks to one of our smaller political parties (COPE), that provision has now been removed from the act. However, the department has got a year to implement that, so we’re probably still going to be at the forefront of organizing a gay marriage.

4. Jacobsen:With bringing in homosexuals into the fold, through secularism, what has been a relatively perennial issue in the secular community across the globe, as far as I can tell, there tends to be a lack of women being represented in leadership positions. That shows up in who are the public intellectuals, who are the ones doing the speaking tours, and engagements, and who are the ones writing the most popular books. I think that’s generally true.

Jani, as the founder and [Ed. Former] president, as a woman of a secular organization, and to your point, Rick, about bringing homosexuals into the fold, what can we do within community to better represent women in those leadership positions, as well as finding a context in which women feel more comfortable coming into the fold because often neither of those are the case?

Schoeman: I wouldn’t say we are actively doing anything about that right now, which is something for us to consider. It is a difficult thing to do. I don’t know what can be done. I’ll have to think about how we can do this or focus on this a little bit more.

Raubenheimer: In fact, it is so that SASS is largely male and white. We’ve had a lot of good interest from women as secular marriage officers. Several of them are lesbians and active in the gay community. Because our marriage officers will be part of the leadership structure, that will, I think, bring quite a balance in, both from the gender point of view and from the sexual orientation point of view because we haven’t had much representation of gays in leadership in SASS either.

For us, even the more pressing question is how we bring people of another race in. As I say, SASS is largely white now, and that’s a concern for us because the population is largely black and Christian.

Schoeman: I don’t know how much of the SASS leadership knows this, but I’m bisexual. It’s not something I go around advertising but I’m thinking maybe I should do it a bit more. Obviously, we have a lot of overlap when we’re finding that we have overlap with the gay community and the LGBT community.

We have had interested black and Indian people, and Asian people. We’ve had various people come to the meetings, and stuff, and show interest, but I’d like to up that a bit more.

5. Jacobsen: What are some of the fun activities that you do within the community, as the original organization was, essentially, an atheist Meetup?

Jani: We still have that component. We still do our Meetups. It’s a mix between exploring Joburg. We do especially scientifically orientated sorts of outings. Just this Sunday, we went to a science museum called Sci-Bono. It’s mostly for children. There was a rock art expedition there, and a whole thing on archaeology, which I so, so, so loved. It was amazing.

We’ve been to the Cradle of Humankind. I don’t know if you know about the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. We’ve got some cool paleontological, and archaeological sites in Africa, and specifically South Africa, so we do a lot of those sorts of outings. We’ve done outings where we go to the breweries and just drink beer and gin, and stuff. We do all of it.

The other sorts of things we do are more discussion-orientated Meetups. These normally take place at somebody’s home. Most of the time it’s at Rick’s home, Rick’s and Judith’s home. We’ve had everything from, “Why are you an atheist?”, to secular parenting, is another one. We had a psychologist come and talk to us about secular parenting once. We do all sorts of things.

Raubenheimer: One of our leaders is looking this year at establishing Camp Quest in South Africa. You’re aware of Camp Quest?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Raubenheimer: They’re looking to broaden internationally and we’re looking to possibly, in about a bit short of a year’s time, have the first Camp Quest camp in South Africa. That will be great fun, as well. That joins in with secular parenting.

Schoeman: I must say, something I also discovered quickly upon establishing SASS was that there’s really a need for people, for parents who have no- there are no activities for non-religious activities for children. The Christians and the churches have all their camps, but there’s nothing really for the atheist kids, if you can call them that. Kids of atheist parents. People have a lot of questions around parenting when it comes to secularism and atheism and bringing up your child as a free thinker.

That’s also a niche, I think, that still needs to come to existence in South Africa, that we haven’t really tapped into yet, but we have touched on it.

6. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Raubenheimer: I think we should have another one [Ed. Search “Ask SASS…” at www.canadianatheist.com.]

Schoeman: I wanted to mention in my history, quickly, that I was a Young Earth Creationist up until the age of 21. Just something I didn’t say, which I think is significant because I went basically from that to atheism. There was no in-between.

7. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Jani and Rick.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Rick Raubenheimer, President, SASS; Jani Schoeman, Former President, SASS.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sass-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Krystal Volney on Family History (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/01

Abstract

Krystal Volney is the new Journal Editor of United Sigma Korea. Volney is known for her computing interviews for WIN ONE Magazine (World Intelligence Network) as a tech writer, Co-Editor and publications in Award-winning/bestselling educational books that can be found in bookstores and libraries around the world, journals, blogs, forums & magazines such as Thoth Journal of Glia Society and City Connect Magazine since 2012-present. She is the author of Cosmos and Spheres poetry book and the ‘Dr. Zazzy’ children’s series. She discusses: intriguing family facts; biggest changes between 18 and 30; definition of genius; family national background meaning for the ethnic background, and some of the linguistic, educational, and religious or lack thereof, influences from them; Dominica important to family history, and Empress Josephine; Robert-Marguerite Tascher, baron de La Pagerie and Marianne Felicité, Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls, and Henri François Pittier; forms of love missing in early life, and moral courage.

Keywords: editor, Krystal Volney, United Sigma Korea, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network, writer.

An Interview with Krystal Volney on Family History: Author & Editor, WIN ONE (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As a Millennial – using the term to satisfy demographers, or a 30-year-old, the parental background and personal background become more or less better known, statistically speaking. However, some knowledge only becomes understood if presented in the tone of the person. What intriguing family facts emerged later in life for you? Those unknown in youth and unlisted to the public, so far.

Krystal Volney: When I was a child I wasn’t aware. but as a teenager, I was given evidence that my Volney relatives and I are descendants of the notable Count, Count Volney. I only told my close friends and some of my maternal cousins. I did not see it as a big deal. I did not want to be treated differently from other people my age. The person that I once was over 12 years ago is a completely different person to who I am now as a result of experiences in my life. I never aspired to be a genius until my later years and never knew what I wanted to do with my life initially. My family controlled me. When I was very young, I was enthralled by Ancient Egyptian culture and thought of becoming an Egyptologist when I grew up, reading many books on that. I loved the culture of Cleopatra, Nefertiti and the Pharoah Tutankhamun.

Other family facts that emerged later in life for me is information about my Dominican (paternal), Barbadian (maternal) and Martiniquais (paternal) heritage. I read an extraordinary book in 2016 about my grandmother’s first cousin Phyllis Shand Allfrey called A Caribbean Life published in 1996 about my family’s relation to Empress Josephine’s Uncle and her cousin Marianne Felicité through my grandmother Rosalind Enid Alford Nicholls-Volney’s father Ralph Nicholls, grandson of Marianne Felicité. Having a turbulent past, that sort of information was intriguing to me; even though, I did not expect to be treated differently from anyone out there. I prefer having my own achievements; although, I do respect those who want to be elevated because of their families and ancestries. I believe I would make a great impact on the globe, helping others by sharing my childhood issues, so that this useful information would stop innocent minors from being sexually abused by trusted employees in their family homes. I want people to know that child sexual abuse can happen to the most intelligent of people’s children as you can see priests and nuns are trustworthy people and even they have been accused of pedophilia. As a child, I did not know what my childhood pedophile did was wrong but as a mature woman now, I could definitely look back at my past and know that she manipulated and groomed me.

2. Jacobsen: What have been the biggest changes between the ages of 18 and 30?

Volney: I have definitely become a more mature individual and although it is said that ‘Age is just a number’ , the once ‘Being popular and being cool’ vibe from my younger years has definitely changed. I value the friends that I have now and are thankful for them. I live a life of gratitude for what I have and try to not focus on any negativity in life. At the same time, as I get older I try to become more mature but still maintain a youthful mentality in certain aspects.

3. Jacobsen: What defines a genius to you? Or, perhaps, what different definitions of genius suffice for you?

Volney: Someone who is exceptional or gifted in his or her respective field/s.

4. Jacobsen: Some biographical information exists on the website, which states, “Her family comes from Martinique, Venezuela, Dominica island, Montserrat, Barbados, Trinidad, Dominican Republic, Cayman Islands, Scotland, Canada, Aruba, St. Kitts, Jamaica, Norway and USA.” What does this family national background mean for the ethnic background? What were some of the linguistic, educational, and religious or lack thereof, influences from them?

Volney: Oh ethnic background? My family is of Mestizo heritage. My father is Mestizo and my mother has African mainly, Portuguese and British heritage. My maternal grandmother is Biracial and my deceased grandfather was predominantly African. I identify as multiracial race or ‘Black’ physically. However, race and ethnicity should not matter though! Personality is more important than what a person looks like right? Generally, my entire family is well-educated as you asked about educational influences from them. Having a solid education means a lot to my maternal and paternal relatives. However, my personal views are that I stand on my feet independently and have my own achievements than rely on those of my families’. On the other hand, I don’t judge anyone who depends on theirs as it’s not my place to condemn anyone.

5. Jacobsen: Why is Dominica important to family history, i.e., in regards to the Volneys and the Cromptons? Who was Empress Josephine?

Volney: My family history in Dominica is lovely to me as I did not know of it until my mid-twenties. Empress Josephine? Oh, she was a French Queen born on Martinique.

6. Jacobsen: Who were Robert-Marguerite Tascher, baron de La Pagerie and Marianne Felicité? Who was Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls? What was the relationship between Henry Nicholls and Henri François Pittier?

Volney: You will have to ask a historian about that but by reading from distinguished books, Robert-Marguerite Tascher, baron de La Pagerie and Marianne Felicité were relatives of Empress Josephine’s… honestly, I would like to know the intimate relationship myself between Henry Nicholls my great-great-grandfather and Henri François Pittier from Venezuela as they wrote a book on Botany together.

7. Jacobsen: What were the forms of love missing most in early life? As to childhood sexual abuse, we can cover this in one on the next parts more fully. Thank you for sharing this, and with a full name, this takes moral courage and emotional resilience, and the commitment to the truth, to represent oneself this open and vulnerable to the public.

Volney: Child sexual abuse and child grooming that happened to me as a little girl from 5 to 13 years old secretly gave me a wrong understanding of love from an early age. I enjoy single life as an adult now but don’t need anyone in that regard and if I date the right man, it would be for us to add to each other’s lives not subtract, and grow older together. Otherwise, I can remain single for the rest of my life.

Sure Scott, I enjoyed sharing this and thank you for seeing it as moral courage and being emotionally resilient to represent myself this openly and vulnerably to the public…

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Wikipedia. (2019). Oba (ruler). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oba_(ruler).

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Wikipedia. (2019). Silversmith. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silversmith.

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Wikipedia. (2019). The Gaylords (Dominican band). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gaylords_(Dominican_band).

Wikipedia. (2019). The Legend of Zelda. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda.

Wikipedia. (2019). Trafford Publishing. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafford_Publishing.

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Wise Famous Quotes. (2019). Krystal Volney Quotes. Retrieved from https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/krystal-volney-quotes/.

Yggdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts. (2014, March). March 2014 VOL XXII, Issue 3, Number 251. Retrieved from users.synapse.net/kgerken/Y-1403.pdf.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/2019/08/01/volney-jacobsen/; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Graham Powell on Editorial Leadership Transition and a New Tone for WIN ONE (Part Five)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/01

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell, earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: debut as an editor with the publication on October 10, 2010; content of the fifth issue; most popular points of the publications; and setting a new tone for the leadership of the publication.

Keywords: AtlantIQ Society, editor, fifth issue, Graham Powell, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network.

An Interview with Graham Powell on Editorial Leadership Transition and a New Tone for WIN ONE: Editor, WIN ONE & Vice President, AtlantIQ Society (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your first editorial production debut was on October 10, 2010, with the fifth issue of WIN ONE, if including Genius 2 Genius Manifest. You characterized this issue as a “bumper issue” at the time, correctly, especially with the massive increase in the size of this particular issue. The largest chunk of the material belongs to the statistical analysis of Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis of the first decade of the World Intelligence Network. What was behind the selection of the particular colour of blue and design of the border, and picture of the village of Oios (Oia) on the island of Santorini, Greece? The border of the issue and the colouring appear decidedly Greek. It sets a tone. The famous picture of Oios may be the giveaway hint.

Graham Powell: I approached Beatrice Rescazzi early in the preparation process of this Edition and asked if she would mind illustrating it. In the end, she reformatted all of it, and, I think under the influence of Evangelos being Greek, chose the font which dominates this issue. Evangelos was the last to submit his huge analysis, after which the edition went to Beatrice – this being within a few days of the publication date. She was suddenly taken ill and the magazine was uploaded a few days after the 10th, with an appropriate note going on the WIN website. When Beatrice sent back the finished copy, the size of the file was immense and covered as many pages as all the previous editions put together. I decided to label it a ‘bumper edition’ at that point. It marked a grand return to the arena and the next few magazines had people eagerly contributing, the feedback about the format being positive. I think the blue and white obviously reflected not only the colours in the Greek flag, but the dominant colours within the photo of Santorini. I also like to have a background colour to the magazine pages, plus a watermark, and often the watermark reflects a deep theme within the edition.

2. Jacobsen: The entrance into the fifth issue includes some work on, appropriately, an invitation to a new IQ test, some things to consider for systematizing the construction of a meaningful life, the ways in which religion may play a role in public life and the formation of the individual citizens’ political and personal choices in the public sphere (long think piece), on divisibility and the number 3, a nice puzzle set, a consideration of the application of the Socratic method – as opposed to rhetoric – to political concerns (with a nice separation between “first-order philosophical knowledge,” “second-order philosophical knowledge,” and “third-order philosophical knowledge”), and the representation of the truly bold vision-in-action for WIN Dr. Katsioulis harbors. If you can recall, granted it has been almost another decade since its publication, what articles took the most negotiation with the authors, e.g., Marco Ripa and the translation from Italian into English?

Powell: As previously inferred, Marco’s was the most complex composition to interpret and of course translate. I had to liaise with him to make sure it was accurate and indeed I made a slight correction to it, if I remember correctly. (And to be fair to Marco, it was just a typo.) Anyway, the other notable challenge was breaking down the long articles via the addition of illustrative photos and subtitles. I conferred with Paul Edgeworth, though he trusted my judgement from the beginning and after the edition came out, he said how pleased he was with the result. It is also quite noticeable how many errors appear in some essays, so I read them very carefully and researched anything I thought awry. This was also appreciated after the publication date. Rich Stock was particularly thankful for my contribution to his essay, which he wrote specifically for the magazine. It certainly forged our friendship which, as you mentioned, goes back over a decade now.

3. Jacobsen: Within the previous question’s framing, what were the most popular points of the publications in the bumper issue, the fifth issue?

Powell: Evangelos Katsioulis loved the cover design. He also appreciated the font, which was reassuring. Furthermore, with a huge interest, 2010 was, indeed, the pinnacle of interest and participation, that ‘high curve’ of participation being bolstered by the fact that only a few magazines from the member societies existed at that point in time, plus people were not so interested in writing for cash. That has changed now, as far as I can surmise, the plethora of blogs and magazines created with the raison d’être of earning money, resulting in, I think, the demise of magazines like the WIN ONE. Also, the increase in Asian interest in high IQ societies, from new members without the English skills or easy access to western societies’ discussions, means that the participation in magazines which predominantly promote western culture is considered unwise, or, at least, is not openly encouraged. Additionally, the WIN ONE was a sounding board used by people to show off their skills and talents, which the World Genius Directory “Genius of the Year” award also encouraged in the early years of my tenure as editor. What is more, people expressed their appreciation of the simplicity of design coupled with the large variety of content. The bumper edition set a standard for the way the magazine was now going to be presented and it was liked by most. I also enjoyed creating the puzzles that have become a regular feature. I think, through all of what I have just mentioned, people identified with the person predominantly creating each edition, and they appreciated the guidance given too.

4. Jacobsen: As the publication went on a slight hiatus over time between the fourth and the fifth issues, what were the important points about setting a tone for the new editorial leadership here?

Powell: The Plain English books have long been an influence on me, going back to Sir Ernest Gowers at Oxford. The Critical Sense: Practical Criticism of Prose and Poetry by James Reeves, has also been at the core of how I present myself in writing, resulting in, fundamentally, an ability to adapt and present work that is as easy as possible to access, whilst being fun to experience as well. Going by the feedback I have received over the years, I think I have achieved that goal, that balance between the complexity of content and the clarity of presentation.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: August 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-five; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Secularism, Pluralistic Democracy, and Religious Courts (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/22

Abstract

Gita Sahgal is the Executive Director of the Centre for Secular Space. She discusses: secularism and pluralistic democracy; Sharia courts; most judges as men in religious courts; impacts of the community through ostracism.

Keywords: Centre for Secular Space, Gita Sahgal, pluralistic democracy, secularism, Sharia Courts.

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Secularism, Pluralistic Democracy, and Religious Courts: Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview edited for clarity and readability. Some information may be incorrect based on audio quality.*

*This interview was conducted November 13, 2016.*

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The roots, by which I mean that which it embeds in, seem two-fold. One, the nature of secularism as a must in pluralistic democracies. On the other hand, the nature of religion. On the first, the former, secularism is a must because this permits everyone freedom to or from religion.

In that, if an individual society, partially or fully theocratic, then it will basically support one religion over all other religions and irreligion. In addition, you can even have a pluralistic but only religion.

In some countries, like the United Arab Emirates, you cannot sign yourself as irreligious in your marking, even if you are an expat and not necessarily an Emirati. On the latter, the nature of religion, to me, seems to be that it is not only a comprehensive worldview theory but also a comprehensive practice.

It embeds itself in all aspects of society. We saw it in Christendom. We see it during the Caliphate. We see it in other parts of the world. Therefore, in secular democracies where they give up their power of secular rule of law and socio-cultural contexts, then religion will begin to fill in the hole that it probably considers itself to have a rightful place too.

Gita Sahgal: Yes, there is an aspect of Britain, which is particularly tragic. Unlike the US, the British, as a whole – and I think this is across minorities, were not religious. One, Britain is not a religious state. Two, the Queen is the head of the Church of England. The Church of England is the established church of the state.

But as a Christian state, you are free to believe what you want. Because it is fundamentally a liberal society, not the state. A lot of social life is lived around the religious community. You have America as a secular state where there is a huge marketplace of religions.

As we found with the Trump campaign, there is an evangelical strong vote. There is no power of evangelicalism in Britain politically. In Britain, Christianity has no real political force. People do not go to church.

Even if they call themselves religious, and then put it down, they tend not to attend church. Society is very secularized. Yet, for political reasons, the government is promoting religious groups. One of the reasons and this is t least related to the Rushdie affair.

“There is the Christian stuff. Therefore, in the interest of equity, we will have other faiths.”

Jacobsen: Right.

Sahgal: We have Christians as lawmakers, not simply Christians who are Christians but Christians who sit in the House of Lords. It is so bloated that it is bigger than the House of Commons. It is mad. It is insane that this is the case.

There are 800 people or something. It is bigger than the House of Commons. It is mad. Bishops are taking up the House. So, they have to put more Muslims, Hindus, other religious people into the Upper House. Not because of the societal reasons, but also because they want more of those religions.

These are state-funded Church of England and Catholic schools, so they had to allow Jewish schools – and so they had to allow Muslim schools. So, in the interest of equity, we have more and more religious discrimination in the religious arena.

[Laughing] that is what will happen with the Sharia courts as they have the Jewish marriage courts. So, they have religious marriage and civil marriage. There are a civil marriage and a religious marriage of minorities.

People are voting to promote religious marriage only. Then they are marrying more and more women because those marriages are recognized as not breaking the law.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: It has become a social fact. Women are saying, “We are having these religious marriages to be respectable.” My generation: if you wanted to live with a man, you shacked up with him like a white person in this country, or your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever.

They may get married or not. They may marry in middle age because their pension is coming up. So, they figure, “I might as well marry now” [Laughing]. They want to stay together anyway.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: Muslims are making the same kinds of decisions as other people because of the hassle of their parents and some hide for a while. Then some eventually get married. They settled down. Now, you hear these young people influenced by fundamentalist versions of Islam.

They want to go over with some man who their parents approve of to have a religious marriage. Many feel as though they have to do that. Then the man wants to dump the woman with some children.

Then the woman finds the marriage is not recognized in English law. So, she can claim welfare benefits as a single mother, but she cannot dissolve the marriage and then she has no choice but to go to a Sharia court. People with civil marriages do this too. These are being allowed to exist.

Even though, there hasn’t been a huge demand for them. That is the horror of religion; people are not madly religious. They do not think that if you ask people if they believe in creationism and humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time. That the world was made exactly as this 6,000 years ago.

A lot of the wrong views are erroneous views rather than strongly held erroneous views, probably. For them to have real influence, they would need to take advantage of the education system.

2. Jacobsen: If you take the Sharia courts or the education system, or arguing for human rights and women’s rights, what are some moves people can do to implement and instantiate women’s rights and provide a feeling of not feeling trapped to not have to go to Sharia courts for some women some of the time?

Sahgal: It is not where the groups exist that provide an alternative to women. The women do not go. The two organizations providing frontline services around domestic violence provide long-term therapeutic work with women.

We have been having a lot of attacks calling us secular extremists on the women, on Twitter and stuff like that. There is one woman who is attacking Maryam. Maryam said to look at these ex-Muslims being murdered. The woman said that this is not her problem.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] Wow.

Sahgal: What kind of response is that? [Laughing] that is anti-human rights approach, where it is not your concern. Nobody has a ban on what politics or views you hold for the provision of a service.

People come because they need a service. They need to leave their husband, have been facing their violence, need therapy, to talk to somebody in a safe space. The women may be religious or not or may move from one to another.

We do not evangelize people in that space. Nobody evangelizes in terms of how we deal with individuals who need help. Unlike, the Christian or the Muslim organizations where evangelization is built into their work.

We provide services where we think there is a need for services. We send them to where we think they will be served properly. We talked to the head of the Sharia council. They are encouraged to head there or told to go there. They may end up there.

But the fact is they do not end up there because they have detailed work and their own court work. Some end up there. It is harder, but then you have to do the level of work that you need. You do not have a one-size-fits-all form of service.

A lot of services that do domestic violence are getting worse and worse. We know it works. We are not talking about something we do not know about. Southall Black Sisters has generations of women. Who come in destitute with their children who are suicidal or contemplated suicide before they came in, this was something I was doing with service delivery in the 80s; their children are grown up and lawyers or things like that.

They do art design or something like that. They survive. Their children survive. They help them stand on their two feet and then get out of these religious services. We know it can be done. It can be done. It is not something out there. We are saying, “We have done it. We are doing it,” to understand that it is possible.

If you get someone who is running a Muslim women’s center and their main job is to keep a woman in Islam, a woman comes in and says, “I need help. I am in distress I need this divorce.” They will say, “Come with us to the Sharia court, we will take you there. We know the guys. They are very nice.”

There was a case of one woman giving evidence to the Home Select Committee. She said that she had taken more than 100 women to the Sharia court. How an organization lost funding because its service was so rotten, they lost funding, which was given to another group to provide for the service.

Nobody knew what was happening to women. There were not dealing properly with the cases because they did not think any religious solutions or putting women in the hands of these so-called Sharia judges.

It was allowed to be rotten. We are talking about basic common sense. We have an evidence base for it. Yet, it seems like something arcane. “Women want these services. We are told.” They want those services because they do not have any other services to go to.

They end up going there as their destination. As I said, one woman who works with the United Iranian-Kurdish Rights organization said, the Sharia councils themselves can be considered violence against women.

It is not some discriminate and others do not. It is systematic of the form of violence against women themselves.

3. Jacobsen: Are these judges mostly or all men?

Sahgal: They are not all men. There are some women. The women are as bad as the men and they out there on TV at the Home Select Committee. While all of the men run these operations. [Laughing] it is very interesting the rebranding going on.

They always call themselves councils. They cheated in divorce courts. They call themselves judges, issue rulings, and issue fatwas, and issue divorce certificates, which are not legal in any sense. However, they are treated as legal tender.

Not money, but no actual document; they say that they are mediation and arbitration courts now. It is getting to understand the endless academic accounts of having these Sharia councils and having women there and having them called mediation services.

These academics are wide-eyed to this [Laughing]. They are legal pluralists. You talk about secular democracy. There is a very, very strong argument for legal pluralism. In Canada, you have it around First Nations as secular groups, which denounce Canada in wanting their own laws.

There is a famous case called Lovelace. I am not sure who it came up in a human rights document. The Lovelace case was a woman who married out and lost her status as an Indigenous woman in a group, in her nation.

She was not allowed to hand down property or something like that. It showed even if the intention is supposedly progressive, which I understand with many of the First Nations is about long histories of oppression and marginalization and so on.

They feel they can best get it if they have their own cultural legal system-services and run internal courts according to norms that they want. They have been extremely restrictive on women’s rights. So, women have to be married within the group to pass on.

They are making things pretty difficult. Since then, they have done marvellous things. However, it is interesting that one of the cases against the human rights framework is by a woman who was denied her rights by the Indigenous court of her own group.

Not by the racist white system in that case. What happens, the racist white system allows people to fall through the cracks. What we find, when you have parallel systems, one system will set you back into the parallel system or will be hands-off.

They do not, in the end, protect your rights. The Supreme Court, they do not protect your rights. So, you have minorities having these systems in lots of different countries because there are whole systems of personal family law in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

In India, the Hindu person law got changed. It was not ended, but it ended polygamy. There was a reform in the 50s. In Pakistan, in the early 60s, there was another change. Pakistan-Hindu law, Hindu marriages are only just being allowed to be registered in Pakistan. Hindu law did not change.

It was horrific. In India, the law was not the problem. India was probably the most backward Muslims, or anywhere in the world, in secular India. Because where you have legal pluralism, the laws are not viewed as needed for minorities.

It is precisely a way to keep minority women subjugated in their own communities. The state says, “We are hands-off because we are listening to the community.”

Jacobsen: It is PR on the part of the state.

Sahgal: Yes, the state has always said that.

4. Jacobsen: Canada and the UK are a little different. Things would be different if you were a Brahmin compared to a Harijan in law but also in culture. That makes me think of the United Kingdom, where if a woman goes to a court system and gets the divorce.

Then it is accepted. How does that impact her life within the community in many cases that she has grown up in her whole life? Is there shunning and ostracism in general?

Sahgal: There has been some of that. Some women have to then build their lives. They get some professional qualifications. The two women in the case study. They were two older one. One woman rebuilt her life.

She got herself educated. Late in life, but she got educated, she remarried as well. So, she rebuilt her life. Some women, they may end up pretty isolated and devastated. Even if there is a women’s center in the community, like Southall Black Sisters, it becomes another community.

They have something to celebrate and come together. I am not part of Southall Black Sisters any longer, but I feel very emotionally attached to them. It becomes like an alternative community. I find some women stayed in the area and then do go on living their lives.

They do withstand that. Then there are lots of complicated and different stories. These groups where you can at least create a space like the Center for Secular Space. One is called Secular Spaces: Asian Women Organizing.

S, whatever society is doing, we can create our own space. It was an autonomous group. It was originally a black group – meaning Asian and African. It was a very, very out there space. Now there are a lot of African women because there are more Somali women who have settled in the area, into SPS.

It was autonomous. In that, it was a time when we felt that we were feminists and part of a broader feminist movement. We were not anti-feminist or anti-all white feminists. They were not taking on the same issues as us.

A much more problematic space for us. We wanted to deal more politically with those issues, but along with the domestic violence stuff. We began to raise issues of religious fundamentalism. In Britain, our first meeting had fundamentalism and International Women’s Day. We had the Rushdie days.

Then we were like “Why are we talking about religion?” rather than Solidarity with South Africa [Laughing]]. Why does it have to be about religion? Religion was not felt as much of a that at the time.

It is a threat. Religious fundamentalism is a threat. It was very much from that minority women’s perspective that we began to discuss these issues.

5. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Gita.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sahgal-four; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Graham Powell on Dr. Florian Schröder, Owen Cosby, Genius 2 Genius Manifest, and WIN ONE Editorial Direction Set in the Past (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/22

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell,earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: the first three issues of WIN ONE under the aegis of Florian Schröder and the formats of the issues; the issue under the editorial leadership of Owen Cosby; and the influence of the prior issues on the editorial guardianship of Powell.

Keywords: AtlantIQ Society, editor, Florian Schröder, Graham Powell, intelligence, IQ, Owen Cosby, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network.

An Interview with Graham Powell on Florian Schröder, Owen Cosby, Genius 2 Genius Manifest, and WIN ONE Editorial Direction Set in the Past: Editor, WIN ONE & Vice President, AtlantIQ Society (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we look at the ways in which the publications have changed over time for the World Intelligence Network, or WIN, one of the more noticeable changes has been the transition from the previous title of Genius 2 Genius Manifest to WIN ONE.

The first three issues were under the auspices of Florian Schröder. The fourth issue was under the aegis of Owen Cosby. Now, the formats remained relatively similar for Genius 2 Genius Manifest with a word from the editor, art, poetry, essays, riddles, and then one change with the inclusion of a section for photos. Any idea as to the reason for this specific format to the publication in its prior manifestations?

Graham Powell: Dr. Florian Schröder would have to definitively answer that question, Scott, though the format may have been influenced by Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis as well. Evangelos supervised the early editions I produced, as one might expect from the Founder and President of the WIN. The impression I got from the early magazines was that they were akin to research papers, the origin of some of them coming from research, so I hypothesize that this origin influenced the layout and format.

2. Jacobsen: Also, following from the previous question, we can note the content with Pascal’s Wager and Kraïtchik’s Paradox, Martin Gardner, IQ and EQ, intercultural competence, phenomenology and theology, nonverbal communication, haikus, analysis of the early demographics of WIN (findings: mostly male members in several societies), and intelligence and competence (highly in-depth).

When Cosby took over as the main editor, the content, for his one issue of editorial leadership, contained some photographs with Chris Chsioufis, Julie Tribes, Thomas Baumer, and Evangelos Katsioulis, part two of the content on intelligence and competence, an interesting take on the ontological status of “GOD” through smushing the lines of epistemology into an penultimate and eternal agnostic epistemic state on the question (can’t say one way or the other), on the work of Descartes, Baruch de Spinoza, and some commentary on intelligence tests in a framework of logical art.

Prior to working on the fifth issue as the editor for WIN ONE, as the name changed – as noted, how did this prior work and content inform the fifth issue?

Powell: I wanted the WIN ONE to be more like a magazine, not a collection of research papers. In May 2010 I helped Beatrice Rescazzi produce the first magazine for the AtlantIQ Society, the layout and colourfulness of the design appealing to me. Beatrice was largely responsible for that, plus I was interested in putting more artistic elements into the WIN ONE. After a near four-year gap in production, I eagerly contacted my friends in the WIN and put advertisements on the website. In a short time, many publications were supplied, most notably, a paper on mathematics in Italian, which I decided to translate. I only had 15 or so days to do that translation, but I liaised with Marco Ripà and we got it done. This increased the content significantly. Evangelos also volunteered to supply an overview of the WIN, largely due to the increase in society membership during the first half of 2010. The average IQ of the meta-society was now lower than before, which also influenced my approach to the design. I wanted it to appeal to a broader spectrum of membership.

3. Jacobsen: Continuing from the last question, how did this begin to inform future issues past the fifth? How did you adapt the content and the format into something entirely personal while within the framework of the World Intelligence Network for WIN ONE?

Powell: In 2011 I took a year out from work, my interests in creativity and innovation occupying my days. I read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and extrapolated from it thoughts and ideas which I later found to be aligned with concepts in Positive Psychology and philosophy, the essay by Paul Edgeworth on Contemplation strongly influencing my approach to didactic planning, for example. This was reflected in the WIN ONE production as I wanted creativity to be featured within it much more, the overall layout and design also being quite simple, yet visually appealing, as well as duly stimulating cognitively.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-four; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on 1694-1770, Sex and Gender Dynamics in History, and Universal Sympathy (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/15

Abstract

Dr. Iona Italia is an Author and Translator, and a Sub-Editor for Areo Magazine, and Host of Two for Tea. She discusses: Margaret Atwood, a feminist frame for research, feminisms, and 1694 to 1770; equality playing out in the daily lives of ordinary women; social equality and legal equality; impacts on the further equality of women; the reaction of men when they came back from the war, and the counter-reaction of women; precedents of women entering into new arenas as a trend; sex and gender divide by disciplines; and sympathy.

Keywords: Areo Magazine, Iona Italia, Margaret Atwood, Parsi, Two for Tea, Zoroastrianism.

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on 1694-1770, Sex and Gender Dynamics in History, and Universal Sympathy: Host, Two for Tea & Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were talking earlier about a feminist frame for the research, what was the understanding of a women’s movement, of feminism, at that time?

Because we live in a time when there are, more properly framed, “feminisms.” I know Margaret Atwood commonly states it is probably at least 50 things, depending on who you’re talking to. At the time, from 1694 to 1770, what did they mean?

Dr. Iona Italia: When I was doing my Ph.D., I was interested in women’s position in society and how the way that they talked about themselves and they represented themselves as women reflected those kinds of stereotypes. The way that they played with those stereotypes, e.g., the old maid being one of the obvious ones.

Jacobsen: Right.

Italia: Yes. It wasn’t necessarily that those stereotypes created a victimhood stance. I was interested in that, in women, their position in society, women as writers, et cetera. I wasn’t exclusively interested in that, but that was what I began being interested in for my Ph.D.

Then I noticed that there were five women – well, four and the maybe. They are all anonymous. The one whose identity we haven’t yet discovered was probably a woman. There are various theories, though. I thought five is the perfect number for a Ph.D. It is one per chapter, and then the introduction and conclusion. That is why I decided to focus on the women essayists, rather than looking at women poets or novelists.

They did not think of themselves as feminist. That term wasn’t used. Feminism as we know it, I would say, did not begin until 1788, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What we have in earlier works, pre-Wollstonecraft, with people like Mary Astell, I would say they are classic battle-of-the-sexes style things. It is all about which sex is better, men or women.

There were some people in the early 18th century. A lot of people published. For example, there is one called From Abbasia to Zenobia. It is a biographical mini-encyclopedia or dictionary of famous women. It is a book celebrating famous women throughout history.

There are also some works that are addressed to usually upper-class women, which are educational works, which are encouraging women to study botany or astronomy or mathematics, often framing that as a man teaching his daughter or a brother teaching his sister and it is “The Lady’s Guide to” whatever. There are also those kinds of works.

There are some works, like Mary Astell’s, which advocate a pseudo-nunnery style situation, a pseudo-university for women. (What Mary Astell is advocating is a college.) Then there are also a lot of polemical works that have titles like “The Proof that Woman is Superior to Man,” and things like that. This is the battle of the sexes. None of those things are what I would describe as feminism. Although, you could say that these are women-centric writings and concerns.

But feminism begins where it is not a battle, but it is about equal rights. That begins with Mary Wollstonecraft. The systematic definition of that begins with Mary Wollstonecraft.

2. Jacobsen: How was women’s position in society transitioning towards more equality in the 1694 – 1770 period? How was this played out, not necessarily in thematic things like a battle-of-the-sexes form? How was this playing out in the daily lives of ordinary women?

Italia: I would say that I do not think there were a huge number of legal changes happening, but, of course, the Enlightenment was happening. That had a couple of knock-on effects for women, I think. One was that education became much more highly valued, so the proportion of women who were illiterate went down considerably over this period.

Then also, because of this emphasis on rationality, there was more emphasis on education. I was talking earlier about, mostly for upper-class women, this spread of books teaching women different subjects. That became democratized in the 1760s with the magazines.

The original magazines were huge tomes, monthly tomes. They had lots of this educational material inside them. You would pick up a magazine, open it up. There would be an article on the flora and fauna of Sri Lanka with fold-out illustrations and things like that.

Magazines were affordable. They were often available in public spaces, like cafes and coffee houses and in people’s houses, where domestic servants would have access to reading them. You did not have to buy a copy to be able to see it. I think that also helped women’s education and self-awareness.

The decline in superstition. 1733 was the last time that a witch was burned in Great Britain, in Tring, in Hertfordshire. Clearly, that also improved women’s lots.

In general, during the Enlightenment, there was a strong emphasis on questioning authority, on not accepting authority, of any kind, blindly. That began with not accepting the divine right of kings. That began with The Glorious Revolution.

Then, of course, the questioning of religion and Christianity, which the church was able to fight back against in Europe. But in the UK much less so, the church was so much weakened by what had happened during The Glorious Revolution. Of course, it was a logical next step from there to questioning the authority of husbands over wives.

3. Jacobsen: What came first, social equality or legal equality?

Italia: I think it depends on the specific law. Sometimes, laws are changed to reflect what is already common behaviour. Other times, laws are changed first and then behaviours gradually change.

4. Jacobsen: After 1770, what were some major developments in other parts of the world that were directly or even derivatively impacted by this development of further equality for women?

Italia: That is a good question. If you’re talking globally, then I do not know. If you’re talking about the West, then, eventually, women began to enter the professions. That happened around the 1870s, 1880s, starting with medicine. There were a couple of famous women in the 18th century who dressed and lived as men and entered the medical profession, as everybody knows. Women began officially entering the professions starting with medicine in the 1870s, ’80s.

Then you had the suffrage movement. Women got the vote. I think largely as a result of the First World War; women began entering the workforce in greater numbers. Those are some of the larger developments that happened.

5. Jacobsen: After the world wars, when the men came back, what was the reaction of the men? What was the counter-reaction of the women, in general?

Italia: There was a strong backlash against feminism after the Second World War, after the First World War I think even more so. There was a strong backlash among many men who had been to war who felt that women were complaining about nothing. They had it too easy because they hadn’t had to go to war.

In the meantime, of course, during the war, women had had to take over many jobs that had previously been male jobs. For example, here in Buenos Aires, there is a bridge called Puente de la Mujer, the “Woman’s Bridge,” which was entirely designed by women engineers and built by women construction workers because the men were at war. That was a genie that it was not possible to put back into the bottle.

6. Jacobsen: Does this reflect a common trend for centuries, women seen as not being able to do something, some cultural or historical event requires women to simply do something when the men are not there, or the women making their way in some way and then that basically being continual waves of genies’ bottles being opened up and then the genies not being able to put back into the bottles? I guess the current example is Will Smith now, in the new Aladdin.

Italia: [Laughing] I think so. There is also the question of average preferences. This is the other side to the coin, which is if women are not within a profession, to what extent is that social? To what extent do women prefer certain professions over others?

Also, I do not think there is anything particularly and intrinsically good about every profession having a 50/50 male/female balance. That is only good if otherwise, it is stopping people who would be happier doing that profession from being in that profession. Otherwise, there is no intrinsic reason why every profession must have 50/50.

There may be a reinforcing factor, which, maybe, also, that women prefer to be in professions where there are some other women around. That may also put the brakes on opening of new areas. Then, obviously, there are things that require more upper-body strength, or which call for more risk. Women are less keen to take physical risk than men.

I do not know. I think that it is hard to tell always how much of a thing is socialized and how much is nature. That is an impossible question to answer unless we do “the forbidden experiment.” I do not know if you have heard about this. You would kidnap a bunch of babies and throw them together on a deserted island and leave them with enough food and resources that they wouldn’t die and wait to see what society they would build.

A few people have attempted to do crazy things like this, like Rousseau, on a small scale. Since you cannot do that experiment—it is not ethical—we do not know how that experiment would turn out, so we’re always working with what we have and developing from where we are. I think that there is a tendency in some strings of feminism—I’ve noticed it a lot in the men’s rights movement, as well—to completely disregard biology.

For example, the wage gap may not at all be at all due to discrimination, but it may be due to women’s voluntary choices of certain professions and those professions being less well paid. “Why they are less well paid?” is another question, but it may not be a sexual discrimination factor.

And then men’s rights activists always complaining about men are committing suicide more often, living less time, I think it is a nine-year average shorter lifespan and performing less well in academics during puberty and early adulthood. All of those could be due to biology, for obvious reasons. Testosterone is not conducive to concentrating or focusing. One would expect men to have more trouble focusing during the period when your testosterone is highest, which is school, early university.

Also, men dying sooner than women is what we would expect from biology. There is a cuts-both-ways thing, here, going on. When we see disadvantages, we do not know if disadvantages are the result of discrimination, or the result of biological factors which we could mitigate, as we did, for example, with birth control, or biological factors that we cannot easily mitigate. Hard to say, but it is a complicated issue.

7. Jacobsen: It is a complicated issue. It requires extensive conversation. It also requires a courage, in the current moment somewhat limited, to look at the facts, admit them, of which there are fair points on all sides, not two, and then having a distanced, relatively objective analysis of things insofar as one can attain it.

However, if we look at English literature, or English, psychology, and medicine, we can see a stark split by sex and gender, in general, compared to physics, cosmology, mathematics, engineering. We see these. We note them. In some reportage, there does seem to be an indication of quiet – within admissions offices – selection for more men in certain areas, simply to balance things out in terms of the ledger of gender or sex in the universities.

Italia: There seem to be some preference things at stake, as I understand it, at school, if they are taking sciences. In some educational systems, you can stop taking it at a certain age, like 16. Girls’ and boys’ performances are equal, or girls generally outperform boys in all subjects except maths.

They outperform them in sciences at school, but they do not choose to take science at university in the same numbers. Certain sciences, they do. Biology, I think, is now equal. Medicine has more women than men, but physics, engineering, et cetera. That suggests that something is going on, some factor is going on there that is not aptitude related. It could be socialization. It could be choice. We do not know.

I do slightly have some sympathy with positive discrimination in favour of men in arts and humanities. Because, I feel, in science, it is not important what the sex is of the person doing the work; although, I would love to see more women in science. I do not think science suffers from having fewer women in it.

I do not think there is a feminine approach that would benefit science. However, in arts and humanities, I think that your subjective approach can be much more coloured by your personal experience, so I think it is actually more important to have more gender balance in those subjects. That is my personal feeling. But I do not think it should be forced, either. I do not generally like positive discrimination much because it is unfair, but I have a little more sympathy with it in that case.

8. Jacobsen: In my own perspective, everyone has my sympathy because, in a way, we’re at a historically unprecedented moment. I think everyone is trying to figure it out at the same time, and not on this question or this set of questions alone, and so everyone has my sympathy.

Italia: [Laughing].

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Host, Two for Tea; Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/italia-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Innovation, Science, and Economic Development (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/15

Abstract

Dr. Sarah Lubik is the Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Concentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She discusses: innovation, science, and economics; and the innovation and entrepreneurship agenda of Canada.

Keywords: Canada, entrepreneurship, innovation, Sarah Lubik, science, SFU, technology.

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Innovation, Science, and Economic Development: Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & InnovationConcentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, there’s an article in 2016, where the first sentence described you as “one of Canada’s 10 Innovation Leaders who will help form the nation’s Innovation Agenda.” (SFU News, 2016). I’m referencing with respect to that time stamp.

This is being spearheaded by Navdeep Bains, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. What is your particular role? What is the overall vision? How will this Innovation Agenda be implemented?

Dr. Sarah Lubik: Lot of good questions. Navdeep Bains and his ministry are spearheading the formation and implementation of Canada’s Inclusive Innovation Agenda. This was started in collaboration with the Ministers of Science, and Small Business

Ten leaders were picked from across the country as people who could help, gather, activate, and excite Canadians across the country about innovation and to gather grassroots and bottom-up ideas for what the Innovation Agenda should look like.

One of the things that is important to understand, that I’m glad our government understands, is that you cannot top-down command innovation, at least that I’ve seen. Passion drives innovation and entrepreneurship, if you try to create an innovation strategy nationally without getting buy-in from people in the country, you will end up with a great deal of shelf ware. Recommendations and reports that will be difficult to do anything about in practice.

What you need is to find out what do people actually want to do and what do they see as the challenges and how might you get around those challenges, and when you set that big vision, how will people across the country see themselves in it?

So, our job was to bring together these members of the community across the country and host roundtables and events with experts, one of the other reasons they asked the innovation leaders rather than run it through the government was because they also wanted to get the perspective of people who were not the usual suspects,

That they wouldn’t necessarily have thought of or had access to.

The outside perspectives also led to more outside perspectives. One of the other innovation leaders from back East went down to the States and to learn what we could learn from them. Back to my trend of being opportunistic, I was going over to Cambridge, England to be at an R&D management conference with some European leaders around innovation.

So, I enlisted a roundtable there to talk about what we learned from places around the world and what would be their advice for Canada, given what they’d seen work, and not work, elsewhere.

One of the other things that we did was bring together a number of different communities.

That’s why it can be so helpful to have a university’s backing when you’re doing innovation. SFU actually hosted a sold-out event of 170 people at the Center for Dialogue, partnering with the Center for Dialogue and Public Square at SFU, but also the early stage incubator Venture Connection, RADIUS Futurepreneur, the Beach Association a more. The whole point of this was to get as many different communities as possible. We set the scene, and asked “How do we create a more entrepreneurial and socially innovative society?”

It was a friendly conversation with the public as well as leaders from the First Nations Community and from Social Innovation Community and a Tech Community -To get the public and the experts talking across communities.

What we found from having that event was actually a lot of the challenges these communities of people were facing where the same, and that we could learn a lot for each other.

With regard to wanting people to be more entrepreneurial, no matter what community you came from, people were concerned about things like if you want too entrepreneurial, will there be security for you, what will the rewards be? Can our national systems be better set up to take care of innovators and entrepreneurs?

If you have come up with a great idea or a great initiative, whether you’re social or tech, do we know how to scale them effectively in Canada? How can we support that? Then how can we create and maintain talents?

We have many fantastic international students with entrepreneurial hopes but then if they come up with a venture they want to take forward, how can they do that if they can only stay if they work for someone else’s company?

How do we bring in leaders? Because again, we’re a small country. The people who have grown 100 million dollar companies in Canada are few and far between us.

The thought process was that if we can bring in more of them, more people can learn at the feet of giants.

A big take away from that event was that these communities have a lot in common and a lot to learn from each other. We need to make sure that in the Canadian Innovation Agenda, we were speaking to a diverse range of people and that the Canadian entrepreneurial community has a lot of communities within it.

These findings were delivered to the ministries to help inform Canada’s next steps around innovation.

There was also a website where Canadians were asked to tweet or submit their ideas for a more innovative is Canada. What can we do to use innovation to make the lives of Canadians better?

There are so many excellent pieces of feedback including “focus on problems that matter to the world”. The innovation leaders have also been invited Ottawa and other ventures to talk to different leaders and communities.

What did we learn? What did we hear? What would our advice be? We came back with more interesting perspectives like from a woman who said, “How do we make innovation as Canadian as hockey? Everyone gets that here. Most Canadians get their first pair of skates or have their first hockey lesson, what’s the innovation equivalent?”

Can we answer that question? I thought that was brilliant. With my own experience of bringing those different communities together, one of the pieces of feedback that I thought was important to give way that is an opportunity for Canada to build its own brand of innovation.

Are we in place that solves problems that matter to Canada and the world? That comes back to your question on why would people stay. That’s also important to say, “What does Canada mean when it says that it’s going to be an innovative nation?”

That we are collaborators and peacekeepers, whether you like that or not; it’s the reputation we have internationally. There’s a reason why we usually travel pretty happily with a Canadian flag on our back.

So, building on what’s already established as this friendly, collaborative, intelligent country, can we be the place you come to solve problems that matter to Canada and the world? So, those are the pieces of feedback I gave.

Regardless of what innovation leader talked to who and where, coming back to where you and I started, entrepreneurial talent came to the forefront. The culture and the mindset of it.

The culture and the mindset that comes with being entrepreneurial, whether it’s your need to start your own company or being an agent of innovation – being that person that finds a way to make sustainable economic and social value from innovation.

With that definition, you can be an entrepreneur whether you’re in a big company or government or a small company or non-profit. So, right across the board, no matter what sector you’re in.

When I met different officials, they asked great questions around, “How can we either help or boost with the systems we already have, the resources we already have?” One of the things that makes me happy is to look at the government and seeing them actively try to strengthen our system of innovation and spurring innovation through investment in talent.

But also, are there systems that need to change?’ Yes, there are.

2. Jacobsen: Where is an area where Canada is a complete whole in its innovation and entrepreneurship agenda? And what are we not succeeding in where you need to get on because it’s one of the major future industries that Canada with its current talent pool could capitalize on?

Lubik: So, I have to unpack that question because with the current talent pool that might be one of the challenges of making sure that those translational skills we talked about at the beginning, that ability to speak across disciplines to deeply understand probable outcomes, etc., haven’t been part of traditional curriculum In particular, it’s important to not to confuse technology talent with entrepreneurial talent. It’s easy to talk about innovation and think we need to learn tech, and we do, but we need entrepreneurs from every sector and background.

We have good schools; we graduate smart people. But are their skills and mindset necessarily the skills and mindset you need for innovation when you look at Canada’s performance on international indexes? We don’t do nearly as well as you’d think. In particular, we don’t rank highly on the commercialization of the world-class research we have, because we do rank pretty highly on global research rankings.

However, on getting that research out into the world, we do poorly. So, we have to get better translating it into a useful application, then into companies or ventures. Hence the commercialization program I mentioned earlier.

This is a place where that talent creation is going to be so critical. It’s also where systems are going to be important because one of the things that is not been happening is what I’ve seen in my own research, and looking in other countries, has been people taking bets on innovation in the earlier, less risky stages.

So, waiting until you get to the point where venture capitalists or at least angel investors can invest and say, “We’re going to put all our money there.” The problem with that, going back to what we originally talked about, is that innovation happens on a continuum and in a social system.

So, if you haven’t built that talent that understands translation and understands how to work in teams and how to actually take those great ideas forward, then none of that moves any farther forward. A lot of that great work and research is going to go nowhere because you don’t have the talent to create those big visions and take them forward. That means pouring investments onto a few good ideas that got through, which is not what we should be doing.

If you look at how innovation usually works, you want a lot of tries. Few people are successful on the first go. So, you want people who have been serial entrepreneurs before they’ve been out of school or people who have tried and learned.

Then by the time you get to that later stage, there should be more to choose from. So, one of the keys of how we could do right with this – one of the things Canada could do – if we looked at innovation as a system, as a continuum, and make sure that investment is going in all the different stages.

You need quality and quantity is the beginning, those people who can be serial entrepreneurs or serial innovators, who have taken shots and created teams.

They’ve dealt with ambiguity, who have connections into the ecosystem, who have connections into all the resources that they need and then you’re going to get a bigger quantity of saleable businesses and of high growth and high impact businesses etc.

That will help take the Innovation Agenda forward and help, I hope.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/lubik-four; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy on Canadian Muslim Narratives and Theology (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/15

Abstract

Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy is the Founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Founder of the Muslims Against Terrorism. He discusses: narratives of Canadian Muslims; certain media outlets or anchors who are fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment; countering hate groups and hate movements; conversations within Islamic theology; leading Sufi scholars; concerns and hopes as we’re moving forward as a country further into 2019; and negotiable and non-negotiable aspects of Islamic theology.

Keywords: Islam, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, Muslim, Muslims Against Terrorism, Sufi, Syed Soharwardy.

An Interview with Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy on Canadian Muslim Narratives and Theology: Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you were to relay some stories or narratives in conversation with Canadian Muslims about their own experiences, what would those be? What would their experiences be of a rise of hate crimes, of the experiences of some Canadian Muslims in Canada?

Imam Syed Soharwardy: With the rise in Islamophobia and hate crimes, we still believe Canada is the best country on the planet. We believe in the Canadian system and the Canadian leaders, whether the background is religious or ethnic.

It is a place where people of faith and non-faith can come together and live in peace and harmony. There are some people who come and spread hate, who are in the minority. Unfortunately, hate and violence are more viable than love and peace. The stories of this country for Canadian Muslims is that we live in the best country; that God has blessed us with a place like Canada as a home.

2. Jacobsen: Are there certain media outlets or anchors who are fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment? Or is this something simply coming out in the media more?

Soharwardy: Yes, I know there are some outlets. I don’t want to give them an advertisement.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Soharwardy: I have confronted them. They have confronted me, in the past. They dislike Islam anywhere. No matter how good a Muslim becomes. They hate him, or her. In the past, when I had to face these people, they are 25 or 30 people at most.

They were putting anti-Muslim comments on websites. They are very active. It looks like a lot. But no, they are very small. We have seen the Yellow Vest movement in Canada. The Yellow Vest movement was all about the economic prosperity and the crunch Canada is facing, as in France.

Those kinds of things have all symptoms of being frustrated within the nation; thus, they became anti-immigrant. Those people are very small. They can get into many of the good organizations and then contaminate the whole environment.

But we are not represented by those people. Even though, they cause concern. The majority of Canadians are decent people, tolerant and accepting people. They have no problem with ant segment of the society.

We stand side by side. Those who are hatemongers. We pray for them that God changes their heart.

3. Jacobsen: Who has been important in the efforts to counter hate groups and hate movements, or those who want incite, very consciously, hatred against individuals or groups in this country?

Soharwardy: I think it is at all levels of the government being worked on, as they can. I always say, “They are not doing enough.” But the law enforcement is doing their best to monitor and see those people who are inciting violence against anybody.

They are the ones who have the responsibility to protect all Canadians equally. But the same, Muslims in this place of the world acknowledge the Indigenous peoples have been here since God knows when.

Muslims know the history of this part of the world. Whenever we come, we had to face a hard time. When the Jews came, they had to face a hard time. When the Sikhs from India came, we know what happened to them. When the Japanese came, we know what happened to them.

When the Chinese came, we know what happened to them. We did not face a hard time like the Chinese, Sikhs, Jews, and others, in the past. We were lucky. Civilization has matured. People understand diversity.

There are bad elements that cause racism and violence against minorities anyway.

4. Jacobsen: When it comes to the more advanced and graduate-level, professional theologian levels, of Islam, what is the conversation right now? How are things developing along those more advanced lines? The nuances of the faith being discussed intellectually. I mean the specialist-intellectuals who professionally read, research, and think about Sufi Islam.

Soharwardy: I think it people who research and have a modern interest. People are getting inclined towards the Sufi interpretation of Islam, especially Sunni-Sufi Islam. It focuses on the main meditation and centrality of the person and life of the Prophet (pbuh).

There is quite a bit of research happening in theology departments around the world. There are all levels of degrees offered in many places around the world. There were many Ph.D. students working on various Sufis of Islam and Sufi theology of Islam.

They were doing those things. There was a tremendous interest in the Sufi interpretation of Islam. I am so happy that several bridge-minded academics who used to be in their past life quite supportive of Salafi-Wahabbi school of thought are changing their mind.

I see it in Pakistan, where, in the past, even currently, there is a lot of Saudi influence. It has brought Wahabbism in Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere. People are realizing that this Salafi-Wahabbism is violent, the Devil’s interpretation of Islam.

They are coming back to the Sufi version or interpretation of Islam; that this is the correct or true interpretation of Islam. That is what caused Muslim deaths. We never hated God’s creation. We live in peace with our Christian, Jewish, and other people of different faiths.

They have a different faith than us. They practice their faith. We practice our faith. It depends on the faith. We still love each other as creations of God.

5. Jacobsen: Who would you consider some of the leading Sufi scholars today?

Soharwardy: There are many Sufi scholars, especially in North Africa. There is Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi who is very respected in Morocco. He lives in France. There is the chancellor at Al-Azhar. There are several scholars in Egypt.

I met some scholars in Syria. I met some who came as refugees in Canada. They have been quite intellectual on the Sufi Islam. So, there are many others in Pakistan. There are people who are quite learned people of the Sufi version of Islam.

Shaykh Habib in Yemen, he is a very good Sufi person. There are many in Canada now. It is a growing population around the world.

6. Jacobsen: If we’re now back to Canada rather than the international perspective, as we’re moving more into 2019, what are your concerns and hopes as we’re moving forward as a country further into 2019?

Soharwardy: 2019 is going to be a very important year because there are the federal elections upcoming. We hope that the next government, whoever the government will be, will stay on the path of tolerance and diversity.

That they do not take an extreme path and do not follow the Donald Trump line. Our government in Canada should continue in the way of our traditions. We are peacemakers and not warriors.

We do not get into wars. We work towards peace. This is the stance of Canada in the world. We hope the economic prosperity will continue. In Alberta, we have problems because of this oil price and the pipeline.

I am hoping that because I am Albertan and have been here more than a quarter of a century. It is my home. [Laughing] I would hope the government would realize that it is affecting thousands and thousands of families in Alberta because of this pipeline issue.

It is a survival issue for many, many families. I know many families. They have no jobs. They are hand to mouth. They are below the poverty level. I know how many Muslim families are depending on the food banks.

They can even be professionals. This is the issue in Alberta. I would hope 2019 would bring some senses to the people who are causing these kinds of uncertainties in our country. And that the federal government continues on the path of immigration.

I know Mr. Trudeau stated that they will bring 1,000,000 immigrants in the next 2-4 years. I think this is good for making a good tax base for the government. This is the secret of the United States being the world power. It is immigration.

With Canada, it is on the right path. Hopefully, this continues and the economic prosperity will help each and every Canadian be treated with dignity and respect. I want people to realize that this pipeline issue should be resolved.

It is 2019. I think in British Columbia; they’re seeing this as an environmental issue. We are concerned about it. It is my faith requirement to keep the environment clean because it is God’s gift to us.

We should not be polluting the environment. But there are thousands and thousands and thousands of families who should not be deprived of their basic needs.

7. Jacobsen: Now, if you looked at, let’s say, primary aspects of the faith, and if you looked at secondary aspects of the faith, of the Sufi interpretation of Islam, what is negotiable? What is non-negotiable?

Soharwardy: What is non-negotiable is the teachings of the Holy Quran and the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), those cannot be interpreted. That is totally unacceptable. I will not allow others to misinterpret it, as with this Victoria, B.C. imam. This thing about Christmas.

It is non-negotiable. I am 100% sure that he is wrong. It is against our scriptures. It is against the prophet’s teachings (pbuh). It is against the faith. What is negotiable within the Muslim community, we have been different definitions and different internal positions and perspectives, and way of life, as long as we are law-abiding citizens of this country.

We can accept and disagree. What I cannot accept, violence against innocent people, hatemongering, or rigged and narrow-minded views towards any segment of the society; this goes against basis and the foundation of my society.

This is what the Sufis always believe. You have to always believe to accept diversity and acceptance. You have to understand all humanity has created differences intentionally, not all people are the same. The Quran says that God created us different nations, and colours, and peoples so that we can unite. This has to happen.

This is the Sufi tradition, which is the basic Islamic tradition.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Imam Soharwardy.

Soharwardy: Thank you very much, Scott, thank you very much, bye.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/an-interview-with-sufi-imam-syed-soharwardy-on-canadian-muslim-narratives-and-theology-part-two/; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: Imam Syed Soharwardy.

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2023-02-16

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence, Academic Freedom, and Life’s Work (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08

Abstract

Dr. James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He discusses: declines or apparent declines in IQ over the last decade or so; the changes in the notions, or the formal definitions, and research, and trends into race, class, and IQ over time; general thoughts about the state of academic freedom and the state of graduates; modern developments of things like research ethics boards, REB and IRB; what the socio-political left and right are doing right and wrong in the academic system, in the humanities, regarding academic freedom; justifications for an ethics review or not; historical precedents of adherence to the principles of freedom of academic inquiry; persecution comparable to The Red Scare and the McCarthy Era; egregious cases in the modern period of persecution; trajectories into research on IQ and intelligence; the future of the academic system regarding freedom of expression (and so freedom of speech); and overall thoughts on life’s work.

Keywords: academic freedom, general intelligence, intelligence, IQ, James Flynn, political studies.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence, Academic Freedom, and Life’s Work: Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (Part Three)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the declines, or apparent declines, in IQ over the last decade or so?

Professor James Flynn: People have never understood that the factors that feed into IQ gains are quite complex and interlinked. I do not know if you have seen the article with the very distinguished British psychologist, Michael Shayer, that we published in Intelligence.

People focus on Scandinavia but most of the Scandinavian data are young adults taking military tests, and it could well be that the environmental triggers for IQ gains have declined for that age-group while they have not declined for other age-groups. For example, in all cultures today, including Scandinavia, there is much more emphasis on cognitive exercise in old age. This may still be progressing today and if you looked at the aged in Scandinavia, you would find gains.

I have studied the Dutch. I suspect that the Dutch are still treating their aged better, making them healthier, and giving them more food, and more cognitive stimulation. Then we go down to mature adults who are in the world of work. There is some Wechsler data showing that in that age group, IQ gains are still proceeding, meaning the world of work in Holland is still more cognitively challenging than it was 30 years ago.

Then you come down to the kids just out of school who aren’t in the world of work. There is overwhelming data that in most Western societies, males are interfacing with formal education worse than they did in the past: more expulsions, less homework, more rebellion. At that age, Dutch IQ may be slightly lower than in the previous generation.

Then you look at the Dutch down at preschool and you find, essentially, stasis. This is before kids go to school. It appears that their environment is neither better nor worse. Perhaps parents have exhausted their bag of tricks for making the childhood environment cognitively demanding, but they haven’t lost any ground either.

The question of IQ gains over time must be looked at in the light of full data that involves all age groups. Remember, again, my point, that whether we have slight increases in IQ during the 21st century, is far less important than the level of ignorance during the 21st century.

2. Jacobsen: [Laughing] Looking at the research since 2000, how have the notions, or the formal definitions, and research, and trends into race, class, and IQ changed over time as further research has been done?

Flynn: As for race, those who want to evade the issue still say, “Oh, the races just differ in term of class.” This is ludicrous because as you know, if you match black and whites for socioeconomic status, it does almost nothing to eliminate the IQ gap.

Then you say: “But the black class is more insecure, they are more recently arrived at middle-class status, and thus class does not mean the same thing for black and white.” Note those words. Although it is never admitted, you have slipped from a class analysis into a black subculture analysis. You are saying that you can no longer look at this issue purely in terms of socioeconomic status. You must look behind matching for SES and see what is going on in the minds and hearts of people. Despite this, there is an enormous inhibition against using the notion of subculture. This has to do with weird notions about praise and blame.

If you look at Elsie Moore, you think, “Isn’t she saying that black mothers are less efficient mothers than white mothers? Isn’t she saying that they are more negative? Isn’t more corporal punishment waiting in the wings?” Maybe there is. If so, these things must be isolated and altered. But they make white scholars shudder. If they talk about black subculture, they will be accused of “blaming the victim”.

The cover is to talk vaguely about the fact that blacks have a history of slavery for which they are not to blame. And that they are poor for which they are not to blame. This is a sad evasion. Unless the history of blacks has current effects on their subculture, it would be irrelevant. Once again, you must come back to subculture. Note that the Chinese have a history of persecution but that is irrelevant because their subculture today is not affected in a way that lowers their mean IQ.

I do think that there has been a rise in the number of people who take Jensen’s hypotheses seriously. I have. Dick Nisbett has. Steve Cici has. Bill Dickens has. How do you balance that against this deeply rooted feeling that any investigation in this area has to be subject to a moral censor?

Jacobsen: This leads into the book you are going to be publishing later.

Flynn: The one on the universities?

3. Jacobsen: Yes. It has to do with academic freedom and the prevention of certain research. Also, in terms of what is coming out of the universities in terms of the graduates, what are your first general thoughts about the state of academic freedom and the state of graduates?

Flynn: There is a sad intolerance on the parts of students when they encounter people who hold ideals or ideas that they find repugnant. Look at the persecution of Charles Murray. I do not, by the way, deny that this sort of thing happened in the past. When I was a young academic, I was persecuted for being a social democrat and driven out of US academia, so I am not one of these elderly people who say, “It was nice in my day.”

It is ironic that the left today seem as intolerant as the right were in my day. When students banished Charles Murray at Middlebury University, they merely proved they were more powerful than he was and could threaten him with violence. There was not one person in that mob educated enough to argue effectively against his views. They did not know what he had to say and never having heard him, they will never know. They mimicked lecturers who said, “This man is a racist. Let us keep him off campus.” That is one force against academic freedom.

The is also the fact that no young academic has security. Over half of the courses in America today are taught by adjunct professors.

They have no tenure and can be fired at the drop of the hat. They know where their careers lie. Imagine giving a vita to a university and saying on it, “One of my chief interests is research into racial differences and intelligence and the necessity of an evidential approach to the work of Arthur Jensen.” What chance do you think you would have? You wouldn’t get hired. You wouldn’t get given tenure. You might as well jump off a bridge.

People are being fired in American universities today, merely because they use the term “wetback” in a lecture, which is considered so offensive that they could not possibly apologize for it.

The administrators, of course, are supine. They just want as little trouble as possible, and the least trouble possible is to have a speech code. When a student is upset, you get the lecturer fired. If the lecturer remains, there is trouble and controversy. What other people do to academics is one source.

The second source is what academics do to themselves. There are certain departments where there is what I call “a Walden Code”. The phrase is taken from Skinner’s book Walden Two, which has a code that describes what is permissable. Various academic departments tend to enforce such a code.

In anthropology, if you are a Piagetian, and you think that societies could be ranked in terms of mental maturity, you are considered unholy. If you are in education and you think that IQ tests have a role to play, people recoil in horror. IQ tests rank people, and what education is all about is producing a society in which no-one ranks anyone else.

Then there are the new groups like black studies where there is often a fierce fight between ideologies as to who gets control. Who gets control is very likely to banish the others. Whether you are a revolutionary black Marxist, or whether you are this or that. There is a great deal of intolerance.

The same is true of women’s studies, though by no means in all departments. My department here at Otago is good. But in many of them, you cannot seriously investigate the reasons why women have less pay than men. It is automatically attributed to male malice without looking at all the sociological variables.

There is also the larger issue of what universities are doing to their students in general. They do not educate them for critical intelligence but to just get a certificate for a job. And some departments see themselves as sending out missionaries, for example, Schools of Education send students out to turn the schools into an imitation of a “liberated” society.

The teachers and students bat ideas around, but the teacher steers the conversation toward America’s ills points out that there are poor people in America, and that rich people profit from the poor, and that blacks and gays suffer. All very true. But the students arrive at university without learning what they need to cope.

My book gives a classical defence of free speech. It details the knowledge I would have been cheated out of had I not benefited from arguing against Jensen, and Murray, and Lynn, and Eysenck. It details all the threats to free speech posed by the university environment.

4. Jacobsen: How important are modern developments of things like research ethics boards, REB and IRB?

Flynn: Some of these, of course, are appropriate. You do not want psychologists experimenting with how students perform at various levels of inebriation, and then let them drive home and kill each other in traffic accidents. Certain ethical codes are important. The abuse is when they are used to ban research that the university knows is unpopular.

A point that I haven’t touched on. The natural sciences, the mathematical sciences, and professions like law and medicine are not exempt from pressures toward conformity, but they do have to educate for the relevant knowledge, and they are less subject to corruption. I guess you could take an ideological line in favour of Newton, an Englishman, and against Leibniz, a Frenchman. I once knew a lecturer who turned his Accounting classes into a plea for Social Darwinism. But still, students have got to learn to do the math.

In physics, it is hard to take an ideological line when you teach the oxygen theory of combustion against the phlogiston theory. The same is true of chemistry. After all, your graduates go on to graduate schools and you don’t want them to embarrass you by seeming woefully inept. Someone must be able to do surgery without always nicking the tonsils in the process.

The hard sciences have an incentive to maintain a higher standard of intellectual training than the humanities and social sciences. Yet they can easily be corrupted by the fact that they usually require lots of money. The government put strings on what money it is willing to give, and corporations put strings on what money they are willing to give. They can effectively forbid research that they dislike.

My book does not go into that. It is mainly about the humanities and the social sciences. I am told that the Trump administration is trying to do awful things to the biological sciences when funding the National Health Foundation. He is certainly discouraging research into climate change.

5. Jacobsen: If you were to take what would be termed the socio-political left and the socio-political right in the academic system, in the humanities, what are they doing right and what are they doing wrong regarding academic freedom?

Flynn: They are doing something right insofar as they are scientific realists, and they are doing something wrong insofar as they are not. [Laughing] Of course, that is not purely a political divide. There are plenty of people both on the so-called left and on the right who live in an ideological dream world, an image of man and society which they try to “protect” by getting people fired they disagree with.

But fortunately, on both right and left, there are people who say, “We have got the scientific method. It is the only method that actually teaches us what the real world is like, and we’re going to fight like crazy to apply it despite all of the forces against us.

6. Jacobsen: If an academic on either side of the aisle want to make a point as in the ends justify the means, is it justified for them to simply ignore or skip an ethics review and potential need for ethics approval in a university when they are doing research?

Flynn: The notion that the end justifies the means, if stretched far enough, will open the door to censorship. There are limits, of course. I wouldn’t be in favour of a physics department that spent all of its time trying to develop a doomsday machine: how to dig a hole, and put enough nuclear weapons in there, so that any nuclear attack on your soil would trigger a nuclear explosion that would tilt the earth on its axis. [Laughing]

There are also limits in the humanities. To have a whole department of geology dominated by people who believe in crop circles, would also be bizarre. What you have got to do is say, “The scientific community recognizes that there are screwballs out there. We have got to take efforts to try to limit their presence in the classroom. But we must always, always be alert to the difference between necessary guidelines and censorship guidelines that allow us to shut up people we disagree with.”

Aristotle called finding this balance “practical wisdom”. I do not know how to give say 90% of academics practical wisdom so they can tell the difference between the two, but it is what academics have got to strive for whether they are right or left.

7. Jacobsen: In what contexts in history have there been academics as a majority who have adhered to those freedom of academic inquiry principles?

Flynn: I am not sure that they have ever been a majority. It is better to ask, “Are there universities today that sin less than others?” I would say that the University of Chicago sins much less than Harvard or Yale. In my book, I detail the extent to which the University of Chicago tries to deal with the forces against free speech on campus, and the extent to which Yale and Harvard have succumbed to these.

When you look at the history of universities, there sure as hell was not much tolerance before let us say about 1920, if only because of the influence the churches and their respectable members. In the 1920s, the Red Scare intimidated thousands of academics. Later, there was the McCarthy period. But in all those periods, there were academics who fought for free speech come hell or high water.

It is hard for me to say what the ebb and flow has been over history. It is much better to look at universities today and see who the worst sinners are.

8. Jacobsen: If you were to take a period-based qualitative analysis, is the persecution now from the so-called left, as you labelled them, worse than those from the so-called right towards the left during, for instance, The Red Scare, or the McCarthy era?

Flynn: I am trying to say that it is too hard to tell. I lived through the McCarthy period. I was damaged by it. My wife was damaged by it. My friends were damaged by it. Obviously, it has an immediacy for me. But at that time, even then, I felt I could probably find somewhere in the academic world where I might find a home.

Today, I look at the young adjunct professor in Virginia frantically trying, despite being an outstanding researcher, to find a berth somewhere, and being terrified of being thought unorthodox. I think today is at least comparable to what went on in the McCarthy period. It shouldn’t be thought of as somehow a lesser influence against freedom of inquiry than what went on then.

9. Jacobsen: What are the more egregious cases in the modern period that come to mind regarding this?

Flynn: The continual firing of adjunct professors because of a slip of the tongue. In my book, I also examine cases in which tenured professors have either been fired or have had their research curtailed. All sorts of things are done to them because they were investigating the wrong issue at the wrong time. Hiring policies. The banning of speakers on campus. All these things are at present in full swing.

10. Jacobsen: What do you see as the trajectory of research into the 2020s on IQ and on intelligence?

Flynn: If you look at problems that do not raise the spectre of race, there’ll be very considerable progress, particularly from the brain physiologists. Also people are becoming more sophisticated in understanding that you must deal with g and not be hypnotized by it.

11. Jacobsen: What about the future of the academic system regarding freedom of expression, not just freedom of speech?

Flynn: There is a real reaction against what is going on. The interesting thing will be to see how far it will go. It will go far only if principled university lecturers get behind the various groups that are fighting like crazy to have a more open university. Heterodox Academy is one such.

I do not know how many university staff still retain academic integrity. I do not know how many of them, integrity aside, can no longer think clearly about issues. I do not know how many of them have sold out to careerist interests, but there do seem to be encouraging signs. A lot of academics are saying, “We’d rather teach in a place like Chicago, and not a place like Yale.” Let us just hope we can turn the tide.

A lot of it will have to do with exterior events. If you get a wartime climate, all reason goes out of the window. What the effects will be of global warming, I would hate to guess. I have no crystal ball, but the universities are in the balance. There are significant pressures against the forces of reaction.

12. Jacobsen: Do you have any further thoughts, overall, just on your life’s work?

Flynn: I do not want to comment on my life’s work. Either it has had an influence, or it hasn’t. [Laughing]

Jacobsen: I think it has. It was nice to talk to you again. Take care. I hope you have a wonderful evening.

Flynn: We will be in touch.

13. Jacobsen: Excellent. Thank you very much.

Flynn: Good-bye.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/flynn-three; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: James Flynn.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Mahua Mukherjee on Life Story, the Times of India, Religion and Politics in India, and Journalism

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08

Abstract

Mahua Mukherjee is a Reporter for The Times of India. She discusses: family background; personal story; the Times of India; religion in Indian politics; Hindu nationalism; favourite professional moments; becoming involved in India’s journalistic world as a foreigner; and final feelings and thoughts.

Keywords: journalism, Mahua Mukherjee, politics, religion, reporter, Times of India, writing.

An Interview with Mahua Mukherjee on Life Story, the Times of India, Religion and Politics in India, and Journalism: Reporter, The Times of India[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us start from the top. What is family background, geography, culture, language, and so on?

Mahua Mukherjee: Well I am Mahua Mukherjee and I am from Bihar. I was born in a small border town of Farakka in West Bengal and was brought up in Patna the capital city of Bihar. My parents are from Bengal and shifted to Patna when my father joined the State Bank Of India. I was educated in Notre Dame Academy and then went To Patna Women’s College. Thereafter, I did a crash course in Business Journalism from the Times Centre of Media Studies and joined the Times of India. I can speak three languages English, Hindi and Bengali.

2. Jacobsen: What is your personal story? How did you become involved in journalistic and other work?

Mukherjee: There is nothing great about my personal story. It is an endless saga of trials and tribulations. I wanted to go into academics and had started writing about offbeat stuff right from my college days. I was supported by Mr Uttam Sengupta the resident editor of Patna Times of India. My first story was about A homeopathic doctor Dr Bandhu Sahani who transmitted homeo drugs through hair and you can get cured any where across the globe provided your hair is with him. It sounded fascinating as I was his patient, so I did it I got very good response and he literally long queues outside his clinic in Shivpuri way back in 1990s. Thereafter Uttam sir kept on giving me assignments and I would travel across the city in search of stories. I got into the mode of being the first one to get the news and tell others. It was like an opium for me. So much so that even after getting a chance to join the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University I opted for Times of India. I broke many important stories as a business journalist and one of my stories about McKinsey report revamp of State Bank Of India was raised in the Parliament and I was very scared. I also received death threats for breaking a major fraud and thereafter I switched to desk reporting. It was during this period I decided to be less adventurous and stay grounded. I wanted to do something different and was given the task of conceptualizing the NIE (Newspaper in education) edition. It was great fun as well as learning experience. All my experiments of telling the news items as stories to my daughter came to use. It was well appreciated. I have also written and designed a kid’s magazine and want to distribute it free of cost to under privileged kids from government aided schools, but I do not have enough funds to do it. As of now I am working on the political desk and cater to Western Uttar Pradesh in northern part of the sub-continent.

3. Jacobsen: You have written for the Times of India (TOI). It is huge and prominent Indian publication. To give a sense to the audience here, what is the level of influence of the Times of India on public and public intellectual discourse in the world’s largest democracy?

Mukherjee: It is very true that TOI is very prominent not only in India but also in this part of the globe. Many a times during my stint as a business journalist on global junkets, fellow journalists were literally in awe of the paper and that gave me a kick. We do have various campaigns by our paper, and it acts as a pressure group on the government of the day. Also, some of our campaigns like the current organ donation helps in putting across the message loud and clear to the masses who come forward in large numbers to be a part of the movement initiated by the paper. Also, many a times our human-interest stories have a significant impact on the people. Once a journalist did a story on how an Olympic level archer Limba Ram was living a life of penury and was very unwell. Within 24 hours the apex Olympic Body got him admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in new Delhi. The minister announced ex-gratia and numerous individuals and NGOs came forward to help him. Not only in India but people across the globe follow Times of India. Way back in 1997 I did a story based on NIMHANS study about nearly 80 percent of Delhi Police personnel being depressed. The next day I got a call from BBC London about how they had got a call from some NGO there who wanted to help the Delhi Police personnel come out of their depression and what was the route they should take and the best way they found was to contact the Times of India through their London office. What I want to prove that Times of India is still followed by the elite and we do make a difference in people’s lives so our stories and whatever we report must be true. We cannot afford to be casual because if we dare to the next day we are literally torn apart. Even small thing like a single column picture of African elephant instead of Indian one tucked somewhere down the inside pages is noticed by our readers. Yes, it feels great to be a part of tradition called the Times of India.

4. Jacobsen: You have written a bit on religion and its influence on politics, where personal identity impacts political trajectory. How important is religion in today’s India?

Mukherjee: Frankly speaking it is some stupid notion fed by some equally stupid journalist to the world and it refuses to go. I have been closely associated with Syed Shah Nawaz Hussein, who being a staunch Muslim, is the national spokesperson the BJP, which for some very strange reason is a communal party. And let me assure you that I have not seen religion being so important to overshadow his political life. Well the great Karl Marx was very right when he said ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’ but here I need to define the word masses. In Indian context masses are the illiterate people who are literally herded by the political leaders for their petty gains. For the educated Indian youth religion is to be practiced inside the four walls of your homes and left there only when you step out. Because they have understood religion is not going to lead them anywhere, so it is very personal. Talking of Shahnawaz Hussein, his wife is a Hindu Brahmin and their sons, studying in London, think religion is as personal as your body. As you do not take off your clothes before everyone, so your belief and how you follow your religion should not be of concern to anybody. On the other end of the spectrum we do have a sizable chunk of the so-called masses for whom religion and politics are the same thing and want to garner votes by dividing the voters. It might work in the interiors of the nation but certainly not among the educated ones.

5. Jacobsen: Is the influence of Hindu nationalism healthy or unhealthy, overall, in India?

Mukherjee: I do not think there is any thing called Hindu nationalism as I have said before for the educated Indian there is no concept of Hindu nationalism. Only because some not so great leader coined some stupid term does not mean it rules our lives. If some government takes steps to protect the cow or clean the Ganga river it does not make them Hindu nationalist. We are secular country and I am very proud of the fact in my country every person is free to follow his or her religion without any fear. Some stray incidents here and there do not make the country Hindu nationalists. Nationalism is just nationalism and religion have no place in it. I refuse to believe in the concept of Hindu nationalism.

6. Jacobsen: What have been your favored moments in professional life so far? What writings are you most proud of looking back now?

Mukherjee: The Mckinsey report,

MS shoes fraud

Urea fraud

Launching of NIE

Branding of Apollo Hospitals

Conceptualising of my kid’s magazine ‘Kalpana’ (PDF Attached)

7. Jacobsen: If a foreigner wanted to become involved in Indian political culture, writing, and journalism, how would they do it? Any recommendations for them?

Mukherjee: To begin with you must become a part of India. You must understand the nuances of the Indian culture which varies from state to state to be able to do justice to your writings. You must learn to love and accept India and Indians with all their shortcomings and follies and begin by reading a lot about India. Where do you start well, come to India be a part of it and the best place to start would be to begin with writing blogs and take it forward and the best place of course in The Times of India .

8. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion?

Mukherjee: Journalism is a great responsibility so one must choose their words carefully. A casual question mark at the end of a sentence can create havoc. Be impartial and just be a reporter. We must report facts and do not try to colour your reports with your own thoughts.

9. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Mahua.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Reporter, Times of India.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mukherjee; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Alix Jules on American Secular Communities, Positive Work, Secularization of Communities, and Communication (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08

Abstract

Alix Jules is a Writer at Patheos Nonreligious. He discusses: secular communities and positive work; the proportion of African Americans who identify, not simply as secular, but as an atheist, in America; the slower trajectory for the black community compared to the white community in America in secularization; and communicating and socializing.

Keywords: Alix Jules, atheism, Catholic, intellectual trajectory, Patheos, secularism.

An Interview with Alix Jules on Background and Meeting an Atheist: Writer (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of the narrative or story provided before, or the personal ups and downs about the trajectory of world view, this has a lot of overlays. Some of them not necessarily stated explicitly, but they’ve come up in other conversations in personal journalistic work, for me, talking to other people in secular communities.

One of them has to do with the explicit and implicit bias, if not outright prejudice, against the secular from the nonsecular, from the religious. Sometimes, it can go the other way. That’s an internal conversation secular communities need to have about civility standards, providing dignity to even those one opposes.

However, in other conversations, we could find sectors of the secular community having conversations about inclusion, the inclusion of more women, the inclusion of more people of colour, not simply having the conversations, but actually doing things about it. In terms of American secular communities, for those who would like to help or include more people of colour, and more women, what would be a baseline recommendation? What has been some positive work that has been done?

Alix Jules: That is a tough one. I used to travel, talking about how we need to build bridges in the secular community. This was one of the first things I did in terms of outreach. My guidance then was first an explanation to these communities as to why it is so difficult to build these bridges.

Even though you’re an atheist- and you may be a white atheist, however you identify, ethnically- when you take a look at black atheists, or atheists of colour, and women, we still exist in a much broader context. This one thing that we share in common, may not be enough to bring us together. In fact, that’s what we’ve seen. If you consider that there was a much larger, much broader big-time atheist movement in the US. There’s been a lot of fracturing and factionalization.

I would argue, no, it’s just what someone would call “dividing lines” have been defining lines, all along. Just because you’re an atheist on those side of the tracks, doesn’t mean that you’re going to cross those tracks to come to see me. So, just saying that, “Hey, I’m an atheist now and we should all just come together and form a large community,” doesn’t work.

The first thing that I tell people is, “You’ve got to be cognizant of all the biases that still exist, even within your own community.” Even if we just say, “I’m a big atheist community.” But 98% are white males. That’s not necessarily inviting because there is the rest of who I am that is built, as a black person, or a person of colour, around the identity of being an atheist.

I have not been profiled in the US driving while being an atheist. I’ve been profiled driving while being black. I’ve been pulled over because I was black. I’ve been stopped in the street because I was black. I was followed in stores because I was black. I had to run away from groups of Confederate-wielding youth because I was black, not because I was an atheist. We have not addressed those issues within the larger context.

If you want me to meet you where you’re at, the first thing you have to do, not necessarily ideologically, but physically, is meet me where I’m at. You need, because of the issue of trust that just exists between these communities, plain black communities. Within those subsets, there are groups of atheists, humanists, et cetera.

First, you’ve got to break down that barrier, which in itself, is very difficult. You’ve got to show up on my other issues, what you would call “fringe issues” or what others have just called “identity politics”. Those “identity politics” allow me to vote, allow me to buy and purchase equally, allow me to scream and get heard when police are harassing me. That’s the first thing, is meet me where I’m at.

The second one is to realize that these what you call “fringe issues”, or what some call “fringe issues”, aren’t. They’re issues that define my humanity. I didn’t ask for them. I didn’t ask for them. I want them gone, as much as anyone else.

I often get into the discussion. “Why are we all so hung up on race? Race is a social construct.” Well, we live in a society. The beginning of the word “society” is S-O-C. It’s all a related social construct. It exists in society. We are social creatures. We are influenced by societal norms. You can’t say that you’re immune to them just because you’re an atheist.

Just like Christianity, there was magical thinking. In various religious thought and circles, there’s magical thinking. You can’t have the same magical thinking in the atheist community if you say that you are evidence-based. It’s incongruent. It doesn’t happen.

If you can look at me and say, “I understand that you have issues outside of Christianity, regardless of what the root cause is. If you take a big step back, yes, absolutely, in the beginning, when we take a look at how we even define what race is, you take a look at The Inquisition; how do we define bloodlines, and “the other”? Yes, it’s tied to race, but the racial construct is more tied to religion that most people will even acknowledge. Sure, I get that, totally.

But regardless of where it came from, where we are today being this is still my reality. Acknowledge the reality. You want to be an ally; you have to show up. Once you gain that trust, I’ll meet you where you want me to be.

2. Jacobsen: One thing pointed out to me. It was the notion, or the idea, or the reality of if in the African American or the black community in America, not religious, then not fully black, or African American. How does this play out in practical terms in the life of an African American male, or a black woman?

Jules: I can say that, for me, in my generation- I’m Generation X, if that means anything. Previous generations, it was infinitely more taboo to be non-religious. In fact, it was once you become a doubting Thomas, you become an Uncle Tom. That’s true.

We saw that in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You get a little bit of education from the white man. I’ll be blunt. You come back home and you’re doubting God. How dare you? It doesn’t matter who gave you the god. All those arguments just do not matter because the identity of being black, or African American, in the United States, is so tied to religion. It’s Moses. It’s Harriet Tubman. Her story is tied to lore, of course, or the meso-self of the Bible and the Christian Moses.

The fact that so much of the civil rights movement itself was enabled, to a certain extent, by black churches. Of course, you had really strong secular influences, as well, that just never got the attention as secular influences. It was “brethren so-and-so”, “pastor so-and-so”. We can’t ignore the truth that the church has played a galvanizing force in the African America community for so long. You just can’t undo that.

I think that was generational. “You say that you don’t believe. I say that you’re not black.” I think that’s changed. I think we’re changing. I think a lot of what we’re seeing, in the US anyway, is an artefact of the black civil rights movement, where we are beginning to see, even in the streets when there were significantly more protests, or significant more coverage regarding the protests.

I would talk to young organizers and they would tell me, “God hasn’t done anything for me. The church isn’t here. They’re not doing anything. Why would I believe in that?” So, there are challenges that we’re seeing with the younger generation, the Millennials and younger, that show a significant dip in religiosity in the African community. It’s significant. Even if it’s single-digit, 5%, 8%, 9%, that’s pretty significant given that when you take a look at their cohorts in different strata.

Whites, we’re seeing 70% religiosity, 30% “nones” or atheists, if you lump it all together. Even the Hispanic community was actually more or less secular than the white community. What we saw, at least if you use solid polls, is within the African American community, we saw about a 95% of the African American community identified as being heavily religious. That’s changed. It’s below 90%. I think it’s 80-something percent. That’s a big change. That’s a big shift.

The churches we still have, obviously, they’re strong church groups. That’s not going to go away but we’re not seeing the coherence to that identity as much. It is loosening. That, right there, has also, in the US, played a role in why we’ve seen it be so sticky. When you had your identity taken from you, stolen from you, and a new one given to you, or you created one and even the one that you created, you were told was ugly, and lazy, and dumb.

Again, many of those are Christian sentiments from the past and the South in the US that were just pushed onto the negro from about the 1600s all the way through to Jim Crow. It’s the reason why those stereotypes still exist, this identity that African Americans were able to cohere. Identity is complex. It just stuck. Yes, black is beautiful but black also includes this. Fortunately, we’re seeing that black identity is no longer monolithic. It’s wonderful.

3. Jacobsen: What would be the proportion of African Americans who identify, not simply as secular, but as an atheist, in America?

Jules: I think it’s still less than 1% It’s been a while since I looked up the numbers but it’s hovered around the 1% to 2%. It’s going to be low. It’s going to be low, but the ones that identify as “nones”, or say that– I think we’ve reached a tipping point in the US, as a whole, where secularism is just becoming significantly more wide-spread.

We are seeing the lashing out from the other side, especially the evangelical movement. They’re not happy about it. I don’t believe it’s in the death throes. I think we still have a few generations of them being there, but white evangelical children are not going to church anymore. They’re just not.

As that becomes more common, I think we’ll see more of that on the African American side. It’ll be slower but as those numbers really begin to dip, I think you’ll see more people identify as atheist. Even if they won’t call themselves atheist, they’ll know that they are. Just like me. I stayed in that bubble for years.

4. Jacobsen: Why is that trajectory slower for the black community compared to the white community in America?

Jules: I think one of them is the need for the church. The church has been there for childcare. It has been there for education. It’s been there as a safe haven. There’s a lot of reasons why the church exists in some communities, as well. Good and bad comes with the church.

The idea of community itself is necessary with the church. You have the moms. You have the grandmas, the aunts. “We’re going to see you in church, right? I’m taking her to church.” Continuously. It’s a conveyor belt system, to that extent. [Laughing]

Just wanting to continue to be part of that community. That community has, in numbers, been able to push the needle on civil rights movements where no other driving, massive force has. It is still going to be a little bit.

Jacobsen: I’m out of questions. I’m trying to think of another one.

Child: Dad.

Jacobsen: Is that your kid?

Jules: You heard that. Yes. She just ran in from one room to the other.

Jacobsen: Kids are almost like apparitions, sometimes. They just go in and out.

Jules: Yes.

5. Jacobsen: Aside from internal demographic, and inclusion, and dignity issues, and civility issues of the secular communities in North America, how can secular people, for want of better terminology, learn, potentially, some better social skills in communicating, in socializing, and in interacting with those who harbour more supernatural sentiments than them, in public, and in private? This has come up as an issue in some commentary.

Jules: I don’t know that there is a lot of work outside of the human dignity piece that is going to drive people together. One of the problems with not being able to bridge that first. If an outside group comes knocking on a black door, you wind up having the concerns about a white saviour. “Why are you here? Why are you trying to deconvert me? Why are you doing this?” Again, the trust issue is a significant issue. “Why are you trying to sell me this?”

Regardless of the fact that you were sold on the opposite message by the same person, or your core belief system. That’s really difficult. I think it still winds up being interfaith issues or interfaith initiatives. If you can find the white youth in the US, some of them- I know a lot of atheists have issues with churches and their acceptance of magical thinking, or just the acceptance of everyone, but those wind up being really fertile grounds for cross-cultural communication and “contamination”, in the best way.

I will drive down in some areas around here and I will see a huge “black lives matter” banner out front on the church. I already know that’s a UU church, right there, and they’re at least 70% white. I walk in there. Maybe it’s 90% white, but they’re taking the initiative to roll out the carpet and say, “Number one, I hear you. Number two, I acknowledge what’s going on. Three, if you want a place to be, here I am.” That’s something that UUs, Unitarian Universalists, have done well.

In fact, I guess it was in Ferguson, and during the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, after the Michael Brown murder, and then again in Baltimore, after the Freddie Gray murder. The people that are out there, if they were white, they usually were carrying a UU pin or UU banner. If you are able to get close to them and build enough bridges there, sometimes it comes.

I have got a very quick story. A few years ago, we did- it was The North Texas Food Bank. They had what was called a “full on faith” week, where they would invite all these churches to work at the food bank and package food and ship food, et cetera.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Zachary Moore, found out about it, and said, “Wait a minute. Why aren’t we doing this as well?” He reached out to them. They said, “You’re not really a church. You’re faithless. It’s like, “Yes, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t do exactly the same thing. It’s not that we aren’t without charity, without motivation. We’re humanist as well.”

The first event that we went to, I want to say there were maybe 30 people that showed up, which I thought was a great number. We were there and we were mixing it up with other- Christians. Maybe five people, one person, in particular, asked me, “What church are you with?” I explained the organization that I was with. I said “atheist” and “humanist”. She said, “I’m not familiar with that denomination.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing]

Jules: Right. Exactly. I enjoyed the internal giggles for about a good 15 minutes, maybe, but as we worked together, as we were bumping into each other and helping each other, at the end of that, we were, “Where do we learn more about you all?” They had questions. I was probably one of the only black atheists there. There were maybe one or two more.

Even the black church members were very generous and wanted to talk. Some of them kept in contact. One of them is no longer Christian. She was like, “I knew I had questions but I didn’t know who to ask.” That’s one person that was able to leave religion and say, “It’s not that I hate religion. It’s just I don’t need it for what I thought I needed it for.”

That’s a great example of bumping into people doing service, and just being out where people are and having an atheist spin, a human spin. You don’t necessarily need to be competition. You just need to show them that you’re there, and you’re there to help. Sometimes it just takes that much, or at least, that’s a good first step.

6. Jacobsen: I think that’s a perfect place to end on. Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Alix.

Jules: You’re very welcome. It was fun. [Laughing] I get to go back. It’s been a very long work day. I was like, “Wait. What’s going on?” [Laughing] This was good, thank you. I appreciate the conversation.

Jacobsen: It’s one drop at a time.

Jules: All right. Yes, absolutely.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Writer, Patheos Nonreligious.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/jules-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Early Life, Some More (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08

Abstract

Keywords: AAVIVRE, dying with dignity, early life, euthanasia, France, religion, right to die, Pascal Landa.

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Early Life, Some More: Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics) (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

Pascal Landa: To backtrack a little bit. While I was the President of AAVIVRE, which I founded five years ago, I wrote two booklets. One is a new self-deliverance booklet in which I explain clearly, with all the precautions and so forth, about life being precious, that how, if one wants to end his life, he can do it easily, safely and with no investment. It is not difficult to do that.

I detail what we call “the plastic bag method” originally promoted by Dereck Humphry. It is the method where you inhale your own carbon dioxide which puts you into a deep coma and in a matter of generally less than an hour, kills you. The advantage of that is that everybody can get a plastic bag. Everybody can get a scarf to put it around your neck for comfort and scotch tape to make sure it is held in place. Everybody can take sleeping pills, which you do beforehand so that you are sure to sleep throughout the process.

The nice thing about it is when you take the bag off the person’s head, he looks like he is just gone to sleep and had an easy death. What is most important about that method is that most people are horrified about it, and that is essential because of those people who are horrified are clearly not people who are in a phase of their life where they are facing the fact that their life needs to end.

If you are facing, either through pain, or loss of consciousness, or knowing that you are going to be completely debilitated, you are no longer worried about the plastic bag. You are worried about being sure to end your life. I only sell the book to people who are members of an association affiliated to the World Federation of Right to Die with Dignity and any profit is used to finance the movement.

I have observed that experience myself many times while accompanying people. Frankly, the fear that you have of not being able to breathe is not right at all. You breathe easily. You are breathing your own carbon dioxide, but you are breathing and there is NO suffocation. You go progressively. First, you go into sleep because you have taken the right number of pills to go long-term into deep sleep. Then your breath becomes shorter and shorter until you are into a deep coma and you die.

That is good for people who can still manipulate things enough to be able to do that process, but it is not good for those people who are paraplegics, who are unable to physically handle their own lives. Therefore, the law is still needed for those who want or need to be assisted. In the last 35 years, I have spent probably 25 years saying we need a law called “the right to die with dignity law”.

Finally today, I have become aware that we were going the wrong path for legislation. We were going the wrong path because the opponents to our movement oppose us on two principles. The first principle is that a society of persons is a contract between people who live together. One of the foundation stones of that contract is, “Thou shalt not kill.” If we want a law that says we can kill, we are obviously stepping into the mouth of the wolf who is then able to say, “This is not the right way to go.”

However, there is a good way to go. The good way to go, as far as I am concerned, and particularly in Southern European mentalities, which are emotional rather than rational. Latins are a different type of society than the puritan, rather logical and strict mechanical societies that we know in America, in Australia, in England. In France and in Italy and in Spain, the mentality is such that- and it is not just playing on words. It reveals the real basic issues that rule those societies.

The right path is to write a law for the irreversible medical acts. Know that in France, one specialist out of two every year, gets attacked in court. One generalist out of ten, every year, gets attacked in court. All of that is because the powers of the medical profession have been trying to sell us the idea that medicine is a science, which it is not.

Medicine is not a science by the simple fact that drugs that operate on you and drugs that operate on me are going to act differently. We are, each of us, individuals. We are, each of us, different. So the act of medical caring is not just a mechanical process of distributing drugs or operating. It is primarily a human adaptation and accompaniment process. We know that psychology also plays a large part of human well-being or not well-being. Thus medicine is an art.

If we understand that medicine is an art, then we cannot guarantee the results. If we cannot guarantee the results, then we need to have a process when we do a medically irreversible act. A codified process for the amputation of an arm, a leg, the extraction of part of a liver, the extraction of whatever it is, the replacement of a heart ….something that irremediably changes a person’s life.

Several things qualify an “irreversible medical act”. One is that the person is going to change his life fundamentally, for the rest of his life. We need social accompaniment, but a doctor is not a social worker. We need a social accompaniment of that process. We need to guarantee that a diagnostic of the doctor is a good diagnostic. That means that we need to have a second opinion that confirms the first opinion. “This is what is going on and this is what the problem is.”

The third thing is we need to be able to offer, as a professional medical practitioner, a large set of solutions. One is to do nothing. The other is to amputate. The third is to try to treat with drugs but with the risk of having gangrene and dying. Et cetera.

One of the options that doctors often must face is there is that there are no treatment issues to your problem. I am thinking of sicknesses such as those in which you die of suffocation because your lungs cannot do it anymore, which are terrible deaths, or those in which you cannot control the pain anymore because drugs do not work. Despite all the false data and the statements of lobby paid researchers, we know that about 5% – 6% of painful situations cannot be dealt with at end of life. In those situations, one of the options must be assisted medical dying.

Who are we to say when is the right time to say, ‘Deciding to die is the right option?” I am sure you would not want me to tell you when it is the right option for you. I can tell you that I do not want you to tell me what the right option for me. In fact, I want to protect you so that you can also decide that until every single cell in your body is dead, you are alive, and you want medical treatment. That is fine for you. But it is not fine for me.

Me I want the law to state that in a medical process of the irreversible act, that if a certain protocol is followed that guarantees all of the protection of the individual, then we should be in a situation where I can ask for medically assisted dying, and you, the doctor, can give me that prescription or do the actual injection if I choose it. That must be one of the options for care at end of life.

This is what happens in Switzerland. When you go to Switzerland, you provide a medical record that shows that you are in a terminally ill situation of one way or another. It doesn’t have to be terminally ill in the next six months. It just must be terminally ill. But remember, life is a terminal illness. We are all going to die. If we are in a situation where that is the case, and if the patient is not mentally disturbed, and is capable of making concious decisions, then he can choose to have a doctor prescribe a death giving cocktail, but only the patient can “open the valve” or drink the substance. It does not work for those who cannot even move a finger.

I am thinking of, for example, the young man who says, “She has left me. Life is no longer worth living because my sweetheart has left me,” or vice versa. Those kinds of situations are psychological situations where the person has not the required perspective to decide to die. We need, as a responsible society, to be able to determine those cases. Yet we must also be able to say, “You have the right to decide what is a life worth living and what is a life not worth living.” Only a well-codified process can allow this.

You should be able to die with your friends around you. I know a lot of people who like to play cheerful, joyful music. I have friends who said to me, “Pascal, I want you to drink champagne on the day of my death because it is the end of my life and I think everybody should celebrate the fact that I have had a good life.”

To make a long story short, I think that is one of the rights that we will have to recognize, and it is being recognized by more and more people. Unhappily, there’s a lot of issues with the way it is being recognized. For example, in America, they want you to sign off a list of situations in which you say you want to die. That is stupid. The one thing we know is that we do not know when or in what context with what situation we are going to die.

In the French law today, we have been able to get the right for terminal sedation under specific circumstances, and more importantly, the right for a person to say that he is not willing to accept certain types of medical treatment. That includes force-feeding and all treatments that do not pertain to his total recovery. But you can never anticipate, so anticipated directives, as we call them, are just a philosophical statement to guide the persons around you as to how you would like to end your life.

The real key is having somebody who is your person of confidence, a person with whom you have talked and who is going to be a valid person to talk with for the medical profession because the medical profession facing somebody dying has got a huge problem. The huge problem is that he can act like a professional, but he is being asked to make decisions as if he was the person. These are two different roles that require a dialogue and cannot be assumed by a single person.

What he needs is he needs a person to talk to. Often, the patient is no longer able to communicate correctly. What he needs is for the patient to have named somebody who is a person of confidence, who has his full confidence, and who is able to adjust the patient’s will to the real situation.

The real situation could be a car accident and to find yourself in a coma. Do we decide, because you marked on the questionnaire, “I do not want artificial respiration”, that we should decide to let you die? Even though if we give you artificial respiration for three weeks or even two weeks, you’ll be able to recuperate fully and then he’ll be able to live? NO!

We need to have somebody who is fully conscious, fully aware of the person’s wishes and desires, of course, and who can speak for the person. That seems to me more important than anticipated directives.

We must avoid, also, the bad path that codifies what the medical professional one has to do the multiple response questionnaire. Do you want us to do this? Do you want us to do that? Do you want us to do this?” That is ludicrous because the situation is in constant evolution. Those questionnaires only pertain to things that are black and white, but life is not black and white. Life is always specific to the individual, specific to the case at a moment in time.

Exchange and participation are essential. We know, for example, that a person going to see a doctor, when the doctor talks with him and has an exchange, he has 30% more chance of recovery than a person who doesn’t talk to his doctor because medical care is a mutual trust space between a practitioner who knows medical practices and a patient who knows himself. We also know that it reduces costs by 30%, as well, which is an impressive amount.

Last, of all, I think one of the important things we need to keep in mind is that end of life today represents somewhere between 60% and 80% of all medical expenses during your whole lifetime. That means that the end of life is big business for some people. We cannot let financial big business interests be above concerns for that a person that is supplicating that he wants to end his life because he has had enough, enough of suffering, enough of mental torture, enough of seeing those around him suffer, et cetera.

As a responsible society, we also must remember that a person who is in a situation of sickness or end of life, has tremendous pressures from external sources, the wife that tells the doctor, “I want you to keep him alive by all means because as long as he is alive, I am getting my pension. The day he dies, I get nil.” Or the kids who say, “Speed him up. I want to get that inheritance. I can use the money dads got better than he does. Look at what condition he is in.” I just gave examples, but there are millions of motivations.

As a responsible society, we must have a law that saves the individual from torture by the medical industry. End of life people today are test grounds for lots of medications. That is not acceptable unless the person says it is okay but often, they never ask the person or omit this experimental aspect for a proposed treatment.

Today in France, 30,000 people die because doctors, mostly by compassion, help them die. Even that is not acceptable because, first of all for 1% or 2%, we question the fact that is the right decision, but more important, is that they never asked the opinion of the person concerned, and there is no reason we should allow this, it’s like playing “god”. When you do not have the agreement or request of the person, it is called murder. If you ask the person and the person wants it, it is called assisted dying and compassion. Two different concepts.

The other reason is that as a society, we cannot let the medical profession be attacked permanently because people think that medicine is a science and not an art. If we develop a the protocol that protects the medical profession, we’ll find more and more medical professionals having human compassion, human interest in their patients, and doing their job which is helping us to live as well as we can, as long as we can, and in a state that is compatible with an individual’s will to live.

I think I have covered the three basic subjects. My own personal life is not interesting in all this except to say that perhaps I started this movement when I was 30, replacing my father as president of the association in France, and that I have done a successful IT career as an international director of IT while continuously being an active member of the right to die with dignity movement in France and internationally.

That shows that I am not interested in glamour. I just want that law, some day or another, to be enacted. I wrote a book on how to write your personal directives and how to designate the person of confidence so that people can read that book and know how to do that because it seems to be a difficult thing for people to do. It is a book written in French and if you turn the book around, it is in English because I am both a French and English speaker.

I think I have covered the law in France today. In 2005, the law allowed recognition for anticipated directives and the fact that a person you choose “personne de confiance” (person you trust) could be more important than the family as advice for the medical profession.

In 2016, it reinforced the law and said, “Directives are now an obligation for the medical profession and the person of trust is still an advisory, but a much more an important advisory than it ever was stated before.” Otherwise, the law used to say, “We cannot kill people. We can just put them in terminal sedation.” The 2016 law said, “Terminal sedation, the doctor does not have to wake up the patient regularly to check that he is not killing him.”

But terminal sedation today, as practiced in France, can take one day to one month, depending on the state of health of the individual. We think that is totally unacceptable. It is unacceptable for the individual because we cannot say that he is not suffering. It is unacceptable for the family and those around them because we know that they are suffering. We can see it clearly.

There’s still a long way to go but I think this road must pass through a protocol for irreversible medical acts and not a law for directing doctors on how we can kill people when they choose it. That will neither be accepted by the doctors, nor by the religious people, nor by the basic community, even though 90% of the French citizens all say, since about 30 years now, that they want legislation for the right to die with dignity.

Dying is not an easy thing. I am in the middle of writing a book on how you live the best way the last part of your life. Living at the end of your life is a tremendous adventure. At the end of your life, one of the things that happen, whether we like it or not, is you can no longer lie to yourself.

All our lives, we can lie to ourselves, and say, “Life, it is going to continue. I am not going to die,” or any other lies that we do for ourselves, but the one thing that you can no longer do when you are nearing death is you can no longer lie to yourself. That is a period when you can do a lot of progress in your own mentality and on your own awareness of life.

It is too bad you do not do it beforehand. So many people would rather act like the ostrich and keep their heads in the sand until the moment arrives. That is not acceptable, for me. If somebody else wants to live that way, I have no objections. A corner stone of the right to die movement is: We are not asking that others live the way we want to, we are just asking that we be able to live the way we want.

We defend also the person that wants to live until the last second of the last cell that survives in his body. One of the things that I wanted to do at one point was to attacked the state because in today’s life, today’s scientific community knowledge about organisms and their way of living, we are able to grow meat, we are able to grow skin, we are able to grow organs, we are able to create stem cells out of any other cell in the body. We can now, very recently, replace parts of the DNA. In fact, we could say that we shouldn’t ever let anybody die. We could keep a body alive forever. Is living being just a body and the cells that function? We do not think so.

An important issue that is being raised today by the right to die with dignity movement is what is the real meaning of life? Is the real meaning of life having cells that are alive or is the real meaning of life that of being conscious, being able to love, being able to have emotions? Those are the real questions that we must deal with as a society.

Do you have any other questions?

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/landa-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Stories and Cultural Differences (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/08

Abstract

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of Ideas Beyond Borders and Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Global Secular Humanist Movement, and a columnist for Free Inquiry. He discusses: stories, religions, cultural differences, and science.

Keywords: Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Global Secular Humanist Movement, Ideas Beyond Borders.

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Stories and Cultural Differences: Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0 (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Also, Mohammed’s story in another respect, in a minor way. It is teaching Canadians that they also have secret service.

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: It is important to know about CSIS. I did an interview with her. I quoted this part of the interview as the title. It is a beautiful quote. Most Canadians do not know about it. It is important to know in a similar way.

For instance, by analogy, when people used to talk about these pseudoscientific categories of race, in terms of Caucosoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, they were shown relatively clearly as pseudoscience in a similar way as Phrenology in psychology.

It is the ‘science’ of bumps on the head corresponding to traits of an individual such as intelligence or various personality aspects. In evolutionary theory, if you look at geographies over time, what they talk about more is, traits in a species that differ geographically along a gradient.

Those are called clines. I think in a similar way. It is looking at the stories common to us all. It is just the different ratios you’re going to get in different parts of the world. So, it is not going to happen as much in Canada. But it is going to happen in Canada.

Al Mutar: It already happened in Canada few times. There are definitely chances that it is going to happen more. Despite the signs of the world getting better, less poverty, less hunger, and so on, I do not see signs of extremism declining.

I would argue political extremism and polarization is on the rise.

Jacobsen: I agree.

Al Mutar: In Europe, you can see parties. Marine le Pen is in the parliament. You can see Jeremy Corbyn with the Far Left in the Labour Party openly saying crazy things. That can be perceived as antisemitic by many people.

While Canada remains a beacon of hope in some regards, the UK was a beacon of hope for many years. But it is not working well for them right now. There’s nothing in Canada that makes it immune to being a crazy place.

I have been to Canada many times. Yes, because of their geography and America being on South of them, it is different than America having South America on the South of them. It makes them an obscure place. They Canada enter Canada without a visa.

It puts them in a position that attracts fewer individuals from other parts of the world. They are lucky in that regard. But I do not if there is anything in Canada that makes them immune from really going through the deep end in terms of extremism.

Canadian is not that different from American DNA.

Jacobsen: You could have someone moving from Nova Scotia to Iqaluit. They are cranky because they are cold.

Al Mutar: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: “There’s not even a Tim Horton’s, eh? I don’t even know” [Laughing].

Al Mutar: Especially in big cities like Montreal or Toronto, or Vancouver, they look as American as they can get.

Jacobsen: Yes, different labels of companies and corporations.

Al Mutar: Yes, very similar, almost the same thing, it is almost the same diversity. I would say Vancouver is more Asian than the rest.

Jacobsen: The closer you get to Richmond for sure.

Al Mutar: That has always been my hypothesis, in a way, for extremism or resentment. Canada compared to America has a better welfare system. With the recent migration, Justin Trudeau accepted many Syrian refugees.

Jacobsen: That started with Brian Mulroney at quarter of a million per year.

Al Mutar: Many of the Syrian refugees, not negatively but, coming from the different country will not see the welfare system as a welfare system but as a way of life. As a result, it is possible that many will use the welfare system.

Because many are refugees and need time to move up in the economic ladder. As a result, the people who pay taxes in Canada will be angry. I can see that happening a lot in Scandinavia. Every time I go there and call a friend from Sweden or Denmark, social welfare is above what I would consider normal.

There is a lot of resentment from many Danish citizens, Norwegian citizens who say, “I work my ass off all the time. I pay 50% income tax,” which is crazy already and in America 30% considered insane.

“Then I am guaranteed this social contract. I will get education for my son. My neighbours’ sons will get an education. We have a social contract in which we help each other out. They are homogeneous. They know each other. They help each other. They form the social contract.”

Then there are people coming from different culture who do not even know the social contract. Because of the cultural difference, they will say, “I can live and not work for $5,000 per month. Cool!”

Especially in this age of polarization, they do not see themselves as part of the social contract. They see themselves Syrians who think, “Why the fuck should I pay for other people at 50% of my income? Why am I doing this? I do not know anybody. Most of my friends are Syrians. Why am I paying into this system?”

I am afraid Canada will have the same problem. That many Canadians will think, “I am working my ass off all the time. I am barely able to buy a house, maybe not even an apartment or condo. Then there are people who come from overseas and who do not pay taxes and then live on welfare.”

That is the right-wing rhetoric. There are many refugees who do not live on welfare. I am an Iraqi refugee myself. I do not live on welfare. I have a salary. I pay taxes as well. But that is the stereotype of living on welfare. They (the right-wing) can find examples that they can utilize. I am afraid that rhetoric will gain steam in Canada.

Where if you give Canada 10 or 20 years, you might have a Far Right party.

Jacobsen: It is usually 10 years after the US. There was a split with the People’s Party of Canada founded by Maxime Bernier splitting off the Conservative Party of Canada of Andrew Scheer.

Al Mutar: Yes, also, centre-left will be considered right-wingers by the far-left and centre -right will be considered cucks by the far-right [Laughing].

Jacobsen: It will be more egregious in America. We know the ‘news networks’ that will use that as political ammo for a right-wing narrative. In Canada, we have some similar ones. But they are too obviously bombastic and not big enough.

As well, Fox News tried to get a branch over here. It didn’t turn out well [Laughing]. It didn’t start. That kind of sentiment, at least among the portion of North American and Western European examples.

But it can be stoked by fanning those flames in, back to the example, Canada. I see some of it being used. For instance, there was a young Canadian woman. She was murdered by a refugee. So, that was used as a news story to demonize Syrian refugees as group.

One person does it. Therefore, the group is bad, which is the basis of xenophobia.

Al Mutar: Yes, I am afraid some of these groups will do it. Then we will face some bad consequences.

Jacobsen: Back to clines, gradients, as the analogy of phenomena, there are human universals. There are different ratios of people’s experiences. You lived in a liberal household. Yasmine Mohammed lived in a more fundamentalist household, especially with her mom. Honey I Married a Jihadi, basically [Laughing].

Al Mutar: [Laughing] yes.

Jacobsen: The experience of people. To bridge the gap with telling the stories across the language, culture, and religion divide, a good way to do this. It is looking at your own experience in 2010 of fear simply through going onto a religion forum or fora.

It is similar to the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of France, Waleed Al-Husseini, when he was in Palestine territories. He was in a coffee shop because he didn’t want to be home writing these blogs.

He got fond out and placed into a military tribunal and tortured for several months. I think the more common example, in either case of Canada or Palestine or others throughout the MENA region, is the social bullying, being afraid.

Al Mutar: Yes.

Jacobsen: People who are openly secular in Canada. If they work in a student union, in a campus, in a profession, if they are in a church community but lost their faith, they will undergo social bullying in the family, the community, at work, and in the school.

Those stories bridge the gap. A similar phenomena of bullying – public humiliation and so on – to prevent them from being open about their own beliefs. With the barrier, in the extreme cases, with death threats and actions following them, which make the threats legitimate, for the most part, there is the big hunk of sameness.

Al Mutar: One of the reasons why I prior to starting IBB that I started the Global Secular Humanist Movement was to make the people share stories of how much suffering they’re facing or persecution from different parts of the world and make them connected to each other.

People really realizing how they can inspire each other. The ways people can inspire each other. I get emails many times, mostly from individual from the Middle East but also from the West. They say, “Faisal, I saw what you have been through. You have courage to go through what you went through. You are inspiring me to do this for other people and pay it forward. Also, I am not afraid now.”

I always get questions from ex-Muslims in the region, who I always happy mentor. I have 5 activists who I always mentor on how to be safe. I always get the question, “So, my cousin saw me drinking beer. Should I apologize to him and say I will never do it again? Or should I own it?”

I try to listen to them and see their situation, ask them not to do something crazy, and figure out a way to survive until their cousin becomes more secular. I am constantly reminded that there are many people who are facing persecution because of their beliefs.

These people always are looking for stories to be inspired by. There were times when they were constantly thinking and reached a point of depression & defeatism. They need each other. We always need to pull them out and prove them again, and get them optimistic about life.

A life without goals and optimism is not a life worth living to me. It is torture.

Jacobsen: Shakespeare had the phrase, “Oh Friar, damned souls use the word banishment to describe hell.” No community is hugely painful for people.

Al Mutar: Of course, it is. We are social animals. We get our energy from other people. There are people who live on farms. But they get contact with other people, not as much as us in the cities. But they still have human interaction.

They cannot live by themselves because we need each other for survival and mental-social reasons.

2. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Faisal.

Al Mutar: Wonderful, thank you, Scott!

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0; Founder, Global Secular Humanist Movement.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mutar-three; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Stacey Piercey on True Self, Newfound Joy, and Daily and Dating Life (Part Five)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/01

Abstract

Stacey Piercey is the Co-Chair of the Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights for CFUW FCFDU and Vice Chair of the National Women’s Liberal Commission for the Liberal Party of Canada. She discusses: true self; newfound joy; changes in daily life; things to do on a Friday evening, a Saturday afternoon, and a Sunday morning; dating life now – difficulties, novelties, and amusing stories; and enough money, time, and access for an ideal life.

Keywords: Co-Chair, Liberal Party of Canada, Ministry of Status of Women, Stacey Piercey, Vice Chair.

Interview with Stacey Piercey onCommunity: Co-Chair – Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights, CFUW FCFDU; Vice Chair National Women’s Liberal Commission at Liberal Party of Canada | Parti libéral du Canada (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s focus on the woman you are now. For those who have made a comfortable transition, what are the last parts of your true self to come forward and integrate with the new life?

Stacey Piercey: Well to truly understand where I am in life, you must realize in my mind, I am making up for lost time. When I presented as a male, there were many opportunities that I could not pursue in the past. While I was on this road of discovery, I was learning for myself who I was again. I was not available in many ways. Then I started to rebuild my life as a woman. My career lagged, but I was fortunate to have travelled so all was not lost.

I believe, my life is starting to reflect who I am. I have gone through some significant changes in just a few short years. I have my doubts and wonder what the future may hold. I have friends, but I don’t have that special someone in my life. I am terrible at dating, and I’m busy as an entrepreneur. To be true to who I am, I am re-establishing a career and home life that I consider to be mine, as it would have been as if I was born a woman.

2. Jacobsen: For those reading this at the moment or at some future present, what is the newfound joy in being your real self?

Piercey: Within the last while, I moved to Newfoundland where I grew up. It is familiar, yet I am having a different experience than before. Most of the people I knew from my past are gone, and I have lost touch with many from my travels. At the same time, I am meeting all new people from Newfoundland as the woman I am now. It is an excellent time to be here as I am getting grounded in what is familiar. It is a much quieter life, and it suits me just fine.

I did some living these past twenty years. I understand that now as I have had time to reflect. I am putting everything together that I was, and that I did. I see it for myself, who I have become. Funny how you are always the last to know. That transgender girl, human rights advocate, board room executive, former Judge and political candidate, plus everything I was before my transition is coming together fast. That person lives in St. John’s, NL and she has been around the block. I can say that I like who I am and where I am going in this life again.

3. Jacobsen: This may be banal or trite. However, some may wonder: how does everyday life change when you’re finally able to have acceptance, in general, within the culture as your true gender?

Piercey: My life took off when I accepted who I was. It was never about what other people or society thinks. I have my journey to live. I remember a time when I was ashamed of being feminine, and I would hide that part of me. I find it liberating to be myself. I don’t have to worry about a secret or that someone might expose me. That followed me for years. Then I found my way as a woman. I am more comfortable with myself, and I do have my confidence back.

I know that I did struggle with survivors’ guilt. For a while, I felt like one of the lucky ones that made it. Then I realized I was a trailblazer, creating the way for others to follow. I changed when I decide to live for those who couldn’t. Then I was happy that I woke up every morning and I try to see the sunrise every day. I don’t think about my gender anymore, and I am glad that is behind me.

4. Jacobsen: What do you like to do on a Friday evening, a Saturday afternoon, and a Sunday morning?

Piercey: I appreciate it when I get to unplug. I like listening to the radio, going for walks, and finding art. I have adventures, where I go out and do my thing. I go with the flow, talk to the people, and drift impulsively. That is the Trans girl; her street nickname was ”Mary Poppins,” and that was me, popping into different worlds, expressing different sides of myself. Her free spirit will rule me forever. She has a different life than most, that is the executive having fun and using her powers for good. I am always learning and growing as an individual. It amazes me what I stumble into at times.

5. Jacobsen: How is dating life now – difficulties, novelties, and amusing stories?

Piercey: As with dating, I am terrible at expressing my sexuality. I worry more about being taken advantage of, and therefore I am guarded. I have talked to some men, and I have been on a few dates in the past years. I’m just getting to know myself. I do wonder how does a relationship fit into my life. I know that it is where I am going, as I was married before. I have been thinking about who Mr. Right is, and I can’t wait to meet him. It will take a while for me to find someone to spend my life with and I am okay with that.

As for exciting stories, I think I managed to talk to someone for two weeks. It was nice to have someone to look forward to chatting too. I have lots of people that ask me out, but not anybody serious about a relationship. I did have a spell where I was getting hit on and asked out so much that I felt like prey. I became shy from all the attention. I don’t see it myself. I even dress down now when I go out to avoid such silliness. I meet so many people, as I run around town. I am honest in saying, I can’t wait to see on my calendar “Coffee with Husband 3:00 pm and don’t be late this time, or he will ask questions.”

6. Jacobsen: If you could have enough money, time, and access in the future, what would be your ideal life? How would you go about building it?

Piercey: This Newfoundland version of me is that of a writer and business owner. It is the life that I always wanted. I am rather new at it, and I haven’t received the benefits as of yet. I feel as if I am so far behind compared to my peers in many ways. Mostly though, I am starting a new career after some life changes. I have been building my ideal life, and I have been busy too. I like it, I walk out on the streets, and I know everyone. I feel safe in my neighbourhood, and I feel safe online too with the friends I made away. I have street smarts, excellent credentials and great potential.

I know many people in my new town. I see familiar faces everywhere, and I have some social groups that I joined that I like. In this next year, I will be putting together my business, finding associates and I am extremely confident I will be successful in this endeavour. I hope to have a great life as well to go with that.

7. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Stacey.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Co-Chair – Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights, CFUW FCFDU; Vice Chair National Women’s Liberal Commission at Liberal Party of Canada | Parti libéral du Canada; Mentor, Canadian Association for Business Economics.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/piercey-five; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0 (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/01

Abstract

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of Ideas Beyond Borders and Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Global Secular Humanist Movement, and a columnist for Free Inquiry. He discusses: clever obstacles placed by governments; books being translated through Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0; and selection of who leads the conversations.

Keywords: Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Global Secular Humanist Movement, Ideas Beyond Borders.

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0: Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0 (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the clever obstacles some of the governments are putting up or would potentially put up?

Faisal Al Mutar: One of the main things is the tracking stuff. These governments track behaviour. They are able to see what other people see. They can track the location and then be able to arrest the perpetrators. One of the other main things; that many, at least 100, people I know get exposed.

One of my writer friends, two months ago, is a Tunisian. Not through Al-Qaeda, but there were many extremist websites sharing her name and address on webpages, they said, “She is an infidel, kill her.” They do not say, “Kill her.” They say, “Do something,” with the implication there.

That way, Facebook cannot track them as easily. This is one of the tactics that the extremists use. I have had this happen many times to me. I “are less, because I live in the West. But there are days when I went to a chat room about religion. Somebody said, “What is your email? I would like to take the conversation to private.” It’s not smart. I know.

I think a guy has a device or something to get the IP Address from the email. He took it to a page. This is when I was living in Malaysia. He took it to a page and out my photo online. They said, “This guy this in this neighbourhood around here.” It got 10,000 likes.

That was in 2010/11. Lots of comments, “I am going to kill this guy.” I freaked out at the time, rightly so. Nothing happened. But I was scared for a week. Because the address put online was within three blocks.

Many of the people saying, “I am going to kill him,” probably lived in Indonesia and not Malaysia. This is the trouble people who consume our content may face death threats, being killed, and so on.

We, as an organization, in terms of dealing with translators is wanting to empower the translators. We want to pay for these people. Other than them working as an Uber driver. We would like them to get as much money as they get from Uber but from us – translating the most important ideas of the 21^st century.

Some issues faced by translators, not all. Because of the blasphemy laws, the translator is afraid of translating the book, because they would be breaking the blasphemy laws. We had a translator who lived in Egypt.

He said, “Look, Faisal, I agree with everything. I love Steven Pinker. But I cannot translate it. There are blasphemy laws. I can be persecuted in my country, even though these things are not my ideas. I can be punished through blasphemy laws for translating.”

For example, they cannot make a contract with us. We have to work entirely on trust. They translate the book. We give them money. If there was a physical contract, their lives would be in danger. This has been one of the issues faced by us. It is looking for translators.

Most of our translators live in the Middle East. It is the policy that I take. One is the lower cost. Another is empowering those people over there. It has been a big obstacle. But so far, we have been really successful in finding really high-quality translators, who are so excited.

They are probably so much more excited than me. Because they are translators. They speak the same language. They recognize that many people because of language barriers, blasphemy laws, and so on, cannot access this stuff and need it.

It is about stopping extremism before it takes root. This is the idea behind IBB.

Jacobsen: By the way, 35 million people, that is the size of my country [Laughing].

Al Mutar: [Laughing] there are many people who speak Arabic. There are about 500 million people who speak Arabic, but not all of them are experts. It is good. One of our policies is generally not reinventing the wheel.

We are trying to improve the already existing systems. The people who are bloggers and have pages related to our cause. We are partnering all together to distribute each others’ content.

Jacobsen: It centralizes through an umbrella but decentralizes because it is distributed as a network.

Al Mutar: Exactly, yes.

2. Jacobsen: Why start with Lying by Sam Harris? Why The Future of Tolerance, which is a conversation between Maajid Nawaz, former extremist, and Sam Harris, an inactive neuroscientist?

Al Mutar: There was no holy reason why we started with lying. It is a small book. We wanted to test the model with small books before moving to big ones. The reason why I think this book is important, whether we started with it or not.

Many people who live in authoritarian regimes, like my own, Iraq, live with a constant state of fear. They don’t trust anyone. My mom, who I adore a lot, lived through the revolution before the Iraq-Iran War, the Iraq-Iran War, the Gulf War, then the sanctions, then the Second Gulf War.

In a lifetime, she lived through all these things. Her generation who grew up in the 1950s. They live in a constant state of fear of each other. Because the neighbour may be part of the militia. As a result of the climate, there is a climate of lying.

You lie about how much money you make. If you are rich, you say you’re poor; if you’re poor, you are you’re rich. Because the whole of society is based on lies. Many of the things people talk to each other about are not true.

When I grew up, people ask, “Do you like Saddam Hussein?” Of course, I say, “Yes, I love Saddam Hussein.” I have to lie. This book by Sam Harris really explores many of these dimensions of really lying for survival to white lies if your girlfriend asks, “Do I look fat in this dress?”

It even asks if white lies are good for society or not. Even though, they are not detrimental in terms of consequences. I think the Arab audience will learn a lot by looking at the different dimensions of the concept of lying and white lies, and others.

As for Islam and the Future of Tolerance, it is the right audience, in my opinion [Laughing]. There are three things that I think people can learn from it. Number one, it is that you can have a civil discourse about one of the most complicated and also emotional cases of our time.

It is Islam, Islamism, and so on, in which it is so easy for emotions to run high and so easy for people to get defensive/offensive – to advocate for barbaric policies. It is so easy for things to go crazy. The fact two people come from two different sides of the world. A neuroscientist atheist who studied at Stanford and went with Buddhist monks.

Jacobsen: Being a security guard for the Dalai Lama.

Al Mutar: [Laughing] yes, being a security guard for the Dalai Lama, then writing a book about a call for the end of religion. Then there is Maajid Nawaz who grew up in a moderate family but gets radicalized.

His life mission became political from being a minority Muslim in Britain to being beaten up by neo-Nazis, being an Islamist and recruiting people to destroy his home country that he is born in, and into being jailed in Egypt.

Sam Harris went to overseas to study Buddhism. Maajid Nawaz went overseas to establish a Caliphate [Laughing]. These are people from completely different backgrounds.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: I am honoured to know them personally. They are able to maintain a civil discourse. Maajid is really trying to change the Muslim world from within. His point of addressing abrogation and extremism, and the diversity in the Muslim or the lack of it.

It is something many Muslims need to listen to the perspective. Hopefully, it is bringing the conversation together. This is an example of a conversation. I am hoping through the translation work getting the word out there is good.

I am hoping there will be Lebanese Christian and Syrian Muslim having a conversation. They can take the example of Maajid and Sam and people of different backgrounds into having their own conversations about the future of tolerance, whether about Islam or other subjects.

It is a region filled with civil wars and other conflicts.

3. Jacobsen: If we look at the mainstream conversation of the secular community in North America and Western Europe, more often, it’s led by men. There’s a number of reasons for that, at least arguments put forward about it.

Not in favour of it, but in terms of description. Would it be powerful to some of the audience, the 35 million or the 8-10% of people reached, via people like Harris and Nawaz but with a woman who was a former Buddhist and a woman who was a former Muslim?

Al Mutar: Sure, definitely, I am very honoured by some of the translators and the lead advisor in the Advisory Board, including a woman, Dr. Nadia Owediat. She has an incredible story and courage.

I am in favour of empowering. It is far more difficult to come out. It is so difficult to be a woman in the Middle East.

Jacobsen: That’s boilerplate.

Al Mutar: Add to that, it is to be an uncovered woman in the Middle East. If you are a woman who didn’t wear a hijab, you are also at a disadvantage because people think less of you. Some may see you as a prostitute, at least in some parts of the Middle East.

Others will be more liberal and more open-minded on that subject. Let’s say you’re an ex-Muslim, a liberal Muslim, and so on, through my organization, I am in favour of empowering these voices of courage and inspiration.

There are some new voices popping up in the Middle East including Manal al-Sharif. A Saudi woman who led the driving campaign. I saw her speaking at the Lincoln Center in New York There is Yasmine Mohammed travelling across the United States and Europe to give talks and not to forget, also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has been outspoken about this stuff.

We definitely need more. I think that we are definitely a community and need to help each other out in this regard. I am always looking for helping out. This is out of the organization. But as an individual, I have 400,000 followers on Facebook and 30,000 on Twitter.

I am always willing to retweet or share other voices, whether men or women, LGBT, and so on. Those underrepresented groups. I am a straight male. I am happy being one. But I am definitely in favour of getting these underrepresented voices more representation.

I do not know how much a retweet can help. But I am followed by many journalists and many people who book events and many organizers, and many CEOs. All of that. Just giving some exposure to them and hoping they will be picked up by someone else, it would be incredible.

I am doing my part. I am asking all of the others, not necessarily leaders as there is no leadership here but those, with influence to try to create more influencers. There are two reasons. Obviously, there is a collectivist reason.

We try to help each other out. Also, I think it is in the benefit of us as a cause and individually to help one another. For example, one of the main things I have been facing in North America. Whenever I talk about extremism, Al-Qaeda, etc., people say, “You have an accent. You’re from Iraq. It is too far. You do not know what you’re talking about. We do not have extremism here.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: They look at me as some sort of alien, as if I am from some foreign land. My issues aren’t relevant here. One of the best counterexamples to that is Yasmine Mohammed.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Al Mutar: She was married to an extremist guy. This was in fucking North America. She didn’t grow up in Egypt or Palestine. She grew up in Vancouver (Canada). This is in the context of North America.

People like her and others. Those who live and grow up here. They have been helping me as well. Because when I speak about extremism, I can speak about them with extremism here. I have been dismissed in the terms mentioned before.

I get a personal benefit, not simply the charitable benefit of helping these people out. But I get the benefit of saying, “Okay, my friend grew up in an extremist household.” If someone says, “You have a foreign problem,” I can reply, “No, my friend grew up here and had the same problem.”

In fact, I would argue that I grew up more liberal in Baghdad than Mohammed in Vancouver. My parents were more liberal. So, what the fuck are you talking about here? Extremism, as with IBB, is also beyond borders.

Now, most of the world is infected by it. There needs to be a holistic and global solution to this international problem of extremism.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0; Founder, Global Secular Humanist Movement.

[2] Individual Publication Date: July 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mutar-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Parsi and Zoroastrianism (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Dr. Iona Italia is an Author and Translator, and a Sub-Editor for Areo Magazine, and Host of Two for Tea. She discusses: personal background, and ethnicity and religion; Zoroastrianism; approximate global population; outside of Bombay; Ph.D. from Cambridge; reclusive caves of doctoral students; and 1694 and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Keywords: Areo Magazine, Iona Italia, Parsi, Zoroastrianism.

An Interview with Dr. Iona Italia on Parsi and Zoroastrianism: Host, Two for Tea & Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is personal background for you? How is ethnicity and religion intertwined in this backdrop?

Dr. Iona Italia: Parsi is the ethnicity. Zoroastrianism is the religion. It is ethnic religion. You cannot convert to Zoroastrianism. Your father must have been Parsi – it is patrilineal – for you to be Parsi and Zoroastrian. You can, obviously, also be Parsi and be an atheist, but you cannot be Zoroastrian. Unless you are Parsi.

The requirements are that your father was Parsi. It doesn’t matter whether or not your father was an atheist, but the requirements are that your father was Parsi and that you have had an initiation ceremony which we call the Navjote, which literally means “new flame” and which is usually performed in the ancestral homeland of Iran at around age 15, 16, but now in India, usually between ages 8 and 12.

I had it done originally in Karachi at age 8. You can have it done at any time in life. There is a famous example of someone who had his Navjote at age 70.

Once you have had your Navjote, if you are Parsi and you have had your Navjote, then you are a Zoroastrian and at that point, you can enter the Agiary. Obviously, you can enter to have your actual Navjote, but until the ceremony is done, you cannot otherwise enter the Agiary, which is the fire temple. We have a ritual garment. It is called the Sudreh Kusti. It is a cotton “wife-beater,” I rather irreverently call it, with a string belt.

The main worship that we do involves going to the Agiary, and then there is a ritual you follow with handwashing and various things. You wear this Sudreh Kusti and you undo the belt and you re-tie it, and as you re-tie it, you recite certain prayers. There are a few little gestures that go along with it, as well.

You tie and then you take off your shoes, you go inside, and there are a few other little gestures like touching the painting of Zoroaster, which we always have in the Agiary, and going into the place where the actual fire is, saying a small prayer at the fire, and putting a little bit of ash on your forehead. That is the main mode of worship. This is probably way more information than you need.

It is not like church, where there is a service. We do have a few servicey-style things, but mostly you go in and it is like visiting a shrine. You go in, you say your prayers, and you sit for a while, if you feel like it, or not, and you leave.

Zoroastrianism was the ancestral religion of Iran until the Islamization of Iran in the 8th century. When Islam arrived in Iran and everyone was converted by the sword, a group of Zoroastrians, so legend has it, got into a boat and fled to India to the Gujarat coast, where they settled. They agreed that they would follow the Indian customs, wear the Indian clothes, eat Indian food and have weddings after sunset, which is a Hindu thing – if they could follow their religion. The Parsis are mostly settled in India now, for more than a millennium, and mostly in Bombay. That is a little tale, maybe rather too long an answer about Parsis and Zoroastrianism.

2. Jacobsen: When was Zoroastrianism originated? What’s the – if known – definitive point?

Italia: It is not known. It probably predates Judaism. Whether or not it predates Hinduism is unknown, it is one of the oldest world religions.

3. Jacobsen: What is the approximate global population at this point, in terms of the Zoroastrian diaspora?

Italia: It depends if you count Iranians as ancestral Zoroastrians, as some people do. I said that you cannot convert, but there is an exception, which is if you are Iranian, so some people are attempting to revive this in Iran, which is why Armin [Navabi] wanted to talk to me. [Please note: Armin and I discussed this here, https://soundcloud.com/user-761174326/episode-028-armin-navabi-the-battle-for-iran, from around the 32–53 minute marks).]

If you do not count that, then the population is small. We have always been a tiny, tiny minority. We have always been a small group. Probably in the 8th century when the Parsis arrived, there were probably only 4,000, 5,000. I think now there is around 100,000. Half are in India, and the other half are in the diaspora.

4. Jacobsen: Outside of Bombay, where else do you find those who have that form of ethnic/religious background?

Italia: The majority are in Bombay. There are a few scattered around elsewhere in India. Then there are some small diaspora communities in London, I know there is one in Toronto, and, for example, there is a small community in Texas. There is one in upstate New York, which I have visited. I have been to the temple in upstate New York. That is the only diaspora community that I visited, in fact.

5. Jacobsen: In the UK, when you did your Ph.D. in Cambridge, did you happen to meet some of the diaspora there, as well?

Italia: No. I did not meet anybody in Cambridge, no Parsis. [Please note that I met many other people!]

6. Jacobsen: Is part of that a consequence of being in the reclusive caves that doctoral students put themselves in when they are doing their research and their work?

Italia: I was, at that stage, not interested in exploring that side of my heritage. My parents died when I was young. My father died in 1980. After I came to the UK, and my parents died, I was 11 at this stage, and I went to boarding school. I had a complete break from that entire side of my family. I grew up with no Indian relatives, with no Parsi relatives.

I was at boarding school. In the holidays, I spent time with my much older sister. She was 19 years old, my half-sister on my mother’s side, who I did not consciously meet until that stage, and with a few aunts, and a few times with non-relatives also assigned by the state. I left that entire culture behind at that stage. I rediscovered it much, much later.

7. Jacobsen: What was your doctorate question or research? What was the answer or the findings?

Italia: I did my doctorate in English literature, so we do not have a question, like that. I do not know if that is a social sciences thing.

I did my undergraduate degree in English literature. I did my Ph.D. on 18th-century periodical essays. I began my writing on women writers from the period, so I looked at five journalists. Then I later, after I finished my Ph.D., expanded it into a book. I looked at ten journalists for the book. I had them all in sexed pairs, so there were one man and one woman in each, as the feature of each chapter.

Journalism as we know it began in the 1690s, in 1694. Before that there were broadsides and pamphlets that were issued in response to specific events, so they were like one-off flyers. What we would think of as a periodical, is a regular publication, those began coming out in 1694. I will not go into the whole history.

There was a reason for the specific date. The things that I was interested in were not news reporting. They were essay periodicals, as they were called. Later, I also looked at magazines, which were basically social and political commentary. The writers that I looked at approached that in an especially witty way. They usually had pseudonyms. They invented backstories for themselves. They wrote in the voices of these sometimes ludicrous figures.

One of them, for example, wrote as “Miss Mary Singleton, Spinster.” They wrote about how they conceived of their role as social and political commentators, which was a new role at that time.

At first, my approach was more of a feminist approach, so I was interested in women writers. Four of them women and one was probably a woman. We cannot tell because men did often write under female pseudonyms, too, in this period. Women writers negotiated that and represented themselves. [This doesn’t make sense—maybe the tape is unclear? I’d leave it out.] Later, I was more interested in, in general, how writers saw their role during this period when journalism was beginning.

I looked at the period in London from 1694 up to 1770. It is in London, the main chunk of the Enlightenment period in the UK, in England. The Scottish Enlightenment got going a little later towards the end of the period. This is the core period of the English Enlightenment.

8. Jacobsen: Two questions: Why 1694? Why did the Scottish Enlightenment take a little bit longer to get online?

Italia: 1694 was the lapse of the licensing act, which meant that the government was no longer pre-censoring printed material. Up until 1694, you could not publish things without having them first pass the government censors. That made it impossible to run a newspaper. That was one thing.

The other thing was some major technological innovations that made it possible to print off more copies of one thing at once. If you’re printing a book, then it doesn’t matter so much if it takes you six months to print off 500 copies because the book is not going to go out of date, but you cannot run a newspaper that way. You must be able to print enough copies at once.

There were technological innovations. Also, before the licensing act lapsed, the government had control of all printing presses, as well. If you wanted to print something, you had to get it past the censors and then get the government to print it on their press. Once that ceased to be the case, people started buying their own presses. Then they were able to create their own journals.

As for the Scottish Enlightenment, I do not know that it took longer to get going, as such. It is that these things tend to be virtuous circles, where you have people who are influential, and they encourage others. Then you get a burgeoning group of thinkers and writers. A similar thing happened, for example, with the Lunar Men in Derby in the 1760s.

That is what happened in Scotland, in Edinburgh, and in Aberdeen from about the 1770s onwards. There were some Scottish people also involved in the English Enlightenment, but who were based in London. I am talking about a Scotland-based Enlightenment when I talk about the Scottish Enlightenment.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Host, Two for Tea; Sub-Editor, Areo Magazine.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/italia-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on IQ, g, Racial Differences, Ethnicity, Species, and Affluence (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Dr. James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He discusses: IQ gains as not necessarily g, or general intelligence, gains; racial differences and definitions in intelligence research; and ethnic groupings, species, and getting to the roots of the research regardless.

Keywords: ethnicity, g, general intelligence, intelligence, IQ, James Flynn, morals, political studies, race.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on IQ, g, Racial Differences, Ethnicity, Species, and Affluence: Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (Part Two)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are IQ gains not g gains, that is, general intelligence gains?

Professor James Flynn: Simply because IQ gains over time have occurred on all IQ subtests and have not been greater on those subtests that are of the greatest cognitive complexity. However, I do not think that the fact that IQ gains fail to particularly load on g (or cognitive complexity) is a reason to discount their significance. IQ gains on subtests like vocabulary (among adults), matrices, block design, classification, should be very important even if gains are equivalent on other less demanding subtests like digit span, which mainly tests rote memory.

G has an appeal as a concept of intelligence. It shows that individuals who do well on IQ tests beat the average person more and more as problems become more cognitively complex. If you and I were to sit down and say, “What would be one of the characteristics of intelligence?”, we would probably reply, “The person who is intelligent can beat the average person more on complex problems than easy problems,” wouldn’t we?

This mistakenly leads to the conclusion that IQ gains are not really “intelligence” gains and must lack significance. I am not going to get into defining intelligence, but certainly gains on vocabulary are highly socially significant no matter what has happened to other cognitive skills. If you really want to see why IQ gains have not been as significant as they might be, you would do better to focus on the fact that universities are doing such a bad job of educating.

I have a book coming out this year, in September, called In Defence of Free Speech: The University as Censor. At present, universities spend as much time censoring as teaching. Anyone who has unpopular views on race or gender or practically anything is banned: they can’t speak on campus, they are not read, they are derided ignorantly.

In my book, I detail all the things I learned, precisely because I read Jensen, and Murray, and Lynn, and Eysenck. It is wonderful when you encounter a highly intelligent, highly educated opponent, who takes a point of view contrary to your own. You must reassess your arguments. You often find that you have been simplistic, and that arguing with these opponents teaches you ten times as much as you knew when you were naive.

Let us go back to our friend, g. The is overwhelming evidence that cognitive abilities, even when taken individually, are significant. This is true of individual skill in all areas. If we studied drivers in New York, or in Boston, some would be better drivers and some worse drivers. We could rank driving tasks in terms of complexity. We would probably find a “g pattern: that the better drivers bested the average person the more as the complexity of skills rose. I am sure that the better and the worst drivers would not differ much on the simple task of turning on the ignition. But note that the presence or absence of the g pattern would tell us nothing about the causes at work, not even as often thought whether the causes were environmental or genetic

For ordinary city driving, the better drivers would start to forge ahead of the worse ones. This would become more pronounced if you looked at driving around the cities on beltways: that is one of the first things elderly people give up. There are so many cars coming in so many directions and changing lanes. Many elderly people who still drive will not do beltway driving. The better group would be much better at it. Finally, there is the question of parallel parking, which is the part of the driving test most people fear. The better group might better the average person most of all on that.

When we look at these two groups, how useful would it be to derive a g factor? It would be disastrous to assume that since g is influenced by genes the better drivers were somehow a genetic elite. G would tell you nothing about causes. For example, you may discover that the people who are the worst drivers are new arrivals in New York City who have had no experience in beltway driving. You also find that in their town, you just drove into a parking space and didn’t have to know how to come in on a parallel park.

On the other hand, we might find that none of this is true. We might find that they were equally experienced, and then we would say to ourselves, “I bet there is a genetic factor. Perhaps some of these people are better at spatial visualization. Perhaps some of them are better at information processing. Perhaps some of them are better at manual dexterity.” Our minds would go in the direction of skill influence by genes. But it would depend on the case. You must approach each case with fresh eyes, and not be hypnotized by g.

I am quite sure that any two groups can be differentiated by genetic factors, and that this would affect performance. For example, if one group was a lot taller than another, it would affect their basketball performance. But you must take these cases one by one.

I looked at black/white IQ differences in Germany. Blacks in America fall further behind whites the more cognitively complex the task, which leads some to infer that they are lower on g and are genetically inferior. But then you study Eyferth’s children in Germany. These were half-black and all-white children left behind by black and white Ameican servicemen in post-war Germany. The g pattern had disappeared. There was no tendency whatsoever for the half-black kids to fall behind more and more as you go up the complexity ladder.

That seems to imply that this group difference has something to do with culture. The first thing that comes to your mind is that these half-black kids were raised by white German women. There was no real black subculture in Germany after World War II. The black subculture element is totally absent. Then you go to someone like Elsie Moore.

She did a wonderful study in the 1980s. No-one, of course, will repeat it again because of political correctness. She had, as I recall, it was something like 40 kids – or maybe it was 48, that sounds more like it – all of who were black. Half of them were adopted by black parents of high SES and half of whom were adopted by white parents of high SES. At the age of eight and a half, the black kids adopted by white parents of high SES were 13 points ahead of the black kids adopted by black parents.

Elsie Moore called the mothers and kids in. She found that white mothers were universally positive. “That is a good idea. Why don’t we try this?” The black children came in with their black foster mothers. The mother was negative. “You are not that stupid. You know better than that.”

It became quite clear that even though both sets of families had elite SES, there was something in black subculture that found it unwelcome to confront complex cognitive problems. Once again, by the age of eight and a half, the black children adopted by whites of high education and SES were 13 points above the blacks adopted by blacks

You can say, “Is that evidence enough?” It is not enough, of course, but it does tie in with the German data. There, black subculture was absent, and the g effect was absent. In America, black subculture is thriving. Even the black children being raised by white parents, as they grew up, would tend to merge into the black teenage subculture, the “shopping mall” subculture.

My main point is that we must approach all this with an open mind. I am not saying that Jensen’s concept of g does not pose interesting questions. It does, but it cannot be taken as an automatic piece of litmus paper as to when one group is genetically privileged over another. Both options must be open.

I think that a genetically influenced g effect occurs between individuals. I think that when you have sexual reproduction, the higher cognitive abilities are more at risk of “damage” than the lower ones. You can imagine that would be true. You have two siblings. If one had bad luck, he will have more deleterious recessive genes paired. This may damage complex cognitive skills more than less complex ones. The bad luck twin will probably be below his brother more on Raven’s than on rote memory. I published this opinion recently and Woodley took notice of it. Do you know who Woodley is?

Jacobsen: I have heard that name before, but that is about all.

Flynn: He’s a very prolific British researcher, very good indeed. I supplemented my remarks by saying that it was interesting that the higher cognitive abilities were the ones that would have come along latest in the human evolutionary history and, therefore, they might be more fragile in the genome. Woodley is now pursuing this possibility

The concept of g shouldn’t be dismissed. Whenever anything describes a phenomenon in intelligence, we must probe for its causes. It is terribly sad that it is gotten side-tracked: into a debate over whether the fact one group falls further behind another as cognitive complexity increases is an indication that they’ve got to be genetically defective.

As you know, I have done research with Bill Dickens that showed that blacks gained on whites about 5 points in the generation between 1972 and 2002. This correlated with evidence from educational tests, as well. What are we going to say if they gain another 5 points? Are we going to conclude that the g pattern is not as pronounced as we once thought it was? That would fly in the face of evidence in its favour. So, g, to me, is an interesting concept for research but it is not the be all and end all of what we do when we do intelligence research.

2. Jacobsen: Racial differences also lead to some questions around definitions. For instance, is it a scientific category, race? In other words, is it proper to even talk, in a modern scientific context, about the category “race” when talking about intelligence?

Flynn: I do not have much patience with that. I see that as an evasion of real issues. Imagine that a group of Irish came to America in about 1900. Of course, the Irish have not been a pure race through all of history, but they have much more in common in terms of heredity than they do with Slovaks.

These Irishmen in America settle in a community down by the Mississippi. You will find that when the children send them to school, some Irish kids will do better than others; and the ones who do better will, on average, will grow up to buy more affluent homes.

Thus they divide into two groups. Below the railway tracks near the Mississippi, where it is not so nice, you will have what we used to call “shanty Irish”. Above the railway tracks, where things are much nicer, you will have what we used to call “lace curtain Irish”. If you compare these two groups, you will find an IQ gap between them that has a genetic component.

You can try to dismiss this by repeating the mantra “They are not pure races.” Of course, they are not pure races. They are sociological constructs that have a different sociology because of somewhat different histories. But it still makes perfectly good sense to ask whether there would be a genetic difference in IQ between the shanty Irish and the lace curtain Irish.

When individuals within a group compete, genetically influenced cognitive skills are involved. Some people, as I have said, will do better at school and, on average, they will have a better genetic endowment. It will not be a huge gulf. American children from parents in the top and bottom third of SES tend to have an IQ gap of 10 points; and perhaps 5 of these may be genetic rather than environmental.

I hope this cuts through all of this nonsense. Also, the “irrelevance” of race seems to be special pleading. If we cannot talk about blacks as a “pure race”, and that disqualifies grouping them together, how can we have anything like affirmative action? The answer will be, “Well of course they are not a pure race. But they identify themselves as black, and whites identify them as black, and despite the fact that they are a social construct, they get the short end of the stick.”

If you can compare blacks and whites as to who gets the short end of the stick, you can also give them IQ tests, and you can also ask yourself as to whether in the histories of these two peoples, there has not been sufficient genetic diversity that one has built up an advantage over the other.

The causes of the black-white IQ gap are an empirical question. It has nothing to do with the stuff about pure races. There are groups that are socially identified as different, groups that identify themselves as socially different, groups that have histories that could conceivably lead to a genetic gap between them. You have got to look at the evidence.

It is an evasion. You ignore the fact that there are no pure races when you say, “more blacks live in poverty.” Why drag it in when you compare races for genetic differences?

3. Jacobsen: What about the shift in the conversation in terms of talking more about species rather than races, and then looking at different ethnic groupings? So, it is doing it within what probably are more accurate depictions than terminology such as “race”.

In terms of reframing it within a more modern scientific context, in terms of having species, and then having different groupings, as you noted, it is with ethnic groupings with different histories, rather than talking about races.

Flynn: That is fine. I have no objection to that, but it is not going to make anything go away, is it?

Jacobsen: No.

Flynn: There are still going to be 10% of Americans who self-identify as “black” and virtually all whites will identify blacks as “black”, and then we will still have to ask the question, “Do black and white at this point in time differ for cognitive abilities entirely environmentally?” I do not see how any verbal device will change this

There used to be academics who said that since humans share 99% of their genes with bonobos, you could dismiss the notion that genes have something to do with intelligence. The significance of this was exactly the opposite. If one percent difference made a huge difference in intelligence, then if racial groups differed by 1/100 of a percent, it might create the IQ gap difference that we see today.

I haven’t found any argument yet for sweeping the race and IQ debate under the carpet which is anything but special pleading. I do not think these arguments would be used in any other context whatsoever. They are used in this context so that we can all say, “We do not have to investigate these matters. We can pat ourselves on the back.” When actually, we should feel scholarly remiss.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/flynn-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: James Flynn.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor on 2019, Vice President Mike Pence, Fervour and Zeal, a Truly Secular Nation, and Women’s Rights (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Annie Laurie Gaylor is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She discusses: looking forward into 2019; the Trump Administration Vice President Mike Pence; the dual issues of fervour and zeal; a secular nation; and #MeToo and women’s rights.

Keywords: Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation, women’s rights.

An Interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor on 2019, Vice President Mike Pence, Fervour and Zeal, a Truly Secular Nation, and Women’s Right: Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does this then look going forward into 2019? I do recall a Guttmacher Institute publication noting that legalization of abortion in the cases studied by the Institute, or its team, reduced the instance of abortion, in addition to all the associated harms that come along with illicit abortions that women will get anyway.

Annie Laurie Gaylor: Of course. The Freedom from Religion Foundation wouldn’t exist were it not for the religious battles against abortion and contraceptive rights. My mother and I cofounded FFRF as a regional group in 1976, when I was a college student. She had been, basically, a full-time feminist activist for several years, especially working for abortion rights in Wisconsin.

It opened our eyes to the harm of any kind of religious control over our secular government because we could see very clearly that the only organized opposition to abortion rights was religious in nature. We’re still fighting the same battles.

There’s just no question that we must keep religious dogma out of our secular laws, and that the crusaders against abortion rights are all doing it in the name of religion. It’s fine if they don’t want an abortion, or they don’t want to use contraception, but they should jolly well stop trying to impede the reproductive rights of other people.

Of course, this is a huge fight. It’s a huge battle but most Americans support abortion rights and certainly support contraceptive rights. We’re in danger that we could lose these rights. We think that politicians may have had a wakeup call with the midterm elections, as well.

One out of three women having had an abortion, this is an awful lot of people. That’s why the abortion rights movement encourages people who have had abortions to speak up so that it isn’t stigmatized.

2. Jacobsen: Is Trump Administration Vice President Mike Pence a symbolic threat, a legitimate threat, or both, to those rights?

Gaylor: I think it’s both. I think that Trump has turned over much of his domestic policy to Pence. That was a deal that they made and he has continually reminded the religious right of all the things that he has done for them. He does it almost every time he goes before a religious body and, hence, has wielded a lot of power.

There have been some ruptures that have been gossiped about recently. We were talking about how he might cast aside Pence if he runs again, when he runs again. Who knows what’s going on behind the scenes, but there’s clearly been a deal?

We have seen Mike Pompeo, our top diplomat, Secretary of State, believe in the rapture. There was this expose of his remarks in 2015 to that effect, talking about how he wants to work for Jesus Christ, and how there will be a rapture.

This is a level of ignorance that we have never seen before. We’ve seen the religious right in the Reagan administration, Bush administration, but we have never seen so many foxes guarding the chicken coop as in the Trump administration, so many of them just sincerely fundamentalist Christians.

It’s like you want to be in the Trump administration, you better have that kind of pedigree. He’s just clearly selling out completely to the religious right, and he’s going to continue to do it, and they don’t seem to care a bit about his moral failings. They just want to get their agenda passed. I think that it’s been quite a wake-up for us that the Christian right has completely ceded any moral high ground.

3. Jacobsen: How does a population of secular women, who aren’t necessarily the best represented even within the community, combat the motivational forces of zeal and fervour found unlike any other place in the Western world, as found in evangelical fundamentalist Christian communities in the United States?

Gaylor: We have held a wonderful Women’s March In 2017, with all the Pussy hats, and we have seen continual push-back at the rallies with women dressed like they were part of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Jacobsen: Those are pretty good, actually.

Gaylor: It’s become a very iconic sight. I think we’re making our position very known and very clear. I think an awful lot of women got a wakeup call. That’s why so many of them, an unprecedented number, and an unprecedented number of minority women did run for office. They didn’t all make it, of course, but it was a tremendous outpouring of legislative activism by women who were fed up.

I think that we’re doing well in terms of making known our dissent from the current administration, as far as we can. Obviously, women are still grossly underrepresented in the House. You can forget about it in the Senate. It was fascinating that there wasn’t any change in the number of Republican women in the US Senate. It’s pathetic. That stayed at 13. The Republican party is obviously losing women.

I wouldn’t be in this business if I wasn’t an optimist. It’s an uphill battle—

Jacobsen: That’s true.

Gaylor: – working for freethought, being an atheist, working for the separation of church and state in the United States.

I’ve lived through a lot, but we do have to be especially alarmed now that we have the Kavanaugh appointment, and we have several elderly liberal justices in their 80, one of them has just gotten another cancer, on the Supreme Court. There’s just no question that in terms of the Supreme Court, we are in trouble, but I do think that political pendulum can swing back very quickly.

The trouble with the Supreme Court is it will be there for several generations, and there is already talk by the Democrats about what they might do to fix that. They don’t have to have nine members on the Supreme Court. They could add more. They’re talking about different things that they might do. It may come to that. These things get out of hand.

Or it may be that Roberts, who is cognizant of, I think, how he wants to go down in history may be able to guide the court and avert some of the worst disasters. I do not think that separation of church and state, that keeping our country secular, is going to be top of the list on the Roberts court. He may come through for abortion or the worst of the abortion attacks, but I don’t know whether we will be able to salvage as much as we can for a separation of church and state.

If the Supreme Court takes a position with the Bladensburg case that the government can put up a Christian cross as a war memorial, we have lost enormous ground. We are not a secular nation anymore. We will have to see. We fight very hard against that.

4. Jacobsen: Was America ever a truly secular nation?

Gaylor: Our constitution is truly secular. It is completely godless and the only references to religion are exclusionary, such that there should be no religious tests for public office. It was first among nations to not claim a pipeline to a divinity. There is no god in our constitution. It’s godless.

We, theoretically, are a secular republic, but as soon as it was adopted, there was pushback. The Christian Party in Politics became very active, especially in the 1820s, and one of their first victories was to stop the mail delivery on Sundays, for example.

We were secular. The mail was being delivered on Sundays. Only 7% of Americans were church-going at the time of the adoption of the constitution. That doesn’t mean that they might not have been religious, but it wasn’t a hugely religious country. But we’ve had so many eras of revivals, and it’s taken its toll.

We’ve had so many violations in the 1950s that have rewritten history. “In God we trust” adopted as a motto, putting the words, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. These have had a very deleterious effect because whole generations have grown up thinking that there is a relationship between God and our government, or that somehow, we are a godly country. They assume that if most people are Christian, then we are a Christian nation, but we have a neutral government.

It is an uphill battle reminding people about the secular roots of our country.

5. Jacobsen: I have one more. This is less legal, but more socio-political, or just maybe cultural, secular culture. As we’re seeing the 2006 Tarana Burke #MeToo come forward into October 2017 with Alyssa Milano giving it an extra boost, and then this being taken in various contexts, and particularly some of the religious ones, #MosqueToo, #ChurchToo, and so on, we’re seeing men who have acted badly in their personal or professional lives, being called out in religious and in secular domains.

What can secular men do, but also secular community do, to perhaps give a more sympathetic and respectful ear to women coming forward with claims of sexual mistreatment or mistreatment generally? I take this in a serious note because looking at the FBI reports, they would estimate that about 8% of the rape claims are unfounded. In other words, it’s an extreme form of sexual violence, so any allegation should be taken very seriously in addition to some of the statistics provided by the FBI – and the Home Office of the UK indicating relatively reliable findings on a surface analysis.

Gaylor: At the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in 40 years, we’ve only had a few incidents. In our early days, we had a male speaker who happened to be on our board, accost one of my friends, a young student, in the elevator at the end of our convention, grab her in this bear hug and kiss her all the way down the elevator. She was a rape survivor. She was upset. Fortunately, she told me. My mother called that guy up and said, “You’re off our board. We don’t want to see you again.” We weren’t going to put up with that.

A couple of other minor episodes where we immediately took action. Those are unusual, but we act. We were started by two women. We’ve always had a feminist bent. I don’t think that I would assume that secular groups haven’t been responsive. I think maybe FFRF is unusual, in that we were very feminist-oriented.

I think that American Atheists, I can’t speak for them, but they did get rid of their executive director who was accused of some very nasty things. Maybe it took them a little longer, but apparently, they say the board did not know about these things beforehand. That at least sends a message that you’re not going to tolerate it. Yes, it can happen in secular and religious cultures.

I think secular cultures are more apt to be a little more feminist, but you can’t always count on that. In general, I think that the freethought movement has been such a good friend of feminism. Certainly, when I did a lot of work on a book I edited, Women without Superstition, about 19 to 20th-century feminists, freethinkers, you would run into that repeatedly.

People like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were very lauded by the freethought movement. They loved her. They adopted her. They appreciated her even before she wrote The Women’s Bible. They saw what an asset she was.

I think, in general, the free thought movement has been much more sympathetic to women and women’s rights, of course, partly thanks to the feisty women freethinkers who have started groups and written books, and been activists and made sure that our voices were also heard. But I do think that freethought and feminism are natural allies, whereas religion has got that awful book, the Bible, which is like a handbook for women’s subjection.

That gives religion, a hard way to overcome its past. Certainly, many denominations do embrace some feminism now but it’s not because of their Bible. It’s because of the women activists who forced them to change.

I think that secular government is women’s salvation. When you see what happens around the world, and how women are treated in Islamist nations or theocratic nations, we can see it’s a matter of life and death that we should have secular government.

6. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Annie Laurie.

Gaylor: Thank you for listening. Hope I didn’t talk your ear off.

Jacobsen: It was lovely.

Gaylor: All right. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Pleasure to talk to you too.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/annie-laurie-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Racism, Change, and Actual Violence (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Gita Sahgal is the Executive Director of the Centre for Secular Space. She discusses: those forced into change; racism, a collective history; and oppression.

Keywords: actual violence, Centre for Secular Space, change, Gita Sahgal, racism.

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Racism, Change, and Actual Violence: Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview edited for clarity and readability. Some information may be incorrect based on audio quality.*

*This interview was conducted November 13, 2016.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are there other groups that are Right or far-Right that are forced to change? Not just a PR campaign by putting a smiley face on it but effectuating proper change.

Gita Sahgal: I do not think they change. What I think what happens with white fascist groups, they do not get the time of day. This is where these issues of no-platforming because difficult to discuss. Or, rather, we need to discuss them.

There is a free speech lobby, which is fine. It says, “Talk to anybody and put anybody on a platform,” but the way people like fascists were marginalized was by not putting on platforms. There was a red line across which we were not really prepared to go.

What has happened now with safe space policies, and no-platforming is that if you’re a white fascist or far-Right as a movement like the English Defense League, that claims it is not fascist and does not Muslims or Islamists very much.

They do not make much of a discussion between Muslims and Islamism, though. They would never, in a British university, think of bringing them to a meeting to hold a meeting. Even the free speech lobbyists would not do it; while, the Islamists are in there all the time [Laughing].

They are connected to movements. That commit mass murder abroad. That is much stronger and more dangerous. I am not saying the EDL is not dangerous. It is dangerous. However, there are other things going on.

Near where I live, there was an Islamic center, which is like an afterschool Mosque type place. It was burned to the ground.

Jacobsen: Ugh.

Sahgal: There was a lot of interreligious violence with shootings in the street. They were very serious levels of violence going on – discrimination and actual violence, and fire bombings of mosques and places of worship and so on.

However, the Islamists are involved with massive hate campaigns. Tonight, I couldn’t make it because there was a huge transport disruption. There is a meeting of Bangladeshis who are highlighting minorities and Buddhists being driven from their homes and attacked.

They are being thrown into the streets with the onset of Winter. This is happening again, and again, and again, and happening more and more. What is supposed to be a secular government, they often standby or do nothing; this is a serious problem.

They connect it here, but they treat it as respectable people to be given platforms. However, it is the no-platforming that helped to make fascism not respectable in places like football clubs, who come down very heavily and fine clubs where people are doing racist chants.

It was one time when racism in a football field against black footballers, and on the terraces, was standard. Black footballers had to play against a barrage of racist insults and things being hurled at them.

It was only by fans of the opposing side, or even by their own side, who did something. They had to work through horrific abuse, but that has been ruled out of order by the football authorities. Also, young people who are football fans themselves went down and protested the racist violence.

The regulatory bodies worked against it because these activists were working against it all the time. We changed these ideas to racism. So, with state attitudes to racism, and so on, there has been progressing.

However, with the Islamists, it is largely ignored because the Islamists are seen as almost analogous to rebellious black youth and, therefore, had a democratic point because, of course, the young black youth kept getting arrested, stopped and search, chucked in jail, beaten up, and so on.

There were police who belonged to fascist groups. It was only when Britain began to crack down on it. The main police are backing down from all that because they think they are moving into Muslim communities.

It is a different picture. So, we cannot do what we did before. But what is interesting now is that the people who did it before, they do not have to go through racist violence. They do not understand what happened. They do not think there is any problem with what happened because of mostly the PC Left.

For those who did fight racism and did fight it back, we always know it is right there around the corner. For the political atmosphere created, and formed on the streets, it is reminiscent to us of the worst days of the 60s and 70s.

I hear young people sneer, “They are going on about it. What do they know?” Because we told them that the 70s were bad. They didn’t know how bad the things were. They do not see the difference. They do not understand white people are being assaulted with Brexit as well.

I have many people who speak various German languages. The Italians speak Italian. It is not simply those of us who speak Hindi or something who bring suspicion. I have been in London for 30 years.

I do not feel treated with suspicion. I dress very conservatively, mostly with Asian clothes – quite often not but mostly. I often have my head covered in a wrap [Laughing] and so on. I do not expect to meet racism.

I don’t on a normal day. I do not expect it. Now, you do wonder. You hear people talking loudly about immigrants sitting next to you, wondering when they are going to leave and things like that. It is not a pleasant atmosphere.

So, we drove it back, but it is back in some ways. However, we got the opposite problem when we succeeded with the state. Obviously, not getting rid of all forms of racism, it was getting them as considering racism as a crime, recognizing hate crimes.

The police are better on homophobia than they used to be. I know friends who have been subject to repeated and recurring homophobic attacks and serious attacks by organized gangs and things of these things.

The police collect evidence and bring them to court. We have had huge changes. But the government acts differently and people act differently. Also because of the challenge to fundamentalism, it is seen as part of a government agenda.

The Left, in general, is not on board with it. Even with the people who are leftist-Islamists, some are not, but they are also anti-government in general. There is a difficulty there in taking a stand. It is difficult.

However, we have built up a voice. Even though, it is difficult. There is an alternate voice out there. It is different than the voice in the States. It is not far-Right. It is Liberal to Left. It is not for any racism or fundamentalism, but it is a small voice.

Of course, those are the people who criticize Islam as such or Islamism, but they are doing it from the point of view that Muslim immigration has to be stopped and the country is unsafe because of Muslims.

We do not buy into any of that. Southall Black Sisters or I, those similar organizations; there is a huge movement in the Kurdish movements connected to the activism going on in Rajavah.

The Sunnis are there, but also the progressives are there. They are still raising the issues of the Bangladeshis, Kurds, Iranians, Indians, Pakistanis [Laughing], and so on. We work together. That is good. All those things are good.

2. Jacobsen: If we take into account the difficulties in conveyance of the emotional problems that are felt when having racist slurs thrown at one being a footballer or when witnessing it in sympathy for the person that is a victim of it, in addition to seeing the change over time and then having young people saying, “It doesn’t really happen.”

The youth tend to be the ones that have more energy, more time, and, therefore, more influence in terms of making effective change in socio-cultural contexts in this particular case, the United Kingdom.

How can we convey to the youth the difficulties of the very real racism? That you witnessed and, possibly, felt yourself in the 70s to the youth now.

Sahgal: There are two different sets of people. There are some people who are completely buried in the racist argument. People think that Britain is a slave country or something. It is a [Laughing] mad argument.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: They will talk about slavery and imperialism. Not that these aren’t issues. I am not with the people who say, “This is a load of bullocks. Do not talk about it.” If you look at the slaveholders in Britain, I did not know this, but the government compensated them at the end of slavery.

They have lots of records. They weren’t all super-rich people. They were quite ordinary people many of them. They had this huge project that looked into where they were, where they’d been, and what they were compensated with.

Slavery is embedded in Britain. Not as much as America where the entire economy was run on it, Britain exported it. The British wealth, the Tate is a great museum. It is also the sugar manufacturer, the Tate.

Now, the manufacturer, what does that mean? They, at some stage, must have been involved in the slave trade in the West Indies or something like that. The sugar plantations in the West Indies. You still can’t point fingers.

They will go heavy on trying to talk about it. They do not have the same resonance as the States. It was the form of racial segregation in the same way. The working-class communities have intermarried for a very long time.

My old Caribbean boss said, “You cannot compare it to the American racism because we have always worked in these communities, particularly working-class communities. People who settled here then intermarried here.”

What is happening now, it might be more segregated than people when they first came in large numbers. How do we convey that history? We need to have that cross-conversation. Some people only need to talk about racism.

Some people think talking about racism is a form of racism. Some people who talk about fundamentalism and, therefore, think any talk about racism is changing the subject and is total nonsense, when, in fact, they are on to the worst form of oppression there is.

To me, it is about similar kinds of harms and similar forms of persecution. One based on religious origin. One based on skin and racial origin. We need to be simultaneously opposing both. We worked to do this with a book that we wrote.

Not as a policy paper with recommendations to MPs or anything like that, but more for an intelligence 17, 18, 19, or 20-year-old. A high schooler or a university student, it is called Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights.

That is how you can oppose the war on Terror without being pro-fundamentalist. It looks at the issue of amnesty in this specific organization called GAGE, and now called GAGE. It is a public relations front for Al Qaeda and so on.

Now, they have portrayed themselves as an organization for counter-extremism. They are working with the S. They have a distribution problem. There is a problem of getting it out there.

It is still very relevant. We need that material. I take it to meetings and things like that. There is a problem of getting it out there. We need more of that material, which is written by Meredith Tax. She is American. She lives in New York.

She has been an activist for many years. She is an older woman. She is older than I am. She was there at the start of Second Wave Feminism. She was a Bernie Sanders supporter. She is brilliant at the political writing, which, without dumbing down a subject, can explain the subject without jargon. She explains the mess the left gets into.

I enjoyed it. It is from the left-liberal perspective. She wrote a history on the Kurds. Not many people in North America know about them. The book is called A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.

It looks at how feminism became central to this. The struggle for Rajah and the enclaves carved out of Syria and so on, which have been done by Kurdish groups. So, she has written a book to cover this complex history.

It is about how to make a new society from where we are, which is quite an amazing idea. So, she is doing that work. So, we go on doing our work. We have not won the argument. But we are providing a space for people to speak up.

For instance, campaigning against Sharia, Maryam Namazie founded the One Law for All campaign. She was quite isolated then. There were women against fundamentalism. I went to one of Maryam’s meetings. I thought she was great.

But much later, there is a coalition for the One Law for All banner with people have and groups have specific expertise. We have all done a huge amount of work as feminists and human rights activists. We come together to work on terrorism and sharing our common understanding of the things with Sharia councils, put different testimonies online, and even carrying an inquiry, recently.

There was a secret inquiry, which we boycotted because it seemed like a theological inquiry. The Home Select Committees across parliamentary groups. I do not know how it works in Canada. You look at certain issues.

Everything that you do then goes on the parliamentary record as part of the parliamentary inquiry. It is an important venue. We have produced a lot of material of thinking that through. For me, it is not so much about winning.

The process is as important as anything else. The tide is still running very strongly against us. But what we have done is built a movement, which is where we trust each other and share a common platform, it is about secularism and opposing all forms of religious fundamentalism as well as racial bigotry.

We trust each other to share information. The thing in the Mail on Sunday is about trying to get out voices out there by being on news interviews. Maryam is the main spokeswoman for the whole thing, but all of us have been trying to help.

She has been amazing in trying to promote our work, even though the media will go to her because she is personable. It is a situation where money is short, and organizations are campaigning for the same small pots of money and trying to put in grant applications.

There is a lot of backbiting and nastiness and things among women’s groups, the Left, among progressive groups, and a lot of different places. To help build that up, it is really important. It is really sad because we cannot relate too much to this huge movement in the Labour Party.

It is now the largest political party in Europe. It has something like half of a million members. The Labour Party is so large, but it is controlled by people who are in bed with Islamists. So, we cannot expect any support from them.

Even though, many of us have known many of the leaders for many years. Jeremy Corbyn has been supportive of the Kurdish issue The Kurdish activists do not talk to him anymore, the Kurdish rebels.

It is sad. This moment when there should be this wonderful alignment with feminists fighting for secular values and particularly those from minority backgrounds. Those who have been labeled and have been supported by the Labour Party.

The Right has this narrative. Because we talked about how we were let down by the Labour Party by these multicultural parties. The Right has this narrative about how the Labour party harms women. But it is a more complicated story.

The Right when they came to power were trying to cut our parties down. We had a difficult relationship with the Labour Party before, but they were the ones who founded and supported us.

When it came to the Hindu Right and the Muslim Right, and the women’s groups, there is a broad umbrella. We have been struggling women being helped. But the Right does not tell that story. It only tells the story of the labor Party being horrible to poor brown women such as myself.

That is not the story that I want to be told. It is hard with the Labour Party because there is such vicious and organized attack on many of us. It is coming specifically within the Labour Party including Muslim Labour MPs.

It is not a good situation at all. So, it is a constant struggle. How do you get to youth? Many of the youth are in the movement. This side movement that has energized the Labour Party and led to Jeremy Corbyn not once but twice in the recent past.

I feel despair the way the Labour Party has gone because the parliamentary Labour Party did not understand the power of this outside movement. They have tried to unseat Corbyn. There are a lot of reasons for them to be pissed off with him, but they also behaved very badly.

A lot of people got fed up with them for that because they were constantly writing in student papers. They thought that they could stage some unseating. But they did not have the strength. It is quite clear. Nobody heard; nobody really wanted to stand against Corbyn.

A lot of precious time when they should have been opposing conservatives was wasted on that. Meanwhile, Corbyn seems not interested in parliament, but in forming a huge movement. It is fine. But why is he the head of the Labour Party? He should be leading some extra-parliamentary party and stomp the country making speeches

It is perfectly okay. He is not forming in parliament. He is all over the place. Those of us who want to see a revival of popular movements in the country – because there are many things to oppose – do not see – and here is where we differ from the counter-extremism people – cuts to welfare, cuts in medical and health services, cuts in services for women as absolutely central to our fight.

Because if you do not have a society, which does this work on the ground, you cannot fight extremism. Our secular services and still have, most have been decimated except for the Southall Black Sisters and the Kurdish Women’s Rights Organizations, which we work within the One Law for All movement.

These are very strongly secular somehow managed to survive all these massive cuts. But many of the groups have gone to the wall. We see our fight as being to defend this kind of work, which the counter-extremism experts have not written one single report about.

They are not even very interested in it. The government is interested in women’s rights. But to criminalize violations of women’s rights, where is the money for it? You can stop it. You could get the campaigners and others excited with the governmental support.

However, if you do not have the other structures and the policies and all of the other boring stuff and actually people doing the work, then having the government does not help. Because having the air of the government, it does not help in these ways without the support structure.

When the Sharia councils were saying that you have to restore legal aid because they cut legal aid for family matters, women are struggling in family courts by themselves. Britain had the gold standard legal aid services. Canada is different. The US, historically, has had it.

In Britain, we had these things. This is a country. We had a free health service, which had some problems. But it was a good service. It is being eroded from within. The government didn’t dare bring in fees.

They had fees for lots of it. But they could not bring fees for use. So, they marketed the services within it. It cost more. It forced closings. What they have done is a disaster, it has made things worse, but what has happened is that most people fighting that stuff think the fundamentalism is irrelevant.

We are saying, “It is absolutely relevant.” You see this in America. The religious groups will provide care homes, hospitals, legal services for marriage, and so on. The Sharia issue is not an issue on its own.

It is intrinsically linked to control of the state through social services. That is what is being pushed. Those are the two things that are going together. It is shrinking the state. It means they seek not just welfare services but the means for people to have lifelines.

They are being smashed. Religious organizations are encouraged to step in when the secularism isn’t supportive. It is terrifying, few people make the connections.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sahgal-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Ideas Beyond Borders (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of Ideas Beyond Borders and Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Global Secular Humanist Movement, and a columnist for Free Inquiry. He discusses: Ideas Beyond Borders and its work; different audiences; and the Reason interview.

Keywords: Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Global Secular Humanist Movement, Ideas Beyond Borders.

An Interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Ideas Beyond Borders: Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0 (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, when it comes to some of the more recent initiatives of IBB, Ideas Beyond Borders, what’s going on? What’s new?

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: There have been some amazing updates. One of the things since we started the organization; it has been important to have a system of translations to me. That the moment we get a book, article, or content.

That it will go through a system and get the highest quality in the fastest time possible. The latest update is that we have built a great system. Once we have a book, we have a deadline for when it will be publishers. We have translators, followed by editors, followed by proofreaders, and followed by linguists to make sure the words used by editors and translators approved, etc., will be the ones used.

We try to produce a piece of art translation. That system has been finalized, roughly, around August and beginning of September (2018). I can, honestly, say that we have two books successfully translated. One is Lying by Sam Harris. Another is Maajid Nawaz and Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance.

There will be the premiere of the moving in November. We will launch the book as a celebration alongside the premiere of the movie. There is an Arabic version that will spread across the Arab world like wildfire, for those who desperately need it.

We tried to translate the book Radical from Maajid Nawaz. It is interesting that there is no Arabic translation, which shows we need to exist. Part of Maajid’s life was in jail in Egypt for 4 years. He did a year of college in Egypt.

Yet, he mostly is known to Western audiences. But I think the people who most need to know him are people in the Arab world. For your audience and the others, for getting shit done, there will be, at least, 10 books done by the end of the year.

We are building an online library. We have a company, affiliated with WordPress, who will work pro bono for us, make the access easy for us. Hopefully, it will be designed with quotes and derivatives, small derivatives, an audiobook, a video, and so on, to make the information as accessible as possible.

We are trying to reach as many people as possible. We are an educational organization in the end, try to reach people of all ages and attention spans [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: Those who want to read the whole thing. Those who want to read some of it. We are also tapping into another case, which I realized recently. This is something for people to search today, not when things will be changing.

If you look at Wikipedia, many important pages like the Civil Rights Movement, it is only 1 sentence in Arabic. In English, it is 25 pages.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: It is a movement for anti-racism in America: “Oh, really?” Things to do with human rights, LGBT rights, science, medicine, new discoveries. None of them exist in Arabic. If they exist, they exist as a sentence or two, but not many.

Your audience should also expect that working with many partners across the Middle East who have expertise in writing, translating, and editing. We are hoping for 50 articles per month, maybe 100. Some things may not work as we always want, though – so 50-100 per month.

Articles ranging, as we translate them, from Utilitarianism, scientists who are Arabs but live in the West and the way the people in the Middle East do not know that they exist, e.g., four Iraqis writing about biology and live in the UK. Many do not know about them.

We try to make many of these Arab scientists, liberals, and thinkers to be known in their audiences. We are also translating Arab, liberal, secular, and Enlightenment thought, and open-mindedness of Arab thinkers into English.

There is an Iraqi sociologist who is a pretty amazing person, Ali Al-Wardi. He is not known to many in the West, but he is well-known in Iraq. He wrote a book called The Mockery of the Human Mind (Arabic: مهزلة العقل البشري).

He is a sociologist who tried to understand the nuances and contradictions of Arab society: why would someone want a girlfriend but also a virgin for marriage? He taps into all of these contradictions and tries to explain them.

This is something many in the West would want to understand, because these are complicated. It is seeing things from local writers and authors, which would be fascinating. We are doing a lot of things.

Our campus program with the AHA program expanded from 6 campuses to 24 across the United States, Canada included We have York University in Canada, then we have Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, UCBerkley, Texas A&M, and so on. All over the place: South, Midwest, East coast, West coast, and so on.

Now, we are in Toronto. People from other areas of Canada. We are more than happy to reach out to them. The plan is to make 12 events this Fall semester. The conversations that we are mostly interested in is the women’s rights in the Islamic world, female genital mutilation, free speech in the Islamic world, secularism, separation of mosque and state, and the conflicts in the region.

We have a speakers list that is expanding such as Yasmine Mohammed, myself, and others. We are expanding to experts in extremism and experts in defeating and fighting extremism. Unfortunately, many students across the US and Canada and, hopefully, expanding into European, which they are not familiar with.

They are mostly listening to, in my opinion, a narrative that is not the full picture. They listen to people who portray America as racist and Islamophobic, which is, of course, somewhat true. But they portray the Middle East as a beacon of victimhood. And if not for America, then everything would be good.

We say, “Things are more complicated. There were civil wars before even America existed.” It is listening to more than one narrative coming from the Linda Sarsours of the world and others. The goal is to diversify the set of knowledge the Arab youth have access to, but also to those Westerners on campus – especially on the Middle East and elsewhere.

We are in connection with organizations that work on the ground in Iraq, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, and some parts of North Africa. It is starting to do workshops about the books that we translate on the subjects like extremism and others.

We start on campuses because these are the places where people are receptive to ideas, to have a place for conversation and workshops about why we have extremism in the Middle East and how to defeat it.

It is engaging with the local communities, the young people. Many people do not know this. But the Middle East is considered one of the youngest people in the world. Many are wondering about life, more than any other place of the world.

Because they are bombarded with terrorists and with words. Many of them are questioning the old way of life, the extremist way of life. Definitely, we have plans for the end of this year and next year to open branches of Ideas Beyond Borders in Baghdad, Kurdistan, Tunisia, Iraq, and Morocco.

We will start to work underground with people. The translation, campus, and workshops are the main things that we are doing. Hopefully, as we grow, people will be expecting more programs for us.

Hopefully, our programs will be expanded as possible. It is hard to translate these texts into Arabic, where most of the knowledge is not available. Our programs are definitely scalable. There is always a need for transiting more content, more books are being written every day if not every minute.

Lots of the content existing in thee books could be relevant to our target audience, which is, as of now, the Arab youth. This will expand to the Kurdish youth, Iranian youth, Turkish youth, Indonesian youth, and Pakistani youth.

My role as the ED and founder is to build a model that is so successful that can be multiplied in other places. I would rather do one thing super well than do a bunch of things with half-assed work.

We focus on the Arab world. We build a successful model there, where we are at 80% now. Our partners and amazing staff and board have done amazing work. I am proud of them. I think that as we progress; we are going to build the model the world has ever known in terms of the translation and getting access to knowledge there.

2. Jacobsen: People who tend to be more open minded or liberalized in terms of their ideas, or the consideration of new ideas. You noted one of the key demographics, young people, as well as university educated people.

Are metropolis residents another consideration for target audiences?

Al Mutar: A big segment of them are there. Also, one of the main obstacles: because many of the books cannot be published inside of these countries because of blasphemy laws and the banning of content from authoritarian regimes.

It is difficult to get the knowledge available for the places that do have access. That being said, there are multiple developments happening in the region now, which allows rural people to have access to the internet.

Also, the ability of many cheap laptops and many cheap Kindles and all that to be accessible. It would be amazing for a company listening to this interview if they donated more and more laptops and internet access to many of these remote areas.

Because as of now, the only means by which to reach as many people as possible is limited. The influence can be viewed in multiple ways and in multiple directions. As of now, through our partners in the region, distribution partners, we have access to between 25 million and 35 million people.

That’s a lot of people [Laughing]. Many of these people, there are two policies of influence, which I have studied and want to implement. You can either be the influencer or influence the influencers.

Let’s say 30-40 million people having access to the knowledge, they can be influential and can take the knowledge into more remote areas. These individuals can be who are influenced. These can be influencers themselves to influence through recommending a book to a friend, tell a friend about us, print the book and give this to a friend who does not have access to the internet.

Or even, they could take the ideas and absorb and then use them in their own language and in their own way, to the people who live next to them. Even if we don’t influence everybody, everybody can be influenced by an influencer. That is the goal as well.

It is reaching 500 million Arabic speakers. But if we influence 10% of them, and really well, they can take the knowledge, process this in their own way, and then explain it. It is the way I was influenced by other authors.

It is like the way I became an influencer to other people.

3. Jacobsen: Also, a recent Reason interview: you talked about evolutionary theory and its Wikipedia page in Arabic. What is the story there?

Al Mutar: Yes, so, many of my Saudi friends, and Turkish friends, the theory of evolution page has been banned, which is for obvious reasons why. Then Turkey, and Iraq unfortunately, started to remove any reference to evolution in the biology books.

They are afraid the ideas will come to their country. They are trying to ban them. But we are working really hard with a major partner who has a project called The Theory of Evolution Arabic. They are developing Q&As, everything.

It is 0 to 100, from somebody who is a beginner and doesn’t understand anything about evolution into somebody that is advanced. This can answer many of the questions many people have in the region. Are we still monkeys? If you believe in it, does this mean your parents are monkeys?

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: These basic questions that most people do not understand. They try to make this simply understood. They are one of our main partners that are part of this. Hopefully, we will get a digital library built fully fleshed out on evolution.

Maybe, we can tap into other sources like Wikipedia and others, also translating. It is to make the resources available. We are also trying to work with many tech companies over the past few years, where we have developed relationships with software engineers at Facebook and Google.

We want to, hopefully, use some of the tools they developed and then use them for our purposes. There is a USB drive, where the computer will make its own VPN. That way, the authoritarian governments and others will not be able to track people.

In a meeting, I said I am more than happy to distribute some of these tools, e.g., the VPN self-generating computers, and so on. Also, our website and the digital library, one of the main requirements asked of the engineers and web designers is to create multiple versions of this website.

In a way, the authoritarian regimes – Saudi Arabia and others – will block the website, which I expect to happen. There will be multiple other websites and, constantly, new URLs popping up all the time, of all the PDFs and the things that we do.

That way, the book can be found somewhere else. The idea, we are not making money. We are more than happy to let people upload the books in their own serves, as we are a non-profit. The more servers, the more versions are available elsewhere.

In Saudi Arabia, unless, they decide to block the whole internet.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Al Mutar: There will always be a place or website for people to access our content.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Ideas Beyond Borders & Founder, Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0; Founder, Global Secular Humanist Movement.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mutar-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sadia Hameed on Religious Authorities, Age Demographics, and Maryam Namazie (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/22

Abstract

Sadia Hameed is a Spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She discusses: religious authorities providing a counter push; age demographics; looking to latter 2019; and Maryam Namazie and other resources.

Keywords: Britain, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Ex-Muslims, Islam, Maryam Namazie, Sadia Hameed.

An Interview with Sadia Hameed on Religious Authorities, Age Demographics, and Maryam Namazie: Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are the religious authorities providing any form of counter-push to either effort to support those who are leaving the religion or a religion? What are some communities, religious, across the board supportive of the work of CEMB?

Sadia Hameed: We have been engaging more. I do not know if you attended the 2017 conference. There was a female imam. We always support the progressives and liberals, or the true progressives and true liberals.

They also tend to stab us in the back. Our last conference, we have been trying for an entire year to be part of the inclusive mosque initiative. They are more of a liberal mosque.

They allow transgender and LGBT members to come and pray. It is unheard of. They then through our secular conference held a counter-conference, when we had asked them to engage with us anyway rather than this; they passively aggressively held another conference.

They talked about how secularism was a Western and colonialist, and imperialist, construct. It was not for the brown person. They named and attacked specific speakers. Sometimes, I think what ends up happening is the liberal-progressives, and some of the LGBT Muslim groups; we need to support them wholeheartedly.

We know that the community that they are so desperate to be a part of wants them dead. We do stand in solidarity with them. They attack us. We stand in solidarity with them, because we are both considered unwanted by the community.

It is the same with LGBT Muslims. They think that if they do something that those who are against them do; then they will be accepted. Conservative Muslims are never going to say, “Oh, those LGBT Muslim groups hate CEMB too.”

“We’ve obviously got the one thing in common. We’ll be friends.” It is not going to happen. If you are LGBT, there might be some who accept you. But the conservative and fundamentalist groups in our country, they will not change their mind on you.

The institutions will not, even though the individuals will, because the institutions have made their position very, very clear on that.

2. Jacobsen: What about the age demographics? I note most of those coming to Councils or organizations tend to be on the younger side. I do not hear much from those who may be from the elder set or, at least, the near-retired set.

Hameed: Our age range ranges between 16 and to the oldest member who is 67 or 70. The largest proportion of our members are between 20 and 40.

3. Jacobsen: If we are looking at the latter half or latter portion of 2019, what are some of the other initiatives that are going to be coming online? What will be some of the extensions of some of the programs already in place?

Hameed: We have done Fast Defying for many years. We are carrying on with the asylum seekers. We do quite a lot around misogyny and opening our service and making our service more accessible to women.

It is putting a lot of time and effort into it. We are doing stuff around the rights of children. We were supposed to protest outside the steps of a place that created the child veil to put on 6-year-old children last year.

But because of the weather warnings, we got stuck. We will carry on next year. We also have been doing a lot around child fasting issues. We have some projects coming around later in the year. They are not quite ready enough to announce yet.

There are half-finished projects this year [Laughing].

4. Jacobsen: The main name in my experience with interviews is Maryam Namazie, of course. Who are other inspiring women ex-Muslims? Who are other inspiring men ex-Muslims?

What are some books for individuals who are curious about the issue or for questioning Muslims if they are simply in terms of their freedom of religion rights not seeing that faith as one for them to practice?

Wherein, they simply want to live a life without one.

Hameed: What I would recommend to people to look for inspiring ex-Muslim women, I would look online at past conferences with lists of ex-Muslim women who are phenomenal who you can engage with.

This year’s atheist conference, there was a YouTuber called Mimzy Vidz. She does accessible videos for young people. It is with a lot of videos. She attended a faith school herself. Her dad ran one.

Then they both changed. Her dad is an agnostic. Mimzy is an atheist. They would be really, good people. They are easy to engage when you are young and do not have a lot of time.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, she is the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She is a sort of female atheist who is good go to. There was a woman who had her husband murdered in Bangladesh.

She is doing magnificent work now. She has been quite heavily involved in the movement. Now, there is Jamilah Ben Habib. She is a women’s rights activist. There is a Muslim professor and human rights campaigner who is fantastic.

She has written a book about women and Sharia law. It is an academic read; it is very, very wordy. It depends on the type of reader that you are. It took me months, months, and months, to read. It can come across as a bit of an ego-drive flip-flop.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Hameed: If you are interested in that stuff, it is a delightful read. Fauzia Iliyah. She is the Founder of the Atheist and Agnostic Alliance of Pakistan. Deeyah Khan, she is the spokesperson of One Law for All. She is an ex-Muslim herself.

She is a human rights activist and researcher. She is outspoken and a great speaker herself. Gita Saghal is the director of Centre for Secular Spaces. Again, she is fantastic to read.

There is a playwright as well if you are interested in artsy stuff. Her name is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti who wrote a play called Behzti. It was about “dishonour.” It was about a young woman who was raped in a Sikh Gurdwara. She was attacked. Her play was shut down. There were riots.

There was controversy around the play. Yes, she is one. She is a really, interesting woman. If you are looking for inspiring women, there are so, so many out there. They are worth looking up

If you go to our website, there are plenty. There have been many doing the work that we have been doing for a long time, including Southall Black Sisters. It is about combatting violence in our own communities to do our battle.

Our work on religious fundamentalism and saving apostates; those are our two remits. They fit together quite nicely. There were so many. I had to start reading this literature after I left home.

This would have been problematic in my home. It probably would have gotten me a beating, to be honest. If you look at these sources, there are some to direct you too, e.g., Women Against Fundamentalism, Your Fatwa Doesn’t Apply Here.

There is so much literature out there. I could send so much to you. I could suggest so much to you, the readers.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Sadia.

Hameed: Brilliant, thank you so much.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hameed-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Principles of Innovation, Talent Retainment, and China, India, and Canada (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Keywords: Canada, entrepreneurship, generational differences, innovation, professional women, Sarah Lubik, SFU, technology.

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Principles of Innovation, Talent Retainment, and China, India, and Canada: Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & InnovationConcentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Then with the broadening of the horizon for looking into various business models as how to build the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators, what are some principles that we should take into account if we’re wanting to build that culture of innovation aside from those implied from this discussion?

So, modern universities focus on diversity, inclusion, and experimentation.

Dr. Sarah Lubik: Absolutely. One of the other principles is going to be teams, if you call that a principle or not, but back to the original point: statistically you’re probably not going to make an amazing professor also an amazing entrepreneur. They exist, but they’re not common.

You’re not going to make a grad student do his or her entrepreneurial venture by themselves. A CEO or a CTO needs a co-founder of their company. That’s where you want those diverse skill sets. So, you want to teach entrepreneurship as something team-based rather than something about just yourself and ideas you can’t take forward alone.

So, building those communication skills and those cross-disciplinary skills early is incredibly important because most people, once they get out of school, they realize quite quickly that not everyone went to business school or engineering, etc. You need people with other skills and they probably don’t think like you.

Not everyone spent four years in engineering or business. Yet, we’ve spent four years in a world where everyone thinks like us. That can be a shock to the system, especially when you’re doing entrepreneurship.

One of the things we often hear from people who started a company is that they need to build a team, but the team needs to understand each other. They need to be able to work effectively with each other.

But you get different work principles and even languages when you’re in different disciplines. So, learning about how to thrive in a diverse team is one of the key things that we work on here.

Another core value is the ability to go out of the world with confidence and to want to go out into the world.

First, make your assumptions about what people want and where problems lie, but then be aware that you need to validate your assumptions and that is not looking for people who agree with you, but also, looking for people who don’t. It is also a challenge.

Because we’re humans and we like to be right.

The final core value is that to be a good entrepreneur, you need to be looking at solving problems that matter and curious mindset deeply understand them. So often, you get entrepreneurs, or would be entrepreneurs, who are interested in solving problems, but because they don’t know much about the problem they’re not humble enough or knowledgeable enough yet to realize what they don’t know and still need to find out.

If they can get a surface impression of a problem, say you’re interested in homelessness and want to help find a solution, it turns out to be a complex problem, and that your solution would make sense for you, but makes absolutely no sense for that community, or for that user.

So, that ability to step back and learn to understand problems and where you might take a wicked problem like climate change or homelessness and deeply understand one piece of it and how that fits into this bigger system and how that might be addressed. But you may also realize that you’re probably not going to solve that entire global problem by yourself, so need to either be really specific about the part of the problem you can solve, or figure out how to be part of something bigger.

2. Jacobsen: Another issue is retainment. So, if a university, a province, territory, or a country at large develops a culture that is inclusive and diverse, provides the ability and citizens with the willingness to work in teams on various projects, then the businesses begin to flourish from small to medium and large.

The transportation between countries is much easier than at any other time, too.

Lubik: Wow! I’m still recovering.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] Yes, point taken. Even with that an individual can travel more or less, compared to 50 years ago, some recent time, it’s easy to travel. So, an entrepreneur and innovator could go to another country and begin a business there.

For instance, the United States has these H-1Bs. So, these probably are what are called the genius passports. People that would previously have stayed in the United States and created multi-million dollar businesses there have gone back to India and China, for examples.

Who are two major countries that the United States gets some brains from, they’re now creating those multi-million dollar businesses within their country that they were born and raised in.

So, it’s a loss of not only talent but also potential innovation and revenue for whatever local industry they have in the United States at large. Another principle that I wouldn’t call secondary, but I wouldn’t necessarily associate it with the other ones because it’s distinct in a way.

So, how do you encourage innovators and entrepreneurs to stay with a particular university or country?

Lubik: It’s a good question. What would make someone stay? I have a couple of colleagues who recently enrolled here. They came here. They loved the culture and the system of SFU. They liked the community.

They like the willingness to be learning and working for meaningful change in the education system and community. They also love the lifestyle of BC, where we get to live, how beautiful it is, and how nice the people are. So, we have a built-in advantage of people wanting to live here.

It’s lovely. The culture is great. It also has had its problems, it’s not Silicon Valley, etc.

So, how you get people to stay here? It totally depends on the person. But some of the things that I’ve been hearing lately, especially as I talk to people across the country about what do we need for entrepreneurship and improved innovation, are around our specific resources and being near things you can’t get elsewhere.

So, for example, if you’re a material science company, you can get access SFU’s facility called 4D labs, it’s a material science facility where industry members use the equipment, work with the students and with cutting-edge researchers. It’s like having your industry lab but without having to pay for it yourself.

So, there aren’t many places where you can go and get that access to that knowledge, and not many resources. If you start a company here, leaving could be more challenging because you’re going to have to wield those resources yourself.

Another thing that can make people say, and I feel like my culture is my word of the day, is being part of something you believe in. Beedie put on an event about how to grow large companies in Vancouver. and we asked a number of CEOs who had grown multi-million dollar companies in Vancouver, “How do you get people to stay? It’s an expensive place to live, no start-up company can necessarily pay what a Google or an Amazon could?”

They said, “You have to create the vision. You have to be able to sell the culture. You have to be able to sell being part of something that is bigger than what you are.”

There are companies in Vancouver creating solutions to problems people want to solve, and having a big enough community of leaders in one place can be attractive. How are we going to help with the stress in the workplace? How are we making life better for people in Downtown Eastside? So, being brought into a culture where you’re making a difference, that seems to be worth staying.

We also have a fantastic quality of life, because we are lucky in Canada, we have these systems, whether they are flawed or not, that takes care of people.

having that relatively safe, peaceful place to live with meaningful work appeals to a lot of people. Then, of course, having those special resources to work with, and creating places where you can work on things that matter, We’ve got a lot going for us.

Another piece that’s come out of the work we’ve been doing in the federal government is talent. As a company or an entrepreneur, you want to be where the great talent is, and the Vancouver area is increasingly known as a place to get fantastic tech and entrepreneurship talents.

For entrepreneurship, that can be incredibly attractive. So, you want to make sure companies know they can access these resources, hire enough talent. You want that lifestyle that attracts more talent. Then these make the area competitive for Canada.

But we also have to take steps to make sure the talent can afford to stay, too.

3. Jacobsen: At the same time, Canada has maybe 37 million people, when compared to the United States’ 325 million people. India and China coming around a billion and a half each. So, their talent pool that they can pull from internally is much bigger.

So, they have a lot more leverage internally with respect to that. Canada’s main strength then would be in the way that it can pull people in based on the quality of life or even basic freedoms that they may not have in their host country, possibly.

Lubik: Yes, we can speak more for the West coast at this point, but we’re right up from one of the biggest markets in the world. We are a short trip from some of the biggest markets in the world. We’re often called the Gateway to The Pacific. We’re a jumping off point to some of the world’s largest markets and with it becoming easier and easier to telecommute or travel, that better access is a benefit to Canada at large.

But we also have to realize that while we’re a great place to have a company, we also have to help companies access those large markets because our local one isn’t big enough if you what you want to grow is a large company.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/lubik-three; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy on Some Recent Developments (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy is the Founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Founder of the Muslims Against Terrorism. He discusses: recent events; similar instances; having difficult conversations; concerns of some Canadian Muslims; and seeing Muslims as Arab and as a bloc.

Keywords: Imam Soharwardy, Islam, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, Muslims Against Terrorism, Sufi.

An Interview with Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy on Some Recent Developments: Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There was a recent event. It provides an insight into the dynamics of the community. What happened there?

Imam Syed Soharwardy: The imam regarding the Merry Christmas thing. This imam is not part of our organization. He was claiming that saying Merry Christmas to anyone – Christian, Muslim – that it was equivalent to or worse than murder.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Soharwardy: That was a very foolish and ignorant statement made by this person. I have no clue. His statements were absolutely un-Islamic in my opinion and calling “Merry Christman” to Christians or anybody is not equal to murder.

It is not in the Quran or in Sharia. There is no such thing. This is why I condemned it. I challenged him by the way, if he had the guts to come and talk to me face to face. I had the chance to talk to this guy and prove him wrong.

2. Jacobsen: What are some similar instances of things like that in Canada?

Soharwardy: There are people in the Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and atheist community who just take an extreme path and do not take disagreements, take diversity, do not accept difference of opinion.

Those people exist in all communities, including Muslim communities. There are Muslims who say you can not be with Jews and Christians. They misinterpret the verses of the Quran. Muslims have been directed in our scriptures to other Jews and Christians and other faith groups.

Those verses in the Quran have to be taken in a specific context. It cannot be generalized for all Jews, all Christians, and all people of non-faith. There are others who say Muslims cannot celebrate Christmas. But they are already a minority.

There are Muslim scholars from around the world, especially Egypt, Bolivia, and Pakistan, and Canada and the United States who see Christmas as perfectly allowed. It is normal. There is no such thing as not practicing Christmas in Islam. There may be extremists who will disagree with them.

They disagree with us. We disagree with them.

3. Jacobsen: If you were to sit down and converse with someone making essentially something out of nothing, how would you go about inviting them to the conversation? How has that conversation played out in the past?

Soharwardy: I don’t want to debate with anyone for the sake of having a debate. I want to have a fruitful, logical, and so on, debate and dialogue. I don’t have time to waste on moving someone along or somebody moving me along. We can disagree. From what I studied, from what I have learned about my faith, my Islam is common sense, natural, normal way of life.

People do abuse Islam, do abuse the Quran, and do abuse our Prophet’s (pbuh) teachings. It is my obligation as a Muslim to counter them and to refute their interpretation of my faith. I do not want to get into a useless debate.

I am happy to visit anyone. But definitely, it has to be a meaningful and thoughtful, and special dialogue, to learn from one another. If someone has a bad understanding of Islam, I want to teach them, who is rational and will learn – not simply being arrogant and denying all that Quran or Islamic teaching says.

4. Jacobsen: If we expand the question or line of questioning to broader community issues, what are some of the concerns of Muslim communities in Canada insofar as you have found them based on conversations around the country?

Soharwardy: The biggest issue, which we see right now, is not only in Canada, but in the United States and in Europe. I think it is a worldwide problem. The lies of racism, discrimination, and violence.

Muslims in Canada definitely are sensitive about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. As you know, there were the latest attacks of law enforcement in Malaysia of a huge increase against Muslims in Canada as well as anti-semitism on the rise and Islamophobia on the rise. Those movements are a huge concern, not only for Muslims for also for a majority of Canadians. That is a concern.

I think the Muslims in Canada have a concern around the issue of what is happening south of the border and its impacts on Canada, in Calgary and elsewhere, and the relations of Canada to China.

It is not just the Muslim community. I say the Muslim community because most people are immigrants, don’t have jobs, and are struggling. This is more impactful compared to those who have been here for five generations.

There are violence and hate. There are global issues of these trade wars, which are a major concern at this time.

5. Jacobsen: Is part of the issue, in this country and elsewhere, the notion of Muslims as a bloc, simply being of Arab ethnic background?

Soharwardy: The overwhelming majority of Muslims are immigrants or ethnic people from the Middle East, South Asia, or Africa. That would be a visible minority regardless of the country of origin.

Muslims have been seen by mainstream Canadians as a block, whether black, brown, or white Muslims. Definitely, it causes a major concern on the part of the people who see that there is a, in a political arena, weight that the Muslims are gaining in Canada. It is maybe 1.2, or 1.3, million Muslims in Canada.

It is good for Canada. Definitely, for Muslims, can cause some reason for concern because Muslims are not going to budge with the discrimination that we’re facing. We are going to stand up against racism, against anybody.

I stand up against violence. I stand up against the anti-Muslims, against the anti-Christians, and so on. The people of faith stand together to fight hatred and violence that is coming at us.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/syed-soharwardy-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Rick Raubenheimer and Jani Schoeman on Acquiring Superpowers and Superhero Origin Stories (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Rick Raubenheimer is the President and Jani Schoeman is the Former President of the South African Secular Society. They discuss: origin story; transition from religion to non-religion; social and family reactions; and another superpower development.

Keywords: Jani Schoeman, Rick Raubenheimer, secularism, South African Secular Society.

An Interview with Rick Raubenheimer and Jani Schoeman on Acquiring Superpowers and Superhero Origin Stories: President and Former President, SASS (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Start from the top, like a superhero origin to the story. In brief, let’s provide some context. What was your background? Let’s start with the founder, Jani.

Jani Schoeman: How much do you want to know? I could tell you my whole childhood story, but I don’t think I’ll do that. I come from what you guys would perhaps call an evangelical Christian background. My dad is a minister. My mother is a Christian schoolteacher. I was religious up until the time I did my postgraduate degree, and then I fell off the bus.

After a few years of not knowing any other atheists or really anyone who’s non-religious, I, in 2014, started the South African Secular Society. At that time, it wasn’t what it was called. It was just the atheist Meetup group. I think in 2017, we got registered as a Nonprofit Organisation. Rick, is that correct?

Rick Raubenheimer: Yes. We only got our certificate in February 2018.

Schoeman: Yes. We applied in 2017. I don’t know how much more than that you want to know. Do you want to know about the organization or just my history?

2. Jacobsen: Both of your histories first, then that sets a context, so people know a little bit more where you’re coming from. The one thing, you stated it as ‘falling off the bus.’ What was that transition point from evangelical to not-so evangelical?

Schoeman: I think most people would answer in this way. It’s not really a moment where you like, “Oh, okay. It’s all made up.” It’s a slow transition. You lose a little bit. You get a little bit of doubt here, a little bit of doubt there.

I think the main thing that was the nail in the coffin for me was when I did my master’s degree, my thinking started to change in terms of getting a scientific mindset. I was in a scientific degree. I learned about how to test evidence, for example, how to find out if something is truth or a placebo effect, and just general stuff like that.

I don’t know how some people can get an education like that and still be religious. I think they really must compartmentalize, then. That’s not something I could do. If I learn something, your our brain gets rewired, I think. If you’re doing science in an honest way, then you kind of must. That’s where you’re going to end up, I think. That’s where I ended up.

3. Jacobsen: One last question on that note. Was there a difference in the way social and family life, as you made that transition?

Schoeman: Yes. I went to see a psychologist when I realized I had lost my faith because my parents are hectically religious. My entire family is very religious. I was okay with the whole fact of losing my religion and all of that, but the social implications for me was the thing that I really struggled with because I knew I was going to gravely disappoint my parents, and people were going to see me differently in the family, my extended family.

My mum’s parents were missionaries. It’s so much a part of them. They were missionaries in Africa. I grew up with all those missionary stories and things.

My grandparents, right now, I can’t really have a relationship with them anymore. Every time I see them, they’re like, “The Prodigal Son needs to return,” all this type of stuff. They’re really in my face about it. My husband really doesn’t appreciate it. I’m a bit more tolerable, but he really doesn’t like that. So, I don’t really see them that much anymore, unfortunately. They are old now, in their 80s.

My parents, on the other hand, I didn’t immediately tell them that I was no longer a Christian, but at a certain point, about maybe a year or so after I lost my faith. I told my mother, “I’m starting from scratch now. I don’t believe anything anymore. I’m going on a journey now to find truth.” Even saying that, she couldn’t really respond to that. I could see she was very upset.

A year or two later, there was an incident where my grandmother was visiting, and she made a comment at the dinner table about evolution not being true, “People think that humans actually came from fish.” I was like, “You know what?” Then, during that conversation, it came out that I was an atheist. There was a bit of a disagreement.

Then I didn’t speak to my family for about six months, which was very difficult for me. My parents live about 20 minutes away, 25 minutes away from my house, and we did see them quite often. After six months, I wrote them a letter and told them, “Let’s still be friends. I don’t think we have to break up over this.” We gradually got the relationship starting again.

This was maybe three or four years ago. Now, I think I have the best relationship I’ve ever had with my parents, and with my family because it’s honest. I don’t have to pretend anymore.

As a Christian, growing up, I didn’t get with it very well. I had major issues in my teenage years with my mother, and my parents. I ran away from home at a certain point. All that stuff. I was boiling on the inside, and I didn’t know why, but it was from all this Christian guilt that I was carrying around because living according to the Bible, especially the way my parents taught me, was an impossible way to live in a modern society. That really messed me up as a teenager, I think.

All that stuff is history, now. Now that I’m out, my parents don’t ask me to come to church anymore, which I’m so happy about. I have a good relationship now with my parents. My sister is also very religious. I have two brothers as well. They’re both agnostic, but hectically in the closet.

4. Jacobsen: Rick, how did you gain your superpowers?

Raubenheimer: My parents were both schoolteachers. My father was a school principal. They retired from teaching and brought a small holiday resort in the Magaliesberg, which is a mountain range in what was then the Transvaal – which is now Northwest Province.

My father was a free thinker from an Afrikaans background, which was quite unusual. He preferred to be in the English-speaking community, which he found more liberal. My mother was Jewish, and her marrying outside the faith caused quite a rift in the family. Her brothers didn’t speak to her for years, but they eventually reconciled.

I wasn’t brought up with any religion. I encountered religion at school, first, which was in the form of [with accent] Christian National Education. Jani will recognize the accent.

[Laughing]

Jacobsen: I got the accent.

Raubenheimer: Where the schoolteacher, and I say the schoolteacher because it was a very small farm school, which had exactly two members of staff: a teacher, and a principal. The teacher took what was then Grade 1 and Grade 2, Standard 1, Standard 2; and the principal took Standard 3, Standard 4, and Standard 5; and that was where the school got to. That would have taken one to about 12, 13 of age.

When the teacher heard that we didn’t pray at home, she was quite taken aback, and she taught me to pray, which I tried out at home one evening, I think possibly to the consternation of my mother, but she hid it quite well, and spoke to me afterward. I forget what she said, but I didn’t actually pray again. Presumably, she pointed out to me that it didn’t work, or wasn’t necessary, or that we didn’t believe that sort of stuff, or something.

My father then died when I was eight. My mother decided that it would be a good thing if I was brought up Jewish. I, somewhat belatedly, started what was called Haida lessons. That was the equivalent of a Jewish catechism. I had a bar mitzvah at age 13. For a while, I was nominally Jewish.

After school, in matric, we had conscription, so I was taken up into the army, where I was nominally Reform Jewish, which was terribly useful because I was posted to Pretoria. Jani will know Voortrekker Hoogte, as it was called in those days.

We lived in Johannesburg, which is about 50 kilometers away. I would go in from camp on the Friday night bus to attend synagogue. I would then go absent without leave and hitch-hike home to Joburg. I would then hitch-hike back on the Sunday and come in on the bus from church with the Christians. That all worked out very nicely.

I then went to university at Wits University, University of the Witwatersrand where I studied civil engineering. There I encountered Transcendental Meditation which I took up and practiced for seven years, which got me into various advanced techniques. At that stage, they were developing a thing called the Siddhis, which is Sanskrit for “perfections,” which was supposed to be things like “knowing things at a distance”, “walking through solid objects”.

I forget what they all were. I learned the first four of them, which didn’t appear to be terribly successful. The ultimate one was the “flying Siddhi”, as they called it, which was levitation. We went on various retreats for weekends, and weeks sometimes, at a time, and spent a lot of money on the Maharshis organization.

I became disillusioned with it after I had sneaked into one of the advanced ones where they had the people flying, and the flying turned out to be essentially sitting on a foam rubber mattress and hopping up and down. They actually produced photographs of people supposedly flying, and they were at a distance above the surface they were on, but if one looked very carefully, one could see that they were in motion because the hair was flying, or their clothes were flying, and so on.

I moved on from there, and I went into other forms of meditation. I had meditation from a chap called Gururaj Ananda Yogi and found that to be too Hindu orientated for my liking.

Somewhere along the lines, I went into a derivative of est, Erhard Seminars Training. Probably doesn’t exist anymore because this was in the 1980s. This one was called the I am training, run by a fellow called Pat Grove, using high-pressure psychological techniques to get people to change their lives.

I was involved in that for quite a long time. I met my wife there. The movement fell apart and schismed into about three different factions, at which point I stopped being actively involved, but I think I got quite a lot of benefit out of that.

Then, Judith and I moved into the New Age movement, and we did things like rebirthing, which was a breathing technique intended to recapture and release the birth trauma. We had groups at our house where we would have fire ceremonies, sitting around a bonfire at night.

Schoeman: I did not know any of this, Rick. I’m just saying. This is so interesting to me now [Laughing].

Raubenheimer: Yes, you missed the meetup where we did our spiritual background. I’ve still got a video of it, which I must still post. I’ve just got a backlog on the videos.

We would have these fire ceremonies. We had a healer called Hilda Light- or so she called herself. That wasn’t her real surname – who did the rebirthing, and talked to us, and brought messages from gurus and things, and told us about supposed prophecies of what was supposed to happen. I’d always regarded this with a degree of skepticism, and gradually became more skeptical about it, and started questioning it more.

Somewhere along the line, I read a book by Dave Mills called “Atheist Universe.” This crystallized for me what I believed, that I preferred reason and science. I went on from there to read most of Richard Dawkins’s work, and Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.

Schoeman: Can I interrupt you?

Raubenheimer: Yes.

Schoeman: When was this, Rick?

Raubenheimer: This was around 2008.

Schoeman: Okay.

Raubenheimer: About age 55 or so. About 10 years ago, or thereabouts. I got involved in online atheist groups. Because I was posting a lot, without being asked at all, I was made an admin of South African Atheist Movement, which is a Facebook group. That’s the public Facebook group, probably the most prominent one, of atheists in South Africa.

There is another one called South African Atheist, which is a closed group, or private group, a secret group. People there discuss more fractious things, and so on, whereas SAAM tends to be more of the public face of atheism. I delete posts that are deliberately provocative and tend to provoke people. I’m still an admin there.

I think it was through a Meetup that I got to know about Jani wanting to have an atheist Meetup at Zoo Lake and went along to that. Then, from that, we grew that into the South African Secular Society. I think that’s it.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Rick Raubenheimer, President, SASS; Jani Schoeman, Former President, SASS;

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sass-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Early Life (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Keywords: AAVIVRE, France, religion, right to die, Pascal Landa.

An Interview with Pascal Landa on Early Life: Founder and President AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics) (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us start from the top like a superhero origin story. What is early life?

Pascal Landa: Let us start from the genesis of the right to die movement in France, a movement which was created by my father following an article he wrote called “A Right” (Le Monde November 1979) in which he explained that being able to at one point in one’s life say, “Stop,” to a situation of life that is no longer wanted by the individual should be available to all and be accompanied; and that there is no reason we should treat people less well than we treat animals that we euthanize.

The reason he wrote that article was that as he was a philosopher, a Doctor of Philosophy and History of Philosophy, from Berkeley, he had in the Second World War (1943-4), participated in a Maquis at 16. When his fellow mates would be hit in the stomach by German bullets, they would be condemned to a slow death and know that they would die after three, four, five, ten days of tremendous suffering. To avoid the suffering, they asked their fellow members and the head of the group to just put a bullet through their heads, which was regularly done. That impressed him a lot.

In 1959, his mother was dying of generalized cancer in a hospital in Paris. She was screaming in pain most nights. He asked her over time if she wanted to stop this, and she said, of course, yes, so he helped her pass away. You must remember in those days, the common belief was that suffering was a way of gaining redemption in heaven. It is still believed by some people, which is fine, but certainly not our way of seeing things.

In 1977, my grandfather, who had been travelling around the world all his life, came and lived next to us. He arrived in October, ‘77 and quickly we learned he had terminal cancer. We accompanied him until March, to his death. He was a person who refused to look at the fact that he was dying. He refused to look at the fact that he was terminally ill.

One of the experiments that had been done in the Northern countries in Europe, was to help people reconcile themselves with the end of life using LSD, lysergic acid a drug that reduces inhibitions . In fact, it worked extremely well with my grandfather. He did maybe a dozen trips from October to March. It was amazing for me, I was 22 at the time, to see him open up, become a person that would discuss with us, a person that would give us a chance to exchange with him and learn about his emotions, learn about what he felt about life. I had known him as a closed-up human being. Through the LSD experience, he opened and reconciled himself with life. He was a known stock exchange expert. He, at the end of his life, would just make fun of those experts while looking at them on TV.

That shows that one of the issues of the end of life is being able to look at your end of life as another step and another phase of your life. My father helped him die at that time. We all accompanied him. One day out of three, either I or my mother or my father would be alongside him and sleep at night with him and massage him and give him the right kind of food and all the things that made him comfortable. Then one day, he decided that it was just too much pain and my father helped him die.

All of these experiences led my father to write that article in 1979. After his article was published, hundreds of people wrote to him saying, “We should do something about this. You are right. Your article says clearly what we believe. We should not be treating people worse than animals. We should have the individual right to decide about our own end of life, and be accompanied in this.”

He proposed to senator Caillavet in France, who in 1978 had proposed legislation in the Senate asking for the right to die with dignity, to head the movement. The senator said to Michel, my father, “You need to be the president because as a senator, I cannot be both the president of an association and a senator.” My father created this association in June of 1980.

In November of 1980 he fell ill and had to get a triple heart bypass due to a serious heart affection. Right before his operation in December, we discovered he had lung cancer, a tumor as big as an orange. They stopped the operation and he fought against this cancer for the next six months of his life. I myself came back from where I used to work in the US and accompanied him to his death.

He did the treatment, the chemotherapy and all the drug-taking that modern medicine suggests. But at one point, he said, “This is enough. I am not going to do the radiotherapy because things are not improving anyhow. It is just spreading, and now it has metastasized.” He said to his doctors, “Give me the drugs that will keep me alive and clear of mind without intolerable pain as long as possible.”

At that time you must remember, it was 1980, beginning ‘81. Doctors still refused, at least in France, to give you medicine able to keep you intellectually aware without pain because they said, “You are going to become an addict.” There are still some doctors today that say that. “Even though you are six months away from dying, you are still going to get addicted.” This is crazy, insane.

Hopefully, now, most of the doctors understand that pain is not a redeeming value and that people who are near death do not need to be worried about taking too much drug. The objective is to keep them as intellectually aware and able as we can, but not put them into a mindless state.

This is one of the issues with the movement, palliative care. Of course we support palliative care, but palliative care is a phase of treatment, it is not for many the end treatment. Palliative care extremists say, “If the person is not feeling well, we just give him more and more drugs, and then he dies drugged.” We do not want to die drugged. We want to die aware and conscious of what we are doing. There is no meaning in life to lie in drugged unconsciousness for weeks or months.

One day my father said, maybe in June, “The day I can no longer get up and take my shower myself, and the day I have less than one hour of intellectual capacity, is the day I will decide to go away because there’s no reason for me to continue living.’ On the 15th of August, he said, “This is the day.” Remember that he was a political figure or at least a public figure, and it was considered killing people to help somebody die.

He had made everything clear. He was going to take the right drugs and go by himself, but he wanted to have a last dinner with us. My brother and sister are 15 years younger than me, so they were 14 and 15 at the time. We had a last dinner with him and then friends took them away to protect them should the police make an enquiry.

Listening to Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, he an insulin overdose meant to bring him into an irreversible coma followed by death. My mother and I were shocked that at one o’clock in the morning, 6 hours after he had taken insulin, we could see he was, agitated. It was that he wanted to go to the bathroom, so that he would not pee under himself.

This is first to remind you that life is tenacious to our bodies. Killing oneself is not an easy thing. We can know how to do it, but life does not give up easily. The second is that the individual is conscious until the end and primarily wants self-respect. That is one of the big issues of ending one’s life.

We brought him to the bathroom and put him back in bed and he fell back into his deep coma. The death process continued and continued. In 1981, the law was so restrictive, and he was such a public figure that at six o’clock in the morning, we decided, my mother and I, that we had to help him. Thank goodness we had a backup solution with morphine. I gave him an intravenous shot of morphine. In 10 seconds, not even, 3 seconds, it was over.

I do not wish for any son to have to do this for his father. It is a terrible thing to kill your own father. I did not kill him. I just gave him what he wanted, ultimately, but it still is a difficult thing for a son to do with a father. It is much better if it is a third party who is not emotionally affected and emotionally implicated. I gave him death with the same love as he gave me life.

As he died, he left the leadership of the right to die movement in France, called the ADMD, bereft. He had asked me to do two things before he died. First thing was to guarantee ADMD would survive him because I had, of course, helped him build the movement. At that time, we had about 600 people in the movement. He wanted me to guarantee him that the movement would become self-sustaining.

The other thing he wanted was for me to publish a little booklet that he had started writing, called Self Deliverance, in which he had written the precepts, well, a few notes on what he wanted to say to people about taking one’s life and deciding to die.

Mostly he had used the work of a Dr Admiral physician in Holland. This man had put together lists of all the drugs witch existed at that time, a lot of barbiturates, that would enable you, in a cocktail, to end your life in a reasonably safe manner. Based on his notes I wrote the booklet. I had a team of pharmacologists review the drugs and make sure that the French drug names and compositions corresponded to the nomenclature of drugs from Holland.

I had the booklet published by the ADMD with a lot of arm-twisting of the Board of Directors of the association because they were all scared of their shadows, but I was 30 at the time, so I was gung-ho and clear about getting things done. I had already created 2 firms at that time so I had some experience in management.

In publishing this booklet, we got hundreds and hundreds of requests for the booklet “Autodélivrance”. To be able to buy the booklet, you had to be a member of the association for at least three months which meant many new members. We sold if for ₣F50 at the time, which in today’s money is $50. This helped finance the association for the long term and made sure that we could hire good lawyers if we were to run into a court case.

I ran the association as its president for two and a half years. At that point, I was 30. I was just starting my career. The old folks on the board of the ADMD wanted to take the lead and continue the movement. I remained as a member of the board as the vice president, for I think ten years or so, and was a member of the board for 30 years.

In my term as President we grew to 17,000. Today that association is 60,000. For over 30 years, we built a reputation for that association that made the Right to Die Movement be recognized and considered as a responsible, reasonable movement. UN-happily, 10 years ago, a politician took over the leadership and he has turned the whole association into his own promotional tool and changed the statutes to enable him to lead without any opposition possible.

That is a frequent issue in the right to die movements. Because of ego issues and greed people fight and cheat financially. We have a lot of members who are old and who do not particularly care or are concerned about how the association works, they just want to contribute to get the right to die legislation in place. Unethical persons then take over and exploit this.

The active persons left the original movement in France because of this. It is of no use spending energy in futile wars. We denounced to the authorities sustained by facts to say, “This guy is doing illegal stuff,” but the authorities have not reacted despite newspaper articles to this effect. We would rather focus on helping the movement move ahead than focus on going against this guy.

To make a long story short, five years ago, I created with a few ex-ADMD members a new association called AAVIVRE (Association qui Accompagne la Volonté des Individus a Vivre selon leur Ethique – Association that Accompanies the Will of those wishing to Live according to their personal Ethics). That went on for 3, 4 years, but since my retirement, I have been sailing. I had to pass the hand on to other people, who decided to create a new association called Citizens for Choice at the End of their Lives “LE CHOIX” (The Choice).

I joined this association because they have the same spirit as those who originally created the movement. They are working for the right thing: The right for an individual to be able to choose, not to impose, but to choose. We are now on 10,000 people in that movement and it is growing fast, it is only a year old. I think it will be the new right to die movement in France, as time goes on.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/landa-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe on Advice, Developments for Humanism and Secularism, and a Historical Perspective (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Dr. Leo Igwe is the Founder of the Humanist Movement in Nigeria. He discusses: recommendations for leaving religion; exciting developments of humanism and secularism in Nigeria; and a historical perspective.

Keywords: Christianity, humanism, Islam, Leo Igwe, Nigeria, religion.

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe on Advice, Developments for Humanism and Secularism, and a Historical Perspective: Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: For those men who are leaving religion and looking for a safe place when they leave religion, what are recommendations for them? For women who are looking for a safe place when they are leaving religion, what are recommendations for them as well?

My assumption is such that women and men leaving religion will different difficulties on average. Of course, there will be overlap.

Dr. Leo Igwe: Religious people are usually not happy when one renounces religion. Both men and women are usually unpleased to hear that one no longer believes. They find it annoying and regard it as a form of betrayal. They can respond subtly in terms of severing family ties or relationships, refraining from helping the person when he or she is in need.

So there is a price to pay for leaving religion. Incidentally, men do not get the same treatment as women because men are in a stronger social and cultural position. So, it is always important for people who leave religion to try and become independent in terms of finance and other means of livelihood. They have to be in a position to fend for themselves, to exert material and financial independence otherwise they could come under pressure and persecution, even to the point of religious people denying them familial or social support.

2. Jacobsen: What are some exciting developments of humanism in Nigeria now? What, also, are some positive developments of secularism in general?

Igwe: There are many positive developments. One of them is the fact that today there is a space for nonreligious persons, an official platform for those who are critical of religion or of religious ideas in Nigeria. People are expected in many countries to simply believe, and not question. But today, things have changed. We have a space for people who are non-believers including those who are undecided, those who are “confused.” People who are questioning their beliefs or who are unsure about the existence of the supernatural. Those who do not want to be associated with religion. This is one exciting development.

We also have the benefit of having a forum to challenge religious claims. Very often, you can’t question religious beliefs in many places. You either believe or preach one or another religion. Right now, we have a trend of challenging and questioning openly the existence of God, Islamic teachings, Christian teachings, the idea of an afterlife and the content of the Quran, the Bible, and all these holy books (if they make sense or if we find them reasonable, ethical, or moral), and so on.

Non-religion has gone to the table of religious discourses. So, this is a very important development. Also, we are seeing humanism recognized and being a significant part in the campaign against superstition in the region, against witchcraft related abuses, and the campaign against harmful traditional practices. We are witnessing a kind of cultural renaissance. Some reformation, an intellectual awakening that seeks to liberate people from religious chains and shackles is sweeping across the region. I think that as the movement grows and blossoms, we will see some more positive developments.

Jacobsen: Can you hear me now?

Igwe: It is clear now.

Jacobsen: One last question keeping in mind the time limit.

Igwe: It is very clear now [Laughing].

Jacobsen: I know! Finally, right [Laughing]? You know what, I paid $10 million for my new WiFi. It was due to the wonderful Nigerian prince who sent me a Spam email was desperately saying, “Sir, I have to give you money.” He said, “Dear Brother, Mr. Scott…”

Igwe: Yes [Laughing].

3. Jacobsen: Let’s take a serious historical perspective, if we are looking at individuals who are seen as emancipatory figures, whether intellectually or by their life, individuals like Kwame Nkrumah or Nelson Mandela.

We are looking at people providing an image of an Africa in a post-colonial or, at least, slowly exiting a colonial context, not simply on paper, but the derivative impacts that are noticeable.

If we are looking at a Nigerian context, of a post-colonial context, what can be done to make that transition more rapid, more healthy, for Nigerian citizens on Nigerian citizenry’s terms?

Igwe: I think it is very complicated, okay? Because, first of all, many people try to survive. For them, it is a case of: “Let’s see what we can do and make the best of the situation.”

Sometimes, they find their efforts encumbered by other interests, by global-international schemes, by cultural policing forces from the east and the west. Many Nigerians are fighting for the basics of life in terms of food, shelter, and clothing.

They want to enjoy what life has to provide, the innovations and inventions of this world. They want to move around freely. They want to have a vibrant economy. They do not want an economy that continues to worsen daily, weekly, and yearly.

They want an economy that provides the basics of life. Unfortunately, things are getting worse. Every change that has been made in the post-colonial context has not yielded the benefits of emancipation and economic empowerment.

We have seen more devastation, more poverty, more penury, suffering, despair, hopelessness. This is how the whole trajectory has played out. The basics of housing, better salaries, food, good living standards have continued to elude many.

Living conditions continue to worsen. This is not only encumbered by local conditions but also by global forces of greed and deceit, by interests driven by profit and the quest to exploit whatever can be exploited in the region. People find themselves in a hostage situation which they cannot break away. The goods of this life are not translatable at least on account of their own efforts or aspirations. They hear about prosperity, wealth, and development, but never possess them.

Sometimes, these goods are only in the West or come only to the West, not to the rest. The good of this world has eluded the most in the world. People feel disconnected, and disempowered. They do not see how the efforts that they are making would help them connect or live well, or help them realize their basic yearnings and aspirations. That is why today; we are seeing the waves of migration of those most affected by the prevailing global inequalities. Global equality is forged and maintained by the powerful nations who gain most from it. But many African people are making perilous journeys across the desert and the Mediterranean because they have been betrayed; they have been left behind by the world. They have been duped by the east and the west, by the north and the south. They feel that the whole project of African emancipation has failed. Globalization is a pernicious process that has brought alienation and devastation. African development has become an illusion.

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Igwe.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/igwe-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sheryl Fink on Climate Change, Indigenous Traditions, Myths and Truths, and Scientific Methodology and Findings (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Sheryl Fink is the Director of Canadian Wildlife Campaigns for IFAW – International Fund for Animal Welfare. She discusses: climate change; indigenous traditions; myths and truths around sealing in Canada; becoming involved; recommended people; final feelings or thoughts; science now; and the main reason for the rejection of science.

Keywords: Canada, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Sheryl Fink.

An Interview with Sheryl Fink on Climate Change, Indigenous Traditions, Myths and Truths, and Scientific Methodology and Findings: Director, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, IFAW (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about issues around climate change? Although, I note a mis-reportage in the title when individuals in the news may say, “Climate change,” or, “Global warming.” They should say, “Anthropogenic climate change,” or , “Human-induced global warming,” for clarity.

Sheryl Fink: Totally.

Jacobsen: How does this play into the long-term future impacting the population levels and health and wellness of seals?

Fink: We have been seeing climate change impacts on seals in 2006. Because we were waking up to it. The ice is not there on the East Coast like it used to be. Harp seal are an ice dependent species. They need a stable ice surface to give birth to their pups.

They do not give birth on land or have not been found to do so. If there is no ice or if the ice is not thick enough, the moms will abort the pups in water rather than go on land. We have increased abortions of pups in recent years.

Another thing that will happen is the mother will give birth on ice. But if it is not thick enough, and if it breaks up in the storms before the pups are weaned and able to feed themselves, a lot will be crushed or starved to death on shore.

We saw that several years in the past. That is going to have an impact. We are not seeing it so much in the population. Yet, I do not think. As it takes them a bit to mature and for these to show in the adult population, these things are highly variable and thought to be dependent on the ice conditions.

We are seeing years with climate change the numbers being hunted. In some years, the complete set of cubs born in a class year may be wiped out.

2. Jacobsen: What about Indigenous traditions around or my involved sealing? How can we respect those as well?

Fink: We are not against Inuit seal hunting. The Inuit hunt seal in Northern Canada. It is a different seal. It is a different hunt. It is a hunt for food. They use the skin to make clothing and other artifacts. We do not campaign against that.

They have the right to harvest seal. It is their culture, their tradition. We generally are not seeing the large-scale slaughter as seen on the East Coast, which is, as I said, profit-driven. 92% of the meat is wasted and then left on the ice. That is why we focus on the East Coast hunt.

It is unnecessary. It costs Canadian taxpayers dollars to run this year to year. We can find people another source of income rather than paying them to club seals.

3. Jacobsen: Often, or sometimes, there can be a variety of misrepresentations, lies, obfuscations, and so on. At the same time, there can be very good reportage. To the former category, what are some around sealing in Canada? What are some truths that dispel them, just to clear the water?

Fink: We went through a period where the media was content to repeat the Canadian Government talking points. It is humane. It was sustainable. It was well-regulated. They would be repeating this very uncritically. When we showed them the footage of what was happening out there, they would say, “That’s only on a couple of boats. This is not everything.”

We’d say, “This is being captured. The boats know they are being filmed. This is what happens when people know that they are being filmed. I am sure it is not much better when people aren’t being filmed.”

This is very frustrating. The lack of willingness of certain media outlets to question the government talking points. That what the government was telling you was fact or was truth. But in fact, it was not.

I think it has changed, thankfully, in recent years. We are seeing more balanced reporting. We still see a lot of media covering the position. There are too many fish and need to be hunted. Yet, they are not giving equal or adequate coverage of the scientific side saying, “It is not true. At all. There is no evidence for culling seals helping them to recover their numbers.”

It is repeating one side of the story and not realty digging deep int whether there is any scientific basis for the belief, simply repeating as if it were fact. It is very frustrating [Laughing[.

4. Jacobsen: I can imagine. Are there any ways in which individuals can become involved, donating time or professional networks, volunteering hours, or becoming professional trained and then a staff member, and so on?

Fink: Seals specifically, the most important thing that people can do. The reason for its continuance is politics. It was revived because of politics. Brian Tobin saw this to get easy votes on the West Coast of Canada.

To me, it is a political issue. We need to stop funding this thing and start finding alternatives. We need to contact their member of parliament and the government of Canada. Tell them, the politics and policy need to be based on evidence rather than the opinions of sealers or ones not validated by science.

That there are better ways to use taxpayer dollars such as clubbing seals, which has no future. The markets are gone. The markets are not coming back. We spent tens of millions of dollars trying to fond seal markets over the past decades. All of them have failed [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Fink: Why are we still doing this? Why are we keeping this industry afloat? The answer: the only reason is for votes. We know that politicians, even on the East Coast. In Newfoundland, people say, “It was useful before. It is not the jobs that young people want for the future.”

They need to start providing real alternatives for people.

5. Jacobsen: Ayn recommended authors or speakers?

Fink: Let me look at my book selection here [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Fink: One is Linda Peloso. It looks at the political hypocrisy around the whole situation and how much effort is put into finding ways to killing seals and justify killing seals, to placate a very small but vocal minority. People who want to kill seals.

6. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Funk: It is hard to pack into an hour, isn’t it? [Laughing]

Jacobsen: It is.

Fink: It has gone on for centuries. With some of the schemes over the past couple of years, the idea of killing seals to make aphrodisiacs out of their penises to sell to Asian markets, proposals to kill seals and grind their meat and to make protein powder for body builders.

These were proposals seriously considered by the federal government to justify going out and killing more seals. [You noted sending some more reports to me here.]

This is what the government is spending time and money on, paying for these proposals. They want to slaughter 200,000 seals on Sable Island. It is one of the more popular breeding areas now.

The question is what to do with 200,000 dead seals with no market for it. The idea was what to do with 200,000 dead seals without a market for them. They were going to use modified logging equipment to pick up the bodies and then portable incineration chambers to burn the seals [Laughing] in these incineration chambers, and then dump them in the ocean.

This was going to cost Canadians $26 million dollars. This was the Canadian government [Laughing]. This was back in the Harper days, but still. It is like, really [Laughing]? This is what is going on.

7. Jacobsen: For those who may not be aware, is this a time when science, scientific methodology and facts in other words, were not respect?

Fink: Completely ignored. The Trudeau liberals, they have given a lot of lip service to respecting the science. They have been a lot better. We have a Fisheries Minister who has acknowledged that there is no science supporting the idea of needing to cull seals, kill seals, which is very refreshing.

The role of science plays in policymaking and decision-making is shockingly small in some form. I think particularly in wildlife policy. The other issue that I am working on. Alberta is poisoning wolves.

This is being done because politicians will see endangered Cariboo. We do not see the poisoning the wolves and others with foresting, mining, and all of that. It is killing them. It is killing wolves. Killing wolves is an easy answer and looks good, it makes people think that they are doing something by killing predators.

8. Jacobsen: What is the main reason for the rejection of science? I ask s an expert and as a scientist, to you.

Funk: I think politicians are looking out for themselves. They want to get re-elected in 4 years. It is very difficult for a politician to look beyond the 4-year time frame in a lot of cases. Science is a long-term process.

We need to look at long-term trends to see where things are going. I think all humans have that problem. It is doing what is best in the long-term rather than what seems to be immediately the most gratifying.

In a political sense, getting re-elected or getting the votes, it can often be the main driver in decision-making, not scientific bases or evidence.

Jacobsen: I am out of questions.

Fink: [Laughing] excellent questions.

9. Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Sheryl.

Fink: Well, thank you, I look forward to what comes out of it.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Director, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, IFAW.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/fink-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Alix Jules on Background and Meeting an Atheist (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Alix Jules is a Writer at Patheos Nonreligious. He discusses: early life, pivotal moments, and intellectual trajectory; and the feeling of meeting an atheist for the first time.

Keywords: Alix Jules, atheism, Catholic, intellectual trajectory, Patheos, secularism.

An Interview with Alix Jules on Background and Meeting an Atheist: Writer (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start with a little bit of background so people know where you’re coming from. What was some early life like? What were some, if there were any, pivotal moments that influenced your own intellectual trajectory and your own outlook on the world, orientation side?

Alix Jules: I grew up very religious. I grew up in New York, grew up in Brooklyn, inner-city kid, child of an immigrant from a specifically West Indian background. It was the ‘70s, ‘90s. I’m more of an ‘80s kid. I grew up Catholic. I grew up very much Catholic. I used to say that going to the schools that I went to, which were private schools, parochial schools, that I wound up praying a significant amount of time. I think I was praying more than five times a day at one point.

I went to Catholic Church, grew up in the Catholic Church. My mother actually didn’t think the Catholic Church did a very good job of teaching the Bible, although she subscribed to the doctrine, and she actually sent me to a Seventh-day Adventist parochial school for the first part of my life.

Still, I wanted to be a Catholic priest. If you understand a little bit of the differences in the doctrine between the SdA, or Seventh-day Adventist and Catholic, they really very much saw the Catholic Church as The Whore of Babylon.

That’s the environment that I went to school in. There was some bullying. I was the shy kid, but I was always curious. I was always really interested in science and math. When I was really young, I said, “I’m going to be Galileo.” Someone pointed out to me, “You know how that ends, right?”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Jules: I really thought that I was going to be able to reconcile my faith and my emerging belief with science and how I was developing my world view. That much more was possible then, than what was allowed in the Catholic Church. Of course, being exposed to some of the Adventist, that was tough because, like I said, it was ongoing bullying.

Then, really around middle school or so, we wound up having too many issues at the Seventh-day Adventist school. My mother sent me to a Lutheran school where I was exposed, once again, to a completely different set of beliefs.

At this point, when I retrospectively look back, although my mother hates the idea that I’m an atheist, I look back at it and say she set me up to be an atheist, specifically because of all the different exposures that she was indiscriminately, and very much unwittingly, exposing me to.

By the time I got into high school, I had really been exposed to several of the various sects in Christendom. For the first time, I wound up really seeing other religions, as well, Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic. I went to a very science-focused high school, a science magnate. I was the kid with the Bible in the backpack because, of course, I was a Christian crusader at that point, still, but when you’re exposed to so many different ideas– I met my first atheist in high school. I didn’t know that that actually existed.

2. Jacobsen: May I pause it? What was the feeling when you met the first atheist in life?

Jules: I didn’t understand how that was possible. You had to believe in something, right? I was like, “What do you mean you don’t believe in a god or a higher being? How did we get there?” It’s funny in a more ironic sense where when I get into those conversations now, I can empathize a little bit because I’ve been there. I understand where it’s coming from. You have such a dominant world view that says, “This is how it’s done, with certainty.”

My particular journey, I went from ready to debate anyone about Christianity- I was like, “Come on. Let’s go. We can do it for days. We can do it for hours.” I was ready. I carried two Bibles. [Laughing] I don’t remember which versions I had, but I know at the end, I needed something else in my backpack.

I think it really hit me when I remember someone asking, “But what if you’re wrong?” I never actually examined that idea. I hadn’t thought about, “What if you and everyone else is wrong?” “Yes, absolutely.” “How do you know?” “Because what tells you so.” I would continuously get into this loop and not able to break out of that thinking. Looking back, it was circular logic, but that was all I knew.

It took a couple of years, still. A Bible-thumper, a holy roller, everything that I’ve heard other people call other Christians, that was me. I was proud to be it, too. It was about my junior year or so, where I had been pushed so far in my belief that I left my Bibles in my backpack. I actually, “This can’t be right. There’s got to be more.”

Again, the exposure to other beliefs really wound up taking me to explore Judaism. I’m like, well, “That’s not right. That’s just the beginning of the story. Christianity, that’s the continuation of the story.” What I’m finding is some of the most basic questions, I got conflicting answers.

I would go to my church parish, and talk to my parish priest and ask him questions on, “What do you think about good and evil? What do you think about the tautology? What do you even think about the creation story? Is that literal or non-literal?” His response was, “It’s a fable. Jesus spoke them all the time, so, of course, we don’t really believe that.”

Then, take a trip to Manhattan, from Brooklyn, to have a conversation with an archbishop at the Catholic diocese, or stroll over to a synagogue somewhere and have a conversation with the rabbi. He’s like, “Of course we don’t believe that that’s literal. It’s figurative. It’s so plain.” Then, go to talk to the bishop. The bishop’s like, “It’s absolutely literal.” “Wait a minute, I just got a different answer from someone that kind of, sort of, reports to you, in the grand scheme of things. What do you have?”

For me, I actually explored Islam. I went through the process. My mother was very supportive. My family was a little forgiving because I had not walked away from the idea or the conceptualization of this higher being because, of course, “You still believed in something.” I did. I still believed in something. I just was really reaching and struggling to define what that something was, and so it was Allah.

I spent about a good year and a half really exploring Islam. I found myself, on the other side, asking the same questions, with no good answers, just no good answers to submit. It is what it is.” No, that’s not really a good answer because I was still being intellectually stimulated. I was still asking the same stuff. My love of science and belief in God was still there, so what’s next?

I walked away from the church. I walked away from believing, for a while. I did the college thing. What did I call myself? I was “spiritual but not religious” for a long time. Married, children, left New York, came to Texas. One of the first things that they’ll ask you as you walk into your job, it almost doesn’t matter what position you have it’s, “Hey. You’re not from around here.” “No, I’m not. I’m from so-and-so, up north.” “Have you gone to church yet?”

It was stifling. It was suffocating, the level of religiosity that was there but I still had a wife, my ex-wife now, who was a believer. I had my first child. Trying to explain to your mother-in-law that, “I think we’re going to skip baptism because I don’t buy any of that,” that’s just not going to keep the peace. “You’ve already taken the family 1,200 miles away for work and now you’re telling me that you’re taking them away from God, too?”

Mind you, these are some of the same people that go to church three times a year and break every single law out there, or maybe 200 out of the so commandments that are out there. They’ll go break it in a weekend. It is what it is.

In the ‘90s, I was part of the church, but not really. I was more of a social Christian or a cultural Christian, and only in name. I knew what I was becoming. I felt it. I went through some personal tribulation when I was really thinking it through. There were a lot of times I closed the door on questioning because it was just, “I can’t do this anymore because what’s my next step? What am I going to call myself tomorrow? Agnostic? Okay, that’s cool. I can deal with agnostic. I don’t know.”

I was okay up until September 11. Being from New York, I heard about what had happened. Someone calls me up and says, “Have you seen the news as to what’s going on right now?” I was like, “No, I haven’t.” I turn on the TV and I see it. A couple of days later, I’m on a flight to New York.

We couldn’t find a couple of people. I’m there, and I’m walking with people, and I’m talking with people that are looking for their loved ones. By that time, I had given up the idea of becoming a priest. “I can’t. I’m good.” Got married, and the whole thing kind of messes it up. I wanted to be a priest up until high school. I was still saying it in high school.

I was walking and talking to these people who were in pain, and suffering. I knew then because I had studied both sides of the argument. I understood what it was to be a Christian and ask the questions, “Why?” but I also understood why Muslims, although extremist- and these were extremist, these were not just ordinary Muslims. No, this was the extremist faction- I understand why they felt they were emboldened to do this.

At that point, I looked at it and said, “I don’t believe in a god that would justify this, either way, or allow this to happen, either way. Neither one of you can claim this, in any sense.” It was right then that I said, “You know what? I am totally okay with calling myself an atheist, at this point.” It was September 13th that I called myself an atheist. I said it out loud.

It wasn’t long after that. My mom knew that I was drifting, but when I used that word, that was a monumental point in my family relationship. It was like, “We don’t know what to do with you.” From then on, my life has just taken some really interesting twists and turns, much for the good, I think.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Writer, Patheos Nonreligious.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/jules-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Tarek Fatah on God, Universals, Conversations, Rahaf, Rights, and Ethics (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Tarek Fatah is a Columnist for the Toronto Sun and the Founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. He discusses: singular secular public school system; a God who needs help; universalization of particulars; Rahaf al-Qunun; rights; men and ideoogies; and final feelings and thoughts.

Keywords: Canada, ethics, God, Islam, Karachi, Pakistan, Rahaf, religion, rights, Tarek Fatah, universals.

An Interview with Tarek Fatah on God, Universals, Conversations, Rahaf, Rights, and Ethics: Columnist, Toronto Sun & Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does this mean for the larger conversation around a single secular public-school system?

Tarek Fatah: It must be. When you started with the Catholic school system, it began some of the vote banks. Then the Indians and the others started their own.

We learned that there was a subject about character building. We learned how a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew lived together. They are no longer in Pakistan. We learned what was geography, history, mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, and, also, we had character building, where ethics and morals were taught to us.

We were supposed to write about the character. We had a thing about doing one good deed a day. It did not matter what. My patrol leader was Catholic. The real victims were the Muslims who were willing to become American aid and tanks, and money, to become the foot soldiers of the United States.

Because the Serbs did not want to fight the Soviets after Vietnam. With Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan have been ruined now, Iran with Khomeini, The Americans got in there. It is not as if Khomeini was with the USSR.

The Americans overthrew the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. He was a socialist. It was people sitting in the House of Representatives [Laughing]. If we do not wake up, we might survive – secular democracy and liberalism, and ethics in government by humanity rather than ordered by the divine.

We can get religion as a moral compass. We can get our guidance. I am not going to get guidance necessarily. I am not a copy. I do not think God wanted me to tell people what to do in their backyard, “No pig rolls there!”

2. Jacobsen: Some people have an idea of an omniscient and omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and so on, being with property aseity who also needs help. Right? Who can do everything, knows everything, and needs help, as you know, the need for someone to be the police officer for him, in other words?

Fatah: There are enough hells on Earth, brother. If you go to the Congo, it is hell. Could it be worse than 30 million people died, and nobody noticed? Imagine a genocide as in Darfur. We had a genocide of Arabs killing African Muslims in 2005, half of a million in one year.

They wanted independence. They are eating each other up as to who is a better Christian over there. For the Christians, it means the more Western, who wears the more Western hat. I do not know about sub-Saharan Africans named Mr. Goodfellow.

Then the Sudanese wearing these hats, hunting somewhere [Laughing], as if in Northern England. It is silly. How many people have died in South Sudan due to tribalism, religion? Look at Rwanda, it was Christian versus Christian, right?

It was a genocide when Christians slaughtered Christians. Look at Bangladesh in 1991, nobody even knows now. George Harrison kept singing about Bangladesh. Ted Kennedy went there. We forget everything.

Nobody would remember the New York Madison Square, where they had the great George Harrison singing about Bangladesh. They raise millions for the children and the orphans who had been slaughtered by the Pakistanis.

A Muslim army killed 3 million Muslims [Laughing]. George Harrison sang. I do not know anyone who else did it in the Islamic world. All of them were supporting Pakistanis. So, religion’s role outside of being a moral compass makes you irrational.

There is always something about the hair and the head as very primitive. That is where the head shines. You put the cloth over the head to absorb it or show it. It is across many religions. But it is symbols of pre-science, “I can’t think. I have a headache. What if I put a piece of cloth over it? If I work in the fields of India or Punjab…”

You would cover the nose if on a camel in the desert. Why cover the nose if in Switzerland?

Jacobsen: These become signifiers of culture and identity.

Fatah: Yes, you start believing this as God’s deal. What Surah of God talks about this covering hair or nose? Imagine God like this, a God is checking, “Nuh-uh, your eyes. You squinted too hard. I am going to get you.” What about 11-year-old girls are being told that you need to cover yourself at school and the rest of the girls are sluts?

That is said to a lot of girls. “The rest of the Canadian girls are sluts.”

3. Jacobsen: Sorry to interrupt, how do we shift this conversation from where, typically, someone’s own religion is seen as universal into a situation in which humanity is seen as the universal and religion is seen as a flavour – so to speak – or the particulars of that universal?

Fatah: You cannot change this overnight. Muslims will be 2 billion soon. Most Muslim imams think that the more Muslims there are the better. 1 billion was not enough. So, they want 2 billion [Laughing]. The only way to do this is to separate religion and state public policy and public life.

You cannot respect someone for being stupid. He has a right. She has a right to be an idiot. You are not asking anyone to take away that right. But to fund it?! You give tax breaks to someone who is cursing Jews. Do you see this?

Can you imagine someone having a memorial for Hitler? India has memorials for Muslim invaders that destroyed their cities! I am visiting India very soon. The holiest place in India is the confluence of three rivers.

Every 12 years when Jupiter and Earth are in line; there is a festival. I have calculated that this could be my last time to visit it, as I am 70. I will 82 next time. I better visit this place now. The holiest place in Hinduism. Guess its name?

Allahabad [Laughing], they put “Allah” right in the name.

Jacobsen: It is like Lynchburg, Virginia. To have the title “lynch” in the United States, it is dramatic.

Fatah: Over here, the invaders came here, took over the holiest city, named it after their God, and then said, “Anyone who changes it is against India.” Give me another example of it. So, it only stems when people either lose self-respect, which I think many Canadians are losing.

They are losing self-respect. They are embarrassed. They do not know what their parents left for them. They did not get it by working hard. Your parents’ generation is responsible for the Charter or the UN Declaration and the concept of individual liberty and the concept of the man and the woman, the respect for the child, the court system that says that you are innocent until proven guilty.

These are new things. It used to be that you are guilty until you are proven innocent. We, as a civilization, turned this around. We are tolerating a king that killed Turkey. We are calling him a reformer. A murder takes place in a sovereign country.

As soon as Trump got in, he is only a one-term president. What is going to do? It is for businesses. This is the level at which we have sunk here. Kudos to our prime minister, I am not much of a liker of the Liberals. But Trudeau gave a kick and stood up; it hurt the Saudis. I salute him for it.

There is one woman. Chrystia Freeland said, “I am getting this girl, giving her citizenship, and making sure that she has full protection. This is Canada.”

4. Jacobsen: How is Rahaf doing?

Fatah: [Laughing] She is under different imprisonment now. She is under the NGOs.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Fatah: They do not want to say she was in trouble to denying Islam. It is punishable by death. The Canadian media said its own lies. I said, “Oh, she is against…” Because that was what they were supposed to accurately report on.

She is not coming from a battered home. They sent her to an Italian neighbourhood. On the record, I was told that she was told not to contact “bad Muslims.” Bad Muslims are Muslims like me. So, she went around. Whoever she has met has been approved by [did not get it], this is how stupid we have become.

That an Italian settlement agency is taking care of a Saudi woman who says, “There is no God. There is no Allah. I reject it.” Don’t you think it would be better if she was with some secular and liberal Muslims who understand her language, joked with her, made her comfortable?

“No, we will send her to an Italian group. This way, one or another organization will get money, social workers will get money.” I would not be surprised if Punjabi workers said, “Come here, it will make you look good.”

I told her, “Good luck, anytime you need help. We will be here. Otherwise, goodbye.” Yasmine Mohammed who is in Victoria. She and I raised $11,000 in 10 hours for Rahaf. I do not want to say some things on the record [Laughing].

She turned it down because there was no acknowledgement from anyone. We could have raised $100,000 for her. It could have gotten her through education, paid for the rental. People from Canada across the spectrum came to help her, sea to sea. They donated money to this case.

5. Jacobsen: I like hearing those type of stories across the board helps. It is showing that notion or, maybe, that value set talked about before, of religion as a particular and human needs and wants and concerns – as exemplified in December 10, 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights – becoming more universal, where some religious values are emergent within it.

Fatah: Absolutely, I think religion has a significant role to play in the individual’s life as a moral compass. It is not a license to dictate to the village.

Jacobsen: We get these great traditions. You get the Christian tradition. You see the Song of Songs. You see the Parable of the Hypocrite. You see the Sermon on the Mount. You get the Golden Rule. You get these great guides. But we also get myths as guides.

As Margaret Atwood notes, we eventually all become stories. Our narratives are extraordinarily important to us, especially to the young.

Fatah: It is true. Our nursery rhymes, you should look at how Hindus, young kids. There is so much magic in their mythology. 5 or 6 years old, there are so many stories. They are wrapped in the faith without hostility to anyone. The great Buddhist Brahman clashes of the 5^th century.

Now, they mesh into one syrup. Even into Islam, it is very different. We have the Hindus praying and others over there. [Laughing] It is wonderful. I am not very religious. I remember going to Delhi and seeing these guys sitting there.

There was one guy from Bangladesh who danced all day. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “What am I doing?” He was in a trance. He did not think he was dancing. I remember one man with bells between his fingers. He was dancing.

I thought, “This is wonderful. I like this religion. This is my type of Muslim. He is not lecturing everyone.” Like, “Your knees are showing!” I think it is an answer. You can see the Catholics. In Canada, they discovered Christmas when the Europeans came. They were Christian but did not know Christmas.

So, it is breathtaking. People are Jewish. They are also in the South. It is the only place on Earth where the Jews have not been slaughtered. It is amazing. If not slaughtered, those who have been mocked with derision.

Jacobsen: It is the similar sentiment many women went through for generations prior. It was the sort of jocular contempt [Laughing].

Fatah: [Laughing] I know.

6. Jacobsen: When we look at the literalists in every tradition or the fundamentalists in the secular and in the ideologies, most of the violent offenders, of those literalist fundamentalist interpreters of a faith, which is not necessarily an interpretation, are men.

Why are men more often attracted to these kinds of interpretations – so to speak – or these ideologies?

Fatah: Men and women are very different, constructed in very different ways. I just bought a book on it. The thought processes are different. The entire biologies are different. Women create people. We create a mess. They are supposed to clean it up.

Therefore, you do not have as many female warriors. They are in the business of nurturing. I am strictly speaking of biology and the neuroscience. They are wired differently; the female brain is different. You also must understand that the mobility issues for women were being locked up.

A woman could not go about a month’s travel without a problem. On a horse, probably, she had to sit cross-legged. A major development in women’s independence was the pill; I think it was the pad. I think the mobility was it. The lessened restrictedness at that time and now. Where do you go now?

There was nothing to do. This was in the 20^th century. They could not do anything. Women were dependent on men. So, men have dominated and exploited and made sure that the woman does not come up. Therefore, you have polygamy, but you do not have polygyny to the same extent.

There are some places. This needs to be studied more. I am not an expert. But the main impediment in Muslim development has been, even in the Christians in this sense, polygamy, multiple wives and this means multiple heirs to the throne and multiple wars over it.

Europe, you must understand; one wife, one prince, two brothers or three brothers maximum, right? In the European empires, there were the issues of 200 princes fighting it out. I am giving you context at that level. Women, how are they subjugated? It is primarily for this reason. It will take a few hundred years for things to change.

Because this is how a gene pool happened and changed, and how certain traits were passed onto men, how we think of our sons, how we think of our daughters, and so on. Why do men go into bodybuilding? The odd woman will go to work in wrestling.

The most educated and enlightened woman still wear heels. [Laughing] Women, we saw what happened at 9/11. There were hundreds of thousands of heels left over there. The men ran and then women had to throw their stilettoes and others down, so they ran barefoot. They were impeded in running and escaping.

It is a story ongoing of dependency. It will, it will, come to a balance. In many ways, religion, the moment it goes into being a moral compass, will allow women to be free. Imagine Indian women who love to wear black shrouds voluntarily, all their lives; all their lives. That is a great challenge.

If the world cannot stand up and ban the burqa, then they are cowards.

7. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Fatah: I am hoping someone will listen. As a Muslim, I am Muslim. I am terrified that future generations of Muslims will not be able to fly planes. I have been in a hospital as a patient, where another patient wanted to know if the guy giving him anesthesia was a Muslim or not.

People are scared sometimes. If it comes to that, it is worrying all of us. What sort of society we have created, where there is fear on our streets, every time a woman in a hijab or a burqa is beaten up; it is a victory for the jihadis. They love it.

Because then, they can say, “You see. I told you. The white man is evil. I am hoping Canada can export its values. I look forward to both Canada, India, in some ways showing a light to the rest of the world.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Tarek.

Fatah: Thank you! Take care.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Columnist, Toronto Sun; Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/fatah-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Writing and Documentary Filmmaking (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/15

Abstract

Gita Sahgal is the Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space. She discusses: becoming involved in writing and documentary filmmaking; and secularism and Islamism.

Keywords: Centre for Secular Space, documentary, filmmaking, Gita Sahgal, secularism, writing.

An Interview with Gita Sahgal on Writing and Documentary Filmmaking: Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview edited for clarity and readability. Some information may be incorrect based on audio quality.*

*This interview was conducted November 13, 2016.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did you become involved in writing and documentary filmmaking?

Gita Sahgal: I joined a film company in the mid-80s. People thought it was a tourism program. However, it was radical or Left-wing Progressive in the old sense. It is African and Asians producing a black current affairs program. In Britain, I should say, a lot of Asian people call themselves black as part of the broader black movement. Asians tend to refer to East Asians in America. However, in Britain, Asian refers to South Asians, as in Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, by origin, and so on.

They tend to use black as a solidarity term with the black movement. There were a bunch of autonomous organizations that started in the late 70s and early 80s. I was already part of Southall Black Sisters when I was part of this

his television program called Bangdam Files. It was run by a famous Trotskyite who is now appalling on the War on Terror. He was then a very progressive Pakistani who had his hay day in Vienna and the bombing of Vietnam.

We brought together various left-wing groups and a publishing company called Bercer. He had gotten together with another black activist, who had come from left-wing black tradition. That had come out of various confrontations with police.

It was an incredibly exciting time to be an activist on television. Channel 4 is a strange British mix. It is funded commercially. It had a charter with the government. That said it had to deal with minority interests and other issues – a minority in the widest way.

It had very exciting films and obscure documentaries, which were artistically challenging as well as not being straight documentary coverage Documentary filmmaker from all over the world – including North America – looked to Channel 4 to make films with funding – films the way they wanted.

They had films with different takes on things, e.g. feminism, LGBT activism, black things, and so on. Before that, the work was very basic, how to settle into British life. Somehow, we all the sudden had this program that dealt with police violence.

We had investigative stories. One of the first things that it did was an investigation into the influence on Hindu Right and being treated as a cultural group and being given money by labour councils from all over London.

In fact, it is a story still going on. Now, it is the Muslim Right. Under multiculturalism, it is treated as a cultural group and the given money like Labour councils all over London and other places.

Fundamentalist groups have been given money by local councils for ages. We exposed it with the Hindu Right in 1986. Something like that I started by reading the news. I did not want to be doing that, but the job was available.

Then I became a researcher and became a director. Later, I went freelance and became a director and producer and so on. I did these amazing stories on racism in employment. Police racism with the beating of a young man who turned up in prison with a concussion.

The police and prison authorities helped each other. Nobody would have admitted to having been caught in that state. We had a lot of run-ins. We could not go into areas with riots, where the police said that these were no-go areas.

But we went into these areas because we were the people. I did stuff on racism in employment and work practices with Heathrow strikes and other things like women’s rights. I did things on dowry murders in India.

The revival of the practice of Sati that is killing women all over with putting the women on the pyre of the deceased husband. Then later, when the Rushdie affair broke, I was still working with Bangdo. It was public.

There were some rumblings in India and elsewhere. It found its way to Britain from there. There were people marching on the streets in Britain. We started formulating it. I did an interview with Rushdie. I did a program called [… Satanic Verse]. That went out on the 14^th of February, which was on the night of the fatwa.

Nobody knew it would grow that large and that bad [Laughing]. I chose passages for Rushdie to read. I was talking to the director. One of that passages I chose was in the Satanic Verses in which a character he jokes about this Khomeini-type character about this stopping history and a blood tide.

The director said, “I do not understand this passage” I said, “We’ve got to have this! This is crucial.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: He had no idea what we were up against. It is up on YouTube. Then we did another a few months later, which started being directed by someone else and then I took it over. It was on a demonstration supporting Rushdie. 40 women were protesting and supporting Rushdie against 20,000.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: So, I wasn’t filming at that point. As I said, I wasn’t the director. The film was very much about racism, I think. I made a film about secular values and feminism, and secularism, in relation to the Rushdie affair. I did two big films there. I worked with independent filmmakers in India on films.

I worked on various other things. I continued to work on several major films in Britain, which broke new ground, politically. One major film, which became part of a campaign, was about women who kill their husbands because of domestic violence. That was the first done in Britain about that issue.

There had been issues done about this in America. There were several cases. We focused on Kiranjit. He was an old man in jail. We followed their stories. Southall Black Sisters, which I was a part of, campaigned to get her out. Absolutely against the odds, we were able to re-open the case. We had no legal aid.

In Britain, there is no automatic right to appeal, so she was already in jail. It was completely hopeless. Partly because of the film and partly because of intense legal work was mainly done by Southall Black Sisters, we found a way to force the case open.

It became case law. Her sentence was squashed. Then it was sent back to retrial, and then a new retrial. It made case law, changing the law of provocation. That was incredibly exciting work, to be a part of that campaign and being fortunate enough to be through a film and get the work done.

Another central on was called The War Crimes File. It is on YouTube. That was about three British men who were from Bangladesh, who we found were being involved with either issuing fatwas or death squads in Bangladesh, or leading lynch mobs.

The extraordinary thing about that. One of those three now died. The other two rose to high positions in Britain, even though the material was handed to the police. A lot of the films I have done have underlying human rights arguments, not just underlying and even up front. What are these men doing?

They should have been tried under British law of war crimes, which allows for extraterritorial jurisdiction. Some crimes are so serious. Even if they have been committed abroad, they can be tried in the country that they are in now.

So, Britain in this case; some countries have broad definitions like Belgium, but Britain is quite narrow. We tried because we felt at least one could be prosecuted. But there was no political appetite to do that.

One man involved in death squads and taking people to torture centers was eventually convicted in absentia in the tribunal set up in Bangladesh. The film eventually became part of a movement for justice and accountability.

I believe, it became the most popular issue around war crimes that ever existed anywhere in the world. You may not know about it because no one talks about it abroad. There was a film made in the last few years.

The other film was made much more recently with larger international news, which led to huge discussions about genocidal killings in Indonesia in the 60s. I think my film made in the mid-90s was that equivalent.

It energized a movement within Bangladesh. It is interesting to me for people to talk about terrorism, Islam, and Islamic terrorism, but they pay no attention to popular movements against it. None. The whole counter-extremism exercise is totally divorced from where people are.

Not much government backing or help. That movement that I have been a part of has had a lot of problems. I do not believe in the death penalty. But I think they arrested the right people who were the leaders of the Dawateislami.

It was a fundamentalist group acting alongside the Pakistan army, which was the main people who are killing civilians. We do not know how many. We do not have the figures, but thousands of people. 10 million refugees fled.

These are killings on the scale of Syria now, even the refugee crisis was even bigger. The US was backing the Pakistani government. I am trying to shut down this thing. There was a guerilla war with the people in the Bangladesh army.

The government that came to power had a huge democratic landing. Unlike Syria, which went on for four years or something, there was a humanitarian intervention by India, which the elected government got out of the country and ended the slaughter.

Many refugees went back. So, it is an amazing history that is not told. People do not remember it when they talk about Syria or anything. My small part is to be part of this investigative film with these people in Bangladesh and the people who have families killed by the fundamentalists.

People who helped us dig out and find people to interview and who are witnesses. We found journalists and other people who have been eyewitnesses at the time. This was in the mid-90s when there was no political appetite for it.

Later, a friendlier government got elected into power and, as a result, it is never only one thing. However, the film became part of a Campaign in Bangladesh. The government came to power on a promise that they would set up a war crimes tribunal. That is an extraordinary thing. How seldom that happens in history, people get away with murder and governments do not want to take it all up.

Because it can cause a backlash. That backlash against the Bangladeshi bloggers is a big issue. The reason for the backlash is because they were atheists. So, a lot of them were caught up in the movement.

It was an accident when the help came when it did. The War Crimes Files was in the 90s. It was my last big work. After that, I did some other smaller work. I write, occasionally. I have never been able to make a living from writing. I went into Amnesty International for several years.

I was doing policy work rather than writing work. The writing has been quite intermittent, but important to me in talking about issues of fundamentalism. It speaks to fundamentalism. Two people, including myself, wrote something called Holy Rollers, which is available online.

Women Living Under Muslim Rule published an online version of it. That became a point for people to discuss fundamentalism in religions. It has been always important to me to look across religion and not simply at one threat.

2. Jacobsen: I want to touch on something when you talked 1986 and doing an expose on fundamentalist Hindu sectors of the population. You mentioned the reaction to it. What was the reaction to it? Does this reflect a lot of the exposes occurring, and ongoing now, about some fundamentalist Muslims sects with Britain, for instance?

Gita Sahgal: I think the reaction is a lot worse, a lot worse, but a lot of people who are more prominent in the fundamentalist sects get death threats like the activists from the Muslim fundamentalists. If on email, then by email; if on Twitter, then on Twitter.

We have interviewed a person who became the mayor of London. He becomes infamous for being a Holocaust denier and embracing Shayk Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood and hanging out with Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was more Jeremy Corbyn. However, he embraced Qaradawi. He gave him a platform and engaged him on a platform. When we interviewed him about the Hindu right, we did not know that they were fascists. We were mistaken [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Sahgal: He knows what he was doing. They continue to do it. That was pretty much what has happened in Britain since then. The Islamist groups get exposed and then they do not back off. They go online.

They have a lot of supporters in parliament and continue doing what they are doing [Laughing].

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Executive Director, Centre for Secular Space.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/sahgal-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence Research, Evolutionary Biology, and IQ Gains and Advanced Moral Views (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/08

Abstract

Dr. James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He discusses: current intelligence research; evolutionary biology; and the correlation between IQ gains and the advanced moral views.

Keywords: evolutionary biology, intelligence, IQ, James Flynn, morals, political studies.

An Interview with Emeritus Professor James Robert Flynn, FRSNZ on Intelligence Research, Evolutionary Biology, and IQ Gains and Advanced Moral Views: Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand (Part One)[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us start from the current empirics of intelligence research. What are the overall findings now? What is the consensus of the field, if there is one?

Professor James Flynn: One of the consensuses of the field is one that I will not explore, that is, the relationship of intelligence to brain physiology. People seem to be inventing all sorts of wonderful new tools to investigate the brain beyond magnetic resonance imaging and see what type of thought processes are going on, and that should be extremely illuminating.

Obviously, cognition has a physiological basis. If we have illusions as to just what the physiological basis of certain cognitive abilities are, they certainly need correcting.

As to other areas of research, many people are not sufficiently sophisticated about the phenomenon of IQ gains over time. They do not seem to entirely grasp its significance and its limitations.

For example, the fact that people are better at generalization often produces a rise in moral reasoning. If you talked to my grandfather about race, he had certain fixed racial mores. But if you take a young person today, they are more flexible. If you ask, “Should you be underprivileged because your skin is black?”, and then ask, “What if your skin turned black?”, they would see the point. You must render your moral principles logically consistent.

They would not do what my father would do. He would say, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. Who do you know whose skin turned black?” He would not take a hypothetical seriously, or the demands it entails for logical consistency. And once you concede that sheer “blackness” does not count, you would have to list personal traits that made someone worthy of persecution. That immediately gets you down to individuals as individuals, not individuals as a member of a particular race.

In my lifetime; students are less subject to racist and sexist stereotypes. That has had a good deal to do with the nature of the IQ gains over time, our ability to take hypothetical situations seriously, our ability to generalize and to see moral maxims as things that ought to have some type of universal applicability, rather than be just a tribal inheritance.

2. Jacobsen: Does a modern understanding of evolutionary biology help with this?

Flynn: They do not need anything as sophisticated as that. However, in saying that people today are better at moral assessments, I may give a false impression. Because they do need basic knowledge about the world and its history. You can have a very enlightened point of view towards social justice, and you can be free of racial stereotypes and yet, you can be colossally ignorant. All recent studies show that Americans are reading less and are less aware of how nations and their histories differ.

I emphasize this point in several of my books such as The Torchlight List and More Torchlight Books. People are surrounded by the babble of the media, Fox News and even CBS News. They are surrounded by the rhetoric of politicians. When people reach false conclusions about what ought to be done, it is often just sheer lack of the background knowledge that will allow them to put their egalitarian ideals to work.

Remember how America was talked into going into Iraq. This was not to wreak devastation on Iraqis, it was going to help Iraqis. This was going to give them a modern, stable society. Put that way, it sounds very good, does it not?

All people would have had to do would have been to have read one book on the Middle East, like Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Western Civilisation. They would have found that no Western power that sent troops into the Middle East has had a credit balance. They have always managed to get more people killed than would have been killed otherwise, and when they left, they left behind nations that had to “nation build” themselves, like every other nation in history.

I have often used an example that any properly educated person would think of immediately. That is The Thirty Years’ War in Germany (1618-1648), between Catholic and Protestant. It killed off half of the population. Let us imagine that a Turkish sultan, who in 1618, looked at Germany and said, “Look at how these Catholics and Protestants are torturing each other. Surely if I go in with a Turkish army, I can punish the wicked ones who do the most drawing and quartering, and I can reward the people who are more tolerant, and I will teach Catholic and Protestant to live to together in a nation-built Germany.”

We can all see the absurdity of this. But we can’t see the absurdity of a “benevolent” America sending an army into the Middle East to punish the bad guys and help the good guys, and make Sunnis and Shias love one another and nation build together.

The Thirty Years’ war also teaches us a lesson about Israel’s policy in the Middle East. What was Cardinal Richelieu’s policy from1618 to 1648? He said, “I am a Frenchman first, and a Catholic second. What I am going to do is meddle in this war and whoever is losing, I will back. I want these wars to go on forever. The more dead Germans, Catholic or Protestant, the better for France.”

This foreshadows Israel’s stand about the wars that rage in the Middle East. Israel believes that the Arabs will never accept them. It will always have to be stronger than the Arab nations to defend itself, and the weaker and the more divided the Arabs the better. This, of course, has nothing to do with the interests of American foreign policy. America must be talked into creating chaos in the Middle East so as “to do good”.

America is going through a trauma now. We backed Saudi Arabia against Iran, and now it turns out that Saudi Arabia is at least as wicked as Iran, killing people by the millions in Yemen. It still lops people’s hands off for theft. The women who pioneered against the restrictions on driving are all in jail. Until recently the Shiite population could not have cellars because they were suspected of conducting filthy rites down there.

Americans do not know enough to assess either US or Israeli policy. The average person’s “knowledge” is limited to what they are told. They may be well-meaning. But they are told that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant. They meet exiles who dress like Westerners and look like themselves. These exiles use the language of democracy and free speech. However, their real goal is to get back into power in Iraq and their only hope of that is American intervention.

Academics are fixated on whether the 21st Century will see IQ gains or IQ losses. The real question for the 21st century is whether we can produce a better-educated population. The odds seem to be all against it.

I have a book coming out this year called In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. More and more of America’s students lack either the knowledge or the critical intelligence to come to terms with the modern world. There is nothing the matter with our hearts but the problem is our heads.

If anyone had told me, 50, 60 years ago, when I began lecturing, that we would double the number of university graduates, and have a smaller elite of well-educated critics of our time, I would say that was insane. But all the studies show that adults today read less serious literature, less history than they did 30 or 40 years ago, that they are at least as ignorant of the same basic facts as they were 30 or 40 years ago.

To some degree, America is a special case – it is strange beyond belief. In other countries, people may not be well-educated. But few of them have an alternative view of the world that challenges science and makes education almost impossible. About 35 percent of Americans are raised in a way that provides them with a kind of world view that makes them suspicious of science.

At least in France, over one-third of people do not believe that the solar system began ten thousand years ago, that dinosaurs and human beings existed at the same time, and that if one species differs from another it was because God designed them that way.

This world-view was typical in many nations in the late 19th century. Take Britain: people were enraged by Darwin and thought their next-door neighbour was going to hell because they didn’t baptize their kids correctly. But slowly this world view faded in Britain, and Canada, and Australia, and England, and Spain, and Portugal. People who thought of modern science as an enemy, and had this 19th-century perspective, began to disappear.

What the hell happened to America? It is as if a third of the population was taken to Mars, and then came back a hundred years later, and their minds had been in a refrigerator. That is a terrible burden America must carry: about a third of its population has a world view that makes them systematically opposed to learning and critical intelligence.

3. Jacobsen: How much is there a correlation between IQ gains and the advanced moral views that you mentioned before?

Flynn: That is hard to tell. I am only familiar with data within the US. The mean IQ is lower in the South than in states like Minnesota, or like Massachusetts. Despite the preaching of the Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists about the value of fundamentalist Christianity, you have more murder, rape, and early pregnancies than you have up north.

You find a correlation that as IQ rises, people have what I would call more enlightened moral judgment. But you must look at all the confounding variables. Ever since the Civil War, the South has been in a state of schizophrenia. Of course, it is a less prosperous part of the nation. It is a more rural part of the nation. It is a more religious part of the nation. How is one to pick out the causes here? I suspect that thanks to IQ gains over time, some kids raised as Southern Baptists, have learned to be skeptical and to think for themselves. But why has the number been so small?

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Emeritus Professor, Political Studies, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/flynn-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: James Flynn.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Generational Differences of Professional Women (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/08

Abstract

Keywords: Canada, entrepreneurship, generational differences, innovation, professional women, Sarah Lubik, SFU, technology.

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Generational Differences of Professional Women: Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & InnovationConcentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: As you mentioned about five to ten minutes ago, the glass ceiling was not an issue for you. It was something that didn’t necessarily come up.

Dr. Sarah Lubik: Oh! It wasn’t something I was introduced to growing up. But I wouldn’t say it was not an issue. I was lucky because I grew up with two sisters, a strong mother and a supportive father. Our family motto might also well have been: “Give ‘em hell.”

Because that’s all we got told when we got dropped off in the morning. So, there was never an issue of not being able to do anything. It was almost taken for granted that we could do whatever we wanted to and should, having a family that was hugely supportive.

A number of my female relatives were also mentors, not necessarily in business, but in how they live. They set examples. It was a culture in my family of being whatever you want. That importance of culture is actually something guiding how we are setting up the programs at SFU.

Even the work that I’m doing now with the federal government, culture might be one of the most important areas we can work on to build a more entrepreneurial society. If you have that culture and resilience, that drive, there is a feeling of security even when bad things may happen around us. That we can handle it.

I was lucky to have grown up with those mentors and that culture, but, when I moved away, that was the first time people just assumed I was my boss’ assistant.” The first time that happened I was shocked.

That was one of my first run-ins with that kind of experience, far from the last, but I didn’t experience a lot of that here. If I can make one more note there, still; I’m lucky and I’m aware of it. Even other women growing up on the west coast at the same time as me have experienced far worse.

And it’s still a challenge.

Jacobsen: Right, it’s one of those things where the trend line is clear, but individually it’s different.

Lubik: The trend line is clear: lots of strong role models. It’s one of some things that I experienced a lot of, but also, my co- my first co-op job was for a company run by women. The job working with SFU, MIT and Cambridge, was working with a strong, impressive woman here in SFU.

The woman I went to work with in Cambridge is also a powerhouse. It’s not all women, had a fantastic gentleman at MIT, but I didn’t spend much time with him. So I did have strong females all the way through.

2. Jacobsen: In the larger perspective, as we have what seems to be a complicated situation with two trend lines, one as we’ve discussed, which is the glass ceiling more seen in previous generations but still seen in current generations for women in, for instance, undergraduate education.

I’ll keep that there: the glass ceiling identified by women in previous generations.

Now, as you’re not only teaching, but you’re also mentoring, I suspect that you’re mentoring people that have had post-undergraduate training. There is in many developed nations more young women in undergraduate training than young men, as they are graduating, as far as I know, with higher honors, better grades, and at higher rates than their male cohort peers.

What seems to be going on there is not necessarily any glass ceiling, of course, it’s more of a motivational ceiling.

Since you have more of an on-the-ground, or your finger-on-the-pulse, interaction with youth in terms of their undergraduate training, does that seem to reflect another trend?

Lubik: So, what I can speak to is my own program at SFU, specifically around entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship. I’ve found about 50/50, male and female, in the first, 200-level, entrepreneurship class.

What used to happen was that, in my second and third year entrepreneurship classes, we have about one-third female. When you got to the higher levels, it was usually closer to a quarter. So, while the original trend of women at least having the same graduation level, et cetera, as men is fair enough. What I was seeing in entrepreneurship was still fewer women going into it; however, that trend might be reversing. My most recent classes had much higher percentages of women, and some of the new tech and social innovation companies being formed do seem to have more women in them, which is encouraging to see.

This might also have to do with role models. When SFU’s early stage incubator came under my portfolio, we immediately increased the number of female mentors to make sure everyone has those role models. There is literature that points to role models being important for career choice. Then if you don’t see an entrepreneurial woman as a young woman, you might be less likely to enter entrepreneurship period.

I’ve been told there is this feeling in a lot of entrepreneurship spaces that this is still a “boys’ club” or because it’s most men, women feel less welcome. which can be off-putting. So, my experience has been that there’s work to do to do in entrepreneurship to make sure that it is an environment that is welcoming to everyone.

We’ve seen from research that women make excellent entrepreneurs, and have some natural or socialized traits like being able to make a connection across different disciplines, building relationships, and so on, that are beneficial in that environment.

These kinds of fields are where women could and do excel, but these aren’t fields that they get into as often as we’d like to see. That said, we’re seeing a rise in women in entrepreneurship at SFU since we’ve started to focus more on social innovation and entrepreneurship in all faculties, including arts, health science. We also get a good percentage, higher than the national average, in our commercialization programs. That’s very encouraging and it’s better for the community, bringing in lots of diverse views and skills.

It comes back to culture. If you feel like are welcome and valued, and you can see people to look up to, you’re more likely to come and more likely to stay there.

Jacobsen: If those programs aren’t set up to capture that domain of interest for particular entrepreneurs and innovators, Canada does lose out in the long run in that particular domain because we lose out on those innovators and entrepreneurs. Their talent and skills and interest.

Lubik: Absolutely! It’s a conversation that’s being had incredibly publicly right now. The value of diversity. In a lot of other ways, having those different perspectives is key to innovation because innovation happens when new ideas collide. An excellent way to have high quality innovation is to have a whole bunch of people who don’t think like each other in one room.

So, making sure that you always have a different perspective is incredibly valuable, there is research that says companies with more diverse boards and leadership teams are more successful, whether it’s men and women, or whether it’s people from different backgrounds.

That said, it can also be more challenging. You have to spend more time developing empathy and understanding, and realizing the different interpretations or ideas people give might not be what you’re used to. But at the same time that leads to a much stronger performance It leads to far more innovation.

3. Jacobsen: I believe we both know the quote from Prime Minister Trudeau, where “Diversity is Canada’s Strength.” So, it’s reflected in commentary from the highest office in the land, and as you’ve recently earned a ten-million-dollar gift to look at innovation at large.

Can you describe a little bit about what that’s about and where you’re currently exploring its implementation?

Lubik: It’s a ten-million-dollar philanthropic gift that Charles Chang, the alumni of SFU Beedie who founded Vega, the vegan nutrition company. He gave that to the university specifically around fostering the entrepreneurial mindset in all of our students across SFU.

The core of the idea is to support entrepreneurship education across all of SFU. So the Chang Institute is the interdisciplinary home for entrepreneurship mindset creation. Through the Institute, Beedie, in partnership with all of our other faculties can support entrepreneurship from before students even get here, working with high schools and elementary schools, to bringing together programs and faculty from all disciplines to develop and support programs, to working early stage incubation at Venture Connection and SFU’s social innovation lab and accelerator, RADIUS. The collaborative approach is getting us known as a leader across Canada, and farther.

Because we’re much stronger together. We’ve come together around four core values: interdisciplinary learning, teams, social impact and experiential education: making sure that our students have hands on experience working and making a difference in the real world.

So we make them leave the classroom almost immediately, getting out and meeting people, experts and possible users in the community, learning what is really needed. That’s fantastic.

We also created, with this funding and some other funding for the provincial government a paid team entrepreneurship co-op. Also a very rare program.

This is a competitive award that allows students or student teams who have an idea they want to take forward, the ability to focus on just that for a semester. They each get a ten-thousand-dollar award, co-op credit, space in the early stage incubator and mentorship in bi-weekly mentorship sessions.

Not having to choose between dropping these fantastic ideas, putting them on the back burner, and getting a job, makes perfect sense in an entrepreneurial school. We give scholarships to athletic and academic students so they can focus, why not entrepreneurs?

We have also been doing some research on where entrepreneurship is actually coming from in universities.

The short story is that university entrepreneurship and literature around university entrepreneurship until recently focused on first technology transfer, and by that I mean getting intellectual property and research out of the university out, then commercializing it somehow, often through being licensed to companies to integrate into what they do.

Then there is also a fascination with the rockstar scientist, or this idea that you can build an award-winning scientist into an entrepreneur, which has become interesting as people look at places like Cambridge, MIT and Stanford.

It may make sense there, but it’s an unrealistic model in a lot of places because most university systems are set up to reward academics for publishing research and teaching, not spinning off your work into companies. If someone is working toward a successful career in academia and publishing, then stopping all of that to start a business, isn’t usually going to make it have a sense.

So, more recent literature looked at: “Then where should we place our bets?” One of the answers was “We should put them on science and tech grad students.” They are deeply familiar with research, and sadly, we don’t have enough jobs in academia

All people who get a Ph.D. aren’t necessarily going to be professors. So, they’re going to need those transferable skills. And, ideally, there is a great opportunity for someone to take that knowledge out of the university.

For that reason, Professor Elicia Maine, that SFU researcher who was my mentor, started a program here at SFU called Invention to Innovation, which is also supported by the new institute.

That’s where our grad students, postdocs, and even some professors, as well as industry researchers use their own research in the case studies developed commercialization skills, with guidance from thought leaders, professors and serial entrepreneurs.

In that program, one of the things you also see is this mindset shift from the way you think about what you’re going to do in the lab and how you go through research, and toward how you see opportunities for getting thing into the world. For example, what problems you could solve with this how you deal with relationships, users, etc.

Jumping back to the research, I thought, “Why are researchers stopping at science and tech grads? Is entrepreneurship not coming from other faculties, too?”

To put it another way, “Where is the university entrepreneurship is coming from? Is it being tracked?” University entrepreneurship is often measured through technology transfer, as if you count the spin-off companies taking forward research and you can count the patent licensed to companies.

Traditionally, that’s how you tell it whether you’re successful or not as an entrepreneurial university. Usually with some measure of either revenue is coming back to the university or company-created per research dollar or something to that effect.

That is pretty narrow. The research we’ve been doing more has been looking at where such university entrepreneurship is coming from by looking right across the university. It is coming from absolutely everyone. We found people creating companies in every faculty, including undergrads, faculty and staff. Which just makes sense, opportunities can be found everywhere. And in programs like ours where you to start teaching entrepreneurship early, especially if you teach it in a real world way, then you see students who are serial entrepreneurs before they’ve even graduated.

So, the outcome of that is that if you want an entrepreneurial culture you should be focusing as early in the education as possible, and you should be looking at everyone.

Changing those that mindsets early and make those resources and programs available as soon as students get to school or even through high school partnerships, then, by virtue, no matter what students do after that, grad school, jobs, etc, they’re looking for those real-world applications and opportunities.

These are skills to take them further. So, what that suggests is, maybe, depending on what entrepreneurial university you want to be, your focus might be different. If you want to just focus on getting research out through companies and licenses, that’s one thing. If you want everyone to be able to think like an entrepreneur, that’s more our style. It also means your strategies are going to be different: where you put your resources, how you build your community, how you build your systems. Hence the very inclusive programs and research at the new institute.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/lubik-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor on the Work of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/08

Abstract

Annie Laurie Gaylor is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She discusses: recent victories; notable cases; and women’s rights.

Keywords: Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation, women’s rights.

An Interview with Annie Laurie Gaylor on the Work of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What have been the recent victories?

Annie Laurie Gaylor: We entered the year with a court victory. It was an affirmation by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last weeks, that refused to hear a petition for an en banc review. A decision by the Ninth Circuit, earlier this fall, in our favour, with a very firm victory against school board prayer, a lot of devotions and prayer by Chino Valley school district in California where the prayer and religious ritual made the school board meeting opening seem more like a church, more like a revival.

We had had some complaints. When we filed our lawsuit, with just two or three plaintiffs, we were contacted by dozens of parents, and people in the school district who were upset with the practice, to the point where we had 20 plaintiffs.

This is a school district near Los Angeles. The school board had been taken over basically by a megachurch. We trounced them at the federal level, and then we won at the Ninth Circuit, and then the school board asked a whole panel to review it, and so the victory that we had at the end of the year was that they would not take the petition for rehearing, which affirmed our strong decision in our favour.

The school board had voted to take this case to the Supreme Court but we’re glad to report that at the midterm elections, several the school board members that were part of the megachurch were defeated. There’s going to be a meeting next week about whether they will appeal. We’re hoping that they will drop the case, which has already cost the community over $200,000. [Postscript: The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the school board appeal and this case is a final victory.]

Jacobsen: Holy smokes.

Gaylor: For our costs. That doesn’t include their costs. It doesn’t include our extra-legal costs for the en banc review petition. That was very expensive even before that we had another victory earlier in December.

The other victory that we had was at the end of the year. We thought we were ending already on a very high note. An appeals court in West Virginia sided with us over a continuation of a very strong lawsuit against a bible class in the schools in Mercer County, West Virginia. This was where very small children, starting at first grade, were being indoctrinated in a fundamentalist Bible curriculum.

Among the curriculum items was something that said to the children, “Imagine how much fun Adam and Eve must have had sliding down the neck of a brontosaurus in the garden of Eden,” so it was creationist as well as fundamentalist. Just appalling.

When we filed the lawsuit, they suspended the classes, but then they refused to put anything in writing that they wouldn’t bring the classes back. Yet, when we continued our lawsuit, they said that our plaintiff did not have standing to sue, so although we had a victory, we had stopped the classes, we were very concerned that they could bring them back. We were concerned, also, with the legal standing that our plaintiff hadn’t been injured.

So, we appealed that to the federal Appeals Court and they strongly agreed with US, and the plaintiff who the school district said didn’t have the right to sue. She was a mother who had had to pull her child out of the school district and go to a different district in order to avoid the religious classes, and there had already been regular bullying that the child had received until she made that decision.

There was a CBS news program, a national program, about it, where they were interviewing a little girl who was talking about how bad it wasif children didn’t take the class. It was obvious what a bad environment this was and how wrong it was. Religion in schools builds walls between children and it’s wrong to proselytize other people’s children in a public-school district.

That case goes back to the federal court, where we hope that we’ll get the school district to go on record that they will not resume these classes.

2. Jacobsen: Are there any other cases that either come to mind or should be noted for the record?

Gaylor: Yes. We won a unanimous decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court in our favour this past year, saying the taxpayer money couldn’t be raided to repair houses of worship. This was a case in the state court in New Jersey. We had lost at the county level, and then it got appealed immediately to the state supreme court, and every single one of them agreed with us. This was where hundreds of thousands of dollars had been used to repair ongoing houses of worship. It was very bad use of taxpayer money.

That’s where the county that we’re suing had appealed to the US Supreme Court. We were represented by Erwin Chemerinsky, who is one of the most distinguished law professors in the United States. We’re very pleased to have him on our side, and pleased that this spring the Supreme Court turned back the appeal.

This had been closely watched for various reasons, because there was a bad decision by the Supreme Court negating state constitutional language barring tax funds going to churches. Our case hinged on the very strict language in the New Jersey state’s constitution, and we’re delighted our side has prevailed.

We have yet another victory at the Appeals Court in the Eleventh Circuit, which is in Atlanta, in a case involving a very large cross in a city park in Pensacola, Florida. We won that last year at the district level, and then we won it at the appeals court level this year, but they were very begrudging decisions in which the judges outright said that they only were ruling in our favour because the precedent forced them to.

Then they wanted the supreme court to overturn precedent against Christian crosses on government property. So, this is a little bit alarming. We are seeing an emboldened judiciary, that the religious right on the judiciary, of course, are emboldened and this is even before we had the latest appointment to the US Supreme Court, which is given the religious right a majority.

It’s very odd. We’re seeing pages and pages where they’re ruling in our favour, and then they’re saying why they wish they didn’t have to. The Appeals Court did that, the Eleventh Circuit did that. The other side, Pensacola with aid of a Christian legal group, is asking the Supreme Court to take our case, but nothing’s happened yet. They haven’t definitively said no, and this could go on for quite a while. We’re watching that one carefully.

That’s quite a concern because we don’t have a supreme court that we think is very friendly right now, but we do think these cases will not be heard by the Supreme Court. We think we will hold onto these rights now.

This year we won at the appeals court level in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where they have a cross on the city seal, and then the city seal is used on the flag at the airport. It’s used on letterhead and stationery. It’s very ubiquitous in the county. It’s not just a seal that nobody sees. It has a cross in the middle of it. We’ve won that case.

We won it at the appeals level, and then, when the Supreme Court accepted a different case, not our case, a cross case, it’s been put on hold. The other side is asking the Supreme Court to do something and it’s all just in limbo right now. That case is the Bladensburg case in Virginia. That’s the case by the American Humanist Association, where it’s a large cross that was termed a war memorial. It used to be on private property.

That case is going to be decided by the Supreme Court. FFRF briefed it with several other groups. We have a pro bono representation by a law firm, which we’re very pleased about, that will be writing the brief for us. That case will have a lot of impact for us.

We also won a federal court ruling in 2018 that we were very proud of, which was that Governor Abbott of Texas was found to have violated our rights when he censored our Bill of Rights “nativity display” that we put up in the capitol there in Texas, after they allowed a Christian nativity display to go up. We had a proper sponsorship by a state representative. We had members who wanted it there, and Abbott called it obscene.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it shows some of the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty. It’s a cartoon. It’s whimsical. They’re gazing adoringly at a manger, which has in it the Bill of Rights. It’s the nativity of the Bill of Rights, which was adopted on December 15th, 1791, so we think that’s appropriate to put in a governmental building, whereas we don’t think Christian crosses are. But why not celebrate the Bill of Rights, which defends all of our rights?

Governor Abbott, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, termed that “obscene” and ordered it removed. In June, we won a firm ruling in our favour. Abbott, of course, is appealing this to the Fifth Circuit. It is a free speech case, and so we think we will win because we think that it’s very clear that he has discriminated. He’s shown preference for one kind of speech over another.

We have a lot of new litigation, as well, a lot of interesting litigation.

One loss that we did have was Barker v. Conroy. That’s where Dan Barker, who is co-president with me at FFRF and is a former minister, was invited by his state Representative, his US Representative, Mark Pocan to give the invocation to be a guest chaplain, they call it, before Congress, to open the house.

He was turned down. He was treated very badly by Patrick Conroy, who was the House Chaplain, who’s the Roman Catholic priest, and he kept putting stumbling blocks in the way of the request. Dan met a lot of these de facto requirements. He does have a good ordination. He was a minister. Conroy said, “You wouldn’t be able to invoke a higher power.” Dan wrote an invocation that invoked the higher power of “We the People” in The Constitution, and Conroy discriminated against him.

We sued and we lost. It’s complicated to sue Congress. We appealed to the DC Circuit. Unfortunately, the DC Appeals Court ruled against us this spring. In any case, we think it’s very important to point out how discriminatory it is that in what’s called the People’s House, an atheist cannot give the opening remarks.

This Chaplain is paid a lot of money, but his only duty is to deliver prayers, but 40% of the prayers every year are delivered by guest chaplains. It has never been done by an “out” atheist, but there have been others done by people who were not ministers and of minority religions. It certainly is a discriminatory situation against atheists and nonbelievers in the United States.

We had been winning our lawsuit against the IRS, wherein ministers of the gospel are given a housing allowance, can be paid through a housing allowance that can be deducted from their taxable income. This is a unique situation, where if you’re a minister, say your salary is $60,000, they can say $20,000 of that is for your housing expenses, so you’ll only be taxed on $40,000.

It’s an enormous benefit because, of course, tax-free dollars go a lot further, so it also benefits the churches. They don’t have to pay them as high a salary. It’s to reward ministers of the gospel for fighting godlessness, according to the Bill’s sponsor in the 1950s.

We’ve tried to fight these various ways. We’re on our fourth permutation. FFRF now pays Dan and me with a housing allowance that we are not able to claim. We asked for a refund. We weren’t given it. That gave us standing to sue. We won at a district level. We won before, but it got thrown out.

Unfortunately, this spring the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, a not very favourable panel, ruled against us. We’ve been on a winning the streak, but when you count heads, or you look at the Republican versus Democratic majorities on appeals courts, it’s getting to be very ticklish to go to court.

3. Jacobsen: If we also look at what are called David versus Goliath situations post-2016 election results, how are women’s rights, especially secular women, potentially under continual threat with that emboldened fundamentalism that you were talking about before?

Gaylor: There’s no question that women’s reproductive rights are in jeopardy in the United States. Nothing’s going to happen immediately, but we saw that an anti-abortion referendum, for example, passed in November in Alabama. We see legislatures in conservative states passing anti-abortion legislation and saying outright that these are intended to go to the Supreme Court.

We’ve managed to hold firm to most of Roe. v Wade this way, but there’s no question that they are gunning for Roe v. Wade, and that we are now in a situation where the swing vote is going to a very conservative person, and we’re hoping that Chief Justice Roberts will come forward for us, because Kavanaugh was replacing Kennedy, who was firmly pro-choice. He wasn’t that great a swing vote. He didn’t usually swing the right way, but he had held firm on abortion rights. We do not expect that to be true for Kavanaugh.

But we also don’t think that anything’s going to happen immediately. There’s a lot of speculation that Supreme Court Justice Roberts is going to try to make sure that the court doesn’t take a lot of controversial cases right away, following that very controversial hearing. Of course, we are sustained by the midterm elections.

It was very exciting to see our first two Native American women, very exciting to see a much higher percentage of African American women, all the women, much more of a cross-section of America in the US House than we’ve ever had before, and a lot of that a reaction to Trump and Kavanaugh. They’re going to be fighting very hard for our rights. I was very thrilled to see it.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Co-President, Freedom From Religion Foundation.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/annie-laurie-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Md. Sazzadul Hoque on Personal Journey

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/08

Abstract

Md. Sazzadul Hoque is the Founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh. He discusses: early life; tenets and beliefs of Islam; reaction of family to non-belief; story now; media coverage; founding the Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh; overarching purpose; planned developmental stages of the council; councils; general public support; expected difficulties and risks; prominent ex-Muslims; and learning more.

Keywords: Bangladesh, blogger, Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh, human rights, Md. Sazzadul Hoque.

An Interview with Md. Sazzadul Hoque on Personal Journey[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

Md. Sazzadul Hoque is an exiled Bangladeshi secularist blogger, human rights activist, and atheist activist. His writing covers a wide range of issues, including religious superstition, critical thinking, feminism, gender equality, homosexuality, and female empowerment. He’s protested against blogger killings and past/present atrocities against Bangladeshi minorities by the dominant Muslim political establishment. He’s also written about government-sponsored abductions and the squashing of free speech; the systematic corruption in everyday life of Bangladeshis; and the denial of the pursuit of happiness.

In 2017, after receiving numerous threats, he was forced to leave Bangladesh out of safety concerns.

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was early life like for you?

Md. Sazzadul Hoque: I grew up in a conservative religious inclined family and also the place where we used to live is one of the centers of Bangladesh fundamentalism historically. Growing up, I had an insatiable quest for knowledge always asked, why this or why that. When I was in 8th grade I was lucky to have a teacher, with whom I argued a lot about theology and the existence of God, it was He who triggered the fire in my head. Since then I could not simply keep my little mouth shut. I have been talking and running from being decapitation by the Islamist.

2. Jacobsen: How did you come to question the tenets and beliefs of Islam?

Hoque: Primarily when I was able to empathize with the minority of Bangladesh. That’s how these people are treated by a fellow human being just because they simply believe something else.

3. Jacobsen: What was the reaction of family to this non-belief?

Hoque: Violent rejection, for which I had to flee my home country. Now I do not have any communication with my immediate and distant family member or my friends.

4. Jacobsen: What has been the story on the run now? What countries have you been to now?

Hoque: To run has been bittersweet adventure, an uphill learning curve, I travel to India and Nepal so far.

5. Jacobsen: Who else has interviewed you? What publications have documented the story of yours?

Hoque: I was interviewed by

6. Jacobsen: What triggered the need to found the Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh?

Hoque: There is no unified platform for ex-Muslim in Bangladesh.

7. Jacobsen: What is the overarching purpose of Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh?

Hoque: To reach the undeveloped mind who needs a little nourishment like I have received in the past.

8. Jacobsen: What will be the planned developmental stages of Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh?

Hoque: Create information that is easily accessible to the people of Bangladesh in their own native language. And to create a support system and network of people who is willing to lend their hand when one is in dire need.

9. Jacobsen: How can other councils help it?

Hoque: Recognition, and help with material which they already have posted can be translated into Bangla and technical knowledge transfer so we can effectively work to propagate information we with people to see.

10. Jacobsen: How can the general public support Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh?

Hoque: Unless social, political view changes general public will never openly support such council, but their support would be silent, they would be reading, they will be watching, the intent of this council is to trigger General people mind to ask questions. It is that question that would lead them to enlightenment.

11. Jacobsen: What will be the expected difficulties and risks of it?

Hoque: The difficulties are to stay alive on Facebook, the way Islamist is organizing their attack on organization for digital association is unprecedented, the difficulties are to reach the general masses, the difficulties become time tested,

12. Jacobsen: Who are prominent ex-Muslims to read and listen to now?

Hoque: There are many out there, Taslima Nasrin, Asif Mohiuddin, Susupto Pathok.

13. Jacobsen: How can others learn more about the story of you?

Hoque: Not sure how but I think it depends on my writing. If I can continue to write and write well that measure up to the test of the readers, then perhaps they will tell their friends and that is how it may reach to others.

14. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Sazza.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Council of Ex-Muslims of Bangladesh.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hoque; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sadia Hameed on Developments for Ex-Muslims in Britain (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01

Abstract

Sadia Hameed is a Spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She discusses: asylum seeker screening and key issues; English and language issues; assistance within and across organizations; women and men coming to CEMB; and handling of male and female cases by the British authorities.

Keywords: Britain, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Ex-Muslims, Islam, Sadia Hameed.

An Interview with Sadia Hameed on Developments for Ex-Muslims in Britain: Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of the Spring of 2019, what have been some of the more prominent initiatives that are a continuation of initiatives that have been ongoing before? What have been some of the outcomes?

Sadia Hameed: One of the things that the CEMB has done is work with refugees and asylum seekers and working in an advocacy capacity. People are wanting help all over the world to get in touch with us.

If they are coming into the countries, it is making sure that they are safe and writing letters of support for their asylum, letters of support for their cases. That is grown quite substantially in the last couple of years.

When I first joined the CEMB, we were working on 300 cases per month. Now, we work on 600 cases per month. Generally, our workload is 50% international and 50% national.

So, my asylum seeker caseload has doubled in the last two years as well. We are doing more advocacy work as well. We are doing more campaigning around the asylum issue as well.

The issue of Home Office treatment of asylum seekers. That has grown quite substantially as well.

2. Jacobsen: In terms of the asylum seekers as well, what is the screening process for them coming to you? What are their key issues?

Hameed: So, we do not have an official screening process because we do not need one. When someone has been in touch with us internationally, largely, we take this at face value. There is no one.

Thankfully, we have no one who wants to cause us harm from the international community. Nationally, we have a couple of basic screen questions. They are more questions to assess what the support needs are.

Through that, if there is not anyone that is not genuine, this helps generally sift those out as well. We ask them about how they became atheists and what made them become atheists. The basic questions around that and what their family situation is like.

It is less of a vetting process and more of a risk assessment to find out what their needs are. That they are safe. It is trying to find out what they are needs are. If it is an issue that we can meet it, we can meet their needs. But if we cannot, then what additional services can help them.

3. Jacobsen: For those, does the English language as a lingua franca become an issue for them?

Hameed: Not always, largely, the people who get in touch with us speak English. On the occasion that someone emails in another language, we have Google translate and bilingual or trilingual staff.

If we do have any issues, then we can outsource interpreters for that. But largely, I would say it does not happen. Maybe, 1% of my caseload has this happen.

4. Jacobsen: If you are looking at the reasons for coming to CEMB rather than other organizations, if they are looking for asylum or assistance, why CEMB? What have been some of the feedback based on some of their stories?

Hameed: I have never asked why someone went to CEMB and not another organization. It would not seem like a question to ask someone when they are asking you for help.

I would assume it is because we are quite visibly people who have left Islam specifically. Also, there are atheist, secularist, and humanist organizations out there. But we focus on people who have left Islam specifically. We challenge Islamic states like Iran.

Religion and religious institutions have been, unfortunately, simply used to making interfaith stuff rather than continuing the stuff for specifically atheists. There is a stigma for atheists. It seems like we are going backwards. There always has been a stigma for atheists.

Those organizations wanting to distance themselves from atheism and apostasy. Apostasy not so much, they can come out in apostasy – they feel, but do not find the word helpful.

To me, as an atheist, I find this as a huge betrayal of the atheists who come to us. Because those atheists who get the support of their loved ones on the grounds that they believe what their family members believe.

If the nonbelieving community all the sudden says, “We’re not atheists. It is a dirty label,” they are being re-victimized, essentially. They are being told once again, as they have been told all their lives.

That they are not believing exactly as what they believe; that something is wrong with them. It is confirmed again, essentially, when the nonbelieving community also does that. Who cares how people want to identify?

If they want to identify as atheist, that is their fucking right. I think it is just as disgusting when a lot of nonbelieving organizations are proselytizing. I know a lot of atheists who want to turn the entire world atheist.

It is not your problem. It is not your job. You could have behaved badly as a religious or a nonreligious person. It is allowing anybody to identify how ever they want whether belief or nonbelief.

If they call themselves an atheist, I think it is a huge betrayal if organizations call atheist a dirty word. You should use an alternative label. That must change. That must change right now.

Because, right now, atheists are still being killed around the world.

5. Jacobsen: Are more men or women coming to you? Why?

Hameed: Largely, we have more men. It is growing more in terms of the females coming to our service. We have done everything that we can to make it more accessible for female atheists.

When a few years ago, it was largely men. Because it is easier. When women become atheists in the Muslim community, they are visibly distancing themselves. They start challenging the whole modesty culture.

Their appearance; their personality, shifts. For men, it is always easier. It always has been easier for them. They are visibly becoming different. A man and a woman who both pretend to pray or not pray. They lie to their families saying, “We are praying.”

Women change their attire. Their behaviour changes. The basic things that change for them. It is much, much harder for them. It incurs a backlash, which it would not do for the men. There is a saying. After marriage, the men come back into line.

So, they must be patient with the men, but they are not patient when it comes to the women. Women are a commodity in our community. The modest, quiet, meek, virgin as it were, is more sellable.

You must think about her marriage. If she is too loud, too abrupt, too brash, she is not going to get married. There is no hope if she has left Islam. Although, we do have one of those key issues that ex-Muslims in Britain face.

It is not so easy to kill an ex-Muslim in Britain. I am not saying that it has not happened. We have families secretly killing their kids. We have honour killings. It happens, but rarely in comparison to Pakistan or Afghanistan, or Iraq or Iran, where the state condones the murder of apostates.

It gives small protection. In Britain, we see forced marriages to bring women back in line – men too, but mostly women. We see statistics with the male-female ratio as the same with a 1% fluctuation.

We see 80% more women and 20% men. You can see that it is a larger number of men. But for our cases, forced marriage, it is a huge, huge, huge risk, which then entails daily rape. If you have corrective rape, too, in one instance, it is raping girls to bring them back to faith and bring them back into line.

I have a case in Pakistan; I am working on where the dad tried to rape his daughter to bring her back in line. The brother had to rescue her. The brother had to escape the house with her three sisters. The dad and family are hunting them like dogs.

Then we see corrective rape in the LGBT cases, largely lesbian cases. Obviously, there are some gay cases as well. There are cases of raping lesbians to make them straight again. This is happening again right in Britain.

6. Jacobsen: How are the authorities in Britain handling the male cases and the female cases? What are the consequences in the differential if there is one?

Hameed: It is a bit of a lottery. It depends entirely on where you are in the country. If you are in London, you will get the same shit response. They will give the same shitty response every time. “We haven’t got the resources. We haven’t got the workforce.”

Who does not? I am working on my own time. I get calls 2, 3, or 4 in a night when somebody needs help. But that is not a good enough excuse anymore. Nobody has the money or the resources. The failing of victims. Other excuses are about not enough training, etc.

In one part of the country with a lot of cases, they do not have the workforce or the resources. It depends on the willingness on the constabulary to deal with it. Outside of London, I have spent the last 10 years working with the police to understand some of the cases that we work with.

Their response is much, much better. However, when you focus on some place like London, it is its own standalone place. It is like its own country. Nobody can compare themselves to it.

I had a case last year. An ex-Muslim told me that a Muslim attendant said, “I will kill you.” The police said, “He hasn’t killed him yet. There is no crime yet. There is nothing that we can do.” He was a male.

In terms of male-female response, again, it is the same. It depends on the constabulary and the willingness to learn. Some constabulary knows this is an issue in their part of the country. But there is not a willingness to learn.

You point out the mistakes. But they get defensive; that is not the time to become defensive. How many more of our members need to be killed before they take us seriously? It is an issue.

Most of our ex-Muslims face honour crimes. It could be forced marriage, honour crimes, and honour-based depression. It has not gotten to abuse. But they know that they have instilled enough fear and terror in their kids; they know that they will not kick back.

Then they know that they are not a problem. We have done all of that. However, in cases of honour killings with honour killings painted as not existing, it is an apostasy issue. One of my female clients contacted an organization focusing on honour-based violence, and so on.

They become the famous face of it in the UK. However, the moment that she mentioned apostasy. She ran away from home to make a call and got home before anybody noticed. The woman on the phone said, “Parents and children have disagreements all of the time. It is best to go back home and try harder.”

If this is the police response, how is it that organizations that focus on honour crimes do not understand these issues? If we put apostasy to one side for one moment, if you look at the number one cause for honour-based crimes and honour violence in the UK, it is ideological differences between parent and children: how they believe, what they believe, or a different way to live one’s life.

We have seen this in the country. One girl was murdered wearing jeans and a t-shirt and was living a more Western style of life. Those who were Pakistani Muslims. This problem is that apostasy fits into that category.

That’s why maybe all of our cases have this honour-based violence and aggression, and problem; however, people are willing to turn a blind eye when it comes to ex-Muslims when it comes to apostates and ex-Muslims because they do not want the tough challenge of challenging religion and the religious community.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hameed-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sheryl Fink on Canadian Wildlife Campaigns and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01

Abstract

Sheryl Fink is the Director of Canadian Wildlife Campaigns for IFAW – International Fund for Animal Welfare. She discusses: family background; building a specialization and a reputation; pivotal moments regarding seal hunts; an ethic around cruelty to non-human animals; important collaborations; blunt force trauma; the developmental trajectory of seals; clubbings gone wrong; ignoring an issue as a culture; noteworthy cruelties; impacts of seals; and appeal to reason rather than pity.

Keywords: Canada, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Sheryl Fink.

An Interview with Sheryl Fink on Canadian Wildlife Campaigns and the International Fund for Animal Welfare: Director, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, IFAW (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us start from the top to provide some background for the audience. What is some personal or familial background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and so on?

Sheryl Fink: Personal stuff, I do not even know my culture. I am a cishet white girl [Laughing]. I live in Ontario. I did not know what I wanted to be growing up. I wanted to help animals at the time.

I thought the only way to do that was to be a veterinarian or work at the zoo. I realized at university that I could get into wildlife biology. I did that. I did an undergraduate at the University of Guelph. I did not really know what I want to do. I wanted to work for the government of natural resources or something.

It did not work out that way. I found IFAW. I describe myself as an animal wildlife advocate now. We try to make better policies and better legislation for animals and wildlife around the world.

2. Jacobsen: In term of your own focus in Canada, how are you building a reputation in addition to a specialization in work within Canada?

Fink: IFAW was founded in Canada in 1969. It was started by one man named Brian Davies who was with the New Brunswick SPCA. He went out to the ice flows on the East Coast. He saw the seal hunt there.

He was brought by the government of Canada to see how the hunt could be more humane. After seeing the hunt, he saw that the hunt could never be humane. He donated his life to stopping it. Our first campaign was 50 years ago with it.

We are still fighting the fight in Canada today and others too. We have expanded in Canada. We are working to protect the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

3. Jacobsen: What was a pivotal moment in terms of seal hunts becoming a danger to the populations in general, especially in terms of simply unreasonable amounts of seal hunting?

Fink: Seal hunts are interesting in Canada. They have hunted seals off the East Coast for hundreds of years back to the 1700s and 1800s for the blubber rendered down into blubber and then sent to Europe to fuel lights and make all sorts of products.

But with the advent of electricity, the demand for seal blubber dropped, obviously. It shifted in the early 1900s to a hunt for fur. The Norwegian companies primarily run it. So, the hunt continued for fur up until the 80s when the world became aware of what was happening on the East Coast of Canada with the images of seal cubs being clubbed and slaughtered on the ice in front of their mothers and the mothers chasing the skinned carcass of the seal cub as the hunters dragged it away.

These images quickly made their way across the world through television and journals. The seal hunt was one of the first animal welfare issues that took the international stage, which is interesting.

Because of the public outcry and groups like IFAW, Europe banned the import of white coat seal products in 1983. That had the effect of almost ending the hunt here in Canada. Canada stopped hunting white coats. They stopped the large vessel hunt for seals.

The hunt pretty much died down to a few tens of thousands of animals each year. The pivotal moment – and the only reason we have the seal hunt now is because of the Liberal Government and Brian Tobin – was the Cod fisheries around 1992. Tens of thousands of fishers being put out of work. Brian Tobin promised the moratorium on the cd fisher would be 2 years.

Then it was like 20-25 years until we can fish these areas again. A politician does not want to hear that or deliver that message; that you are going to be out of a job for 20 years. But 2 years came and went, and the cod stocks had not recovered. He stood up and blamed seals.

He literally stood up and said, “There is one player in fish stocks. His first name is harp. His second name is seal.” Not taking any responsibility for mismanagement or overfishing, it was the seals.

He increased the quota for seals. He started putting tens of millions of dollars into the seal hunt to have seal products, developing marketing campaigns for seal products. They started paying individual sealers a per pound subsidy for meat that was landed.

That was what reinvigorated the seal hunt in the 1990s. It brought it back up. It had the highest quota of seals in the world, 400,000 seals. 400,000 seal pups could be killed every now. It reinvigorated the seal hunts to levels that had not been seen before. In 2009, the EU banned seal products once again. This time banning products from all seals, not just white coat seals.

This brought the seal hunt number down to tens of thousands. We are working again today to bring it lower than that. We are at a position in which there is no need to be killing seals for their fur to make luxury products. It is not a hunt for meat or sustenance.

It is to make purses, coats, and mittens. Those sorts of things.

4. Jacobsen: What about an ethic around the cruelty down to animals? How does this play into living in an age of less innocence, especially as per the note about the documentation, the video documentation, of the clubbings? How does an ethic of reduced cruelty to animals and seals play into some of the work of IFAW and others?

Fink: The seal hunt, I have been part of this for 12 years and witnessed this firsthand. Even if you are in the position of thinking that it is okay to eat and use animals, I think most people would agree that it needs to be done in the most humane way possible if you want to kill another creature.

It should be for a good purpose. I do not think purses and multi-thousand-dollar coats are good examples. Some will say, “It is humane. It is well-regulated.” Being there, it is not. I have seen some horrible disrespect for the lives of these animals.

People chasing them and swinging their clubs like a bat, tossing them on the ice. People hooking animals through the face with a steel hook while they are still alive and conscious. They are barking and biting at the hook trying to defend themselves.

To hook an animal and haul it onto a boat while it is alive and conscious, it is one of the most horrible things that you can ever view. I do not think that is a situation that could be called human, necessary, or justified in any way.

5. Jacobsen: What are some important collaborations that may be necessary to reduce the amount of clubbings, killings, and post-hoc justifications given for the violence against seals in Canada at least?

Fink: The thing that has been most successful in our experience is reducing the demand for seal products and closing the markets for seal products. A lot of people are not aware of where the big seal products or seal products come from; they are not aware of the suffering going into the product.

Getting people to think about where their clothing comes from, where that fur comes from, how was it obtained? Once they realize that, once they see that, once they are faced with the video footage, it is compelling. I think helps to pack a lot of people to change their position on wearing fur.

6. Jacobsen: As a biologist, what does, as one example, blunt force trauma from clubbing to various parts of a seal’s body do to it?

Fink: It is horrible. By law, they are supposed to club the animal on the skull. These are very young animals. The skulls are not completely formed yet. It is a relatively soft thing. In a perfect world or a laboratory setting, if you are clubbing the skull of an animal, crushing both hemispheres of the brain, the death could be relatively quick and painless.

What we see on the ice, this does not happen. Because you are not in a laboratory setting; you are chasing an animal fleeing on the ice with a bat. It is hard to get a clean or accurate blow. We see seals beaten all over their body with this bat or a pick. It is a stick with a spiked metal end on it.

It is horrible. Seals are being bashed alive. They are not being killed quickly and cleanly, as the government would have you believe. It is a horrible thing to watch.

7. Jacobsen: What is the developmental trajectory of the seals in question here? What timeline does it take for them to become adults? What is a relative estimate at to when their skulls, for instance, in an ideal situation of this form, are being clubbed in, to crush the hemispheres?

Fink: That is a good question. Harp seals live to 20 to 25 years of age and are sexually mature at around 5 or 6 years of age. It is a long-lived species. The adults give birth to one pup per year. When the pups are born, they are born with this white, fluffy coat that people are familiar with.

They have the coat for 2 weeks after they are born and nurse with their mother. After 2 weeks, the mothers will leave the pups and leave off to mate with the males for the next season. Currently, the pups are not feeding. They are lying there and feeding off their blubber supplies from the mother.

This is a time when the seal hunt opens. They are 2-3 weeks old. They have been abandoned by their mothers. They are trying to shed their coat. A new silvery coat will come in. That is why the hunters get them currently. It is fresh and new fur. It has not been scarred by life in the water.

The pups are helpless. They have not learned to swim yet. They are lying on the ice when they were born. That makes it easy for the hunters to go out and kill the seals in a brief period. I get criticized a lot for calling them baby seals.

The government will say, “We don’t kill baby seals anymore.” They do not kill the white coat seals anymore, during the first 2 weeks of life, but 98% of the animals are killed between 3 week and 3 months of age. For an animal that is not sexually mature until 5 or 6, I would say very much that they are baby seals.

8. Jacobsen: In a non-laboratory setting, in other words, in the real-world setting in which the clubbings are taking place with the bat or the bat with spikes, what are some things that can go wrong in terms of people thinking they’re working within the bounds of the law but also enacting violence against harp seals or other seals?

Fink: The thing is that these are mostly within the bounds of the law. Sealers can go out and club seals in this way. There are two big causes of the problems and why this cannot be conducted humanely and why mane veterinarian experts say that it cannot be done humanely.

One is the competitive nature of the hunt. It is not about a hunt for food or feeding family. It is about getting as many pelts as quickly as possible before the weather turns bad, before the seals learn to swim and get to the water and are hard to find, before the quota is reached some years and the hunt is turned down.

It is basically getting in, kill as much as you can, and then get out. Killing methods are not a priority and the welfare is not a priority, the main purpose is profit-making. That is why we see a lot of killing. It is about killing quickly rather than properly.

The second thing that we see is because for the weather conditions here with a boat or a slippery ice flow. In the case of clubbing, you are on a slippery ice flow with an animal that is panicked and trying to get away while trying to get at it with a club.

They also shoot seals in some circumstances. In which case, you are trying to shoot an animal from a moving boat with a moving animal, on a moving ice flow, trying to get a shot that will kill quickly. It is very, very difficult. We see animals shot and left to suffer, trying to escape again, until the hunter gets another shot, or the sealer needs to club the seal after getting off the boat. Then it is finally killed.

You cannot control many variables. There are many things out there. Those combine to make for a horrible experience on the ice.

9. Jacobsen: Does the culture consciously ignore this issue or simply not have it brought to their attention in a proper way?

Fink: People want things to be done humanely. They do not want to believe things are being done cruelly. They want to believe they are being done quickly and humanely. That is part of it. That is why it was important for IFAW to go, get the footage, and show what is going on out there.

Another part of it. There is still a feeling that seals are different. They are considered fish under the law. There is this feeling seals are fish. It had to do with Easter. It goes back to a Pope declaring seals are fish, so Catholics could eat them on Good Friday. It is called a “Seal Fishery.”

Many people do not recognize the fact that these are sentient animals. They are mammals [Laughing]. It is interesting. You see how fishers feel about whales and how they feel about seals. Whales are given more respect. Seals are treated as another fish that should be fished.

10. Jacobsen: Have there been any noteworthy cases of obscene levels of cruelty to any of the seal species?

Fink: Yes. A lot of it before my time. I will speak to it. I have seen animals hooked through the face while alive. We filmed a sealer’s boat that had an animal pup in the bottom of the boat. It was sliced open from the belly to its throat, to its tail. It was still alive. It was breathing.

It was clenching its fore flippers. It was gasping for air. The sealers, I do not understand. They could see the animal was alive in their boat. They were not doing anything about it. They were going along and shooting more animals

We have come across stockpiles of seal carcass on the ice. This used to happen a lot while we were there. There would be on there still alive, gasping, trying to breathe, crying out. They just left it there.

There is some horrible stuff that you find out there.

11. Jacobsen: Some individuals in popular culture or the general citizenry in some sub-cultures. They may say, “Do not appeal to my pity. Do not appeal to my emotions. I want to know the facts.” Thus, I ask you. What are the facts in terms of the extent of the issue around seal populations and the impacts on the ecosystem, on other species, and potentially on human beings as well?

Fink: In terms of the population, I think it is interesting. We hear a lot of fishers say that there are too many seals. We need to kill them. They are eating too many fish. If you want to talk about the facts, the government scientists have been looking at this for three or four decades now.

There is no suggestion, no scientific suggestion, or evidence that there are too many seals. We are seeing a recovery of seal populations to the pre-exploitation levels before humans drastically overexploited them.

Almost everyone alive today, we have never lived with healthy abundant populations of marine mammals on any of our coast because we have overexploited them for so long. So, it is easy to look out and say, “There are more seals than when I was a kid.”

Of course, they were overexploited in the 60s and 70s. 70% of the population was depleted. The populations are in recovery. There is nothing o suggest that there is too many or the ecosystem is in balance or that we need to kill seals to maintain some mythical balance in nature.

As far as the facts go and as far as science goes, we are returning to a normal and healthy ecosystem. I think that if we can manage our activities and make sure that we leave enough fish for the other creatures in the ocean rather than keeping them all for ourselves.

Nature has a way of finding its own resilience and a way to maintain.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Director, Canadian Wildlife Campaigns, IFAW.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/fink-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

Dark Energy

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: February 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 11

Issue Numbering: 2

Section: B

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 27

Formal Sub-Theme: None.

Individual Publication Date: February 15, 2023

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2023

Author(s): Richard May/May-Tzu

Author(s) Bio: Richard May (“May-Tzu”/“MayTzu”/“Mayzi”) is a Member of the Mega Society based on a qualifying score on the Mega Test (before 1995) prior to the compromise of the Mega Test and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. In self-description, May states: “Not even forgotten in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I’m an Amish yuppie, born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above suburban Boston. I’ve done occasional consulting and frequent Sisyphean shlepping. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. Occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon the Earth. An ailurophile and a cerebrotonic ectomorph, I write for beings which do not, and never will, exist — writings for no one. I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities/philosophy, and U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to extraterrestrials. I’m a member of the Mega Society, the Omega Society and formerly of Mensa. I’m the founder of the Exa Society, the transfinite Aleph-3 Society and of the renowned Laputans Manqué. I’m a biographee in Who’s Who in the Brane World. My interests include the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings with the capacity to complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. In a moment of presence to myself in inner silence, when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am. You can meet me if you go to an empty room.” Some other resources include Stains Upon the Silence: something for no one, McGinnis Genealogy of Crown Point, New York: Hiram Porter McGinnis, Swines List, Solipsist Soliloquies, Board Game, Lulu blog, Memoir of a Non-Irish Non-Jew, and May-Tzu’s posterous.

Word Count: 7

Image Credit: Richard May

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

*Excerpt from Stains Upon the Silence.*

Abstract

A short piece by May.

Keywords: dark energy, May-Tzu, Richard May.

Dark Energy

The universe is just a rounding error.

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11^th Edition): May R. Dark Energy. February 2023; 11(2). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy

American Psychological Association (APA 7^th Edition): May, R. (2023, February 15). Dark Energy. In-Sight Publishing. 11(2). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy.

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): MAY, R. Dark Energy. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 11, n. 2, 2023.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17^th Edition): May, Richard. 2023. “Dark Energy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 2 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17^th Edition): May, R “Dark Energy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 2 (February 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy.

Harvard: May, R. (2023) ‘Dark Energy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 11(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy>.

Harvard (Australian): May, R 2023, ‘Dark Energy’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9^thEdition): May, Richard. “Dark Energy.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.11, no. 2, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Richard M. Dark Energy [Internet]. 2023 Feb; 11(2). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/dark-energy

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

2023-02-15

Physical Laws as Sampling Error

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: February 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 11

Issue Numbering: 2

Section: B

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 27

Formal Sub-Theme: None.

Individual Publication Date: February 15, 2023

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2023

Author(s): Richard May/May-Tzu

Word Count: 145

Image Credit: Richard May.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

*Excerpt from Stains Upon the Silence.*

Abstract

A nuanced presentation of intuitions formalized into reasoning by Richard May with the incorporation, naturally, of concepts from physics and mathematics.

Keywords: constants, cosmos, Kurt Goedel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, May-Tzu, n-dimensional matrix, physical reality, Richard May, spatio-temporal scale.

Physical Laws as Sampling Error

There is no fundamental ordered physical reality. So-called “constants” are actually variables with a very slow rate of change at the level of scale of the “observer.” As in an infinite n-dimensional matrix of random numbers, every possible ordered series of numbers occurs somewhere by chance alone, there are pockets or subsets of apparent order within the multiverse at certain levels of scale. “Physical laws” and “observers,” themselves, are merely sampling errors within random subsets of data values at a particular level of spatio-temporal scale. This hypothesis cannot be disconfirmed within a finite interval of “time” at any level of scale. Propositions within “physics” cannot ultimately be disconfirmed, as there are propositions within a mathematical system that are true but cannot be proven, a la Kurt Goedel. Cosmos is chaos.

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11^th Edition): May R. Physical Laws as Sampling Error. February 2023; 11(2). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws

American Psychological Association (APA 7^th Edition): May, R. (2023, February 15). Physical Laws as Sampling Error. In-Sight Publishing. 11(2). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws.

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): MAY, R. Physical Laws as Sampling Error. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 11, n. 2, 2023.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17^th Edition): May, Richard. 2023. “Physical Laws as Sampling Error.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 2 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17^th Edition): May, R “Physical Laws as Sampling Error.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 2 (February 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws.

Harvard: May, R. (2023) ‘Physical Laws as Sampling Error’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 11(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws>.

Harvard (Australian): May, R 2023, ‘Physical Laws as Sampling Error’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9^thEdition): May, Richard. “Physical Laws as Sampling Error.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.11, no. 2, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Richard M. Physical Laws as Sampling Error [Internet]. 2023 Feb; 11(2). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/physical-laws

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

2023-02-15

An Interview with Tarek Fatah on Personal and National Trajectory (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01

Abstract

Tarek Fatah is a Columnist for the Toronto Sun and the Founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. He discusses: personal background; national trajectory; walking on eggshells; examples of some religious rhetoric in prayers; mixed ordering of the surahs; contextualization of religious stances; and building bonds and creating secular and progressive changes.

Keywords: Canada, Islam, Karachi, Pakistan, religion, Tarek Fatah.

An Interview with Tarek Fatah on Personal and National Trajectory: Columnist, Toronto Sun & Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was personal background?

Tarek Fatah: I was born in Karachi, which is now Pakistan. It used to be the capital of the part of British India. I grew up there. I went to a Catholic School. I went to college over there. I went to prison over there. I got thrown out from Pakistan television in 1979.

It was a charge of sedition or treason, but formally “sedition.” I spent about 10 years in Saudi Arabia doing advertising. I have spent 30 years now in Canada, living one day at a time, watching things go down the drain.

2. Jacobsen: Over those 30 years, in reflection, based on the phrase, “Going down the drain,” can you unpack that for us, please?

Fatah: When I came here in 1987, you had leaders like Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, the Quebec Separatists, the BQ. Everything was discussed was political in nature, whether the Oka Crisis or otherwise.

It was about ideas across social, political, and economic issues. Mr. Broadbent from Oshawa had one aspect. Mr. Mulroney had a different one. Mr. Clark had a different one. The British Columbians had a viewpoint. Over the last 30 years, it has descended into a very low standard of leadership, where ethnic vote banks have risen.

There always used to be. The Orange Order would determine who ran Toronto. The Catholics must live North of a certain street in Toronto [Laughing]. I used to get bashed by the Orange Order. The Jews got beaten up in a very famous place, a park in Toronto.

All that aside, most were small. It came down to the idea of this as a battle of ideas. All the concepts settled down into a balance, then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, the ideas do not matter anymore.

The background matters more, “I am proud to be from Latvia.” What does that mean?!

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Fatah: Everyone is proud to be a Lithuanian. How does it matter between Bolivian, and an Ecuadorian, or an Indian and a Pakistani? But the crafty manner, the dumbest of political activists manipulated the nominated system of the political party candidates.

To be very honest, a white person cannot get nominated from any part of Mississauga or Brampton. White people do not have tribes anymore. So, the Sikhs can get anyone elected, even anyone as right-wing as Jagmeet Singh.

By “right-wing,” his thinks in terms of religion. It means he is medieval rather than right-wing and can pose as a left-wing activist. He can afford to say, “Who said what to whom about white supremacy?”

Now, it is the latest. He can become the leader of the NDP. In 1988, can you imagine Broadbent stepping down and being replaced by Jagmeet Singh or Brian Mulroney being replaced by Mr. Scheer who has no personality?

Or the Conservative Party leader who has become a leader in Brampton. You simply must have props with you, to look more exotic. People like me are like circus animals. We need to stand behind politicians. You are younger than me.

You would not know that there was never a time to stand behind politicians as props and not look someone in the face and cheering him. That is the norm today! You have been selected to sit or stand at the back of the person speaking without watching their face and getting enamoured. That is dumb! – Capital D.

That’s where we are today. The mayor of the City of Toronto does not know about the major issue of the Saudi woman landing in her city. He does not know which vote bank to get. It is hilarious.

You can do the Oka Crisis today. You would not know who to deal with. It is like the pipeline. The band councils think it is fine. Then you find out about the other issue o the heritage treaties. No one is interested in factual issues.

It is how you cajole how you were born. The disgrace has been that ideas went away for my DNA. It means a person cannot speak, cannot have ideas. We have dropped that way in 30 years before my eyes.

I ran for politics on the NDP ticket. I voted NDP most of my life. I cannot imagine voting for someone who thinks hair is the most important thing to them in a turban. I cannot say that. What I would be, anti-Sikh?

A high percentage of the Sikhs do not wear turbans. Similarly, I cannot be taken as a Muslim because I am not ugly enough to be considered Muslim so far. To be a Muslim, I must have a beard, no moustaches.

The moment I do that. I will have MPs standing next to me. I can put on a guttural accent. We cannot even stand up and say that a burqa is a disgrace on the face of women. We cannot say that. I can say that. Nobody else can say that.

The layers of the burqa. Someone asked me if it was a choice. I said, “Next time some drug addict walks into a train. You say, ‘Oh, he made a choice. It is a democracy!'” When someone wants to commit suicide, back in Toronto, they made a choice.

A person who disguises a persona, not showing their face, is being tolerated. Because otherwise, you would be called a racist. Nobody wants to be a racist. This is what we are facing as crises.

3. Jacobsen: You could get Regis Philbin for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? but Who Wants to Be a Racist? People could be duelling up [Laughing].

Fatah: It could be a popular game [Laughing].

Jacobsen: If we are looking at the growth of arguments dependent on identity, something that someone was not merited with; they were born with it. It is congenital rather than acquired in this sense.

With this, it makes conversations more difficult, more fraught, and, in the phrase, as if one is ‘walking on eggshells.’ How does this prevent, as you are noting and getting at, more serious political conversations and social dialogues?

Fatah: We are at war. There is a world war ongoing between international Islamism and secular liberal Western democracy. Effectively, the enemy, which is essentially The Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, or ISIS, there are 50 different bodies that are enemy Muslims within our countries.

They can shut us down. It has become the story. A Muslim woman who is a young student refused to go to the prom but is perfectly happy to become the wife of the jihadis under ISIS. The places like Tunisia have tens of thousands of pregnant women coming back after willingly, accepting, that rape by jihadis as an act of worship.

It is half of a million dead in Syria. They cannot seem to figure out that what we own today has been inherited by those who worked in the far North over 200-300 years ago. They would lay down their workers who did not have central heating.

When people say, “I pay my taxes.” Those assets were invested by people who did not have running water. I lived in a neighbourhood called Cabbagetown in Toronto. It is not a joke there. People over there literally grow cabbages in their front yards.

That is what their food was, Irish, and others. Other than getting beat up by the Orange Order. They made food to make liberal democracy what it is today, especially after the Second World War. The idea of individual liberty got embedded in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This is core to civilization. It is the crystallization of Britain, France, and the United States. Even after Osama Bin Laden comes in a burqa, we say, “Who could that be behind it? Is it a bank robber?” You cannot say it. But that guy wears a leather jacket and rides a motorbike.

Therefore, we better take him down. That is how stupid we are. To sum, we are going downhill. Unless, we recognize the idea that our enemies are in philosophy in a way. The fighting of Nazis before fighting the Nazis.

As with the First World War, how many millions died? We still have not learned. We keep going back to the same thing. 17 times a day, Jews are cursed in Muslim prayer. Every mosque.

4. Jacobsen: Is this in Canada as well?

Fatah: Every mosque around the world. 17 times a day, a Muslim denigrates the Jews.

Jacobsen: What would be an example of this?

Fatah: It is the opening prayer of Islam. Surah Al-Fatiha, “The path of those on whom You have bestowed your grace, not (the way) of those who have earned Your anger, nor of those who went astray.” [Not the one used, I had trouble finding it, and hearing it properly.]

It is the opening thing. Now, if the mullahs say, ‘We denounce the hadiths.” It becomes a different story. Then it becomes, “Well, the short and straight path,” but not the path of the murderer, of the pedophile, of the smuggler. Right?

But when you publicly say one thing when the microphone is on, then someone asks. You say, “Brother, it is the Jews.” Every Muslim knows that this is going on. On Fridays, we literally pray to Allah to give Muslims the better treatment over the kafirun. That is, you, the kafir.

Nobody is coming to speak out against it, and saying, “Don’t spread hate. We will not finance you with taxpayer money.” The cooperation of the government is funding a situation. There are the issues of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. They would rather have that conversation.

We are focusing on the Maple Leafs, the Blue Jays, and so on. Everyone wearing the same hat. The gladiators who are coming home, the BBQ. People are laughing at us. There is nobody in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, who believes 9/11 happened.

There is nobody. I can tell you 90% of Canadian Muslims, in my community, who openly say, “5,000 Jews didn’t die.” As soon as you ask them, “Do you condemn it?” They say, “Yes, it is very bad.” They say one thing in one context and another thing in another context.

The leaders, no one believes anyone unless they are a Saudi style or other dress. They see this as the Islam way. Most of what is Islam has no relation to any Islamic ideology. There were Muslims before the Quran was written.

There were Muslims who did things before fasting, praying, and the like. How did they become Muslims? The Quran is not a chronological order in which it was revealed. But we shall make you memorize it. It makes it hard to learn. The mullah says, “You do not have read the book in Arabic.”

Because many have memorized it. We can not go back. Because the people who have memorized it will fail the test.

Jacobsen: Right [Laughing].

Fatah: They have memorized it in an order, which is incorrect. Something fundamental to Islam is no priest class. There is nothing between yourself and the divine. The Pope, the priest, the rabbi, the mullah, this was an attraction; you were free.

The some said, “The Christians have a good thing going. They have a Dome.” This is how this came. There was no Dome in Islam. It was the Eastern Orthodox. The Sikhs took it, too. It is an Eastern Orthodox Church replica from Damascus.

What I am saying, it is historically accurate, but, from the Islamic point of view, blasphemy. To save ourselves from blasphemy, we have been becoming dumber and dumber, day by day.

Jacobsen: By which you mean, more historically illiterate in its development and history.

Fatah: I have never met an illiterate radical Muslim. 80% of Muslims still cannot read or write. You will never find a terrorist who cannot read or read. It means all jihadis and others come from the educated class.

When Malala says, “Give me a book, give me a book,” nothing! The moment you read the book; you become crazy because you have enemies. You realize, “Th computer, I have nothing to with it. The light, no! The chair, no!” There is no contribution to our community to any invention in the last 200 years.

What do we have? We have the 8th century to look up to. So, should we move forward or put the car in reverse gear? Then we complain. Gear number one should be forward. The Sun does not set in a rule of mud.

It is not fair. I have seen it. Why would I believe in scholars who believe the world was flat? Can some imam ride a bicycle in the 8th century or 9th century? I can; therefore, I am better than him. Just because he had a guttural accent and a long name, a name that never ends.

Who is he? There are 17 diverse types of the same guy. Tell that to a Pakistani, they will say, “Tarek is lying.” Why? Because that person has the imam telling them. Because Islam came to ordinary men from the priests.

Islam’s last verse – it is very interesting – or the last words of the revelation are “I have completed the faith for you.” The Arabs said, “No, no, no.” 100% of the text has been written after supposedly God said, “Today, I have finished everything.”

By the way, what I am discussing with you, there is no place on Earth that this can be discussed.

5. Jacobsen: What is the last Surah given the mixed ordering?

Fatah: I do not memorize, but I know. It says, “In the name of God who created you.” They preach it. For people who have been asked to read and write, they are 80% illiterate. That is a problem! [Laughing] When you proclaim, “My God told me to read and write. But I have decided not to do it.”

It is the first verse. It is absolutely stunning in its beauty. What did Muslims do? It probably means the guy who compiled by size did not know how to read and write. It is very primitive thought, “Big is better. Small is not so better.”

6. Jacobsen: If you look at the Eastern Orthodox Church and its very satellites, they have their own issues with the Russian Orthodox and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. If you look at the Roman Catholics and Protestants, etc., we can note the same issue of textual analysis.

Them asking themselves, at least the scholars or theologians, tacitly, “How do we properly contextualize this within our particular dogmatic stance?” I would not apply this to the liberal-progressive branches of these.

Fatah: But this has happened in Islam. It happened in the year 900. The rationalists of Islam were slaughtered. In fact, there were a couple of Caliphs who were declaimed as apostates because they nurtured the rationalist view.

The whole debate was if the Quran was a created book or a divine book, the debates of the 10th century were far more progressive than the 20th century. They were brighter than the dumb people now who go around in robes.

So, the Christian divide is, essentially, a European awakening based on Greek thought and Roman tradition. All of that is a European tradition. I keep reminding my Muslim friends. There is a world East of Greece and Japan; that is a different world altogether.

No John Smith is ashamed to be a John Smith. No one says, “I am not going to name my son John. It is a good name.” If you go to Pakistan, you can find people looking for names. It shows the weakness of your identity. “Who are we?”

We cannot even invest in making a bicycle. Imagine if you are an idiot, you find out nothing that works is made in your country; other than bombs that explode. Even those too, we smuggle through deliveries through the Merchants of Death bring Russian materials through Yemen and elsewhere.

We know how to use AK-47s. We just do not know how to make them. We have become so stupid that we fire the AK-47s during weddings. I asked, “Why?” He said, “This is our tradition.” I said, “No, your tradition is in bows and arrows. You did not make them. The Chinese made gunpowder. The Westerners made the cannon. You had spears and bows and arrows. I would you see bows and arrows at your sister’s wedding and then tearing things up.”

Imagine the concept that says, at your wedding, “You need to hear gunfire.” It is bizarre, but true.

7. Jacobsen: For any long-term civilization or culture, there will, typically, whether the Navajo, the Orthodox Jewish community, the Hopis, have strong bonds between generations.

In terms of the more sophisticated secularist, typically, branches of faiths, which implies a certain respect for other people’s beliefs by having that separation, what do you think that we can do in our own countries and in our own communities to build those bonds to make that more progressive and secular branch of faiths more robust across time?

Fatah: It is very simple. There must be no road of religion in any political area of life from the school trustees. The infiltration is taking place. The political party memberships as well, I will give an example of the recent nomination listing in Mississauga-Erindale.

1 in 3 is a sitting liberal. There was one MP He is a former sitting MP [Didn’t get the name], sitting MP who came 3rd. The nomination was won by the group candidate who only had Egyptian Coptic Christians in the nomination.

Number 2 was only a candidate who had Vietnamese people. The two tribes and white Canadians fought. The white Canadians cannot go out and fight with their tribe. People would laugh in their tribe, “Let’s get together” [Laughing].

This is happening now. The Conservative Party nominated someone solely based on being an Egyptian Coptic Christian who would fight against the Muslim Pakistani woman who wants Sharia. Is this what we turned this country into?

The Egyptian Copts and the Pakistani Muslims [Laughing] are contending the next Mississauga-Erindale election. To answer your question, there must be religion taken out of schools. There should be one school board. There should not be a prayer room.

Every prayer room means one thing. Muslims monopolize it. How many Buddhists stop work to stop for prayer? This is how you capture power, by taking over public tax money and every high school in Ontario, all over North America; public money is being taken by Muslims in high schools to take over a room at taxpayer expense.

It does not just become a prayer room. There is a newspaper office with a prayer room. When was the last time that you found a Catholic who says, “Uh oh, I need to prayer”? Go home and pray.

Who are we feeling Why are we lying? York University has a prayer hall. The city of Toronto has the prayer hall. Who is there? No Baha’is are coming and demanding, “We want to pray. We want to pray!”

Canada is being screwed by making sure that it gets screwed well. Hockey players brandish their hockey sticks like gladiators from the Roman days. Get religion out of public life. If you want to survive, if you introduce religion, it becomes one religion.

That is not even Islam. It is what enemies of Muslims made, wrote of Sharia, and The Muslim Brotherhood, and, by the way, backed the CIA to combat communism, “Use Muslims, they are idiots.”

We turned this USSR issue with Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, and then make them fight the communists because it was crazy. Ours will not die. Muslims will die fighting communists. Muslims turned out to be people who love to die because they believe life begins after death there.

This may sound bizarre to listeners or you. The Earth is a transit lounge. “You want to live. We want to die.” Who is going to win?

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Columnist, Toronto Sun; Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/fatah-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe on Founding the Nigerian Humanist Movement (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01

Abstract

Dr. Leo Igwe is the Founder of the Humanist Movement in Nigeria. He discusses: family background; personal background; benefits and downsides of conversion; and how one founds a national humanist movement.

Keywords: Christianity, humanism, Islam, Leo Igwe, Nigeria, religion.

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe on Founding the Nigerian Humanist Movement: Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You’re from Nigeria. You’re the founder of the humanist movement in Nigeria. It’s the most populated African nation-state as well.

Dr. Leo Igwe: Yes.

Jacobsen: There is a there, there. What is geographic, cultural, religion or lack thereof, background for you?

Igwe: I was born into a religious family in a village in Southeastern Nigeria. Nigerian villages are known to be more religious for many reasons. Sometimes, it is because of a lack of effective education, and necessary infrastructure.

Sometimes, development comes with infrastructure that makes people question and that liberates them from primitive fears and uncertainties. Born shortly after the Nigerian civil war, life was very hard. My part of the country was devastated. Life was very challenging for me and my family members. Religion was what gave a lot of people some sense of hope and enabled them to cope with the dire situation. Religion per se may not have delivered substantial relief. Religious organizations were providing humanitarian aid to my part of Nigeria. So, a lot of people were moved by such initiatives.

As we all know, religion is not only all about charity. Religion is about so many other things. So, as I was also growing up, I started noticing a lot of abuses, a lot of excesses in the name of religion. Rampant imputations of magic, witchcraft and superstition, claims of faith healing, as the case may be, made me question religious and supernatural notions.

I started to question things as I advanced in my education. Eventually, everything translated into my founding the humanist movement in Nigeria.

2. Jacobsen: For those who grew up in a non-religious home in Nigeria, and became religious, what are their reasons for doing so, typically? Also, when someone grows up in a religious home in Nigeria, leaves the religion later on, and then rejoins another religion at a later point, what are their reasons for doing so as well?

Igwe: I must say that people who describe themselves in Nigeria as non-religious are in the minority. Those who veer from religion to non-religion are “first-generation” humanists. These persons constitute the humanist or the non-religious movement today. Otherwise what applies is more of people moving from one religion to another religion.

Conversion by force and by choice has been going on since the Western missionaries came to Nigeria and Africa, and Islamic and Arab colonizers came from the Middle East. But what we have is mainly people moving from African traditional religion to Christianity, or people moving from Christianity to Islam or Islam to Christianity as the case may be.

I have known people who moved from being non-religious to being religious. It is not something very significant in our own part of Nigeria. What happens more often is people changing from one religion to another. Switching religion is risky but it depends on which religion and in which part of Nigeria the switching is done.

In terms of people leaving from non-religion to religion, we don’t have this tradition yet. People in most cases are born into one religion or the other. Even though, recently, there are people who say to me: “Yes, I used to be like you. I used to be an atheist. But now I have found God.”

As I have earlier noted the risk in changing religion depends on where one resides and which religion is dominant there. Is a Christian converting to Islam in a Christian environment or in a Muslim dominated area? When persons who profess Christianity change to another religion or non-religion, they face persecution if they live in predominantly Christian areas; it is the same for Muslims converting to Christianity or non-religion in a Muslim dominated environment. Comparatively, those who renounce Islam are worse of.

3. Jacobsen: What are the benefits of conversion to a Nigerian citizen? What are the costs that they may not be taking into account?

Igwe: The benefits are enormous because religion constitutes the basis of identity and solidarity. Religion makes people feel at home and become socially connected. People risk a lot by converting or leaving religion. It is like disconnecting from society. Religion makes it easier for people to access certain amenities more easily, e.g., education, because the schools are controlled by religious organizations. If you want to teach or attend these schools, there is enormous pressure to convert to the school’s religion. Sometimes, religion can help access healthcare programs because missionaries introduced these healthcare centres. Hospitals have become platforms for the propagation of religion. People are under pressure to take on the religion of the institution that owns these places. Religion has enormous political value. Political Christianity and political Islam are immersed in a stiff battle to dominate Nigeria. If you want to succeed politically, a former president of Nigeria once said, “You cannot oppose Islam”. And I want to add, you cannot oppose Christianity.

So, religion is a potent tool for political mobilization and legitimation. “I am a Muslim like you.” “I am a Catholic like you.” “Yes, let’s have a Catholic for president.” “Yes, let’s have a Muslim for president.” A one time governor of Zamfara campaigned on the platform to introduce sharia law which he eventually did. So politicians find religion useful. During the election period, the politicians become more religious. They go to church or mosque more often. They do a lot to appeal to the religious voters; to the religious base.

4. Jacobsen: Founding a freethought movement via humanism in Nigeria, that’s an incredible feat. It is unusual. By implication, it makes you an outstanding person. How did that happen for you, in terms of finding humanism? How did this happen for a Nigerian subculture in terms of founding the humanist community there?

Igwe: Yes, I am happy that you used the word “subculture.” That is the way that I describe humanism or the irreligious culture. Humanism could become the dominant culture some day. There are subcultural trends that are critical of religion. They’re not very visible. They are not prominent. While growing up in this society, a lot of people were critical of religious claims. But they were not outspoken and did not found a movement. At best they were individual freethinkers. This is because a lot of stigma is attached to atheism, irreligion or religious criticism.

While growing up, I studied the works of many philosophers. I noticed that the subculture of humanism has reached a point where it could be more visible than in the past. I thought that humanism could be brought to the cultural table, to compete with the dominant culture, religion. If possible, humanism could beat back the religious cultural trend and check its excesses.

What made me do it is because there is a lot of benefit in founding a humanist movement in a religious country such as Nigeria. I found it socially valuable, beneficial, and advantageous. I think that my own society would be better off if the subculture of freethought and critical thinking get noticed and gets positioned at the table, and able to challenge the dominant religious culture and its excesses.

Look at the world and how the forces of religious extremism are ravaging different parts of the globe. Look at the horrific scale of human sacrifice and persecution of women, the abuse of children, and inhumane and degrading treatment going on in the name of religion.

When religious bandits perpetuate these abuses, they think that they can get away with them. Religion operates with this veneer of unquestionability and impunity. Religious claims are presented as if they are eternally right and true. With this, religious actors, experts, or personalities get away with a lot, a lot of lies and falsehoods, a lot of criminalities and atrocities.

Because they know that nobody can question those things.

I found questioning religious claims liberating. In a situation where these claims are not questioned, a lot of people are misled. A lot of people suffer. A lot of people have been unable to question religious claims in my society. If they had done so, they could have known that one cannot make money using human body parts. They won’t engage in the murder and mutilation of human beings. The subculture of critical thinking and freethought is gaining ground and inspiring cultural renaissance. I founded the humanist movement for this purpose, to help move the society forward.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/igwe-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. Dr. Oren Amitay, Ph.D., C.Psych. is a Registered Psychologist and a Media Consultant. Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is the Vice-President of Humanist Canada. David Rand is the President of Atheist Freethinkers of Canada. Dr. Rick Mehta is a Former Professor at Acadia University. They discuss: moments in national political history represent pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression; moments in national social history representative of pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression; moments in Academia representative of pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression; and important aspects of the work to create more freedom of expression for more citizens.

Keywords: David Rand, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, Oren Amitay, Rick Mehta, Tim Moen.

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Interviewees only answered questions in which they felt appropriate for them.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What moments in national political history represent pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression?

Tim Moen: In Canada the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed in 1982 and instantiated freedom of expression as a fundamental freedom. Unfortunately, Section 1 of the Charter allows government to find exceptions where the rights enumerated may be violated by government.

Most provinces have Human Rights Commissions which are quasi-judicial bodies that pass judgement on perceived human rights violations. There have been a number of complaints about speech adjudicated by these Commissions including fining comedians for offensive speech. So freedom of expression is certainly not protected in Canada like it is in the US.

Dr. Oren Amitay: In Canada, it has been Bill C16 in July 2017 (it was introduced by Trudeau’s government in May 2016) and M103 in March 2017; this latter one is not a law but a non-binding resolution or “motion.” Still, it sets the stage to prevent anyone from holding honest, important and fact-based discussions about Canadian policy because anyone who does raise relevant questions will be branded an Islamophobe and potentially face dire personal, social, professional and/or legal consequences.

Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson: In Canada, I think it would be the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970. By way of background, a terrorist group, La Front de liberation du Quebec, kidnapped two people – a Quebec cabinet minister and a British diplomat. The then prime minister, father of our current prime minister, declared this to be an armed insurrection. The War Measures Act was invoked suspending civil liberties across the nation. This allowed police to arrest people without charge and without recourse to legal counsel, allowed for press censorship, and allowed the federal cabinet to run the country without having to go through parliament. Nearly 500 people were arrested incognito, often because they were believed to have voiced sympathy for some of the aims of the FLQ. Union literature that had nothing to do with the FLQ but which was deemed to be offensive was seized outside of Quebec.

The lesson I take from all this is how fragile our freedoms are. In the hysteria that was whipped up after these kidnappings the public overwhelmingly supported the suspension of their own civil liberties. This hysteria was shared by the Canadian parliament that voted overwhelmingly to make itself irrelevant and invest all power in the prime minister. Today we see an erosion of due process in Canada, following a similar dynamic. Due to a hysteria whipped up by generally unsubstantiated allegations, our present government has amended the criminal code to force defence counsel to share evidence that complainants in sexual abuse cases are lying with the prosecution and complainant’s lawyers before trial. This ultimately allows complainants to know what evidence the defence has so that they can modify their testimony accordingly. This aspect of Bill-C51 to amend Canada’s criminal code only applies to charges of sexual assault and not to other crimes like murder, arson or theft. It’s an erosion of due process.

Dr. Rick Mehta: Probably, in Canada, it would have to be Jordan Peterson’s stand on Bill C-16.

2. Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what moments in national social history represents pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression?

Moen: A recent example that comes to mind is the controversy that Jordan Peterson triggered when he refused to be compelled to use pronouns of choice at the University of Toronto.

Robertson: Delbert and Laroche were Metis brothers from northern Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1960s. Laroche was a swarthy, dark-skinned man with a zest for life sports. Delbert suffered from asthma and had not done well in school as compared to his brother. He was light-skinned and could pass for “white.” They applied for jobs at the mine in Flin Flon on the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. Delbert was hired, Laroche was not. This was part of a pattern where the good jobs generally went to Delbert. Their example was used as evidence for anti-racism funding and legislation.

About a decade later I participated in a social experiment. It had been rumoured that a lounge in Regina was using a dress code as a pretext for discriminating against aboriginal people. We recruited a group of dark-skinned aboriginals and had them dress in sports jackets and dress pants. We also recruited some lighter skinned people and had them dress in blue jeans. The aboriginal people were turned away while the non-aboriginal appearing people were not. We used this as a case with the Human Rights Commission and the establishment was forced to change its practices.

Today examples of overt discrimination are comparatively rare. A recent study by John Richards as Simon Fraser University has shown, for example, that aboriginal people with university degrees are just as likely, even slightly more likely, to be employed at a level commensurate with their degree as compared to non-aboriginal Canadians. The pivotal moment involved the activism of the 60s and 70s. Our society is so lacking in racism that people who for personal or political reasons want to find it have been reduced to looking for it in the innocuous names of sports teams and in the so-called “dog whistle” communication of their political opponents where nothing racist is actually said but the words are supposed to connote some secret signal. A short while ago a leader of one of Canada’s political parties was accused of being racist because while he condemned a mass murderer in New Zealand and expressed sympathy for the victims, he failed to mention that the victims were Muslim. I am sorry, but irrespective of the fact that Islam is a religion not a race, the failure to recite some political script is not evidence of racism. I am angry at the racialists who engage in this behaviour. They are basically saying that someone who cheers for the McGill Varsity Redmen (a name chosen because their earliest sports teams included Irish immigrants with red hair) are equally guilty of racism as the employer who hires people based on the depth of brown that makes up their skin colouring. Frankly, it trivializes racism and brings disrespect to the once honourable term “social justice advocate.”

David Rand: (Canada) Motion M-103 (adopted by federal parliament) and other motions (e.g. adopted by National Assembly in Quebec) which condemn the fictional “racism” known as “Islamophobia” are examples of major threats to freedom of expression here in Canada. The recent repeal of Canada’s anti-blasphemy law is very good news, but much mitigated by the previously mentioned motions. In summary: “Islamophobia” is the blasphemy of the 21st century.

Amitay: At the risk of appearing self-congratulatory, the largest Free Speech talk in Canada was held on November 11, 2017, in Toronto, Canada. It was organized entirely by one woman, my former student Sarina Singh, and featured myself and Drs. Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad.

3. Jacobsen: Also, what moments in Academia represent pivotal moments in the fight for one basic right: freedom of expression?

Moen: The seemingly endless examples of censorship of conservative and classically liberal speakers in North America seems to be bringing attention to the degradation of expression and speech in the Academy.

Amitay: I know there are earlier moments but I cannot invest the time in recalling them. So, more recently, I would say the Evergreen State College debacle beginning in May 2017, whereby Dr. Bret Weinstein and his wife, Dr. Heather Heying, fought against the insanity of their College colleagues and students. I would also say Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s efforts to bring sanity to College Campuses, including his formation of Heterodox Academy, and perhaps most importantly, the Chicago Principles established following the University of Chicago’s engagement with Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in 2014.

Robertson: I think we are in such a moment right now, and I don’t know how it will end. Let me back up for a moment. The Enlightenment that I referred to earlier began in academia over the nature of knowledge. Enlightenment scholars viewed knowledge as something humans could attain through application of reason and observation. Our human rights that are centered on the respect given individuals and their ability to ascertain for themselves truth is grounded in this Enlightenment ideal.

Post Modernism holds that truth cannot be ascertained through reason and empiricism. For example, one of my old post-modernist university professors stated, in a journal article, that science is “just a white, male way of knowing.” Well, if you remove the authority of reason and empiricism, how does one settle competing truth claims? The answer is, of course, through appeals to authority that ultimately rest on naked power, which was the system used by monastic universities to maintain doctrinaire purity prior to the Enlightenment.

Just how this anti-intellectual way of maintaining academic didactic purity operates may have been illustrated by Acadia University’s firing of a tenured professor. Rick Mehta publicly disagreed with the findings of Canada’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” into historical grievances faced by people who are indigenous to this country. He also refused to bend grammatical rules to use words like “they” when referring to transsexual people, nor did he use newly invented pronouns like “ze.” This all is evidence that he failed to follow the party line. The university was not forthcoming in releasing the reports they used to justify his firing, but the seriousness of firing a tenured professor demand transparency.

The improper disciplinary action against Lindsay Shepherd by Wilfred Laurier University leads to further questions of academic freedom. In this case, Shepherd was a teaching assistant who showed a debate between two University of Toronto professors on the use of special transgender pronouns to her students. As a professional educator, I can tell you that this is sound educational practise; however, Shepherd’s supervisors disagreed and said the showing of the debate was like showing a video of Adolph Hitler. Although the university subsequently apologized to Shepherd for this improper disciplinary hearing, she reports that she is now blacklisted from Canadian universities. Her supervisors, Nathan Rambukkana and Herbert Pimlott, still have tenure.

An irony in all this is that the leading post-modernist of the twentieth century was Martin Heidegger, a Nazi. He argued that human reason was deficient and that the German volk should put their trust those who were “Dasein,” specifically, himself and the Fuehrer, to determine ultimate truth. While Hitler described himself as a Roman Catholic and was totalitarian in his approach, Shepherd describes herself as an atheist who believes in diversity and the use of reason and science. But she evidently receive the memo from the modern “Dasein” that some people were to be censored even if in debate with a person holding an opposing view. Will this pivotal moment in our history end with a return to authoritarian universities, or will we retain the humanist vision of the Enlightenment? I believe our continuing civilization will ultimately be determined by how we answer that question.

Rand: Here in Canada, freedom of speech and expression are threatened mainly by social censorship, not political (government) censorship. Specifically, social censorship is imposed via overwhelming waves of gratuitous and defamatory accusations of “racism” or “xenophobia” or “Islamophobia” or “far-right” tendencies or various other slanderous insults. The result is to poison any debate and bully dissenters into silence. This is what the regressive pseudo-left is all about. It has ruined the left. The question remains: Is there any left left? The two most important moments in recent Canadian history where this occurred both involve Quebec: (1) 2013-2014, when the government (PQ) attempted to pass a secularism charter and (2) currently, 2019, as the government (CAQ) plans to pass a new law implementing State secularism in Quebec. In both situations, the media, especially the English-language media went (and continue to go) ballistic.

Mehta: That one, I am not sure if they is anyone pivotal big moment because there are so many. I think it is a lot of small moments that build on one another. I think it is partly because, in Canada, we do not have an equivalent in Canada, as they do in America like the Chronicles of Higher Education. It is hard to really know, because I do not really know all the ins-and-outs of what is happening in Academia. All I can tell is the limited information from Facebook groups like Academics for Academic Freedom.

It is hard to give an informed answer because I do not have the data or the information to give an articulate answer.

4. Jacobsen: On the international level, and as a final question, what have been important aspects of the work to create more freedom of expression for more citizens, as a branch of social justice – understood as human rights and equality? That is to say, more equality in the provision of the right to freedom of expression.

Moen: The biggest boon to social justice has been markets and entrepreneurship. The decline of absolute poverty and access to devices that allow more individuals around the world to broadcast their ideas and content has done more to empower expression than anything else. Governments around the world continue to be tempted to use their power to limit speech, and many people are pushing back, however I think the increasing access to technology and wealth and more speech innovations will make it nearly impossible to stifle expression. Government is just too cumbersome to keep up.

Amitay: I do not quite understand the question, but I would say that we have not seen much impact of such efforts with respect to compelling people to accept that such freedoms are perhaps the most important element of “social justice” or human rights and equality. If anything, we have seen a significant degradation of such principles internationally. Unfortunately, the result has been the boomerang ascent of a number of *truly* “far right” and/or “White Supremacist” organizations, political parties and ruling governments, particularly in Eastern Europe. This is highly predictable because, although “the powers that be” in numerous countries have inexplicably determined that a lot of non-hateful speech somehow constitutes “hate speech” or some other form of “criminal” expression, this is true only if the recipients of the supposedly “offensive” speech are not White, heterosexual, non-Transgender (Christian/Catholic/Protestant/Baptist) males and sometimes females. In other words, it is “open season” against White, heterosexual, non-Transgender (Christian/Catholic/Protestant/Baptist) males and sometimes females, hence they seek out and/or support those who appear to represent and to defend their own interests. If Free Speech or Free Expression were embraced by all, most people who are *not* hateful or bigoted would not feel they need to seek refuge among “extreme/radical” groups such as those mentioned above. Instead, they would feel that they could have honest and fact-based discussions about important issues in any context, rather than being called hateful, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic, misanthropic, homophobic, Transphobic, Islamophobic or any other kind of ___ist/___phobic for daring to say anything that does not conform exactly to what is currently deemed as “proper.”

Robertson: Although the United Nations is much maligned, and sometimes deservedly so, it has served as a conduit for communication from different societies and this has facilitated a common ethic governing such communication. The default for such communication is secular because the organization cannot privilege one religion above another and continue to function. Thus the U.N. through its advocacy of human rights, and its communication generally, has advanced secularism. The greatest threat to freedom of expression is religionism. Without religion, dictators lack moral authority and rule through brute force. Religion provides the moral authority whereby good hearted people do evil things. It worries me that we do not support sufficiently secularists from priest and imam ridden countries. I commend the work of Humanists International, but we need to do more.

Rand: First of all, the very expression “social justice” has become suspect because it has been hijacked by the regressive pseudo-left in the form of “social justice warriors” who in practice enforce, dogmatically and aggressively (and sometimes with violence), the repressive politics of that movement, including social suppression of freedom of speech and expression. This is happening in several countries: Canada, USA, UK, France and other European countries. At the international level, one very important issue is efforts by the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) to impose an international anti-blasphemy law under the guise of proscribing “defamation of religion.” The work of the IHEU to document anti-atheist persecution around the world is a very important aspect of the fight against this kind of campaign for censorship.

Mehta: I think what is happening internationally, to make sure I understand the question, is that right now with the social justice movement. It is actually the antithesis of more freedom of expression. Your right to speak, your right to express yourself, is a function of your identity. So, how much you deviate from being a white, heterosexual, Christian male, who is in good shape? Probably, too, if we are going to include physical fitness, that is deemed the enemy.

The more you deviate from that in the so-called hierarchy of power. That then gives you the greater right to speak. The social justice movement is the exact opposite to giving one’s right to freedom of expression. This could be answer to an earlier question. The University of Chicago’s Principles on Freedom of Expression. That’s probably the one set of principles that is allowing for the greatest expression of freedom of expression in the academic setting, in the universities right now.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, everyone.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Tim Moen, President, Libertarian Party of Canada; Dr. Oren Amitay, Ph.D., C.Psych., Registered Psychologist and Media Consultant; Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, Vice-President, Humanist Canada; David Rand, President, Atheist Freethinkers of Canada; Dr. Rick Mehta, Former Professor, Psychology, Acadia University.

[2] Individual Publication Date: June 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/speech-expression-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik on Background, Qualifications, and Upbringing (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/22

Abstract

Dr. Sarah Lubik is the Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Concentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She discusses: background; qualifications and intentions behind the credentials; and the importance for a variety of experiences for a diverse upbringing.

Keywords: business, Canada, entrepreneurship, innovation, Sarah Lubik, SFU, technology.

An Interview with Dr. Sarah Lubik Background, Qualifications, and Upbringing: Director of Entrepreneurship, SFU Co-Champion, Technology Entrepreneurships Lecturer, Entrepreneurship & InnovationConcentration Coordinator, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we will start at the beginning naturally. Tell us a little bit about your background in terms of family environment, upbringing, so culture, geography, language.

Dr. Sarah Lubik: I grew up in Coquitlam, in the suburbs of Vancouver. I’m lucky to have had a mom at home and a father with a job at Imperial Oil and all the benefits that come along with it.

So, I’m not sure it was that exciting in upbringing as far as the story goes, but I can tell what’s one of the things that has been interesting for me, and that I like to think has shaped me. My parents both come from very hardworking families. My father is the second generation from Eastern European.

They were all entrepreneurs and were always hard workers. That’s something that’s been passed on to my sisters and I. We’ve never had brothers and had a matriarchal family. Mom’s family, in particular, is strong.

So, there’s never been any question for my sisters and I of not being able to do anything or ever being restricted because we are women. We were lucky enough to have a cabin that my father built, up in Indian Arm, when we were growing up, where we would spend the summers.

Being in a place without electricity, you constantly have use of your imagination, like building houses for plastic dinosaurs out in the back with leaves and sticks, and helping dad fix things. So, we started off feeling empowered and capable. It wasn’t until I ended up going away to school in England for my Master’s and Ph.D. that I fully realized there was still a long way to go in many places.

I’d heard of glass ceilings, but I didn’t have much experience it Until much later.

2. Jacobsen: When you were getting your qualifications, what was the intention there? What were those degrees’ purposes towards what you had as a long term vision, if there was one at the time?

Lubik: Your last point was incredibly relevant. There was not much in the way of vision, more a series of opportunities that makes sense in hindsight. There were never questions in my house growing up that we wouldn’t go to University. We were going to University. The question was where.

I was told that my grades are good in science, which meant I could probably get a science scholarship. When I wrote a scholarship essay, I showed it to my English teacher and he said, “Cool! You’re going not going to SFU.”

I was shocked. I said, “No, I wanted to go to SFU, how would I change this?”, and he told me to rip it up. “Because they’re looking for something interesting, they’re looking for someone who thinks differently. This is a -written, structured essay. It’s not particularly insightful or genuine. It’s not going to get their attention.”

Having heard that SFU was a place where they wanted people who thought differently and wanted people to be themselves, immediately, SFU was, even more, my school of choice, and I was accepted with a science scholarship. Interestingly, the scholarship essay was about how I might not say in science, because the most important part of the university was self-discovery, and I might discover science wasn’t where my heart was.

While I had good grades in science and was interested in experiments, I knew was it was unlikely that I was going to stay because I used to like to debate with people, so I wanted to be a lawyer. My grade 12 law teacher was a hero of mine, he even helped me get into some legal public speaking competitions.

I didn’t do well in them, but I enjoyed it, so at the time, I wanted to be a lawyer. So, I transferred from science to business and liked marketing. There was room for creativity in it, and I took international business because, wrongly, I thought that it helped you travel for work.

It wasn’t until my mother came home with the story of ‘my friend’s son is in co-op, loves it, so you need to be in a co-op.’ I wasn’t originally convinced, but I did not win that argument with my mom and ended up in co-op. It was transformative.

I went out and experienced a bunch of different work environments, then found out that there’s a whole bunch of things that I didn’t want to do at all. I learned that event management was not glamorous and how to survive a toxic work culture before I landed what surprisingly became my dream job: I was hired as a research assistant for a professor at SFU, who was studying the commercialization of fuel cells and materials.

My job was to call companies who were coming up with things that sounded like science fiction at the time, to call up their founders and CEOs and say, “Tell me your story and tell me what your challenges were. Let’s see if we can draw conclusions. Maybe, we can find patterns or strategies with other companies that might be able of help ot you.”

It never occurred to me that this was a career option before. No one had ever told me that. I absolutely loved it. I didn’t want the co-op term to end. As it turned out, this project was between SFU, MIT, and Cambridge University in England, and there was more work to do.

I asked my supervisor, “If I do a good job, for me, can you help me go see some of our partners in other parts the world?” She said, “Sure, where?” So, she helped me visit Cambridge for a semester to do the same thing, visiting those amazing companies and calling these incredible entrepreneurial people to find out their stories,

I had a high success rate with getting interviews, enthusiasm goes a long way, and that got the attention of people who we were working with. One day my supervisor in England brought me out into her garden for tea, as you do, and said, “We have some money for around this research. You clearly love what you’re doing. Have you ever considered doing a master’s degree?”

That was the first time I’d actually thought of it, but when someone says, “Do you want a master’s degree from Cambridge?” You don’t say, “No.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Lubik: So, we thought we’ll try it. It was incredibly fun. It was a fantastic way to see the world.

So, I got a way to travel after all, and I got to learn from experts and entrepreneurs all across Europe, which was amazing. Then part way through, I realized that I wanted to do a Ph.D. I wondered, “How do I tell [my supervisor] that I want to do a Ph.D.? Where are we going to find the money for this?”

Then she sat down in a meeting one day and told my department head, “We’re looking for money for Sarah to do her Ph.D.” I realized that she’s known for quite a while. So, that got past the problem of having to tell anyone or having to explain to her that I needed finances.

So, that was what happened. I loved the research side of things, but I also needed a job. I got the job supporting start-up companies because I walked into my advisor’s office and said, “I probably need to get a job to pay the rent, etc. Do you have anyone that you know who needs help?”

He checked post-it note on his office computer and said, “Actually, I do. He works helping startups for start-ups. You work on startups. So, here you go.” It all snowballed. That job was administration, which turned into coordinating pan-European projects and turned into working with all the different tools to support start-up companies and becoming a business coach.

Becoming a business coach let me meet a lot of interesting startups, one of my clients was fantastic, technologically, but could use help, commercially. So, I ended up getting together with those guys and we used their technology to start a new venture

So, I suppose my journey so far is opportunistic. I love supporting entrepreneurship. I love the creativity that comes with being in that world and being part of creating a lot of different opportunities

In line with that, I was studying commercialization of advanced materials through university ventures. The support structures and ecosystems that need to be built to support the university on innovation and entrepreneurship were key.

When I was thinking of whether or not I should move home to Canada, that was about the same time friends back at SFU, the Beedie School, in particular, were talking about how we need someone to lead the charge in this.

3. Jacobsen: When you were having a regular upbringing relative to Canada, you’re going to the cabin, exploring and using your imagination, as well having a key mentor in high school for law, do you think that you would be able to launch into innovation and entrepreneurship as a career path without those experiences?

Lubik: Interesting question. In my journey mentorship has definitely played a significant role, employers and teachers, but also peers.

I did get some exposure to entrepreneurship at the end of my undergraduate career in case competitions, but this was before entrepreneurship was sexy and before our school had entrepreneurship programs. I had already done my first co-op and experienced what I didn’t want to do. When I came back to school, I wanted to make sure that I made the most of the rest of my university experience because I wanted to have a meaningful life and job.

After my first co-op job, I knew nine-to-five job didn’t appeal to me, I wasn’t seeing my friends at school, I was only taking one class. I thought, “How boring and unfulfilling.”

So, I watched other people who were excelling in school. One of the things that was common was they were doing case competitions. I thought, “I’m going to get into that. That’s where the ambitious people are”. They were recruiting for a large case competition: the first JDC West. We had an entrepreneurship team, but we had no entrepreneurship classes.

The person who was creating the team who said, “Sarah thinks on her feet, put her in entrepreneurship.” I went, “I don’t know anything about that, but sure.” I loved it. I loved the problem-solving aspect of it. I loved the strategy aspect of entrepreneurship, but at that point, I’d never studied it or spend time with entrepreneurs.

When I studied it later, I spent a lot of time with start-up companies and with the academics and entrepreneurs who were starting them. So, in a lot of ways, I learned at the feet of the giants. Many of those companies are still going today.

The mentor that I had running the European projects in Cambridge whose mentorship style was the better I did then the more stuff he gave me. That was also experienced with a different kind of entrepreneurship, being let loose to create my own path as long as I got things done.

I’ve been lucky that the person who employed me at SFU also had a similar standpoint on mentorship, which was, “I’m going to give you things that excite you. I’m going to tell you what you need to get done, but how you do it is up to you.”

That’s one of the most important things that I now teach. I want some ambiguity and flexibility. Learning to just start when you don’t know how to start or where to start is a key entrepreneurial trait.

The other thing that took me down this path is that I was in a place like Cambridge. Cambridge is one of the biggest start-up hubs. Maybe not the biggest, one of the most thriving start-up hubs.

The energy and culture there are that people start start-up companies for fun. There are people who you’ll meet who you would not think, “This is an entrepreneur.” But even those people are thinking t, “I’m going to see if I can commercialize my Ph.D. research.” Why? Everyone around you is doing it.”

So, being in that setting, where this is not just possible, it’s the norm, energizes you to take that leap.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/lubik-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Graham Powell on Cognitive Limitations, WIN ONE Content, “Leonardo” and Sidis, and AtlantIQ Society (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/22

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell, earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: cognitive and written content in WIN ONE; English as a second language, intelligence, and other barriers to some content; mental attributes tied to higher intelligence; Text Editor for Leonardo of AtlantIQ Society (WIN registered) work; the (Joint) Public Relations Officer for WIN, and the Vice President of the AtlantIQ Society, work; most exhausting and try parts of the jobs; most rewarding aspects of the jobs; and intelligence and creativity.

Keywords: AtlantIQ Society, creativity, editor, Graham Powell, intelligence, IQ, language, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network.

An Interview with Graham Powell on WIN ONE, Contributors, and Selection (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s dig deeper into the form of thought represented in the written word with a focus on English in WIN ONE and then the differentiation of sigma levels. Mostly, adults will write for it. Therefore, the sigmas per individual will not fluctuate much.

There may not exist a definitive metric in terms of the written word for some of the aforementioned reasons, by you, in Part Two of the interview. However, upper limits will exist on content complexity or cognitive load, for example, for lower sigmas. We can start there.

What subject matter may be out of the cognitive reach of some in the community submitting to WIN ONE – not as a judgment of character or virtue, but, rather, a possible fact of life?

Graham Powell: I appreciate both your diplomacy and candour, Scott. It is indeed, not about virtue or about being judgemental regarding a person’s character. Previously, however, I said that philosophical texts, plus other articles and essays which have a highly mathematical content, distinguish the work produced by the high IQ community from other members of society. Both these types of text can get very complicated, even for people at the 2 sigma level above the mean IQ of the general population, the oft-quoted research by Hollingworth indicating that a 30 point gap between intelligence scores is likely to present an impenetrable barrier to cognitive understanding. Secondly, research by Dean Keith Simonton brings into question the level of creativity that can be gained at higher intelligence levels, the mode of expression and need for intricacy in both detail and precision being too much for many people with very high IQs to deviate from. So, though very high IQ people will probably understand highly creative content, they will not be as good at producing it, and perhaps restrictively critical of the content that is produced. To further illustrate my first point, “Being and Time”, “Sein und Zeit”, by Heidegger presents an ardent challenge to even the most intelligent of individuals, so any further discussion and extension of Heidegger’s concepts and conclusions is likely to be incomprehensible to many readers, including WIN ONE readers and contributors; however, to put things more in perspective for your readers, Scott, the WIN is now open to people to join if they have an IQ from 115 SD15 and upwards. Some of the members of the WIN are leading proponents in their fields, so potentially they can produce work which is too specialized and, in colloquial terms, too esoteric for the majority to fully understand, or even relate to sufficiently – again, talking within the parameters that you state in the question.

2. Jacobsen: After a certain sigma, barring extenuating circumstances of a barrier to English as an understood language, what level of intelligence provides a general ability to comprehend all possible content reasonably published in WIN ONE?

Powell: It has been my experience that those within the three sigma range of IQ can fully understand the kind of content that is submitted. I remember statistics produced in 2010, which evaluated the average IQ within the World Intelligence Network, put it at around the 140 mark, SD 15, the original WIN which was conceived and created by Evangelos Katsioulis having a minimum IQ requirement stipulated by the CIVIQ Society, so at 3 Sigma, though by May 2010, other societies with lower IQ entrance requirements had joined the meta-society. Most contributions to the WIN ONE, in my experience, have been summaries with conclusions gained from that particular approach to subjects. New, wholly original written content, is not usually submitted, mainly because other avenues for that kind of material are preferred by WIN members – though I have assisted in producing that kind of work. Quintessentially, then, work of a complexity which is beyond the understanding of those within the 3rd Sigma level of IQ scores does not appear in the WIN ONE.

3. Jacobsen: Do any negative mental attributes positively, and statistically significantly, correlate with higher intelligence levels? When do these, if they exist, manifest to egregiously bad levels? Or is this an incorrect framing, where intelligence simply acts as an amplifier of regular human vices or negative traits?

Powell: Wow, Scott! That is a broad question which would require a substantial answer covering the equivalent of several theses; but I shall attempt to answer it as succinctly as possible, steering readers towards other sources which will give them further information on the issues.

Firstly, on a neurological level, the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive function have been found to have shorter axons and a myelin sheath which affords quicker responses. In fact, the notion of ‘a big brain’ does not usually correspond to actuality, the neurological structure of grey and white matter being more compact

In terms of mental attributes, the speed of response to impulses produces hypersensitivities which can be detrimental to a tranquil existence. Existential angst, as it is often termed, is a corollary of the deeper, more extensive analysis of what Heidegger named Dasein. Reading any of the biographies of one of the most famous people with a high IQ (perhaps a person who had the highest ever IQ) William James Sidis, will inform people interested in this topic. The Sidis family were prone to exaggeration, yet the core analysis of the life of William Sidis reveals a man of considerable talents, plus lamentable eccentricities and a tragically early death.

As for egregiously bad traits, well, these appear in all parts of society and not wholly due to intelligence levels, though the most common trait that I have experienced and consider lamentable is an overly inflated opinion concerning ability (most commonly cited at lower intelligence levels as the Dunning Kruger Effect, yet applicable to higher levels of cognitive ability too). It’s an unwise person who exhibits this effect within an environment where they are likely to have their limitations made apparent, something which often results in an exchange of insults and, as I have also experienced, a person deliberately creating some alternative profiles on-line to give the impression that others are fully backing up their claims.

Aside from this, autism, though not egregious in itself, of course, has a 25% positive correlation with higher cognitive abilities, according to research done in 2015 by Edinburgh University (so I read recently) especially amongst those who are classified with Asperger’s Syndrome. As a teacher, I always flagged up these youngsters in the class register, because, though I taught English and Drama, their perspective was likely to develop and be influenced greatly via their mathematical ability, plus evolve with some difficulty when they had trouble empathising with other opinions. In general, they tend to be reticent about expressing themselves as a result.

As for ‘framing’, as you express it, noting attributes as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ is open to interpretation, the positivist perspective on intelligence veering towards the phenomenological, or the Marxist. If someone perceives something to be real, it is real in its consequences, as a contemporary statement of the Thomas Theorem would have it. Intelligent people tend to question everything and not to take things for granted, nor register matters as eternally how the majority perceive them. This can be resented and be seen as ‘bad’ within the milieu of the majority, and, in history, I instantly think of Pythagoras, of Socrates, of, even, the ‘upstart’ Shakespeare and the watchmaker Harrison, the last example producing extraordinarily complex timepieces that revolutionized horology, yet upset the upper echelons of British society because he was, to put it simply, ‘not one of them’.

My research into group dynamics has also revealed that highly intelligent people tend not to work very well collectively compared with other more diversely comprised groups. Basically, having highly smart people gathered in a room will not necessarily produce the best results in every situation and discussion. In conclusion, then, I think both broad aspects to your line of inquiry are correct: intelligence in itself has negative traits and can amplify other detrimental factors in society as well.

4. Jacobsen: As the Text Editor for Leonardo of AtlantIQ Society (WIN registered), what have been notable projects and initiatives, publications and experiences, from this station?

Powell: My involvement in the production of this journal, Scott, occurs over a brief number of hours close to the publication date, and this is something I have committed myself to almost every three months, towards the end of February, May, August and November, since May 2010. Beatrice Rescazzi does a really great job pulling together the content and I work on the journal utilizing Publisher. On the first of June, September, December and March, the Leonardo magazine is uploaded. In it we have promoted science initiatives, most notably IQ For Science, whereby participants can use their skills to resolve gene-related problems or abnormalities. We have a competition running at the moment which is centred around high IQ people proposing solutions to world problems, ‘real ones’, not ones of the hypothetical variety. Leonardo is a magazine which represents the members of three societies, AtlantIQ (as you note) the STHIQ Society, plus The Creative Genius Society. I am proud to be an Honorary Member of the STHIQ Society. The founder of STHIQ is a genius named Gaetano Morelli, whose work on dynamic IQ tests, called “Retro-analytical Reasoning IQ Tests” (which he did with European Genius of the Year, 2014, Marco Ripà) I am also proud to say I helped with, if only minimally. I would not have interacted with Gaetano if it were not for the Leonardo magazine. My most amazing memories are of the places in which I have done the text editing, a kitchen in Tecom, Dubai, at 2 am being one of them, then an apartment in Izmir, Turkey, after an argument with my girlfriend about my commitment to the magazine – and not to her! (This was part of the joy of having a girlfriend with Narcissistic Personality Disorder!) My latest editing session was done in the Heraldic Room of The Bugibba Hotel, Malta, just a few hours before midnight. Some of the articles have been very difficult to correct. Correcting anacoluthon, which means the incorrect syntax of sentences, is very difficult when coupled with incorrect word choice. One recent article took hours to get into a readable state, but, ho hum, I did it! It’s also quite an art correcting poetry, the intentions of the poet being uncertain sometimes, and, of course, it is their work of art. As a poet, I am especially aware of how a piece of verse is a unique, personal mode of expression. If I have time, I contact the poet, but sometimes it is not possible. It is then that the art of the editor is an acutely diplomatic one.

5. Jacobsen: As the (Joint) Public Relations Officer for WIN, and the Vice President of the AtlantIQ Society, what tasks and responsibilities come with these positions?

Powell: To be honest, the positions are rather benign ones, though I suppose my help in organising the 12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness, seven years ago, was, in effect, done in the name of the WIN, so constituted me fulfilling the role of Joint Public Relations Officer whilst in Dubai. As for the AtlantIQ Society, Beatrice Rescazzi is the society President and we sometimes talk via Skype and are in monthly contact via e-mail. We often decide on competitions and discuss how to adapt and refresh the look and purpose of the society. The AtlantIQ Society, like any social entity, needs to be changed as time passes and the zeitgeist of the high IQ planet varies. Evangelos Katsioulis and I met in Dubai and spent wonderful evenings discussing how the WIN might develop. This later involved Manahel Thabet as well and, as I mentioned before, I hope this role of getting people together will flourish this year.

6. Jacobsen: What are the most exhausting or trying parts of the jobs?

Powell: I like to think I am diplomatic when dealing with disputes within the societies. Some egos in the high IQ world are ‘stratospheric’, which links with the earlier discussion about some egregious manifestations of being labelled ‘intelligent’. Some members have been disqualified due to cheating, which is just plain disappointing. Some members have shared their problems with us, sometimes at an extremely deep, emotional level. That takes a lot of energy, sometimes, but I don’t wish to give the idea that the notion of support is necessarily a terrible burden. It can be very rewarding.

7. Jacobsen: What are the most rewarding aspects of the jobs?

Powell: For me, it has been the varied opportunities to meet the members, then further interact, help, encourage and appreciate what they have to offer the world. Being supportive during what are, occasionally, tragic circumstances, I have found to be rewarding and truly memorable. The opportunities for working in five different countries have arisen during my tenure in these posts and I am thankful for that broadening of horizons and cultural experience.

8. Jacobsen: Does intelligence level correlate with creativity? Who are the most creative people that you have ever met in life? Why them?

Powell: As inferred earlier, it’s a moot point that I don’t hold as having been validated definitively. I read that to a certain extent, the structures of the brain which afford more creative, divergent thinking are antagonistic to the kind of structures which promulgate fast thinking. It’s partly why studying Einstein’s brain holds such an interest, he being a man of intelligence and creativity – especially via his visions and intuitive insights. Poincaré was a far superior mathematician than Einstein, in my opinion, with similar intuitive, creative solutions to problems. Later physicists of disputed IQ levels, yet with tremendous impacts within their specific fields of study (and here I’m thinking, in particular, of Richard Feynman) also developed a flair for art. I wish I’d been able to meet Goethe and to have seen him in action. I have seen Evangelos assimilate and compile large amounts of data in a short time, but I could not say how creative I think he is. I’ve worked with the chess Grandmaster Raymond Keene, who certainly played some creative games, and I’ve met mind mapping world champions; but, as regards the most creative people that I’ve met, I must admit, I have a higher opinion of the young French boy who did my task in class of creating an island of his dreams. For a start, he put it on a cloud… he certainly proposed ideas never seen by me before and I have never seen since. I think of my friend Gillian “Wiggy” Wilson, an artist, scenery designer, costume maker and modeller: whatever comes to her mind she seems able to make. My fellow drama student, Brian McDermott (who I recently connected with once more on social media) was, and I believe, still is, an original thinker with a strong sense of wonder akin to a youngster’s… I think of my marvellous friend Martine, who is a foreign languages and computing teacher. Her linguistic ability and her fervour for communicating ideas, plus her enjoyment of nature, is exemplary. I will see Martine soon. I hope to see Brian and “Wiggy” again too. They make every day like the first day of your life. Everything is out there, ready to explore. I love that!

9. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Graham.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-three; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/22

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. Dr. Oren Amitay, Ph.D., C.Psych. is a Registered Psychologist and a Media Consultant. Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is the Vice-President of Humanist Canada. David Rand is the President of Atheist Freethinkers of Canada. Dr. Rick Mehta is a Former Professor at Acadia University. They discuss: authors and speakers on freedom of expression and freedom of speech now; issues of freedom of expression and freedom of speech affecting their personal lives; and freedom of expression and freedom of speech affecting professional lives.

Keywords: David Rand, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, Oren Amitay, Rick Mehta, Tim Moen.

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Interviewees only answered questions in which they felt appropriate for them.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who are authors or speakers who represent high-level thoughts on the importance of freedom of expression and freedom of speech now?

Tim Moen: I think most free speech authors and speakers today are generally pretty boring in that they aren’t saying anything new. At best they are regurgitating work of previous scholars and sometimes they are advocating for the undermining of property rights in the name of “free speech”.

I think that Jordan Peterson has said some interesting things on the importance of speech ie “Freedom of speech is freedom to engage in the processes that we use to formulate the problems in our society, to generate solutions to them and reach a consensus. It’s actually a mechanism, it’s not just another value.”

A little known author and thinker that I think is breaking new ground is Stephan Kinsella who is an IP lawyer and libertarian scholar. Kinsella makes a compelling argument that Intellectual Monopoly law is one of the most destructive violations of freedom of expression.

Dr. Oren Amitay: I consider Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro to be important voices in this regard. Given my work schedule, I do not invest any effort into remembering names of others who would be further examples.

David Rand: Djemila Benhabib, Zineb El Rhazoui, Sam Harris, Normand Baillargeon, spokespersons for the magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as anyone who criticizes the regressive pseudo-left, sometimes called the identitarian pseudo-left or the Islamolatric pseudo-left.

Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson: In response to this question, I immediately thought of Roy Bhaskar who said that human freedom depends upon understanding the truth about reality and acting towards it. Ultimately, then science is, as he contended, about human liberation.

My life has been significantly informed by Eric Fromm who said in the now classic, Escape From Freedom, that people fear the conflicts, risks, doubts and aloneness that individual freedom implies, and that the wish to submit to an overwhelmingly strong power, a religion or a totalitarian ideology, is a function of wanting to annihilate that unwanted self and so enjoy the bliss of unthinking certainty and the shared glory of a righteous collectivity.

Dr. Rick Mehta: I think in the present time. I would be remiss if I did not say, “Jordan Peterson,” as we he was a big motivation for me and a big motivation to speak out. The big speakers, definitely, Jordan Peterson, and Janice Fiamengo was one of the pioneers in Canada. Gad Saad is one of the big name figures.

Then there are others who may not have the same fame, but are doing excellent work, e.g., Mark Mercer at St. Mary’s University who is the president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. One person from the University of British Columbia. He is in the philosophy department.

I think many are from the philosophy department. Because it means tackling a problem from all different angles. They are in favour of free speech to allow them to do their thinking.

2. Jacobsen: How have issues around freedom of expression and freedom of speech impacted personal life for you?

Moen: I can’t think of any instances where my negative rights have been violated for expressing myself.

Amitay: My upbringing does not allow me to sit around silently as extremely manipulative, dubious, self-serving, nonsensical and/or pernicious machinations develop and flourish around us.

I have seen ostensibly “good” people and organizations become corrupted and tyrannical after having been granted even a tiny semblance of some form or perception of “power” or “authority.”

They believe (only) *they* (should) have the intelligence, wisdom, virtue, righteousness and right to determine who should be allowed to say what to whom. I have spoken out about such matters on Twitter and Facebook (my personal and professional pages), as well as in the media, on many podcasts, on my professional listserv (the Ontario Psychological Association) and in my classes–when I can show that it is relevant in some manner to the course, especially with respect to critical thinking.

Thus far, I have been suspended from Twitter on four occasions—I am still suspended—and have been banned from the OPA listserv at least four times; they have also censored my messages to the listserv, including not allowing *any* of them to make it through for the past two months.

I consequently quit the OPA in protest this month but may have to return because my only other option (the Canadian Psychological Association; I need to belong to at least one of them) does not have a referral service as the OPA does. In addition, several people have made official Complaints to my regulatory body, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, about my online conduct.

Thus far, I have suffered no sanctions from the CPO. Lastly, I have lost a number of “friends” in real life and on Facebook, but I have no time, use nor patience for such people if they cannot handle the Truth I convey.

Robertson: I marched with Women’s Liberation back in the 1960s as much for my own liberation as for equality for women. While the women wanted equal opportunity to establish careers, I wanted the equal right to not have a career.

I had watched my stepfather have the stress of being solely responsible for the family finances while attempting to satisfy society’s (and my mother’s) definition of “good provider.” He died young from a heart condition.

I wanted relationships where women were equally responsible. To some extent we have achieved that but throughout the 1990s I counselled men who had severe self-identity issues because they stayed at home raising their children while their wives were the breadwinners.

I hoped this would change in the 21^st century; however, in a recent study (Robertson, 2018) I interviewed men who were still described socially as “deadbeats,” because they stay at home while their wives work.

What does all of this have to do with freedom of expression? Well, about a quarter of the people who marched with Women’s Liberation were men. Then at one meeting I attented, a series of women got up to say that some women were afraid to speak because there were men present, and they asked the men to leave. Without protest, we left.

This was repeated at meetings across North America. Since then, the discourse has been rather one-sided. Men who do speak about men’s issues are often derided, even shamed, in so-called “progressive” circles. It is time to use our freedoms to restart the dialogue.

Rand: As a secular activist, I have been subjected to social censorship (but not legal censorship by government) by anti-secular regressive pseudo-leftists, some of whom claim hypocritically to be secularists.

Mehta: Probably loss of friends in real life or in social media. But also, it is made up for by gains in friends. I think that is how it is. Your interaction with others. Your friends and neighbours.

In my own context, mostly, as a professor who had Facebook friends, especially when I started speaking out. Former students, even those who had written letters of thanks, suddenly unfriended me on Facebook as an example.

On the other hand, I gained other friends who replaced them. I probably had more gains than losses in speaking out.

3. Jacobsen: How have issues around freedom of expression and freedom of speech impacted professional life for you?

Moen: At a previous job I have been threatened with termination and ultimately took an unpaid suspension for writing an article as a concerned citizen critical of land expropriation by my Municipal government. I was a Municipal employee at the time but didn’t think I was prohibited from expressing a political opinion about my employer.

Corporate language is much more generic and careful these days for fear of accidentally offending someone. As a firefighter some degree of hazing (ie doing menial chores, taking some ribbing etc) is a rite of passage, this is now heavily frowned upon and you could face discipline.

This seems like a good idea on the surface, it limits the corporations liability and has good intentions, however when your job is to fight fires where team members safety and effectiveness depends on a high level of trust, rites of passage are often an important mechanism to establish that trust and bond with your team.

None of the examples I listed require a law to correct. I think employers are well within their rights to expect certain types of speech and not tolerate others and I wouldn’t want to see this undermined. However, this shift in culture is worrisome in that it is likely to migrate into law that compels or prohibits certain types of speech.

Amitay: Please see above (Ed. his response above, or in the previous questions.)

Robertson: I was Director of Health and Social Development for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations during the early 1980s. We did some good research on such issues as alcoholism and child welfare. I had discussed running for the NDP nomination in a provincial constituency with the Vice-Chief to whom I reported, and he supported the idea.

A month into the campaign he told me I would have to withdraw because the FSIN chief had negotiated a political deal with the Liberals promising to deliver the “Indian vote” to that party. I protested that the deal was with the federal Liberals and I was running provincially, but my boss said that did not matter. I refused to withdraw and some time later I won an unjust dismissal case against the FSIN.

At this time a lot of federal money was flowing to indigenous organizations to do research, and frankly many of the recipients just did not have the skills to deliver. So I became a private consultant.

A tribal council or FSIN bureaucrat would accept research dollars from the feds, spend half of it, then a month or two before the deadline hire my associates and I to do the work. This is how I worked my way through university to get my masters.

In attempting to deny my right to run for office due to a backroom deal, was an attempt to deny my right to political expression. One of my objectives as Vice-President of Humanist Canada is to protect the rights of people to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and to define reasonable limits to those rights.

Mehta: As I had an extended period of opposition to what I was saying, most of the academic mobbing was via email and happening behind the scenes. From an average person’s view, from the outside, they would not see as much compared to what you might see on YouTube with video footage of being recorded in class. There were some incidences in class. I have audio recordings but not video recordings of those incidents. Most of mine came from colleagues at university.

They ended up being complainants in confidential reports that were the grounds for my dismissal. There were accusations that I was creating a climate of fear. Some saying that they did not feel comfortable staying late at night working or that they had panic buttons in their offices.

One person saying there was a fear of terrorism. Although, the probability of that is low based on my conduct. Yes, there was that aspect. Another questioned my professional credentials, the recordings of my classes and every word was used against me, to say that I was not teaching psychology as an example or saying what I was saying was bogus. Or, they said I used my classroom for my personal politics.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, everyone.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/speech-expression-two; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/15

Abstract

Keywords: David Rand, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, Oren Amitay, Rick Mehta, Tim Moen.

On Free Speech and Free Expression (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*Interviewees only answered questions in which they felt appropriate for them.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Freedom of speech is protected within the First Amendment to the American constitution. Freedom of expression, internationally and nationally, is protected in other nations around the world. These different phrases have different meanings. In a coarse view or general perspective, what makes them more the same than different?

Tim Moen: Freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the legal sense are negative rights. Negative rights are essentially an obligation to not physically violate another person, or by extension, their property. So freedom of speech would be an obligation to not physically violate a person or their property for speech. The term “freedom of expression” is likely an attempt to ensure this negative right applies to all forms of communication including non-verbal.

So freedom of speech and expression ultimately means that neither individuals, nor the government they delegate authority to, have the right to use physical force to violate your person or confiscate your property for speech/expression. I think its important to note that the right to be left alone means that I cannot confiscate your property or punch you for insulting me on your property, or in the public space, but it also means that I don’t have to tolerate your insults at my dinner table and can exclude you from my domain.

Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson: Freedom of speech is a subset of freedom of expression; that is, freedom of expression includes freedom of speech along with other ways of communicating.

David Rand: Obviously, speech is a very common mode of expression, so that the two freedoms overlap greatly.

Dr. Rick Mehta: The way I see it. Freedom of speech has to do with the means of communication being a bit more narrow. It is about how you express yourself verbally, through written or oral forms of communication. Freedom of expression, my understanding is more general. It could include arts, such as painting as an example.

It could include sculptures too. Freedom of expression can include music. It covers much more and a much wider base with freedom of speech being one specific example within the broad realm of expression.

2. Jacobsen: In a more nuanced view, what separates freedom of speech from freedom of expression in theory and in practice?

Moen: Often freedom of speech and expression are used outside the legal concept of negative rights and individuals think it is a good policy for private institutions to promote or tolerate all types of speech. I think it is dangerous to conflate the two ideas because it undermines the legal foundation of freedom of speech (negative rights) to suggest that I must tolerate insults at my dinner table in the name of “free speech”. I often see free speech advocates promote government interference in the private domain because private property owners won’t tolerate certain types of speech. Using threats of physical force or confiscation of property to prevent exclusion from the private domain is an equally dangerous threat as using threats of physical force or confiscation of property to prevent certain types of speech.

Conflation of these two ways in which the “freedom of speech” is used also creates confusion around other issues. It’s not clear on what basis a “free speech absolutist” (ie someone who thinks property owners should be required to tolerate all speech) would argue that falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre would be a problem. It’s not clear how they would argue in favour of rules of debate where speakers are each allotted time to speak and time to be silent, or how rules about the audience being required to be silent wouldn’t be a violation of their conception of free speech.

In my conception of free speech falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre is a violation of negative rights for the theatre owner who relies on an enjoyable experience for his patrons, and a violation of the rights of paying customers to enjoy the product they paid for. Likewise having rules around debate in a public forum is necessary to properly communicate ideas and violating these rules violates the negative rights of the debate organizers and everybody who came to enjoy the debate.

Dr. Oren Amitay: We do not have “freedom of speech” in Canada, as we have hate laws in place. We consequently do not really have “freedom of expression” either, as saying “the wrong thing” can result in harsh legal, professional and/or financial consequences, for instance being dragged to the Human Rights Tribunal (provincial or federal) or taken to criminal or civil court. Others have lost their jobs. To be clear, these are not always cases in which someone has called for the outright harming of identifiable groups or individuals.

Robertson: I don’t think they can be separated in practise. In a nuanced view, freedom of speech has to do with the uncensored communication of ideas whereas freedom of expression also includes the ideal of living one’s life according to one’s beliefs. The first is essential to democracy, the second to diversity. But of course, that diversity includes diversity of belief which, if uncommunicated, is inert.

Rand: Freedom of expression may also include modes of expression other than speech, such as dress, music or other art forms.

Mehta: In theory, we’re supposed to be able to express ourselves freely. Basically, freedom of speech and freedom of expression means that you will not get intervention from the government. In practice, that doesn’t protect you from social norms. If people don’t like your painting, and if they decide to have it removed as an example, it protects from the state, not necessarily from what others may do or in social media with increasing regulation on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. On YouTube, they demonetize videos within minutes of being released.

In practice, it can work very differently. Some service workers, we’re told the customer is always right. So, employers can tell employees how to behave on the job. In theory, we’re supposed to have freedom of expression in all areas of life. But depending on the workplace and social norms, there can be consequences for the actions if they are offended.

3. Jacobsen: What thinkers and writings represent crystalline and comprehensive statements on freedom of expression and freedom of speech?

Moen: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” – Frederick Douglass

“My own opinion is a very simple one. The right of others to free expression is part of my own. If someone’s voice is silenced, then I am deprived of the right to hear. Moreover, I have never met nor heard of anybody I would trust with the job of deciding in advance what it might be permissible for me or anyone else to say or read. That freedom of expression consists of being able to tell people what they may not wish to hear, and that it must extend, above all, to those who think differently is, to me, self-evident.” – Christopher Hitchens

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html – John Milton

https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html – John Stuart Mill

https://mises.org/library/human-rights-property-rights – Murray Rothbard

Robertson: Humanist thought is predicated on the Enlightenment idea that knowledge creation is done by people. We may consider this axiomatic now; however, through much of human history knowledge was considered to be given through divine revelation. All ideas that did not conform to such revealed truths were, at best, folly and at worst, the work of evil. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Locke and Spinoza rebelled against the resultant culture of censorship which served to stunt the growth of knowledge. Spinoza in particular held the view, still radical to this day, that no ideas should be censored.

David Rand: Not sure. Perhaps John Stuart Mill.

Mehta: I think probably our earliest were the people who said something. One quote is credited to Voltaire, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it.” So, that’s probably the classic line. I hope that I am citing and giving credit to the right person.

That, I think, is an age-old adage. Now, whether that happens in practice, I think this comes and goes with the times. Right now, we are living in a time of a moral panic with the Me Too movement and the social justice movement.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, everyone.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/speech-expression-one; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

Interview with Amanda Parker on the Ayaan Hirsi Foundation, Violence Against Women, FGM, and Child Marriage

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/08

Abstract

Amanda Parker is the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Director of the AHA Foundation. She discusses: background; tasks and responsibilities; prevalence of FGM, clitoridectomy, infibulation, and so on, other organizations; mental health and physical and sexual health problems, and negative outcome for girls and women who have undergone FGM; parsing of the context, or the environment in which this occurs, whether within the US or around the world; moving into 2019 and 2020; and final feelings and thoughts.

Keywords: Amanda Parker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, child marriage, FGM, girls, violence against women, women.

Interview with Amanda Parker on the Ayaan Hirsi Foundation, Violence Against Women, FGM, and Child Marriage[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is background life, e.g., geography, culture, religion or lack thereof?

Amanda Parker: I am originally from Southwest Kansas. I am a Christian, Protestant. I moved from Southwest Kansas to New York City after college. I worked in finance. I worked in Residential Mortgage-backed Securities before the Subprime Crisis.

My entire department closed. I was telling a girlfriend of mine. I was interested in doing something more warm and fuzzy in terms of the content of the work. I was thinking of going into publishing or the nonprofit world. Because I could imagine getting out of bed for either of those things in the world.

My friend said, “Oh! You have to meet my friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is a New York Times bestselling author. She has a women’s rights foundation.” She introduced me to Ayaan. Ayaan and I hit it off right away.

The foundation, however, didn’t yet have staff. It was still in the process of getting itself organized. The board was forming. They were getting all the necessary insurance and bylaws. Those sorts of things.

I have been working with Ayaan personally to help her be organized on a personal level. Then when the foundation had seed money, I shortly moved over to the foundation. I have been there since.

2. Jacobsen: If you’re looking at some of the tasks and responsibilities of the position, what have been the impacts of those on the development of the organization?

Parker: That’s a great question. Our primary focus is to protect women and girls here in The United States from honor violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and child marriage. We have a second wing of work. It deals with Islamism in the United States.

My focus is the women’s rights side of the work. I oversee all of our women’s programs. Those include honor violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and child marriage. Within those areas of focus, what we do, we work to raise awareness, particularly with professionals, but also in general or with a general audience.

Those professionals who are likely to encounter survivors or at-risk individuals of the specific nature of these types of abuses and best practices for handling cases, and how to work with communities in a culturally sensitive manner.

We also work to educate legislators and encourage them to put in place laws that protect women and girls from these issues in the U.S. That is both on the federal and the state level. Our focus in those two areas are, really, mostly female genital mutilation and child marriage legislation in the U.S.

We do some research. It is new. We have done preliminary studies on forced marriage and honor violence in the United States. Finally, we work directly with women and girls facing these issues in the U.S. to find appropriate services, wherever they are.

To clarify, when I say women and girls in the U.S., it is primarily women and girls in the U.S. It is a sweet spot. But we have worked with men and boys who are facing these issues in the U.S., forced marriage and honor violence.

We also occasionally work with individuals who are overseas, because there are so few organizations working to fight these issues that we do have individuals coming to us from overseas to find support in whatever they are looking for.

I am going to bring this back to the U.S. It could be anything from someone needing legal help to get an order or protection or looking for a domestic violence shelter, or it could be someone who has been taken overseas for help to get repatriated to the United States and getting back on their feet here.

It could be someone facing a crisis of honor violence who needs immediate law enforcement help. All of this is based on a case-by-case, never know what you’re going to get, when people reach out for help.

We do not know what to expect every time. It is a lot of problem-solving and figuring out what each individual needs and then supporting them. That is the overall of our women’s program. I do a lot of policy work.

I do a lot of the training myself, whether working with professionals on how to handle these cases. We have had a lot of successes in all the areas that I mentioned. We worked with a number of states to put in anti-female genital mutilation laws.

We have, recently, worked with Michigan to put in place the most comprehensive laws on the books to protect women and girls from female genital mutilation. We have also worked in a number of states to encourage them, and successfully so, to limit or ban child marriage and have done some federal work on these issues as well.

We have had a lot of successes there. We have trained between 2,000 and 3,000 professionals on how to appropriately handle these cases. I know that those professionals are saving lives. One of the things that we talked to them about is that an individual facing these issues might only have one chance to ask for help.

When they do, they need to encounter a professional who understands the danger that they facing and to take them seriously. That is the main issue in working to protect these girls. There have, unfortunately, been these cases in all the ones mentioned.

People reach out to teachers, law enforcement, or some adult; that should have been able to help them or find help. Unfortunately, that is just not happening in every case. It is raising awareness and helping every professional in the United States understand that these should be taken seriously, which is important.

I used to be the person who handled help requests. Now, we have a couple of therapists who work with us to do that, which is terrific. In all of our programmatic areas, we have had a lot of success. I am proud of each of the individuals we have worked with.

I know the laws we are helping to put in place are having a big impact, and so is the training of the professionals.

3. Jacobsen: I have seen statistics of female genital mutilation of women and girls running from 100 million and 200 million in the world.

This also relates to the general categorization of FGM, of clitoridectomy, of infibulation, and so on, as, in essence, extreme forms of violence against women committed by families, communities, men and women elders within the family even, and so on.

With the United States, as this is the focus of the AHA, what is the prevalence of FGM, clitoridectomy, infibulation, and so on? And what other organizations are impactful in coordination against this extreme form of violence against girls and women?

Parker: Unfortunately, we cannot know exactly how prevalent FGM is, because it is held so much behind closed doors. It is so underground. However, the CDC estimates there are 513,000 women and girl in the US who have gone through FGM or who are at risk of the procedure.

That is and should be shocking to most Americans. That there are half of a million women and girls in this country. There are a number of organizations doing really terrific work on the ground in the United States on this.

One is SAHIYO – United Against Female Genital Cutting. It is founded by a survivor and works particularly with those looking for community. It does amazing work around helping survivors to get their stories out and to empower them.

They also do some legislative work as well. There’s an organization called Equality Now. It does international work and on the federal herein the US. They are doing great work to end FGM. Then there are some smaller players.

There is an organization called Forma founded by Joanna Berkoff, who is an amazing psychotherapist who has done a lot of really amazing work to support women and girls who have undergone female genital mutilation.

There are a number of organizations working on this and we’re coordinating to be complimentary and supportive of each others’ work.

4. Jacobsen: Even with the difficulty of finding those estimates, and even though we have those approximations at an international level, or in the US with 513,000 through the CDC, if we look at the mental health and physical and sexual health problems that follow from this extreme form of violence against women, what are they?

What provisions seem to work for the very negative outcome for girls and women who have undergone FGM?

Parker: I think that that’s a really important topic to talk about. I think that one thing that we should clarify is, as you mentioned, the WHO said this is an extreme form of violence against women and girls. An extreme form of gender discrimination.

We’re not talking about male circumcision; I am not suggesting that we’re pro-male circumcision at the AHA Foundation. The underlying reason for FGM is to control the sexuality of women and girls.

There are no health benefits and potentially lifelong health and psychological consequences that come along with it. Immediately following the procedure, it can include extreme pain, shock, hemorrhage, sores, infection, injury to nearby tissue, and so on.

Long-term women and girls suffer from urinary and bladder infections, infertility. Obviously, if you have gone through a more severe form of FGM, there is scarring, difficulty during childbirth, and so on. There are higher rates of death for babies born via women who have gone through FGM.

Even in a world where FGM is not causing any form of physical impact on the individual, which happens but it is difficult, if you speak with a medical provider about how possible and easy it is to perform the least physically invasive form of FGM, e.g., pricking, nicking, and piercing types labelled Type IV by the WHO, it is very, incredibly difficult to even those less severe forms to perform on an infant girl without causing scar tissue or some more of damage to the area – in a way that is not intended.

Back to the WHO, they make it very clear that it is a procedure that is not to be done in any of its forms, even by a healthcare provider. With that as an understanding, even if there are no physical impacts to a woman or girl who has gone through FGM, she could undergo lifelong psychological consequences, e.g., PTSD, depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, guilt.

Obviously, this is not in every case, but in many cases, I’ve seen. Women face retraumatization in many different instances throughout their lifetime following FGM. That first instance of trauma was when they were cut initially. Following that, they may be retraumatized when they get first their period or when they’re married.

Their first sexual encounter could be an event that is traumatizing to them. Going to an obstetrician or gynecologist can be difficult. We have heard horror stories when they go to a gynecologist.

When they are being examined, the physician, if they are not expecting to see a girl who has undergone FGM, they have audibly gasped or made a facial reaction, a normal human reaction, to something disturbing to them.

We have had doctors have their colleagues come in to be an educational experience to them. All of this can be incredibly traumatic to them. Women and girls who come to us following FGM are seeking medical care and psychological care in many cases.

In looking for medical care, they are looking for someone who can alleviate the symptoms of what I am looking for, in the cases of infibulation. All possible flesh is removed: clitoris and inner and outer labia are removed. The wound that is left is almost entirely closed except a small hole for menstruation or urination

Many women experience an infection due to urine and fluids being backed up, and not released. Many women will have symptoms. There are women who go to doctors that provide something called reconstructive surgery following FGM.

If you have had the tissue removed, obviously, it is not something that you can add back to someone who has had healthy parts of their anatomy removed. You cannot put it back. There are doctors do what they can, doing great work, trying to restore a woman back to the way she was born to what was originally formed, as well as helping alleviate the physical symptoms.

Certainly, psychological support is called for, in many cases. We have women and girls reaching out to us to have a therapist to help with the trauma and the PTSD, and the guilt, anxiety, and other issues that I have talked about.

5. Jacobsen: If we look at the parsing of the context, or the environment in which this occurs, whether within the US or around the world, some will claim this happens within the context of religion. Others will claim this happens within the context of culture.

What is the general ratio there in terms of the context as a source of this form of acceptance in many subcultures or in many cultures around the world?

Parker: FGM is a practice, or a cultural practice, that predates all major religions. It is not mandated by any major religion. But there are certainly patriarchal societies and religious sects that have picked this up and promote it.

It is not required by Islam for example. However, the Bohra sect of Islam has picked up this practice in India. It now has that as part of their religious practices. When you talk to families about why they are doing this, the underlying reason for FGM in almost all cases is to control sexuality of women and girls.

They are trying to prove virginity on the wedding night, in the more severe forms. They are trying to curb a woman’s libido, so she is not having sex outside of marriage. Even given these ideas, there are a number of old wives’ tales that the families think are their reason behind why they need to perform female genital mutilation.

That can include things like removing body parts that are considered unclean. They are afraid the clitoris will turn into a tail if not cut. This is what they think of as far as what beautiful women look like; someone who has been cut.

In many cultures where FGM is practiced, a girl is not considered marriageable until she has been cut. So, I think that’s something that we should talk a little bit about, because when I started working at the AHAH Foundation.

I would wonder how a mom could do this to her daughter – the moms, grandmoms, and females perpetuating the practice, and the men and boys, the family, and the society. How is it that a mother can do this to her child? Why would they ever do this?

After working in this field for a while, I realized they do not do this to hurt their child. They love their children. They are not trying to do something harmful to them. They are doing what they think is best as a parent.

Someone who has undergone FGM. This might seem like the only instance of abusive experience in their family. It can be a completely loving family. It can be mothers do what they think can do to ensure a future for their daughters.

In these cultures, they’re not considered marriageable until they have been cut. It is important for the daughter and her future, and the family as a whole. Marriage is, in addition to being a way to provide for your daughter’s future, an alliance between families.

It is important for the family as a whole. These are families doing this to protect their daughters and to do the best for their families as a whole.

6. Jacobsen: Looking ahead into 2019 and even 2020, what seem like some of the more and major initiatives and programs, and partnerships, of the AHA Foundation?

Parker: We are, this year, working on a number of initiatives in terms of policy; that we are feeling really hopeful about. There is a trial happening in Michigan of the doctor who has been accused of cutting girls in the state of Michigan in a medical clinic there.

This went to trial and the doctor may have cut over 100 girls over the course of a decade according to the prosecutors. There are 9, I think, involved in the case. The judge in the federal female genital mutilation charge said that it is the anti-FGM law is unconstitutional due to federalism. It is the job of the states, they said, to outlaw and ban FGM.

During that case, the AHA Foundation submitted an amicus or friend of the court brief to support the prosecution, which, in this case, is the government. The government is appealing the case. We will submit another brief.

The result of the case is, certainly, going to be hugely impactful in the US. This is something that could be appealed up to the Supreme Court. If it is, and if the law is struck down, which we are very hopeful that it won’t be struck down, it could render the federal anti-FGM law to be null and void, which would be sad and send a horrible message.

The judges initial ruling, I think, already sends a bad message; that the US is not serious enough about protecting girls and women from this abusive practice. The appeals will be hugely impactful on women and girls in the US.

From working with women and families in the US through the AHA Foundation, the law will be something they use as an excuse or as family members, even if they are on the fence. They can get in trouble. It could be a ‘great’ tool for families to avoid cutting their girls.

One result that we have seen from this case. There is some great momentum on the state level. We have worked all along on the state level to encourage lawmakers to put in place state anti-FGM laws. This is something important for a lot of reasons.

It sets precedence in law that is not filled. It is law enforcement and prosecutors who have the tools to deal with this on a state level, which is most likely where this would be handled. Following the judge’s ruling in Michigan, that the anti-FGM law is unconstitutional; we have seen some good momentum.

Some lawmakers realizing that this is something that they need to pick up and run with if they want to protect the girls in their state. This is something that we’re excited about, including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California which has a law and we’re helping to strengthen it, and Utah.

We’re working with a lot of states. We are working with them to make sure that they are putting in place strong laws that act as the punishment for the perpetrators and also include education and outreach for professionals and communities to prevent this practice.

We are also putting in measures to help survivors in the court of law and empowers them to take action when they become an adult if they want to do it. There are more pieces of the legislation that we would like to see put in place.

That is a big part of our work in 2019 and beyond, to make sure that the girls are protected from FGM to the extent that we can; we are also working on the state level on the child marriage issue as well.

There are also federal efforts as well; that are hugely important to us. One is to clarify the existing federal anti-FGM law. That it is okay for Congress to put in place due to the commerce clause of the constitution.

We are also looking to include FGM as part of VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) in 2019. Even though, as we discussed, this is an extreme form of violence against women and girls. It is not eligible for VAWA funding. It is a huge thing for us, and definitely a priority.

7. Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Parker: Honestly, I just want to say, “Thank you,” to you, for bringing awareness to this. Every person that understands that this is an issue in the United States, understands that there are no health benefits and lifelong health and psychological benefits that can come along with it.

It is one more person that we can reach with this message who can talk about this with our president, hopefully, share on social media, and, maybe, call their congressperson and say they want to see the end to this in the United States.

I am super grateful to you for helping to raise awareness about this, because it is personally important to me; it is something that is really under-recognized in the US as something that might be impacting our neighbours, our classmates, our coworkers, our colleagues.

It is not something simply happening overseas. It is happening here. It is happening to American citizens. It is something that we should care about. It is something right on our doorstep and to people that we care about. We really need to start acting like it.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Amanda.

Parker: Thank you so much, Scott.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/parker; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Sandy Marshall on Project Scientist, Girls and Women in STEM, and Mentorship

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/05/01

Abstract

Sandy Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Project Scientist. She discusses: numbers leaving programs; retention; major initiatives and programs of Project Scientist; partnerships with individuals and educational institutes; expanding the scope for boys and girls; analysis of effects; countermovements, and counter trends and organizations; abilities versus preferences; and organizations, books, and speakers.

Keywords: Girls, Mentorship, Project Scientist, Sandy Marshall, STEM, Women.

An Interview with Sandy Marshall on Project Scientist, Girls and Women in STEM, and Mentorship[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start on the pivotal moment, in personal life for you.

Sandy Marshall: Having the child, I was instantly overwhelmed. I don’t know if this was hormones or what. Once I had this child, “Oh my God, I only have 18 years to solve so many global issues. Where do I put my time?” It was a real concern.

I started to do the research. Why do we have hunger? Why do we have climate issues and environmental issues? Why do we even have those when we have pharmaceutical drugs? How do we get that when we can’t fix hunger?

I started to research into if I had continued on to my STEM major. I wanted to be a doctor. When I hit some challenges with Organic Chemistry, and if I had continued and was an engineer, I certainly would use that knowledge for good, especially if you’re having children.

So, why aren’t more women doing that? I started to research what happens to girls and women in STEM. From ages 4 through Ph.D. and working, there’s a variety of reasons why they drop out and don’t get to where they want to get, and can’t solve these issues that most women have concerns about.

I wanted to change that, at least as young as 4, 5, and 6 when everyone has an interest in science and mathematics. It is such a good tool to grab these girls by the hand and continue with their confidence and interest through middle school and high school.

So, they can solve these issues one day. It is a huge hurdle for representation and the top seats. Even in Academia, the way women are seen, treated and valued. There is a lot of work.

2. Jacobsen: If you were looking or are looking at adolescent girls in STEM and young women in their first years of college who are thinking, maybe, of changing a major into a STEM major, what do you see as their barriers based on the research or the anecdotal evidence that has come to you?

Marshall: With the middle school girls, if you have an interest by the time you get to middle school, which is unusual, you continue with it. What happens in middle school, most kids are challenged by math.

If you’re a bright kid with an aptitude for math, somewhere around middle school, you might finally be challenged. With the research on the boys, they take that challenge on, “Oh, if I work hard enough. I can get through this. If I get a C, it means I can be okay. It means I won’t be a doctor or a chemist.”

With girls, we don’t find that growth mindset. The research says, “Oh, I wasn’t born good at math. I need to change majors to English or walk down the hall to English.” We are trying to change that.

There is a ton of research, by Carol S. Dweck from Stanford. She coined the term “Growth Mindset.” Not bad! That is some of the work that we do with girls, especially around math. We have female STEM professionals come and talk to them.

They talk about math, whether they were good or not. Even if you got through it, with a C, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be whatever you want to be. It takes practice: “I had to get a tutor. I had to work hard.”

A lot of time, that is what happens in middle school. Of course, you don’t have a lot of female instructors around STEM subjects in middle school and high school. An absence of that. If you have a male instructor and mostly male in the classroom, especially an AP class, you start to lose confidence.

You don’t have anyone to study with, or who thinks like you or represents you. You start to lose confidence. We need more female teaching. We need more female professors in STEM. Taking that perspective to girls and that orientation.

As far as the college is interesting, I am U of C tomorrow, which is for undergraduate female scientists. They are already in STEM. Switching to STEM, obviously, you will have fewer female classmates and fewer female professors.

The stereotyping is still there. I was at a party before Thanksgiving. I met a prominent neuroscientist, a professor. When my husband told him what I do, he said, “There is only one thing women need to worry about in science. And that’s menstruation.”

He is a professor at a prominent school. We all need, unfortunately, our scripts. I still need them. You practice them with their colleagues, how women react to those things. You still don’t know how to react to those things.

You fall into these patterns of how we have always reacted to it, I guess. “I guess they’re right. I need to change my major. I need to change my class. I need to change my this.” We start developing scripts for girls and women to practice in these situations, so it starts from a better place.

3. Jacobsen: What about guidance to young women, say college age, by older women, whether in or out of university, in terms of what they might expect as they’re moving through their early professional lives, in their training, in their education?

Now, they may not necessarily expect the young women to get through the exact same things that they went through, say two generations ago, but they can, certainly, expect, and, therefore, guide them with anecdotes about what they might expect similarly in a, maybe, marginally attenuated form.

So, there is a certain psychological preparedness for it, similar to what you’re saying about having those scrips.

Marshall: There are a lot of programs out there like that. There is one called WISTEM. Their pilot is program is doing exactly that. It is connecting professional women with college-age women, to mentor them.

I want to preface. This conversation is around what girls and women can do with the current state, to make it a better situation. There’s equal input, equal value, equal time to both. I am not saying it should all fall on women’s shoulders to solve it.

It is super valuable. Some of the schools, like the engineering schools. Where, in recent years, the statistics have been deplorable. One in having women accepted. Once accepted, how many change majors? A lot of engineering schools are having mentoring programs for it.

4. Jacobsen: Is it large numbers leaving it?

Marshall: The numbers have improved. In Cal Tech, their numbers have jumped, how many females they’re accepting. I know UCIrvine for engineering has increased. USC has too. We will see in the next few years if they can maintain those numbers by their senior year.

5. Jacobsen: What have been shown, empirically, as effective retention methodologies apart from more women professors graduate students who can mentor or friendly policies for better environments? That may be more conducive to healthy college life, engineering school life, for young women.

Marshall: The challenges come with more postdocs and female professors. There are policies around sexual harassment and gender equality. It is still hard for people to come forward. The stories are not public.

They are not coming out. Because people [Laughing] don’t want to lose their jobs. At least, it is better. There are policies in place. At least, there are departments that people are told to go to. It is mostly women telling other women what is happening.

But people are not comfortable with it. There needs to be more active.

6. Jacobsen: If we are looking at major programs and initiatives of Project Scientist, what are those?

Marshall: [Laughing] Yeah! [Ed. There was an approximately hour-long in-depth discussion prior to the interview.]

So, we target young girls. Obviously, we work with women at the university level and in countries all over the world. Our goal at Project Scientist is to grab girls at 4, 5, and 6 when everyone has an interest in science.

It is to make sure they are confident in their interest and do not lose it by middle school. We are the only program nationally (US) to focus on girls as young as 4, 5, and 6. We go to age 12. We have a program just for girls on university campuses.

Every day, male and female STEM professionals talk to them about their careers, their educations, failures they have had to overcome, and really build that resiliency and variety in STEM careers and majors.

Wednesdays, our girls get on a bus and visit STEM companies and universities, so girls can see women firsthand in this space. What they do and excelling in this space, we also only hire teachers, because we want to help that workforce be better as well.

To make them more confident in their skills, so the girls are as confident as the boys, it is bringing that attitude back into it. In elementary school, there is research. When girls have a female teacher that says, “I was never good at math.” That resonates with them, “Oh, girls aren’t good at math.”

We are working to help elementary teachers feel more confident. We run 6-week summer academies on university campuses like Cal Tech, USC, LSU, North Carolina, and in Orange County California.

We serve 40% of our girls coming from low-income households. We have a very diverse group of girls. That is intentional as well. The girls in our program are the girls that really love math and science, and want to be there.

They are in there all day for 6 weeks, every day. They are meeting other girls from other neighbourhoods, other income levels, and other schools. Those who have the same interest. It normalizes that.

Especially if you’re a Latina girl in a low-income school, you may 1) not get recognized that you might have an aptitude. So, you’re not given the challenge that you need. 2) There might not be other kids with interest or knowledge.

You might feel like an outsider. Those lifelong friendships through the Ph.D. It can help keep them on task and pulling through. We work with a lot of women who inspire girls and then women in a variety of fields that STEM encompasses.

It is not only during the school year but also when the school year is over. Martin Luther King Day, for example, we had 50 girls in Irvine visit Johnson&Johnson. We have them go to Google and Medtronic. A ton of companies that specialize.

Then we do pre- and post-testing for our research purposes to prove our outcomes. The first day, girls will draw a scientist. The last day, they will draw too. It is looking for a change in gender, in ideas of what is a scientist and what a scientist does.

Often, we will have girls who say, “I am a scientist on the first day.” On the last day, they are drawing themselves out in the field, in the ocean studying ocean life. They learn. You don’t have to wear a lab coat. You don’t have to be a male.

You don’t have to have glasses. There are a variety of fields in STEM. So, now, when I first started Project Scientist, it was, “How do we build girls’ confidence in their voice.” So, they go back to school in the Fall and work in groups.

Boys say, “I will do the math part. You do the writing.” The girls that we work with are, potentially, better at math or want to do the math more than the writing. It is helping build their voice to say, “I am going to do the math part. I am going to do the engineering part.”

Now, we see with the Me Too movement. Things are changing. Girls are coming in way more confident. Our college interns are way more confident. We are seeing a big change in that, in their confidence level.

For me, I am seeing more work for us to work with the parents, really. A lot of our parents work at STEM companies. We do a family orientation before the Summer starts. It is logistics. We give the parents tools at home.

So, they can inspire the girls in the home and work against the stereotypes that the girls are having. We are having to work more with our parents and have them understand; the STEM companies that they work at, “These are some things that you may not be seeing.”

We make it a better place for women. Even with the girls there, they are thriving, have them be comfortable. This is something that we can probably do more. We have these really brilliant STEM professionals.

7. Jacobsen: Have there been partnerships with, in two ways, from individuals and educational institutes to groups of girls? For instance, as we know, an older woman scientist mentor can make a huge difference in the trajectory, success trajectory, of a girl or young woman who is interested in pursuing a STEM field.

Is there a similar way in which it’s, for instance, a Latina girl or someone who comes from a lower SES or background, matching up with someone older who knows the struggles and has overcome them? The institute to group question: is their partnerships with institutes or centres with girls who are interested in STEM with these co-op opportunities, these intern opportunities.

Marshall: There are some programs out there. As our girls age out, for example, we are working more with the university campuses and the other programs that exist, to make sure our girls are ageing into the STEM programs.

Some of them focus on exactly what you’re talking about. At CalTech, for example, our girls are starting to age into hands-on research in CalTech labs with postdocs and professors. We are doing that.

Our college internships is a big program for us. They are influencing the girls during the Summer. They are meeting the STEM professionals every day. They visit these companies. They are making relationships and mentorships on their own. We have had some post-interviews with them, with these interns.

How Project Scientist has impacted them, and their interest in their major in STEM, they stated two ways. One way is when they work with the younger students and inspiring them. They are inspiring themselves.

They are gaining confidence in themselves. I am teaching them and talking to them about what they do, how the young girls look up to them. That is good in terms of keeping them on track. They have also mentioned seeing and speaking with these women in the field.

They are learning from them and making relationships as they see fit. That is one thing. We have also started a new relationship with an organization called Boundless Brilliance. It was started by females that attend Occidental College in LA.

They were all STEM majors and started it for themselves. They created a curriculum with Occidental professors around building confidence, leadership skills, interest in STEM for girls, and the women in this program are training on these tools and techniques.

They are also training on a variety of experiments. They go into schools a couple of times a month. Typically, it is lower income schools. They will teach them these skills. Their experience of that.

The classroom is mixed with boys and girls. But again, bringing out these women to show boys and girls, these are women in the field and in these majors. It is normalizing that. So, we are working with them to help to train our interns and then hire their trained undergraduates to serve as our interns here into the summer.

It is giving us better interns, more experienced and better trained. It is giving us a year-round reach with our schools.

8. Jacobsen: What indirect ways in which to advance what is, for the most part, what the international community is aiming for, which is the empowerment of girls of women? Certainly, they have been disenfranchised in many ways to varying degrees.

For instance, could an indirect way to empower girls and women come through almost encouraging the men who have a mediocre talent for engineering but they have a great talent for the caring professions, e.g., nursing? It is encouraging boys and young men into the fields requiring skills not necessarily core requirements for engineering.

You might find someone with a wonderful bedside manner as a GP, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, and so on. The guys that would be going into engineering, but instead are going into the caring professions.

In that way, it is providing almost an example of the flexibility and better balance within the general culture compared to what we currently have, which, as we both know, guys simply have to achieve, achieve, achieve in just one domain.

It is a very narrow of things, but it is also doing whatever you want – but along certain stereotypical patterns. It may not be healthy for them. It may not be healthy examples for the women and men in their lives, or the culture in general.

Marshall: You’re absolutely right. It all needs to be normalized, right? [Laughing] Both sides. It is funny. My 8-year-old was in a talent show for their elementary school. I said to my sister, “It is so sad. 80% of the participants were female. Why aren’t there more boys?”

Jacobsen: What was the special talent?

Marshall: It was anything: puppet show, anything. There is still competition to get into it. As long as you’re confident, you can get into it. There was one boy group. I think it’s just women are conditioned more to do it.

I don’t know. It isn’t normalized. So, to have that culture where boys can do that too, it is interesting. The backbone of our product is SciGirls, which is a PBS show out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is really great shows featuring girls ages 12 to 13 doing real science with women in the field and real research.

Off those shows, they build the curriculum. It is free for any school, anyone, to use. But we are trained in the SciGirls curriculum. We train teachers to use it, to utilize the videos and the curriculum.

The SciGirls 7 is based on research on how to best teach girls STEM. Girls like to be collaborative. Many boys, whether it is taught/learned or not, prefer competition to excel; whereas, most girls would prefer to collaborate.

Our projects are done in groups of 4. They take turns collaborating. They seem to enjoy that. You don’t have coding competitions or things like this on Project Scientist. Girls, in STEM, like to know what they are learning is going to further help them or help someone improve the world.

Whether the experiments will have a dotted line to, “Okay, you learned about buoyancy. Here is a quick clip about a woman who works with buoyancy in her field. How is learning about buoyancy help you help the world?” Then we discuss that.

It really engages the girls into why they’re learning things, what it could potentially mean for them the world and the future. There is a good study from the Girl Scouts. It is, I think, 90% of STEM girls want to use the knowledge to help people solve the world’s problems.

9. Jacobsen: That makes me think back to the example of the drawings. When girls enter the drawings, they draw a scientist. When they leave, they draw themselves. You have a pre and post set of conditions.

What about a post-post condition in a similar time frame as between the pre and the first post? Where they are outside and not connected directly to the program. But then, they are brought back in, and they draw pictures under similar conditions again, to see if this has been a relatively crystallized internalization or something that has dissipated completely or has dissipated to some degree in between.

Marshall: Yes, you mean if they have aged out of the program.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Marshall: I would love that. If you could talk to the National Science Foundation, we would love a longitudinal study [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Marshall: We would love it. We want a longitudinal study. Are we really having an impact? The first cohort of girls I had in the guest house. They are ageing out this year. They are just ageing out. Those girls, they are phenomenal. They are going to gifted charter schools and winning international innovation competitions.

But as we grow, and as we serve a wider group of girls and cities all over, it would be really interesting, especially as they are hitting that middle school age when girls drop out. It would be useful to compare girls who had our program and girls did not have our program.

Our theory is that we’re building up their confidence in a variety of ways. They are seeing these women in research. If you see these women in so many careers, so many fields, and so many companies, you should be able to lay back on that, as you encounter some challenges in middle school and high school.

10. Jacobsen: So, of course, with any social good movement or institution, there, typically, is a concomitant countermovement or set of counter-institutions that can arise in culture. Typically, this will arise in a culture with the finances to found both.

This raises some questions. I will try to narrow down to one if I can. Who, or what, tend to be trends or organizations within American society that work against the advancement and empowerment of girls in STEM, basically, as a whole? And why those particular trends and forces, and organizations?

Marshall: It is the fact that our transparency and policies have not caught up with what we’re saying and trying to do if that makes sense. It is still not a safe place to be a whistleblower in a variety of instances [Laughing].

Even if, as we highlight girls from our program doing amazing things, for example, two sisters from Santa Ana who have scholarships. One of them got accepted to a very prestigious private middle school-high school, full ride, which is 6 years: transportation, computers, sports, whatever she needs.

We love to highlight those stories. When we talk so much in the media where we’re failing, we lose sight of where we’re succeeding. Girls need to hear and see the success stories. We also need to have a way for people to come forward. It’s not working.

I am not sure anything is there yet in corporate America or Academia. People are trying. But there’s a lot of people being silent about what is really happening.

11. Jacobsen: That’s a topic that needs to be talked about more. That’s where the damage is being done, for sure. It seems like conscious negligence in many instances. “Why should we empower them? Haven’t you seen these innate differences?” These sorts of argument. I think they have dropped the argument.

Now, “it’s innate preference differences,” which sounds like some of these forces are losing a lot of ground.

Marshall: If a company were to excel at this and truly have this transparency, a lot of them are trying. They are talking about it. They have learned through [Laughing] lawsuits and other high-profile instances.

There is a shortage of – they all say – female talent. They are all clamouring to get these women coming out of college. They would attract these women. They are super successful if they were to have a culture like this.

That goes to all the research on women employees and how productive, more efficient, and the team players in culture. All the benefits this produces.

12. Jacobsen: What organizations or books, or speakers, would you recommend for the audience today?

Marshall: For parents, the girls 4 to 12. There is a website called Mighty Girl. They have a great Facebook and newsletter. We are constantly reposting their information. It is a great resource. They have a book resource by age. It is anything from STEM to bullying to issues around girls.

Mighty Girls is a great organization to look at resources for parents. For women, as you mentioned earlier, especially the college women, find a mentor, there is the Million Mentors program.

To find a mentor to go to, for all of us, even internally in companies, it is important. That’s it.

13. Jacobsen: Thank you much for the opportunity and your time, Sandy.

Marshall: Yes! Thank you.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder and CEO, Project Scientist.

[2] Individual Publication Date: May 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/marshall; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Graham Powell on WIN ONE, Contributors, and Selection (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/22

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell, earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: the current trajectory of WIN ONE; prolific contributors to WIN ONE; differentiation of gifted and talented, and not, content; striking poems; soliciting material; selection processes; and determination of an aspect of mind behind produced content.

Keywords: content, contributors, editor, Graham Powell, IQ, WIN ONE, World Intelligence Network.

An Interview with Graham Powell on WIN ONE, Contributors, and Selection (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Now, with the current trajectory of WIN ONE, what will be the plans for 2019/2020?

Graham Powell: I am about to collaborate with Krystal Volney, a long-time member of the WIN, on the production of the WIN ONE. Some ideas that are proposed include getting experts from outside the WIN to contribute, the magazine up to now consisting exclusively of material from WIN members. This will involve Evangelos Katsioulis too, the WIN being his creation, and it will need his approval. As hinted at earlier in this interview, I think the WIN ONE will express the results of one-to-one meetings and the results of discussions. Projects will also be relayed. I wish that real life problems be addressed by members and that active participation from WIN members will be encouraged. The high IQ network of societies is large; but the solitary nature of high IQ people in general, as the protagonists for change at the WIN see matters, means that encouraging participation is to be increased.

2. Jacobsen: Who have been prolific contributors to WIN ONE?

Powell: Aside from my own contributions, which have been substantial, the main contributors over the years have been Paul Edgeworth, Marco Ripà, Phil Elauria, Claus-Dieter Volko, Gwyneth Wesley Rolph and Krystal Volney. Paul Edgeworth has been the most prolific contributor over the entire time that I have been the WIN ONE editor.

3. Jacobsen: What seems to differentiate the content produced by the High-IQ community and the non-gifted & talented community?

Powell: The philosophical nature of the contributions, especially ones which question the role of people in society, or papers which attempt to apply complex mathematical or linguistic theories to societal problems (or existential states) all seem to distinguish the contributions from high IQ individuals from non-gifted people, though, as a person from a professional, didactic background, I wish to point out that talents are multifarious and not limited to the ones which can be expressed in a magazine. It is another reason I want the WIN ONE to evolve and attempt to communicate more widely, gaining insights and contributions from those outside what is labelled “The High IQ Community”.

4. Jacobsen: What poems struck a chord with you?

Powell: I delight in reading the poems by Therese Waneck, one of the few high IQ poets I currently rate very highly. Her poems are short, yet gems at capturing moments of emotive intensity.

“Child Carries the Lullaby”, “Umbrella Clown” and “Educated Mime” spring to mind, each one appearing in the WINtelligence Book “The Ingenious Time Machine”. Obviously, my own poems strike a chord, that’s largely why I wrote them, the most endearing being “As promised, a soldier’s love visits in the rain”, “The Physics of Love” and “Reflections on Time and Darkness”.

5. Jacobsen: What are the main pathways for garnering or soliciting material for WIN ONE?

Powell: Most contributors have become friends over the years and I message them individually. They usually respond favourably. I also put adverts in the Facebook groups and on the WIN website. I hope this interview also inspires people to approach me. In the past, the conferences I have attended and the meetings in real life have also spurred people to write for the WIN ONE.

6. Jacobsen: In the process of accepting or rejecting material, aside from formal processes, there is, as an editor, an intuitive, even emotive, selection process within the framework or bounds of the criteria for submissions. Can you explain some of this non-verbal, or pre-verbal, selection process happening alongside regular choosing of content, please?

Powell: The G2G Manifest and the first WIN ONE were in existence prior to me becoming the editor, so people were aware of the content that had been accepted up to the beginning of my tenure. Firstly, I skim the proposed contributions and note my emotive response to them, as well as my cognitive appreciation of what is expressed. As said previously, I have never rejected a contribution, though sometimes the work has been modified in collaboration with the author. Most authors have trusted my judgement on the presentation and ease of reading that is necessary because even the most intelligent and diligent of reader needs guidance in order to get through an in-depth, complex series of concepts. It is also a question of what I would call ‘the greyness’ of a text, the addition of some illustrations or graphics making the experience for the reader more pleasurable. This is an intuitive reaction to the work that is submitted. I see the editor as a guide throughout the magazine and someone who eases the transition from one part of the magazine to the next. The overall style and look of the magazine should be appealing, and it is the same for a teacher as each lesson proceeds. Like any good lesson, or, indeed, novel, the ending should be clear, plus satisfying. It is also a tradition regarding the WIN magazine that the date of publication follows some kind of a sequence, this also influencing the arrangement and presentation of the content. International Pi Day dominated one edition, for example; another had prime numbers as the date… quirkiness seems to appeal to the High IQ community.

7. Jacobsen: In terms of written content, could one, theoretically or actually, differentiate the content produced by someone at 2-sigma, 3-sigma, 4-sigma, 5-sigma, and 6-sigma above the norm – without prior knowledge of the individual’s general intelligence score?

Powell: Within a high IQ group, this was proffered as a discussion piece a few days ago. My initial reaction was that a precise identification of IQ would not be possible based solely on written content, mainly due to the complexities and varieties of language being diverse and non verifiable diachronically, nor upon transcribing from one language to another – I.E., many people write in a second or even third language, or they demand that their original text be translated. This mediates their expressiveness in terms of complexity, lucidity and profundity. Placing the individual within a sigma level, as you query, however, is possible, in fact, most of the time I already know that information regarding a contributor. So, in other words, based on my experience, could someone make a shrewd assessment of another based on their written contribution? Well, yes, I think they could.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Graham.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: April 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-two; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-15

An Interview with Graham Powell on Gifted and Talented Life & Publications (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/15

Abstract

His Lordship of Roscelines, Graham Powell,earned the “best mark ever given for acting during his” B.A. (Hons.) degree in “Drama and Theatre Studies at Middlesex University in 1990” and the “Best Dissertation Prize” for an M.A. in Human Resource Management from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in 1994. Powell is an Honorary Member of STHIQ Society, Former President of sPIqr Society, Vice President of Atlantiq Society, and a member ofBritish Mensa, IHIQS, Ingenium, Mysterium, High Potentials Society, Elateneos, Milenija, Logiq, and Epida. He is the Full-Time Co-Editor of WIN ONE (WIN-ON-line Edition) since 2010 or nearly a decade. He represents World Intelligence Network Italia. He is the Public Relations Co-Supervisor, Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Member of the European Council for High Ability. He discusses: background, pivotal moments, and educational attainments; becoming a member of the high-IQ community; becoming the main editor for World Intelligence Network ONline Editions (WIN ONE), formerly Genius To Genius Manifest (G2G); tasks and responsibilities; developments in his tenure right into the present; and the most read articles.

Keywords: editor, Genius To Genius Manifest, geophysics, Graham Powell, IQ, World Intelligence Network, WIN ONE.

An Interview with Graham Powell on Gifted and Talented Life & Publications (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of the background, what is it? What are the pivotal moments and educational attainments forming you?

Graham Powell: What an intriguing question, Scott. My first thought is that the immediate aftermath of my birth was especially significant as my mother suffered from depression and I was looked after by my grandparents while my mother spent months in hospital. This meant that I did not get baptised – though my brother and sister were. I later went to Sunday School with my brother, yet my foremost memory is of coming home to help my father rebuild the garage. We were clearly sent to Sunday School to be out of the way as my father did the vast amount of cement mixing, then the two of us did the more intricate jobs. We worked very much around the house and I learnt carpentry and other building skills from age four. We always worked with the end result in mind and little else, my father also being a perfectionist. I remember him shouting at me to keep things still as he laboured to fit everything together. He shouted at me one time because I was not supposed to move, despite him falling over. I had to keep the post straight! Perhaps it helped induce in me an autotelic personality type, something prevalent to this day as I do my daily duties. I also developed an early life with a more philosophical outlook than a religious one. Life has never involved earning money as a main goal.

My mother volunteered as a Saint John’s Ambulance nurse and I read all the books she had on it, gaining an excellent knowledge of first aid and anatomy. It was about this time that she told me about when the doctor performed the post-natal checks and commented on how well co-ordinated I was. I think this influenced my father giving me football training in the field next to our house, sport featuring heavily in my youth. I learnt to play football equally with either foot and was very good at heading the ball, even though I was only average height when young.

At Primary School I was popular, and meeting various teachers clearly forged my mental and physical development. Mrs. Bert took us for creative writing and I emerged as a poet. I was often asked to write poems because my schoolmates knew Mrs. Bert would like them and give us ‘House Points’. On one occasion, she gave Haxted House four points for a poem about a giant bird landing and befriending a poet, so we won the House Competition for that term. Mr. Apps, the science and PE teacher at Middle School, also liked me, my prowess at football suddenly being eclipsed by my exceptional ability at cross country running. Bernard Apps became my trainer and I ended up representing my county at the sport.

At Senior School I broke the school record for 800 metres and was one of the few victors in my House that day. Indeed, I became something of a ‘hero’ within Grants House, though I was shy and in no way ardent in pursuing such adulation.

By age 15 I had added cycling to my sporting repertoire, my father rekindling his youthful enthusiasm for the sport. It was a significant time, in hindsight, because during those three years I met people who are now well-known in their fields, one person in cycling itself, another in politics. Knowing them during more humble times helps keep me grounded.

I also went into the Sixth Form, but was disillusioned by the experience as we seemed to be persecuted for being the ‘Punk Year’, so different from any previous academic group at the school. Just before the first year exams, I had an accident on my bicycle and ended up in hospital, the week spent there influencing my choice to leave school and emerge into the working world. Overall, I was tired of being with teenagers who just seemed so infantile, though maybe their bravado and confidence in social situations also jarred, my struggle through that period being mainly one involving extreme introversion. Most of the times I just didn’t want to speak.

I left school and immediately got a job in geophysics, my rise in that area being quite phenomenal. I developed as a communicator and within three years became proficient in social situations. My new confidence made me want to self actualize, the way of doing this coming via two means: a journey around Europe and a return to academia. I eagerly arranged both.

My ten-week hitch-hiking tour of Europe made me realise that I was exceptionally bright and able to communicate across the continent, even if many languages were known minimally by me. I also developed amazing endurance and could walk for many kilometres each day, if required. I carried most of the kit which my work colleague and I had, which was also an ego-blow to that colleague, so much so that he became jealous and resentful – even violent. Towards the end of the tenth week away, we separated and I went straight back home to Surrey, England, from northern Luxembourg. It took 27 hours!

Shortly after my return, I decided to go to college and my aim was to attend university. I met Dorothy Humphrey, a 53-year-old English teacher from Glasgow. I owe her an immeasurable debt in life for taking what was, in essence, a kindling love of my language and transforming it into a raging fire of desire for it. This has never left me and I know it never will.

About this time, I also joined a theatrical group and my love of acting supplemented my studies in language and literature. Several in the drama group said how brilliant I was and after a few years of saving, I applied and was accepted onto the Drama and Theatre Studies course at Middlesex University. I learnt many new aspects to drama and theatre and I am happy to say that I am still in contact with many from that course. It was an incredibly stimulating, creative and rewarding time in every respect!

My post-graduate desire to fuse personal development with creativity and innovation made me take an MA in International Human Resource Management. At the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I won the academic prize for Best Dissertation. Disappointingly, however, I never got a job within that specific area. Instead, after a few years of retail management, I qualified as a teacher and until recently taught English both in England and abroad. The last few years have seen me develop as an English teacher at university, then advise C.E.O.s and civil servants on how to present themselves, plus create and innovate within their respective areas of competence and responsibility. It’s merges many aspects to my career, which I enjoy.

2. Jacobsen: How did the high-IQ community become part of life? How did you find it, in other words?

Powell: At East Surrey College (where I met Dorothy Humphrey) I made friends with a man who had recently finished a relationship with a member of British Mensa. He was convinced that I would be able to join, so he encouraged me to apply. After finishing college (which drained me of all my financial resources) I resumed work for a while and became a paid-up member of Mensa in January 1987. My interest in the high IQ community really expanded, however, when I got the internet connected within my home in Sardinia. That was 20 years after joining Mensa and by 2009 I had joined a few on-line societies. None of them were in the World Intelligence Network, but, in 2010, I saw a message from Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, the founder of the WIN, about translating the WIN site into Italian. I volunteered to do that, and, just as I was about to finish the translation, more societies joined the WIN and I was suddenly a member.

3. Jacobsen: How did you become the main editor for World Intelligence Network ONline Editions (WIN ONE), formerly Genius To Genius Manifest (G2G)?

Powell: Immediately after finishing the voluntary translation work, Evangelos invited me to resurrect the WIN ONE, which had not been published for over three years at that point, and I took up the editorship, advertising for contributions. They came in rapidly, even a paper in Italian, which I translated. My first WIN ONE was as big as all the previous editions put together, so I was obviously pleased about that.

4. Jacobsen: What tasks and responsibilities come with the position?

Powell: The editor not only advertises for contributions; the role also involves checking each contribution for accuracy, decency and appropriateness – though I must admit that these aspects have never been imposed to refuse publishing anything. The editor collates the content and, especially, corrects the texts, many being written by people whose mother tongue is not English. The editor augments the content, introduces each part and improves the readability of each article, putting in subtitles (for example) or dividing the content into sections. This is all done whilst liaising with the original writer. The last few magazines have seen me contribute a major percentage of the content, especially the puzzles. The editor also decides on the style of the magazine and most of the covers have been designed by me during my tenure.

5. Jacobsen: What have been the main developments of WIN ONE in personal tenure?

Powell: The main development from the WIN ONE has been the WIN Books Project, the first “WINtelligence Books” publication coming out earlier this year as a Kindle book. “The Ingenious Time Machine” is an expression of the talents and ideas within the World Intelligence Network and it took four years to develop and publish the volume. The physical copy of this book should be made available later this year, or at least, that is my goal.

I am also about to publish the WIN ONE more often, though discussions with new collaborators are going ahead now, so I can’t give away too many details… Maybe we can talk again in a few months’ time, Scott… I’d certainly like that.

It has been via my WIN ONE activities that I have made friends and a few times this has evolved into inviting contributors to conferences and meetings, mainly in Dubai and London. It is a personal dream to invite to members to Malta at some point in the not too distant future… Promoting this will be a development within the pages of the WIN ONE. I think the WIN ONE will evolve to be a vehicle for getting people together. Face to face meetings seem more popular in the High IQ World these days, not the production of long, written articles.

6. Jacobsen: What have been the most read articles? Why?

Powell: Though specific data is not available to affirm which articles have been the most read, I can give personal feedback on what you ask. Most people seem to like the philosophical articles, especially the ones by Paul Edgeworth, whose brilliant analyses of philosophers and aspects to their work, such as Aristotle’s writing on contemplation, Cartesian Motion and Heidegger’s Dasein, have been appreciated very much. I know this because readers have contacted me about them. I also appreciate Paul’s work and my own writing has sometimes, serendipitously, evolved to be akin to Paul’s explorations. Rich Stocks’ writing about practical philosophy has been praised too, something I am pleased to have contributed to as well, his work being a commentary on current events in America and the dialectical implications of them, to crudely summarise some of the work he has done. The poetry published in the WIN ONE is popular too. Much of it is also an expression of the zeitgeist prevalent today, which is satisfying to experience.

Above all, Scott, I thank you for your questions and hope that you have gained much from our exchange. I certainly have.

7. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Graham.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Editor, WIN ONE; Text Editor, Leonardo (AtlantIQ Society); Joint Public Relations Officer, World Intelligence Network; Vice President, AtlantIQ Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: April 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/powell-one; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner on Existence, Mathematics, and Philosophy (Part Five)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/08

Abstract

Rick Rosner and I conduct a conversational series entitled Ask A Genius on a variety of subjects through In-Sight Publishing on the personal and professional website for Rick. Rick exists on the World Genius Directory listing as the world’s second highest IQ at 192 based on several ultra-high IQ tests scores developed by independent psychometricians. Erik Haereid earned a score at 185, on the N-VRA80. Both scores on a standard deviation of 15. A sigma of ~6.13 for Rick – a general intelligence rarity of 1 in 2,314,980,850 – and ~5.67 for Erik – a general intelligence rarity of 1 in 136,975,305. Of course, if a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population. This amounts to a joint interview or conversation with Erik Haereid, Rick Rosner, and myself.

Keywords: America, Erik Haereid, Norway, Rick Rosner, Scott Douglas Jacobsen.

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner on Existence, Mathematics, Philosophy (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do philosophy and mathematics mix with one another? How do philosophy and mathematics not mix with one another? What insights into reality emerge from philosophy and not mathematics, or from mathematics and not from philosophy? Or do these seem inextricably linked to one another?

Traditionally, philosophy breaks into several disciplines: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, and so on. Do some of these distinct fields seem unnecessary in philosophy? In that, some sub-disciplines in philosophy seem already explained within others.

Also, what seems like the limits of mathematics and philosophy in providing some fundamental explanation about the world? In that, the rules and principles of mathematics remain non-fundamental.

Same with the purported big questions of philosophy. They remain important. They give insights, even a sense of grandeur about existence. However, they fail, at least at present, for a complete explanation about the world – assuming such a thing exists in principle.

Erik Haereid: Mathematics is an abstract, logical, cognitive tool based on numerical symbols, based on some assumptions, axioms that we agree on. Whether the assumptions are proper or not is a philosophical issue. Mathematics is about structures and exact relations.

Philosophy is some logical investigation into what’s true and false, and what’s right and wrong. It’s a compass in life. We use it trying to finish our mental map. It’s a cognitive tool that helps us directing our lives more proper, as we see it, than lives that are lived in the present and based on pure intuition and urges.

Philosophy and mathematics go hand in hand thus that we begin with some philosophical inquiries, then we put some mathematics to those thoughts, then we make new philosophical inquiries and so on. An example is the Big Bang theory. It’s reasonable that there many years ago were as many ideas of the Universe, what was outside the human perceptions when watching the sky at day and night, as there were humans. That is, basic for philosophizing is our fantasy; thoughts and emotions in a mental soup based on our genes and experiences. The yellow light we saw at day time on the sky, and we thought were god’s candle or whatever, became through philosophy, mathematics, and science to a massive spherical plasma object consisting of such as hydrogen and helium.

Einstein philosophized through his experimental thoughts about how the Universe could function and look like, and he had, for instance, Newton’s work in his mind. He got some ideas, like that space is curved and cause gravity, which were reasonably for him, and he put mathematics to it. He also philosophized over that the three-dimensional space and time were not independent, but one four-dimensional phenomenon (spacetime). That kind of philosophy and related mathematics created new thoughts about how the Universe looked like, and what was beyond our perceptions.

Who could think of the Universe as a 13-14-billion-year-old highly dense little object exploding into a vast mess of matter and energy, impossible to imagine, thousand years ago? It was the philosophy and mathematics that dug the ditch. And still are. Because we don’t know what’s beyond the Big Bang. And probably, if we look to for instance Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, we will never know. At least never get the whole picture.

Let’s say we could explain the Universe; find some formulas that explained everything (determinism). Then we could explain, prove (based on some axiomatic, logical framework), every statement we had. There wouldn’t be any statements that couldn’t be proved. But according to Gödel, within any axiomatic, logical framework there are statements that cannot be proved and therefore human can never prove a deterministic Universe even though the Universe is deterministic.

But since we are curious, and maybe naive, we still dig. And then we make new and more fantasies, restrict it into some logical, philosophical frame of thoughts, put some mathematics, even more strict relations and order, to it, call them theories and try to prove them. The final act is to observe it; experience that the empirical observations are in accordance with the philosophy and mathematics. Then it’s true, in our understanding of truth. When we have revealed the truth, we don’t need to philosophize about it any more. Of course that’s not completely true, because we don’t believe in our perceptions, and/or we don’t know what they are (what is a thought?). So we will continue philosophizing over that, until we get tired and give up, or get mad.

A harmonic alternation between fantasies (chaos), philosophy (order), mathematics (detailed and more order, relations) and empirical experiences (perceptual truth) is the track here.

Humans tend to try to see the surface of the three-/four-dimensional space we are confined in, from the outside. But there is no surface. What is “no surface?” And so on. The only possibility is to make fantasies about it, philosophize about it, create some mathematical formulas to it, but it’s confined within our perceptions and abstract images. Our desire for knowing exceeds our possible limits of knowledge. Maybe this drive is crucial for human’s evolution

AI and technology, build on better abilities, amplifiers, processors and storage possibilities than we have, could be fruitful for human evolution. We have to respect our limitations, like we do when we make cars, planes, telephones and binoculars. And I think we also do.

I also think we should extend our mind and cognitive abilities to its limit. It’s rewarding when mathematicians (and other scientists) find new solutions, invent new concepts or numbers (like when introducing irrational numbers, and later complex numbers).

We need philosophy as long as we don’t know everything we want to know, independent of which philosophical field we talk about. In this context a single philosophical discipline’s existence is a function of if we still see it proper to try to answer more questions about these topics.

When I know how trees grow, through photosynthesis, and am satisfied with that answer, I don’t need philosophizing about trees and growth anymore. It fulfills my needs. But that’s subjective, because the process, any process, has no end in the human mind. There are always questions to ask, even when we know “everything” about that topic.

If you see a tree, you can see it as timber to build houses, as a plant that grow and live through photosynthesis, as an imaginary picture of the phylogenetic development, as a family tree, as a nightmare, as beautiful, as a wish, as an oxygen producer, as a producer of apples and fruits, as x times heavier and higher than a human, etc. To discover all these angles and views is the aim of philosophy, in all areas and with everything we have any real perception or imaginary idea of.

To understand is beauty. We have to respect that we will never understand everything, and at the same time respect that there are always new things to learn. It’s about a balance. It’s like building a monument, like an enormous cathedral or tower; it takes hundreds, thousands, millions of years, but by putting one brick systematically on top of another we know that we each day get closer to the product; by creating time through successive events we experience that we can reach our goal. And until we know how to live forever, we reproduce and let our children continue the job.

What’s the final point? Maybe to reveal a global truth. To reach the very end, where the illuminated revelation is right in front of us. Is this what life is about? Or is it just an uncorrelated mess, with seemingly none or few relations, no goal, a nihilistic travel through emptiness? Shall we reduce life to simple, cynical social maneuvers that suck all the beauty out of it? I choose not to reduce humans to a harsh evolution process, because it’s meaningless, it’s messy and violent, and it’s logical in the simplest way. This makes me religious even though I don’t believe in God. This also elevates my experience of life.

It’s complicated to see the beauty in everything, and on that road we limit us to exclude what we have not understood yet. But still we unconsciously work towards that goal, because we know on an unconscious level that we need to see everything that exists in relation to each other.

In general we philosophize about everything and anything, and related to math about such as black holes and singularity, how to express the primes in a formula, multiple universes, artificial superintelligence, and how to travel and meet the aliens somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy. Dreaming about travelling to the Moon was one thing, philosophizing about it another and the next step, and then calculating how to do it and doing it the final steps.

Obviously, as we can see when we are at AI’s kickoff, the human brain has many limitations concerning perceiving, storing and processing data. The black boxes are mentioned, and our lack of knowledge of what is going on there even though we have created these devices.

One of the blessings by being a child was the large quantity of fantasies. In books, stories told, dreams, what we saw in the nature we yet didn’t restrict to pure science (Some trees grew into heaven, didn’t they?).

Inventions are made by grown up “children”. There is one person now and then through history that revealed something important, that made his/her fantasy becomes real; like that we can talk to each other from one side of the world to the other, or travel in space. The impossible became possible. This is an ongoing process which we all are a part of all the time.

Maybe our search for objectivity and truth, a real Universe, has something to do with us, our mind more than it’s about if the Universe is objective or subjective. Of course, how is it possible to travel in a subjective Universe? Who are you if my mind is the only mind? How can I interact with something else if this is a part of me?

It’s convenient to look at it as me and the surroundings, as different entities, subject and object, because that’s how we experience it naturally. But when we go into it, philosophizing, exploring it with our thoughts and logic, it could be that everything “else” is sort of an unconscious part of ourselves. “We” are not confined in our body.

We just don’t experience it like that, because we are not aware of it. But by putting it into a thought, we can think of it as a possibility, or just a fantasy. When you travel or do things, I do it, but as during surgery and anesthesia. It’s a matter of consciousness and not. Or several levels of consciousness; I am not aware that I think your thoughts.

Don’t misunderstand this; it sounds narcissistic. But it’s not, it’s a philosophical inquiry. If the person thinks he/she is God, then he/she tries to control all other’s cognition, acts, behavior. But we don’t control each other’s thoughts and behavior. It’s in this context the philosophical inquiry is done.

Maybe we are tricked by the fact that we experience that something is outside our own control, and therefore experience it as what we call objectivity. If I can’t remember that I wrote that sentence or did that thing, how can I then claim that it’s my act? How can I be certain of that me is confined within “my” body, “my” senses, “my” emotions and thoughts, “my” free will? It could happen that I am something else than I experience that I am, even everything. This is about how we identify ourselves, and what kind of responsibility we take.

Let’s say that we all are the same. If everyone and everything are a part of you and you are a part of everything and everyone, then all the interactions are a part of us and we are not limited to our bodies. Subject is object. When you speak to me, even though I can’t imagine or sense that this spoken sentence came from myself, I have no control over it, I don’t know where it came from within what I define as “me”, I have to think, from this point of view, that your voice is my voice. It could be a voice from my unconscious part, like my autonomic nervous system.

It’s not the chaos that is beautiful, but our adaptation to it in the sense of understanding and accepting the volatility in the surroundings, the magnitude of the Universe and life. This is what make logical practices like math and philosophy beautiful; they are tools evolving our understanding, abstract and not, and revealing that life is more than we have ever thought of before.

We talk a lot about what technology can do for us in the future, and obviously we need some kind of cognitive and emotional amplifiers to be what we want to be.

Inventions like social media, internet, shows creativity and that we are capable of doing almost what we want to. I am sure that evolution has its right pace, also related to technology.

[Ed. Further commentary]

We humans have the ability to think we are something we are not; we have the ability to believe we are gods and devils, for instance, that we are everything and nothing, abstractions or concrete manifestations different from which we really are, and base our existence on that false identity. The advantage of this feature is that we can create great ideas that can be converted into practical use. The downside is that we kill each other; become more destructive than necessary. Great ideas are also created by people that are self-aware, so let’s stick with this.

I am in favor of self-awareness, to use a word that is not sufficient and do not cover what I mean; but that’s the best word I came up with. It’s about knowing that you are an entity, existence, and who you are, as best you possible can achieve that self-awareness through all your identity-changes through your life. It’s a continuous struggle. And it’s the best way to live your life, if you ask me; for you and the society. It’s a state of contemplation, and maybe the Buddhist monks are the best achievers of that state, I don’t know. We in the western cultures are not very good at it, though.

When we discuss ontological, epistemological, ethical or aesthetical issues, I choose to start with this: We have to know that we are and approximately who we are; for real, not as abstract or false features. If not, we are driven into insanity.

When I discuss whether ideas exist or not, I have to profoundly feel that I am the entity that thinks of and discuss this problem with myself or others. If not, I get lost.

If abstraction exists per se, beyond our abilities to think abstract, is a function of what concepts we so far in evolution have developed and defined, and which logical inference and irrational beliefs we have established (knowledge). Proofs of for instance abstractions’ existence are based on our, humans, innate abilities and learned knowledge. The core is how we humans define proof. And this is about feelings, experiences, profound feeling of and so on; the core inside us (i.e. self-awareness), which is irrational as such.

It’s possible to disagree about anything and everything, even though one wizard claims his or her right (like it seems I do here; I underline that this is my experience), and even “proves” it. Bottom line is that it ends here; reality, existence, truth cannot be proved as anything else than that we experience it and call it “truth, reality” and so on. Something is difficult to contradict as real, though, like physical events that “everyone” sees and experience. The closest we get to reality is therefore our experience of it. Do you see what I mean?

I think we have to see knowledge as a human phenomenon, a mental ability that helps advanced organisms like us to provide better identities and lives. Humans should focus more on what is real and not, and what is me and what is someone and something else; who are we, and how shall we capture a sense of that?

It’s not about living all life in contemplation, but to evolve the ability to slow down the chaotic lives when needed, and find that inner peace or understanding of whom one is; a meditation skill.

We all change identities every minute, every day, all life, and it’s a struggle knowing who we are on this bumpy travel. And since humans have these complex mental abilities, we also have the ability to dissociate, create several personalities, thinking we are something we are not and make a mess for ourselves and each other. I don’t say that I think we would be angels if we all had this continuously inner contact with who we are, but I guess we certainly would have been nicer and lived better lives and also chose the right path; because we would have the inner knowledge and wisdom of “here I am, and that is who I am just now”. Then the future would be easier regardless obstacles we met on the road.

So, if there is one certain achievable knowledge, it is the knowledge of who we are. No one can take that inner experience away from anybody (even though we try and succeed…). But we have to believe in it; it’s not proved mathematically or a result from a syllogism. It’s an experience. It’s beyond thoughts and emotions, which are tools to gain that inner knowledge and wisdom.

If you want to be rich or a king, go for it, but the point is to experience and achieve an inner peace about who you are on that road. It’s not about restraining our lives, on the contrary, but about achieving goals through self-awareness. Do you see what I mean? I don’t believe in piety in the strictest meaning of the word, because that’s a wrong approach to inner peace. I am more in favor of hedonism, but with that extra ability to always know who you really are, and not the narcissistic or ascending self.

Maybe I am a bit off-road concerning the topic in this thread, but when we talk about philosophy and what kind of mindful activities humans should strive for in the future, I have to mention this which I strongly believe in. We can ask ontological and epistemological questions about reality, existence and knowledge, and questions about what is beautiful and not, and what is good and not, but anyway we end up with ourselves. That kind of self-awareness is the key to evolve on every other area we deal with. Being human is not only to gain knowledge but also wisdom, and that is to know when enough is enough.

Because we tend to blend our abstractions of who we are with who we really are, also because other people, the culture, plant ideas in our mind about who we are and should be, we build a distance between our perception of who we think we are and who we really are. This creates chaos in our minds and in the culture; socially.

It’s the culture, family, friends, activities and your surroundings that function as mirrors, that make you be self-aware or not. If this culture make you believe that you are something else than you really are, then you go out searching for someone and something that mirrors the real you, that make you find yourself, until you find it; because we all have that inner profound wisdom about whom we are, all the time. We just need help; mirrors that lead us towards it.

Self-awareness is also about understanding ones limitations. If you are far away from knowing who you are, you are not capable of capturing your possibilities. It’s like a child’s growth: The child develops best when its parents function as mirrors for that child; sees it as it is. Then the child is open-minded for strangers and differences, curious about it, and is driven towards new phenomenon. It changes identity every second. And because its parents sees it whatever what (not accept everything it does, though), it will continue being self-aware. It’s a process through life. When we get older other people function as mirrors, the culture does, and the same rules exists. When we are not seen as we are, when we cannot see ourselves in a film, a book or in a neighbor, we get lost in our minds and develop other and alternative pictures of who we are than we really are. When the culture contains many such individuals and features, then it gets messy.

One of my points is that we become xenophobic and hateful against each other when we abstract from our true self. And the contrary; friendly and inviting when we know who we are. Then ethics is to build a community and culture which embrace values that enhance each individual’s self-awareness. A culture that motivates everyone to be something one impossibly can be is an unethical culture, and the opposite. It’s not about restriction, but a consciousness about whom we are and who we can be. The sky’s the limit in our mind, but not in real life. And I think that is crucial to understand, and making good citizens; people that know how to treat each other with respect and good. And even though it sounds imprisoning, it works opposite; you will actually achieve more in life when you are aware of this. Self-confidence is å product of being self-aware.

You can create a justice system that controls people’s actions until a degree, but the basic problems are still the same; the system does not prevent violence. That’s because it’s still unfair; no such system embraces everyone. The thing, if you ask me, is not to prevent violence and make good citizens by telling people who they are and should be, but letting them be who they are. Then our natural social collisions will make us adapt properly. I think this is a path to more empathy and understanding, as I said before: Egoism is altruism. This is what I mean by that. I don’t say this will prevent violence completely, not at all. But it is, in my opinion, the best way to achieve cultures where all live their best lives and that is inside the acceptable for almost everyone. Statistically spoken the expected value, the average, of life quality could be the same but the standard deviation much less. There would be shorter distance between the extremities. We (think) we need more rules and limitations and governmental institutions because we are less in contact with whom we really are, and more in contact with an abstract, false identity; that’s my point.

About aesthetics: The idea with art is to elevate us, bring us into the contact I speak about, to our true self. So the idea of aesthetics, say art, is to bring us closer to mutual love and respect, understanding and behavior that we all can accept.

It’s about making the right picture, mirroring ourselves. I think it’s not a question if, let’s say in painting, impressionism is better for us than expressionism, or if that abstract art is better than figurative art, but what that piece of painting and sculpture does with us; like the book we read. I read novels that enhance my feelings of being, existing. It’s like travelling and being aware of that. And as with esthetics, it’s not possible to draw general and absolute rules. It’s individual.

When that is said it’s obvious that some with knowledge about paintings can help people to see things in the painting, and through that new insight evolve and appreciate that piece of art. Like in architecture, where you can look at a building and feel that it’s ugly until the architect wizard tell you about the details, the reasons; why, where, how. Then it becomes beautiful, as the zoologist thinks when he watches tarantulas.

Should we draw a painting and write a novel as beautiful as possible, far from reality, to enhance our good feelings that we get when we watch beautiful things; idealizing? Or should we paint and describe reality, with the chaotic mix of ugliness and beauty, reflecting our real emotions in our real lives?

If everything in a culture is about creating idealistic, always beautiful art and social installations, we get lost in our hopes and wishes, in our abstractions and thoughts about how we want our lives to be. If we don’t create any counterpoise to this, we will probably evolve abstract selves and huge distance to our true selves, and without the opportunity to evolve our true selves as we wish. To gain the optimal evolution we have to create idealistic art and art reflecting reality.

Being a true romantic, as an example, is not about being bohemian or poet, but being bohemian in the weekends, so to speak. Hedonism is a spare time phenomenon. It’s about having this inner switch turning you self on and off. A naturalist, a person that embraces things as they are, has also to turn his and her romantic-switch on now and then. Art is not about destruction, but about making us understand that no one survives if life is pure destructive. We have to see, to internalize, that there are good as well. If we don’t, it’s not because of our existence but because of our culture, art, communications and perceptions of life. It’s an illusion that reality is pure destructive. And it’s an illusion that it’s pure good.

[Ed., further additions]

We can divide reality into a concrete and an abstract world, where the abstractions meet the concretions now and then. It is “impossible” to claim that something created or perceived in the abstract world don’t have the opportunity to appear in the concrete world, such as time travels. We don’t know the range of the concrete possibilities that lie in our abstractions. We profit from distinguishing between our abstract and concrete identities. The abstractions as phenomenon are far ahead of us, far beyond, but at the same time provide us vast amounts of opportunities in the concrete world.

Example quantum physics: The fact that two particles can function completely synchronized on different physical places, with no concrete relation, is an example of changes in our perception of reality based on evolved abstractions (math). When I say that we must be aware of our limitations, I mean strive for being self-aware, and not that we shall not endeavor and evolve through our abstractions; including convert from abstract concepts to real experiences like time travels. Abstractions are about aspiring, setting goals, and respect that we reach them when and if we do.

The very first grounds for anything is “because it is like that”. Axioms are established because we feel and experience that this is right, and not because it’s a logical context that leads to the axioms. My point is that all explanations, all mathematics and philosophy are based on an irrational, emotionalized elastic floor that we never can get under or beyond.

Math is about developing numerical logical coherences, formulas, based on some basic rules, axioms that we agree in. When we bump into problems that involve lack of concepts and definitions, we create them. That’s the advantage by abstractions; it’s quite easy to expand and evolve. When mathematicians stop developing concerning formulas containing strange numbers that they until then did not have defined in their number system, they invent new number concepts and symbols (i.e. from natural to rational, rational to irrational and further to complex numbers). They adapt to their abstract needs by expanding their abstract world. Even though complex numbers (square root of negative numbers) seem illogical and incomprehensible by first glimpse, based on traditional mathematical rules, it’s about amplifying the system by thinking beyond what the mind think is possible.

In logical, abstract activities we have the possibility to achieve new coherences and correlations, after developing new abstract concepts, definitions and symbols and the logical rules we attend to, that we possibly couldn’t within the frame of concepts and symbols we are captured into at that time.

It becomes a kind of abstract nanotechnology; we distort basic structures, and create new concepts, definitions and logical rules that we accept.

An intriguing thought: Maybe the prime numbers are math’s enigma to mankind; we have to reveal the formula explaining the primes to understand what life is about; what is meaningful and not. If I was a zoologist I would probably have found another example, though. But maybe it’s impossible to find that formula concerning the prime numbers without expanding into new mathematical concepts.

Maybe rhythm, logic, coherences actually is about developing concepts and symbols, enlarging our abstract world more than trying to gain control over the already existing abstractions we know of. That is, every lack of rhythm and understanding is a lack of new concepts, lack of abstract expansion. If that’s so, it’s not about what we want and not want, but how we can achieve that expanded wisdom.

Rick Rosner: I agree with Eric that our philosophizing about the nature of the world has been recently constrained in the last hundred years by our finally having a first overall picture of the structure of the universe.

Although, I would say that our first conclusions, including the Big Bang, are likely not going to turn out to be as right as we currently think they are. But until a hundred years ago, we didn’t even know there were other galaxies.

It was less than a hundred years ago that the expansion of the universe was discovered. A hundred years ago, we didn’t know that stars ran on fusion. That’s less than ninety years ago. There was no way we would be even anywhere close to right in philosophizing about the universe because we had a very incomplete picture.

Our picture is still well short of, in our current philosophies and science, the overall structure and behavior of the universe; it is still off in the weeds. But it is closer to correct than ever before because we have more observational evidence than ever before, and it is not even a gradual incremental increase in accuracy.

It is an explosive increase in understanding over the past 100 years. We had Newton’s universal gravitation, which itself was a huge step and then we had the relativities but they were brand new.

So, anyway we’re living in a new era of philosophy and science on the largest scales and philosophy can be considered for science on the largest possible scale with an observational foundation for the first time ever.

Ten thousand years of trying to imagine the universe with some explosive steps towards understanding from time to time going from an earth-centered universe to a sun-centered universe, the discovery of the elements and all that stuff, but we’ve only gotten the tools for any observation and information based global philosophizing in the past few generations.

And this coincides with the idea that what science is supposed to do is boil everything down to a single general set of principles or a single theory; unification in general. Let’s see how many things we can put under a single umbrella.

We wouldn’t get arguments from many scientists if you said that biology and chemistry are at their most fundamental levels just physics. And they need to have some quibble saying there are emergent principles in biology and chemistry that you’d have a hard time predicting from physics. So, you can’t do away with biology and chemistry.

Then if you came back and said, “Yes but all the physical interactions from which these emergent phenomena arise, that’s still all physics.” They might have to grudgingly say, “Yeah.” You could argue that evolution is a unifying principle of life on earth.

Now still, you can take it all back on physics, but evolution is the framework that encompasses all that and gives you a philosophical structure for understanding what’s going on. Evolution is still subject to severe revision.

It wasn’t until the 60’s and 70’s when Stephen Jay Gould came on with punctuated equilibrium. Before that most people and still, most people have the idea that evolution, if they believe in it at all, is this gradual thing that cuts along with occasional mutations being helpful and being integrated into net of life.

Whereas punctuated equilibrium says the species generally go on without changing much for tens and even hundreds of thousands or even millions of years until special circumstances permit for rapid change in evolution on change in a few hundred, a few thousand, or a couple ten thousand years based on either a changing environment or a small segment of a population being isolated.

If you were to graph somehow one finch changing into another finch, it wouldn’t be a gradual transformation of one finch into the other. Instead, it would be finch A going along for fifteen thousand, twenty-five, or fifty-five thousand years and then all of a sudden part of that finch population, something happens to it; it gets isolated or the weather changes or some crap happens and then within fifteen hundred years finch B emerges.

But anyway, that’s a recent addition to evolutionary theory and then epigenetics is probably even more recent, not that I can even talk about that in any decent terms but I think epigenetics is like Lamarckism that isn’t wrong.

Lamarckism is the idea that an organism’s life history is somehow incorporated into what it passes on genetically with the standard example being that if a giraffe has to reach higher and higher to get to stuff on trees that reaching is somehow going to be incorporated, it is going to be passed on to its kids because the giraffe had to be so reachy all its life.

It wants to have longer necks, which survive better and pass on their long neck genes. So, it is not individual experience changing, it is the better-adapted creatures pass on their genes and if this happens in enough increments; if there’s a niche for longer-necked creatures, then longer-necked creatures are going to have more life success.

That is, they’ll get more food. They’ll be able to get laid better because they are healthier than the short-necked giraffes. So, the long-necked giraffes will have more descendants than the short-necked giraffes.

What I think epigenetics says, I should probably read the Wikipedia article so I’m not wrong, is that our genome; it has a bunch of junk genes. The genes that are expressed to make us and operate us are like in a teamwork with all the genes we have.

Most of the genes are right along those that have just been passed along because there’s no reason for them to be knocked out across several billion years of evolution. But some of these genes can be turned on based on life experience, so you do have an options package based on your life experience because you have all these templates to express other stuff if you run into the right circumstances.

I’m not sure that this means that these will be passed on based on your life experience, except that there will be bias if you survive better because your genes have been turned on. But anyway, that’s a whole new area of genetics that would’ve surprised the shit out of Darwin; he didn’t even know we had genes.

We have the bias towards unification looking for overall principles in philosophy, in math, in science and this unifying philosophy is generally successful. You’ve got the deductive principle and the inductive principle.

I don’t know which is which, but like one is looking to generalize and the other is you’re looking to specialize; take general principles and make new inventions from what you know. And science has had huge amounts of success going in both directions.

You’re going to make a bunch of money going from the general to the specific and they are making these stuff, but you’re going to get tenure and by going from this specific to the general.

I agree with most of what he says. It reminds me of three possible future paths for science which we talked about, which is:

1) We complete science and know everything.

2) We complete science without knowing everything because there are things beyond what we can know.

3) Science proceeds to acquire a more and more complete picture of the universe but never reaching 100% completeness. There’s always more to know.

That seems the most reasonable path that we’ll render with AI, big data. So, our descendants and the things and people that will come after us will find all sorts of relationships in the world that we had no idea existed, probably don’t even have the mental capacity to process.

But it is still part of the ongoing but never complete process of understanding the world. Eric also talks about the importance of beauty and emotion and it used to be a stereotype when presenting robots in science fiction that they would be emotionless.

They would make dispassionate judgments just based on algorithms. Some of these judgments would be horrifying. The Terminator series with this cold logic tells the robots to eradicate the humans.

I think you can’t operate in the world effectively without assigning values to events and things and ideas and link to those values or emotions feeling good when positive things happen and bad when negative things happen and feeling good when you see something that appeals to your sense of aesthetics.

I think that the beings that come after us with much larger information processing capacity will continue to have emotions but emotions that will probably be even deeper than our own. If you can say something like our emotions are deeper than a dog’s emotions because our emotions are informed from more angles and based on more information, very few dogs write poetry and I think it makes sense to extrapolate from that that the beings who come after us with their bigger brains will have emotional structures that are bigger and deeper still.

The half robots of the year 2115 will feel deeply and have relationships among themselves and other beings that are as intricate and feeling and reflecting of values as our own and more so. Emotions and values are part of the toolkit that let you operate in the world. They are not for fun.

We as evolved beings; our emotions and values are largely evolved. Love is a cultural overlay; the feelings of love and the idea of love is a cultural overlay on our evolved drives to reproduce and to care for our offspring.

Future emotions and future values will have some of those same structures. People in the future may feel things strongly and the more stoic people of the future may feel emotions as being frippery but, in general, emotions help you navigate the world and help order emerge into the world.

They are a necessary part of conscious life and consciousness itself is probably a near necessary part of increasing order in the world. The point of view now is that everything boils down to physics. If you take biology apart everything happens because of physics, chemistry; because of physics.

So, all the more complicated sciences boil down to complicated instances of the simplest most basic science. I would say that similarly some of the complicated ideas of philosophy may be seen as boiling down to the more basic principles that might be found in math and in physics or even more basic than that in the principles of existence.

The consequence of this scientific program for the past few centuries has been to search for and boil everything down to essential principles and when you can’t do that you look for more macro explanations and overarching systems of values and beliefs.

But those overarching systems are subject to being boiled down to more essential principles as those principles are discovered and expanded upon. The current dominant belief of our time is scientism. Thebelief in science is the dominant and most dynamic belief system of our time.

Humans and human society and the universe itself has been increasingly subject to scientific analysis and most scientifically educated people believe that we are the entirely biological products of billions of years of evolution rather than being imbued with certain magical properties by God.

Now, that doesn’t mean that values have to be discarded, instead, we have to discover values within the more scientific framework and there is a lazy default form of science that says everything is random and nothing means anything but that is a misunderstanding of what goes on in an information-based universe.

It is hard to pull a bunch of values from a purely scientific point of view but you can pull some values and then you can build upon those like one value you can pull is that increasing order seems to be good, given how we fit into the world and the desires we’ve evolved to have.

If you can pull out that you want the preservation of order unless it is corrosive dictatorial preservation of order that’s at the expense of other values. You can pull out the golden rule because we know from personal experience that we want certain things and we can assume that other beings share many of the same things, the same desires we have.

And from the preference for order and from the golden rule you can build more complicated philosophies.

Even though we’re building not from benevolent God, His goodness, the magic property of consciousness and souls and all, you can still build from basic principles out to an entire philosophy, which will be helpful and necessary when we start to have to deal with the ethics of the new existences; new beings that we will bring into existence via AI and also the future humans and their future multiplicious forms and their augmentation and the new relationships among augmented humans and AI and the whole mess that’s going to coming in the next century.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Erik Haereid: “About my writing: Most of my journalistic work I did in the pre-Internet-period (80s, 90s), and the articles I have saved are, at best, aged in a box somewhere in the cellar. Maybe I can find some of it, but I don’t think that’s that interesting.

Most of my written work, including crime short stories in A-Magasinet (Aftenposten (one of the main newspapers in Norway, as Nettavisen is)), a second place (runner up) in a nationwide writing contest in 1985 arranged by Aftenposten, and several articles in different newspapers, magazines and so on in the 1980s and early 1990s, is not published online, as far as I can see. This was a decade and less before the Internet, so a lot of this is only on paper.

From the last decade, where I used more time doing other stuff than writing, for instance work, to mention is my book from 2011, the IQ-blog and some other stuff I don’t think is interesting here.

I keep my personal interests quite private. To you, I can mention that I play golf, read a lot, like debating, and 30-40 years and even more kilos ago I was quite sporty, and competed in cross country skiing among other things (I did my military duty in His Majesty The King’s Guard (Drilltroppen)). I have been asked from a couple in the high IQ societies, if I know Magnus Carlsen. The answer is no, I don’t :)”

Haereid has interviewed In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal Advisory Board Member Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, some select articles include topics on AI in What will happen when the ASI (Artificial superintelligence) evolves; Utopia or Dystopia? (Norwegian), on IQ-measures in 180 i IQ kan være det samme som 150, and on the N orwegian pension system (Norwegian). His book on the winner/loser-society model based on social psychology published in 2011 (Nasjonalbiblioteket), which does have a summary review here.

Erik lives in Larkollen, Norway. He was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1963. He speaks Danish, English, and Norwegian. He is Actuary, Author, Consultant, Entrepreneur, and Statistician. He is the owner of, chairman of, and consultant at Nordic Insurance Administration.

He was the Academic Director (1998-2000) of insurance at the BI Norwegian Business School (1998-2000) in Sandvika, Baerum, Manager (1997-1998) of business insurance, life insurance, and pensions and formerly Actuary (1996-1997) at Nordea in Oslo Area, Norway, a self-employed Actuary Consultant (1996-1997), an Insurance Broker (1995-1996) at Assurance Centeret, Actuary (1991-1995) at Alfa Livsforsikring, novice Actuary (1987-1990) at UNI Forsikring, and a Journalist at Norsk Pressedivisjon.

He earned an M.Sc. in Statistics and Actuarial Sciences from 1990-1991 and a Bachelor’s degree from 1984 to 1986/87 from the University of Oslo. He did some environmental volunteerism with Norges Naturvernforbund (Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature), where he was an activist, freelance journalist and arranged ‘Sykkeldagen i Oslo’ twice (1989 and 1990) as well as environmental issues lectures.

He has industry experience in accounting, insurance, and insurance as a broker. He writes in his IQ-blog the online newspaper Nettavisen. He has personal interests in history, philosophy, reading, social psychology, and writing.

He is a member of many high-IQ societies including 4G, Catholiq, Civiq, ELITE, GenerIQ, Glia, Grand, HELLIQ, HRIQ, Intruellect, ISI-S, ISPE, KSTHIQ, MENSA, MilenijaNOUS, OLYMPIQ, Real, sPIqr, STHIQ, Tetra, This, Ultima, VeNuS, and WGD.

Rick G. Rosner: “According to semi-reputable sources, Rick Rosner has the world’s second-highest IQ. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Award and Emmy nominations, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Registry.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. He came in second or lost on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceversusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.”

[2] Individual Publication Date: April 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/haereid-rosner-five; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with John Collins on the Theology of “The Message” and William Marrion Branham (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/04/01

Abstract

John Collins is an Author, and the Webmaster of Seek The Truth. He discusses: false claims and lies of William Marrion Branham; central false claims by Branham about Christianity; the central false claims by Branham about the role of men and women within the church; the central false claims about the nature of the world and the nature of Christ by Branham (compared to mainstream interpretations of the Bible and the narrative of the life of Christ); the main lies by Branham to the followers of The Message; the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about the Bible; the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about Christianity; the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about the nature of the world and the nature of Christ by Branham (compared to mainstream interpretations of the Bible and the narrative of the life of Christ); the peripheral but noteworthy lies by Branham to the followers of The Message; and the single false claim or lie that tends to be the most powerful in deconverting members from the cult or cult-like community.

Keywords: Christianity, faith healing, John Collins, Seek The Truth, The Message, webmaster, William Marrion Branham.

An Interview with John Collins on the Theology of “The Message” and William Marrion Branham (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about specific instances of false claims and lies by the late William Marrion Branham. What have been the central false claims by Branham about the Bible?

John Collins: For any who have never spent any significant time learning or indoctrinated in the theology of William Branham’s “Message” cult theology, it would sound very strange to review Branham’s false claims about the Bible. To the casual listeners of his sermons, those who are familiar with the Bible and its teachings, William Branham’s theology is only slightly off in many cases. The casual listener might recognize erroneous statements but would be unfamiliar with the doctrinal positions built upon those same errors.

I differ with some of my colleagues in their opinion of the nature of these errors. Some who are both familiar with Christian theology and Branham’s errors are of the opinion that Branham was simply an uneducated man who did not understand the Biblical text and made some false claims that are in three categories: trivial mistakes, unorthodox doctrine based solely upon his religious affiliation, and in later years, destructive doctrine. My research has painted a much different picture. His early communication skills, as both a speaker and a writer, suggest that he was educated much more than his latest iteration of stage persona described. His religious doctrine and affiliation are far more fluid than most are aware, as are his doctrinal positions. And the errors that some might consider trivial are the building blocks that were used to eventually lift himself into position as the central figure of a destructive cult that has been the tree from which several other destructive cult branches were created. There definitely appears to have been strategy and purpose behind even these false claims.

For example, William Branham falsely claimed that the Biblical stories of Enoch and Noah intersected[i], and that Enoch lived five hundred years until the days of Noah[ii]. To the casual listener, this is a simple mistake. The Bible states that Enoch was taken by God after 365 years and is very clear on the timeline from Enoch to Noah. According to Genesis chapter 5, Enoch fathered Methuselah at age 252, Methuselah fathered Lamech at age 187, and Lamech fathered Noah at age 182 – placing Noah’s birth approximately seventy years after Enoch left the earth.

Those who are familiar with Branham’s indoctrination strategy, however, recognize this “simple mistake” as one of the primary building blocks for a destructive cult. Branham used this “mistake” to claim that Noah symbolically represented mainstream Christianity, while Enoch symbolically represented the “Bride”, which he considered to be his “Message” cult.[iii] This parallel was used by Branham to later claim that mainstream Christianity must suffer while his cult would escape unharmed before the End of Days.

2. Jacobsen: What have been the central false claims by Branham about Christianity?

Collins: During the formation of the “Message” cult, as William Branham was establishing a group of followers from which to recruit, most of Branham’s claims about Christianity were general observations that could seemingly be verified by a large population of the Christian community. His claims against mainstream Christianity were mostly limited to statements against cold, formal religion[iv], hypocrisy[v], and complacency[vi]; claims that many of his listeners could easily recognize. He rarely spoke against the Christian denominations of faith, as many attendees to his highly advertised revival meetings were from mainstream Christianity. Instead, he promoted his campaigns as “inter-evangelical”[vii] and “inter-denominational”[viii], showing support for the overall non-Catholic Christian community. His sermons contained an inviting, all-are-welcome theme of unity.[ix]

During this time, Branham tailored the theology in his sermons to match the beliefs of the majority of people in his revivals and appeared to have understood what he preached. In a prayer while standing before a Trinitarian crowd in Erie, PA, Branham asked the “Third Person of the Trinity”, the “Holy Spirit” to come.[x] In New York, NY, he announced that he had accepted the Trinity.[xi] In Saskatoon, SK, he attempted to unite Oneness Pentecostalism with Trinitarianism, explaining that Trinitarians believed in One God, and that Oneness theology was mistakenly missing the distinction between the Father and the Son.[xii] Yet Branham is mistakenly remembered by most religious historians as a Oneness Pentecostal.[xiii]

When speaking before non-Trinitarian crowds, however, Branham would reject Trinitarianism, claiming that he believed in three “dispensations” of God instead of three “Persons”.[xiv] While doing so, he often implied that Trinitarian Christians believed in “three gods”.[xv] Over the years, Branham’s doctrine continued to display signs of destructive theology, causing even his closest affiliations to sever ties.[xvi] Invitations to speak before Trinitarian churches would decrease, leaving his anti-Trinitarian statements the more popular doctrine among his diminishing population of listeners. As a result, his false claims comparing Trinitarianism to polytheism would eventually become a fundamental part of “Message” theology.

Branham’s false claim that denominational Trinitarians believe in “three gods” is the central core to several trails of very destructive theology, each trail another false claim that is built upon that false idea. From this claim, he linked mainstream Christianity to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden[xvii]. He claimed that the Bible prohibited baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which was common among his Oneness Pentecostal peers, but took it a step further by claiming Protestantism would eventually merge with the Catholic Church[xviii] to begin the battle of Armageddon[xix].

3. Jacobsen: What have been the central false claims by Branham about the role of men and women within the church?

Collins: William Branham’s church organization theology, commonly referred to as “Church Order Doctrine”, was the basis for the organization, structure, and governance of his religious cult. Within this theology Branham established the hierarchy and rank of his cult pyramid, placing himself as the central figure while positioning key individuals as watchers over the ranks as is commonly done among many destructive cults. This hierarchy had no position for women, which was common among Christian Fundamentalism at the time. Branham’s Creation theology was uncommon, however, as he claimed that women were designed by Satan to deceive men.[xx] Therefore, instead of placing women at the bottom of the pyramid in the cult structure, he appears to have demoted women to a lesser position than even the rank-and-file cult member.

The Bible describes multiple women in leadership positions. Deborah, a female prophetess, was the fourth judge and leader of Israel.[xxi] Junia was an apostle, praised by the Apostle Paul.[xxii] Paul describes Phoebe’s role as a deacon[xxiii], and evidence suggests that Pheobe may have also done the work of an evangelist.[xxiv] [xxv] Priscilla[xxvi] [xxvii], Mary,[xxviii] Chloe[xxix], and others[xxx] ministered or served from their homes. William Branham falsely claimed that the Bible forbade women from participating in these roles, carefully avoiding these particular passages when describing his church organization.[xxxi]

Branham claimed governance of the church body was authoritative rather than servant leadership. According to Branham, even the deacons of the cult churches had roles of authority, and he described their role as that of “police officers”.[xxxii] This is vastly different from the role of the deacon in mainstream Christianity. The word “deacon” is derived from the Greek word diákonos (διάκονος)[xxxiii], which meant “servant”.

4. Jacobsen: What have been the central false claims about the nature of the world and the nature of Christ by Branham (compared to mainstream interpretations of the Bible and the narrative of the life of Christ)?

Collins: William Branham made several extra-biblical claims about Jesus Christ as he compared Christ’s days on earth to his own. According to Branham, eighty-six percent of Christ’s ministry was focused upon “divine healing”.[xxxiv] Rather than an eternally-existing Person of the Godhead, Branham taught that Christ was the archangel Michael from Jude 1:9 in the Bible.[xxxv] Similar to many ancient mythologies, Branham taught a version of Christianity wherein both the good deity and evil deity were equal. According to Branham, Satan was once equal in power to God.[xxxvi]

As a result, Branham’s doctrine over-emphasized the forces of evil, under-emphasized the forces of good, and drew attention to himself as the rising “spiritual” champion. The worldview his extra-biblical claims created was very disturbing, one he considered to be “Satan’s Eden”.[xxxvii] As the cult’s destructive nature began to progress towards doomsday predictions,[xxxviii] Branham’s opinion of the world further declined while his claims about himself grew more egotistical. After convincing his followers that he was the return of “Elijah the prophet”, Branham began to claim that the “Elijah” of today was “Jesus Christ” in the form of a prophet.[xxxix] Branham’s central false claim about the nature of Christ was that he, himself, was the Christ. He was very strategic in how these claims were made; building blocks of doctrine were spread across several sermons, and one must be fully indoctrinated to understand or believe all of his claims about himself.

Mainstream interpretations of the world and nature of Christ are literally reversed. Most people in mainstream Christianity believe Jesus to be eternally God,[xl] and believe any person claiming to be Jesus Christ to be an inspired voice of Satan.[xli] If you examine the core, fundamental elements of mainstream Christianity and Branham’s “Message” cult doctrine, the two appear to be direct opposites.

5. Jacobsen: What have been the main lies by Branham to the followers of The Message?

Collins: Similar to the strategy of introducing a biblical error into the doctrine, growing acceptance, and building tiers of other doctrinal errors upon it, Branham’s stage persona was created by introducing a series of factual errors. Each error appears to be minor when examined alone, but when examined as a collection, one factual error is fully dependent upon another. Yet they are equally as important. All factual errors appear to serve the purpose of giving his stage persona “supernatural” and authoritative characteristics.

At its core, the “Message” belief system has been based upon the idea that William Branham was the reincarnation of the “spirit” of the prophet Elijah from the Old Testament[xlii], and that a series of life-changing “supernatural” events were all part of “God’s plan” to lift William Branham into power as the “prophet messenger” sent to condemn the world and announce the return of Jesus Christ. The factual errors surrounding these events, however, are significant when considering their importance to the “Message”. If these elements of Branham’s stage persona are not true, then Branham’s importance in Church history is diminished to nothing more than a religious grifter.

Branham claimed to have been a Baptist minister[xliii] who ignored the “Pentecostal calling”[xliv], and claimed that as a result, God killed his father, brother, first wife, and daughter during the time of the 1937 flood of the Ohio River.[xlv] He also claimed that as a result of these two events, several “supernatural” events took place redirecting him back into “God’s plan”, which his cult believes (based upon his doctrine) was to become the final “messenger” before the destruction of the world.

Many people influenced by Branham’s “Message” cult theology are surprised to learn that many of the details in these claims are either inaccurate or fabricated for the sake of molding his stage persona. When Branham first started his church in Jeffersonville, Indiana, he inherited a Pentecostal congregation from his mentor: Pentecostal minister and Ku Klux Klan leader Rev. Roy E. Davis.[xlvi] [xlvii] [xlviii] The 1936 deed, plat map, and newspaper advertisements were for the “Billie Branham Pentecostal Tabernacle”[xlix] instead of “Baptist Church”, and he had been affiliated with the Pentecostal faith as early as 1928.[l] [li] His wife was diagnosed with the disease that led to her death in January 1936[lii], and she died long after the 1937 flood subsided. When one takes the time to examine the historical data concerning each claim, it is evident a majority of claims regarding himself and the events surrounding his ministry were both creations of his own imagination and accounts containing many incorrect details.

6. Jacobsen: What have been the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about the Bible?

Collins: There are too many peripheral claims to examine in one conversation, however there is one peripheral claim that is significant when considering the creation of the cult structure. William Branham claimed that the Bible text describes a timeline of succession of prophets, one “major prophet” per “age”[liii], each described as the human through which came salvation, and without which came destruction.[liv] He often used symbology to compare this scenario to present times, suggesting that he was the “prophet” for this “age” while other evangelists of the era who were claiming prophecy would lead “their people” to destruction.[lv] In doing so, Branham changes the Biblical narrative such that it makes the role of Biblical prophets authoritative rather than supportive and creates dependencies on human leadership rather than divine. Branham’s theology concerning Biblical prophets described that of the central figure of a cult, and once indoctrinated with these false claims, his followers use these them to defend Branham’s authoritative leadership.

If one simply searches for ‘Cyrus’ and ‘Darius’ in the Old Testament, it is evident that the Biblical narrative describes multiple major and minor prophets that were alive and active at the same time. Major prophets Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel were prophesying at the same time minor prophets Obediah, Habbakuk were prophesying, and the only theological distinction between a “major” and a “minor” prophet is the number of pages available to us in the Bible canon.[lvi]

So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian

Daniel 6:28

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing:

2 Chronicles 36:22

Are you wiser than Daniel? Is no secret hidden from you?

Ezekiel 28:3

7. Jacobsen: What have been the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about Christianity?

Collins: Branham’s peripheral claims about Christianity were typically statements that appear to have been made in an attempt to create a distaste in mainstream Christianity. Inaccurate statements can be found through Branham’s recorded sermons ranging from modern theology to ancient Church history. When examined as a whole, the combination of false claims promotes his notion that Protestantism would eventually merge into Catholicism leaving only his “Message” cult as the single body of “Christians” that will stand against the Roman Catholic Church – which he claimed to be inspired by Satan.[lvii] Chronologically speaking, this trail of reasoning begins with his inaccurate description of the First Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.)

In Branham’s version of history, the Council gathered to force Trinitarianism upon the body of Christians, introducing the notion of Pagan polytheism into Church doctrine.[lviii] This, he claimed, was Satan’s disguising himself in the form of Christian religion to later deceive those who did not accept “their prophet for the age” (himself). Many people influenced with Branham’s theology are surprised to learn that the intentions of the Nicene Council were almost the exact opposite; they organized to prevent the influence of Arianism, which many claimed to be the influence of Greek mythology (polytheism) into Christianity.[lix]

Arius, from which the Arianism doctrine originated, believed Jesus Christ to be a creature distinct from God the Father, and therefore subordinate to Him. He believed that God the Father existed eternally, but that the Son did not. According to Arius, John 3:16’s description of “God’s only begotten Son” was to be interpreted literally; that God literally fathered a subordinate Son. He believed that the Holy Spirit was not part of the Godhead, rejecting the Trinitarian views for a form of Dualism, or two gods. According to Christian historians, Arius’ theology was quite popular. So much so that the notion of a “God of our God”[lx] was seen as a threat to the existence of Christianity. A council of Christian bishops met in the Bithynian city of Nicaea to squash the quickly growing sect. After much debate, they declared that there was only One God, and that Arius’ notion of two Gods was heretical. This resulted in the Niceno-Constinopolitan Creed, and ultimately the preservation of Christian monotheism in the form of Trinitarianism.[lxi]

It is interesting that William Branham used false claims about the Nicene Council and Nicene Creed to support the Oneness Pentecostalism theology he is remembered for preaching, because Branham himself was not beholden to any specific belief concerning the Christian Godhead. Depending upon his audience, Branham preached Modalism[lxii], Arianism[lxiii], and Trinitarianism.[lxiv]

8. Jacobsen: What have been the peripheral but noteworthy false claims by Branham made about the nature of the world and the nature of Christ by Branham (compared to mainstream interpretations of the Bible and the narrative of the life of Christ)?

Collins: The “Gospel”, in its simplest form, is the idea that God walked among man, in human flesh, to offer Himself as a sacrifice to take the place of the sins of the world.[lxv] In Oneness Pentecostalism William Branham is almost universally remembered as preaching, there is no distinction between God the Father or God the Son; Oneness theology believes simply that “God” died on the cross for the transgression.[lxvi] Trinitarian theologians also believe that “God” died on the cross for the transgression, but that Jesus Christ is one third, or one Person, in a triune Godhead.[lxvii]

In most cases, William Branham agreed with either the Oneness[lxviii] or the Trinitarian[lxix] theological view. To specific crowds however, Branham deviated from both of these theological views to claim that God left Jesus shortly before the crucifixion, and that Jesus was a mortal human at the time of his death.[lxx] Most ministers in mainstream Christianity would argue that the death of a mortal on a cross would be simply that: the death of a mortal on a cross. God offering Himself as a sacrifice in human flesh has significant meaning to most Christians.[lxxi]

9. Jacobsen: What have been the peripheral but noteworthy lies by Branham to the followers of The Message?

Collins: When I first started my research, a minister who had recently left the “Message” presented me with a list of questions that he had accumulated during his years promoting William Branham and his ministry. The list was several pages long. When I first examined the list, I discounted a majority of the issues raised because they seemed insignificant. “Is it true that John the Baptist only had – six converts?” “Are UFO’s really investigating angels of judgment?” “Is Capernaum, today at the bottom of the sea?” The full list, including many of William Branham’s quotes raising the questions, can be viewed on my website at seekyethetruth.com/Branham/resources-deep-questions.aspx.

Over time, and as my understanding of the research material increased, I realized that these were not insignificant questions. Yes, they were peripheral to Branham’s fundamental doctrine, but each question about each false statement made by William Branham was detrimental to the structural integrity of the cult’s theology. Some of the points listed were not even specifically questioning William Branham; they were questioning statements made by William Branham during times Branham claimed that God was speaking through him – they were allegedly statements made by God Himself!

Branham’s claim that the city of Capernaum lies beneath the sea, for instance, seems to be a simple error in geographical and historical knowledge when taken at face value. This statement was made, however, as Branham claimed to be “prophesying” condemnation for the city of Los Angeles.[lxxii] [lxxiii] The “Voice” claimed that the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Capernaum lie at the bottom of the sea, and that Los Angeles would suffer the same fate unless the people of the city repented.

This is significant, because the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah have yet to be discovered. Only a divine voice could know that the cities were in the depths of the sea, if this is actually the case. Capernaum, on the other hand, has never been submerged, and is a famous site for tourists to visit locations where the Apostles held meetings. The city lay in ruins from about the third century to 1839 when it was discovered by a visiting scholar. Recent excavations have identified St. Peter’s home, where Jesus would have visited.[lxxiv]

10. Jacobsen: Of all the false claims and lies by Branham, what single false claim or lie tends to be the most powerful in deconverting members from the cult or cult-like community?

Collins: I wish that I could say that one single area of research could lead to the awakening of those under the undue influence of this or any destructive cult. I wish that I could create one single document or brochure describing the issue and why it is false, providing all of the many resources available to allow members to examine the false claim for themselves. The sad truth is that this is not how it works. There is a reason why the term “brainwashing” is used by some people to describe this process; those subjected to this type of manipulation over long periods of time are unable to follow logic or reason concerning the cult, its leader, or its history.

Of the hundreds of issues identified with William Branham’s claims, there are several undeniable, critical flaws. Each false claim is either related to, supported by, or supporting another false claim, opening the door to circular reasoning. Members cannot reject one claim while supporting another, because each claim has been inter-connected in their mind. Should any single issue be identified to the programmed mind, it is quickly absorbed, devalued, and forgotten through cognitive dissonance.

A member who has fully immersed themselves into a cult has formed a new identity, and that identity is constructed from a blend of both cult doctrine and personal experience. The de-conversion of any victim of this type of mind control requires great effort and much patience. The cult identity that has formed must be separated from the true, authentic self, and this process is an appeal to the human buried deep inside the identity – not a debate with the outer shell of the cult identity over false claims. Sure, the claims must be examined, but it is unlikely that a single claim will unravel the cocoon spun by cult indoctrination. The authentic self must first be seeking for answers, and that authentic self must still retain enough sanity to comprehend the questions.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Webmaster, Seek The Truth.

[2] Individual Publication Date: April 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/collins-three; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[i] Branham, William. 1956, Jan 15. The Junction of Time. “There was Noah and Enoch, preaching, at the same time.”

[ii] Branham, William. 1963, March 18. The First Seal. “Enoch typed the Bride. Enoch! Noah went over, through the Bride…went over, through the tribulation period, and suffered, and become a drunk, and died. But Enoch walked before God, for five hundred years, and had a testimony, “he pleased God,” with rapturing faith; and just started walking right out, and went up through the skies, and went Home without even tasting death; never died, at all.”

[iii] Branham, William. 1964, Aug 2. The Future Home of the Heavenly Bridegroom and the Earthly Bride. “Yet, Noah was a type of the remnant that’s carried over, not the translated bunch. Enoch, one man, went in the Rapture before the flood came, showing that the Church does not go into the tribulation or anything around it. Enoch was translated, one man. Oh, the church may be a number; but the Bride is going to be a very small group that’ll make up the Bride. Now, the church may be a great number; but, the Bride, you see, compare eight with one. Eight times less, will be the Bride, than the church.”

[iv] Branham, William. 1950, Jan 15. Believest Thou This? “That’s what’s the matter with down in these countries now, and all around over the world. We got too many old cold formal churches, having a form of godliness and denying the power thereof.”

[v] Branham, William. 1954, Oct 3. The Word Became Flesh. “And I said, “That’s not true representation of Christianity.” I said, “That’s a form of hypocrisy.”

[vi] Branham, William. An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages. Ch9. “You can express this any way you want, and it all adds up to the fact that the church is complacent.”

[vii] Branham, William. 1948, Apr. The Voice of Healing: An Inter-Evangelical Publication of the Branham Healing Campaigns.

[viii] Branham, William. 1951, May 5. My Commission. “But coming into Divine healing services, I make it a inter-evangelical, just a interdenominational for everybody.”

[ix] Example: Branham, William. 1961, Apr 25. The Godhead Explained. “He said, ‘You know what we’re going to do?’ Said, “We’re drawing a little ring, and drawing you right out of our circle.’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I’m going to draw another one, and draw you right back in again.’ I said, “You can’t draw me out, ’cause I love you. See, you just can’t do it.’

[x] Branham, William. 1951, July 29. The Resurrection of Lazarus. “And may the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, come in now, the Promise, the Comforter, that You said You would send. “

[xi] Branham, William. 1951, Sept 29. Our Hope is in God. “Then suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, buried, rose the third day, setting at the right hand of God the Father, making intercessions now for we who’ve accepted the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity”

[xii] Branham, William. 1957, May 19. Hear Ye Him. “Trinity, they don’t believe there’s three Gods. That is heathenism. And the Oneness don’t believe that Christ was His Own daddy. So, what would that be? See? But you both believe the same thing.”

[xiii] What Is Branhamism. Accessed 2019, Mar 1 from https://www.gotquestions.org/Branhamism.html

[xiv] Branham, William. 1959, Aug 23. Palmerworm, Locust, Cankerworm, Caterpillar. “You say, ‘The blessed holy trinity.’ Find me the word ‘trinity’ anywhere in the pages of God’s Bible. It’s a man-made scheme, an old dirty church rag wrapped around, to take the place of the sap Line of God’s Holy Spirit. No such a thing. There’s no such a thing. You find it and come to me. You’re duty bound to do it, as a Christian, if you find it. It’s not in God’s Holy Writings. And the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” is hatched out of hell, there’s no such a thing as three Gods. Now, I believe in the Fatherhood of God. I believe in the Sonship of God. I believe in the Holy Ghost dispensation of God. But It’s the same God in every dispensation, not three Gods.”

[xv] Branham, William. 1958, May 8. The Expectations. “There’s no three Gods. There’s only one God, three offices of the same God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit don’t mean three Gods. If we’ve got three Gods, we’re heathens. See? Like the Jew says, “Which one of them is your God?” There’s no three Gods. There’s one God in three offices of the same God: the Fatherhood, and the Sonship. This is the Holy Spirit dispensation.”

[xvi] Example: Barnes III, Roscoe. Why Ern Baxter Left the Ministry of William Branham. Accessed from http://ffbosworth.strikingly.com/blog/why-ern-baxter-left-the-ministry-of-william-branham. “Baxter said that in Branham’s case, faith was “becoming a metaphysical thing – it was becoming a form of Couism.” In other words, he seemed to teach, “If I keep repeating day by day that I’m getting better and better” – it was a kind of metaphysical positivism,” Baxter explained. He noted: “This bothered me and I saw it was an ‘out’ to accommodate people who weren’t getting healed. ‘There must have been something wrong with their faith.’ And so that disturbed me.”

[xvii] Branham, William. 1958, Sept 28. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. “Then, then, in here they lost it, went into a Catholic denomination; come out in a Lutheran denomination, come out in a Wesley denomination, then they’re going right into the Pentecostal then. But, just before the end time, the Seed is almost gone from the earth. It’s waded out, the Seed of the righteous. The seed of the serpent is just accumulating faster and faster and faster, getting ready for this atomic age, to be destroyed.”

[xviii] Branham, William. 1962, Dec 16. The Falling Apart of the World. “It’s another Babylon that must fall. Peace on earth? A false messiah! An anti-christ in its teaching. How you going to throw these denominations together when they won’t even…They can’t even agree with one another now when they broke up in little systems like that, how about all joining together and getting over there? Yes. See, it’s a false setup. It’s all done to throw Protestantism into Romanism. A false, anti-christ teaching.”

[xix] Branham, William. 1961, Aug 8. Thy House. “Now, the Bible predicts that in the last days that He will trap Catholicism, Romanism, and all those things, and them—communism, and all of them together in the valleys of Megiddo there, until there will be such a slaughter amongst them, until the blood will flow to a horse’s bit”

[xx] Branham, William. 1965, Feb 21. Marriage and Divorce. “But in the human race, it’s the woman that’s pretty, not the man; if he is, there is something wrong, there is crossed-up seed somewhere. Originally it’s that way. Why, why was it done? To deceive by. Her designer, Satan, is still working on her, too, in these last days.”

[xxi] Judges 4:4. “And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time.”

[xxii] Romans 16:7. “Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.”

[xxiii] Romans 16:1-2. “commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea;

that you receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and that you help her in whatever matter she may have need of you; for she herself has also been a helper of many, and of myself as well.”

[xxiv] Phoebe: Deacon of the Church in Cenchrea. Accessed 2019, Mar 10 from https://margmowczko.com/was-phoebe-a-deacon-of-the-church-in-cenchrea-part-1/

[xxv] Women Church Leaders in the New Testament. Accessed 2019, Mar 10 from https://margmowczko.com/new-testament-women-church-leaders/

[xxvi] 1 Corinthians 16:19. “The churches of Asia greet you. Aquila and Prisca greet you heartily in the Lord, with the church that is in their house.”

[xxvii] Romans 16:3-5. “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life risked their own necks, to whom not only do I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles; also greet the church that is in their house.”

[xxviii] Acts 12:12. “And when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John who was also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying.”

[xxix] 1 Corinthians 1:1. “For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you.”

[xxx] Women Church Leaders in the New Testament. Accessed 2019, Mar 10 from https://margmowczko.com/new-testament-women-church-leaders/

[xxxi] Example: Branham, 1965. Feb 21. “Marriage and Divorce”. “They make her pastors, evangelists, when the Bible completely forbids it. And the Bible said, “as also saith the Law,” making it run in continuity, the whole thing.”

[xxxii] Branham, William. 1963, Dec 26. Church Order. “A policeman (or the deacon) is a military police to the army, courtesy, but yet with authority. See? You know what a military police is, is actually, if he carries out his rights, I think he’s just like a chaplain. You see? It’s courtesy and everything, but yet he has an authority. See, you must mind him. See, he puts…These rookies get out there and get drunk, why, he puts them in their place. And so is the deacon to put them in their place. 133 Now, remember, the deacon is a policeman, and a deacon’s office is actually more strict than most any office in the church.”

[xxxiii] “deacon”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). Bartleby. 2000.

[xxxiv] Branham, William. 1964, March 18. “Jesus used about eighty-six percent of His ministry was upon Divine healing, that He might attract the attention of the people, then explain what His purpose was there. And, that’s the same thing, we’re trying to continue His ministry in the best way that we know how, believing that He still remains the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

[xxxv] Branham, William. 1955, July 9. Beginning And Ending Of The Gentile Dispensation. ““And at that time, Michael shall stand, the great prince.” Michael was Christ, of course, Who fought the Angelic wars in Heaven, with the devil. Satan and Michael fought together, or fought against each other, rather.”

[xxxvi] Branham, William. 1965, Feb 21. Marriage and Divorce. “Did you know Satan was co-equal with God one day? Sure was, all but a creator; he was everything, stood at the right hand of God, in the Heavens, the great leading Cherubim.”

[xxxvii] Branham, William. 1965, August 29. “Satan’s Eden”.

[xxxviii] The Basics: William Branham’s Doomsday Predictions. Accessed Mar 10 from http://seekyethetruth.com/Branham/resources-basics-doomsday.aspx

[xxxix] Branham, William. 1965, Nov 27. Trying to Do God A Service Without it Being God’s Will. “But the Elijah of this day is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is to come according to Matthew the seventeen-…Luke 17:30, is, the Son of man is to reveal Himself among His people. Not a man, God! But it’ll come through a prophet.”

[xl] Ham, Jeremy. Is Jesus All-Powerful and Eternal. Accessed 2019, Mar 10 from https://answersingenesis.org/answers/biblical-authority-devotional/is-jesus-all-powerful-and-eternal/

[xli] How can one recognize a false Christ?. Accessed 2019, Mar 10 from https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/questions/how-can-one-recognize-false-christ

[xlii] Elijah Has Already Come. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from https://branham.org/articles/20130520_ElijahHasAlreadyCome. “God does not play with words, as we are rightly taught by the Prophet Elijah for our day, Brother William Marrion Branham.”

[xliii] Branham, William. 1949, July 18. I Was Not Disobedient to the Heavenly Vision. “When I was a minister, a Baptist preacher in my church for twelve years, I never even received one red penny of salary.”

[xliv] Branham, William. 1951, April 15. Life Story. “She said, “Today she might have something to eat, and tomorrow she might not have nothing to eat.” But brother, I come to find out what she called “trash” was “the cream of the crop.” And bless my heart…?… And said, “You mean to tell me that you’d take…” Said… And Hope started crying. And she said, “Mother…” She said, “I—I—I want to go with him.” And she said, “Very well, Hope. If you go, your mother will go in a grave heartbroken. That’s all.” And then Hope started crying. 80 And—and there, friends, is where my sorrows started. I listened to my mother-in-law in the stead of God. He was giving me the opportunity. And there this gift would’ve been manifested long time ago, if I’d just went ahead and done what God told me to do.”

[xlv] Branham, William. 1955, June 26. My Life Story. “Now, from here, listen. I listened to my mother-in-law instead of God, and forsaken the church, and went on back with the Baptist people. Right away, plagues hit my home. My wife took sick; my father died on my arm; my brother was killed. And everything happened just in a few days. A great flood hit the country and washed away the homes. My wife was in the hospital. And I was out on a rescue with my boat.”

[xlvi] Davis, Roy. 1950, Oct. Wm. Branham’s First Pastor. Voice of Healing. “”I am the minister who received Brother Branham into the first Pentecostal assembly he ever frequented. I baptized him, and was his pastor for some two years. I also preached his ordination sermon, and signed his ordination certificate, and heard him preach his first sermon.”

[xlvii] Being Fingerprinted. 1961, Apr 7. Shreveport Times. “Being fingerprinted at the city police station is R. E. Davis (center), self-described leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was arrested by city police and questioned here today.

[xlviii] Deep Study: Roy E. Davis, Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from http://seekyethetruth.com/branham/resources-deep-davis.aspx

[xlix] 1936, Nov 9. Warranty Deed, Lot 16, Block 4, Ingram & Reads Subdivision to E.A. Seward, George DeArk, Frank Weber, Trustees of the Billie Branham Pentecostal Tabernacle Church

[l] Davis Revival in North Nashville Not Union Affair. 1928, Sept 9. The Tennessean.

[li] Branham describes Nashville Parthenon where Davis’ Revival was held: Branham, William. 1962, Sept 9. In His Presence. “One day down in Memphis, Tennessee, or one…I don’t think it was in Memphis. It was one of the places there. I was with Brother Davis and was having a—a revival. It might have been Memphis. And we was, went to a coliseum, and they had in there, not a coliseum, it was kind of an art gallery, and they had the—the great statues that they had got from different parts of the earth, of different, Hercules and so forth, and great artists had painted.”

[lii] Certificate of Death: Hope Branham. 1937, July 21. “Date of onset: 1-1936”

[liii] Example: Branham, William. 1951, Sept 29. Our Hope is in God. “There never was in the age, any two major prophets on the earth at one time. There were many minor prophets, but there were one major prophet.”

[liv] Branham, William. 1963, Jun 28. A Greater Than Solomon Is Here. “God always in every age dealt with man through signs, because He is supernatural. And where supernatural God is, there is bound to be supernatural things going on. Then we find, in the days of Noah, those who believed his message and come in, was saved, and those that rejected his message perished. He give them a sign of building an ark. In the days of Moses, God’s speaking through human lips could call flies, fleas, frogs, close the heavens, make it dark, by a prophet that was thoroughly a vindicated. Those who believed and come out of Egypt, across the dividing line of the Red Sea, was saved. Those who was on the other side, perished.”

[lv] Example: Branham, William. An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages. “And people will go to them, and bear with them, and support them, and believe them, not knowing it is the way of death. Yes, the land is full of carnal impersonators. In that last day they will try to imitate that prophet-messenger.”

[lvi] Austin-Lett. Major and Minor Prophets. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from https://www.biblewise.com/bible_study/questions/major-minor-prophets.php

[lvii] Branham, William. An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages. Ch 6. “This chapter shows the power of the Roman Catholic Church and what she will do through organization. Remember this is the false vine. Let it name the Name of the Lord, it does so only in a lie. Its headship is not of the Lord but of Satan.”

[lviii] Branham, William. 1961, Jan 8. Revelation, Chapter Four #3. ““Trinitarianism is of the devil!” I say that THUS SAITH THE LORD! Look where it come from. It come from the Nicene Council when the Catholic church become in rulership. The word “trinity” is not even mentioned in the entire Book of the Bible. And as far as three Gods, that’s from hell.”

[lix] Nelson, Ryan. 2018, Sept 14. What Was the Council of Nicaea?. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from https://overviewbible.com/council-of-nicaea/

[lx] Heather and Matthews. Goths in the Fourth Century. p. 143.

[lxi] Arius. New World Encyclopedia. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Arius

[lxii] Branham, William. 1956, April 20. When Their Eyes Were Opened. “The same was God the Father, leading Moses, called God the Father, the three dispensations, Fatherhood, Sonship, and Holy Ghost. See? It’s just three offices of the same self God.”

[lxiii] Branham, William. 1957, June 30. Thirsting For Life. “And they use the word of eternal sonship of God. The word don’t even make sense to me. The word “eternal” means “eternity, which had no begin or has no end.” And “son” means “had a beginning.” So how could it… It could be a eternal Godship, but never an eternal sonship. A son is one that’s begotten of. So it had a beginning.”

[lxiv] Branham, William. 1952, July 13. God Testifying of His Gifts. “Then Jesus Christ comes into His Church, to His people, to manifest Himself out through the people, while He, Himself, is setting at the right hand of the Father, sending back the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the trinity, to live in human beings, to work through them, to show the same works that He did in the beginning, making Him, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

[lxv] What is the Gospel. Accessed from https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/what-is-the-gospel/

[lxvi] Slick, Matt. What is Oneness Pentecostal Theology. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from https://carm.org/oneness-pentecostal-theology

[lxvii] Our Triune God. Accessed 2019, Mar 14 from https://www.gty.org/library/articles/A215/our-triune-god

[lxviii] Example: Branham, William. 1965, August 1. God of This Evil Age. “And then, if that be so, the whole Godhead bodily shaped up in the Person of Jesus Christ. And then when Jesus died at the cross, I died with Him, for I was in Him then; for He was the fullness of the Word, manifested, knowing that we would be manifested later.”

[lxix] Example: Branham, William. 1950, July 16. Believest Thou This. “I believe He was a God-man. He was more than a man. He was the Divine One that God sent from out of heaven. Yes, sir. I know He cried like a man when He was dying at the cross, mid rendering rocks and darkening skies, my Saviour bowed His head and died. That’s right. He was a man when He was dying. But when He rose on the third day, He proved He was God. That’s right. God was in His Son. He raised Him up. He was Divine.”

[lxx] Branham, William. 1965, April 18. It Is the Rising of the Sun. “The Spirit left Him, in the Garden of Gethsemane. He had to die, a man.”

[lxxi] Example: Graham, Billy. 2016, March 24. Did God Abandon Jesus on the Cross? Billy Graham Answers. Accessed 2019, Feb 13 from https://billygraham.org/story/did-god-abandon-jesus-on-the-cross-billy-graham-answers

[lxxii] Branham, William. 1965, April 29. The Choosing of a Bride. “Oh, Capernaum,” said Jesus, “thou who exalted into heaven, will be brought down into hell. For, if the mighty works had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, it’d have been standing to this day.” And Sodom, Gomorrah lays in the bottom of the Dead Sea. And Capernaum is in the bottom of the sea. 231 Thou city, who claims to be the city of the Angels, who has exalted yourself into heaven, and sent all the dirty, filthy things of fashions and things, till even the foreign countries come here to pick up our filth and send it away, to your fine churches and steeples, and so forth, the way you do. Remember, one day you’ll be laying in the bottom of the sea, your great honeycomb under you right now. The wrath of God is belching right beneath you. How much longer He will hold this sandbar hanging out over that? When, that ocean out yonder, a mile deep, will slide in there, plumb back to the Salton Sea. It’ll be worse than the last day of Pompeii. Repent, Los Angeles.”

[lxxiii] Branham, William. 1965, July 11. Ashamed. “And while in there, Something struck me, and I didn’t know nothing for about thirty minutes. There was a prophecy went out. First thing I remember, Brother Mosley and Billy, I was out on the street, walking. And It said, “Thou Capernaum, which calls yourself by the name of the Angels,” that’s Los Angeles, city of angels, see, the angels, “which are exalted into heaven, will be brought down into hell. For, if the mighty works had been done in Sodom, that’s been done in you, it would have been standing till this day.” And that was all unconsciously, to me. See?”

[lxxiv] Capernaum. Accessed 2019, March 13 from https://www.seetheholyland.net/capernaum

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2023-02-14

An Interview with Ruth Henrich on Individualism, Women’s Rights, and Morgentaler

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/22

Abstract

Ruth Henrich is the Treasurer of Humanist Canada and a Humanist Officiant. She discusses: personal origins; North American culture and the individualism emphasis; early life choices and trajectory; reasoning and intuitiveness and influence on postsecondary education; significant secular advancement in Canada over time; the rhetoric coming through the media, the dog whistling, the religious fundamentalist, the anti-science movements often grounded in fundamentalist faiths; hopes and fears; concision in the mainstream media; finding Humanist Canada; tasks and responsibilities as the Treasurer for Humanist Canada; input into policy; concerns about reactionary forces; anti-science and anti-human rights sources in Canada; its legal context; evidence-based sexual education curricula; the Morgentaler Scholarship; concerns of women and girls; medical ethics and”do no harm”; concluding thoughts; and shout outs to other organizations.

Keywords: Canada, Humanism, Humanist Canada, Media, Morgentaler, Ruth Henrich, Science.

An Interview with Ruth Henrich on Individualism, Women’s Rights, and Morgentaler[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your origin story?

Ruth Henrich: [Laughing] it starts with, I am a twin.

Jacobsen: Really?

Henrich: Yes, who would have thought it? We are not identical in personality. She is more right brain. I am more left brain. We were classified earlier in a study as mirror image twins.

Jacobsen: What does that mean?

Henrich: It means that when we were in the womb one side was stronger than the other. In that, it means that we are identical. If I look in the mirror, I see my sister.

Jacobsen: Does this impact neurological development as well?

Henrich: Yes.

Jacobsen: Does this impact the different trajectories of interests?

Henrich: Yes, very much so, she is very artistic. We call her the “oblivious one” [Laughing]. I am the more logical and intuitive one. So yes, it did have a bearing on how we developed as people. But it is also another thing trying to an individual when you are a twin.

It can be very difficult to find yourself as an individual instead of always being a twin.

2. Jacobsen: Is it difficult in North American culture where we emphasize the individual?

Henrich: I would think so. I would think this has a bearing on things. You dab. You learn. I learned that moving out of the same city did a great deal for my development and interests. It did not feel like I was held back in any way, in terms of what the expectations were – because everyone knew who we were.

3. Jacobsen: At that time in Canadian history, women were limited consciously via culture. How did this impact early life and trajectories of where you could go, could not go, could do, could not do?

Henrich: I think it was more about freedom of choice growing up in the 60s and then teen years being in the 70s, where you are very cognizant of what is going on around you. There is sexual freedom. That had more to do with informing me about what possibilities there were as opposed to anything within the family structure.

As kids, we were never told that we could do anything that we wanted. I was a wife very early. I was a mother very early. It was to get out of that situation, which was very stupid. When you are a teenager, you do not think about it.

When I got into my 20s, it meant a lot to me to be able to make choices and what choices I was making, even just choices as to how many children was I going to have. A choice to go into the workforce. It did make a difference, culturally, as opposed to the family thing.

4. Jacobsen: In terms of being on someone high in reasoning and intuitive traits, how did this impact efforts at postsecondary education?

Henrich: It took me quite a while. I had attempted postsecondary education on 2 or 3 various times. I found that I had too many different family pressures, where I could not give school the time that it needed the first time.

The second time, I was probably in my late 20s or early 30s. I went to York University for a while. I found that my interest level was not what I thought was going to take my career further, in terms of interest level in English Literature.

At that time, I found money to be an issue. I did stick with it the third time. I completed my culinary arts certification art George Brown. I finished in 2004. It was later in my life that I completed the certification.

5. Jacobsen: As you have seen more of Canadian culture develop and adapt over time, we still have developments, even recently, into 2018 with the repeal of the Blasphemy Law. It leads to some obvious questions. With some time to reflect, what do you notice as some of the more significant secular advancement of the country over time?

Henrich: There are times when I think secular advancement has taken a backseat to special interest religious groups. I have seen things go backward instead of going forward when it comes to our governance.

I would say in the 80s or 90s when there seemed to be more perceived freedoms as an individual. There was a lot of things happening with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There was a lot happening in terms of the Canadian government. There was more happening in terms of separation of Church and State.

It is interesting because, at that point in time, I was in my 30s and 40s. As an individual, you realize that things are bigger than what is going on in your own life. You begin to pay attention. We saw a lot of advancement. A lot of it had to do with technology. Technology has taken us into a secular world, as it is bigger than any of us. I think this has been the impetus to allow us to think and be for ourselves; whereas, before, it is do as I say and not as I do.

We are going to bring all of these advancements forward. But there will be so many things to hold people back. I think that technology has opened people up to degrees of freedom that they didn’t think were possible.

6. Jacobsen: With some of the rhetoric coming through the media, the dog whistling, the religious fundamentalist, the anti-science movements often grounded in fundamentalist faiths, was the language, the rhetoric, and the tricks used by people in the media coming from that angle less obvious back in the day or, maybe, more taken for granted as the water of the culture?

Henrich: Yes, I think things were taken as part of the culture. This is just the way it is, unless, you’re going to start protesting over each and every little thing. The fundamentalist rhetoric wasn’t something that became part of the lexicon. I am finding now, with the social media, the cultural influence through media is different, more immediate.

Those things didn’t seem that important before has definitely changed. I anticipate what it will be in the future. How are those changes from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and into the second decade of the 2000s going to come about now? What will they be in 2030?

My grandchildren will be coming of age when this stuff is going to be prevalent. There will be a point in time when they are in charge. That is really where I think we are going to see leaps and bounds. There is going to be so much change.

7. Jacobsen: What about the mirror of that, to reflect this to the earlier part of the conversation? The positive, from our perspective, is the next generation with humanistic values as explicit values rather than something that bubbles around. But the inverse of the image of that is reactionary forces not liking it.

We have seen some of this in this country. We have seen this below the border. We have also seen this in characters like Bolsonaro. What do you feel less hope for and more fear for, on that angle?

Henrich: My biggest fear in all of that is that the rhetoric and attitudes are going to become more prevalent. That “consciousness” – that’s the wrong word – or that rhetoric, the hate stuff, and the racism; we have to get so far past that.

I don’t know how we can do that if we cannot bring people into thinking that we are all in this together as opposed to people thinking that we are all so very different that we can’t get along. I am fearful of what is happening in our world and North America – to bring it closer to home.

Where is the Reason? Where are the logical minds? Will we have enough academics and freethinkers to change minds? Or are they going to be drowned out? My fear is that we are going to be drowned out. I think that we have to be thinking together about what our purposes are.

Instead of having fractured groups within the secular and humanist organizations, that is where we really need to come together; our talking points have to be more succinct. They need to be more prevalent. They need to be more forceful.

8. Jacobsen: Noam Chomsky notes in the media. That “concision” is the term within the mainstream media system. We make people say things in only a couple of sentences. Then you can keep them within the beltway. Anything outside of it; it requires further justification, because it goes outside of the beltway. We’re swimming upstream in a sense.

Henrich: Yes.

Jacobsen: It makes the job much harder. But if you look at the progressive change in the country, they have often been humanists, along the lines of human rights and women’s rights.

Henrich: Yes.

9. Jacobsen: So, how did you find Humanist Canada?

Henrich: It was a circuitous route. Here in Grey and Bruce Counties, it is a fairly conservative – if this gets out publicly – backwards area.

Jacobsen: Backwards in what way?

Henrich: People thump their Bibles without knowing what is in them. It is repeating what everyone else has heard without thinking of the ramifications. It is always the “us against them” and a lot of uneducated or undereducated people.

Jacobsen: These are the people getting mad about virtue signalling while themselves using the oldest forms of Western virtue signalling.

Henrich: [Laughing] exactly, I found this disconnect. If you are in this area, if you are not being married by a religious official, then you cannot get married here. I thought that I would do something about it. I looked into becoming a marriage commissioner, which is a whole other story.

When the thing came around, they said, “This is a good idea,” but they did not have a vetting process for who would conduct these marriages. It was at that point that I began to seek out if there was something else out there.

That is when I reached out to Humanist Canada. I like what I heard. It synced with my values and what I was thinking and how I lived my life. Then I found they had an officiant program. I became licensed throughout the Ontario Humanist Society prior to coming over to Humanist Canada.

The reason I did that was that I could get there faster. It didn’t end up that way. I found with Ontario Humanist Society and Humanist Canada that there were some philosophical differences between the two organizations; only later finding out about the fracturing of Ontario Humanist Society doing their own thing from Humanist Canada.

That is how I found Humanist Canada. I found something that actually worked for me. In the process, I found the Grey Bruce Humanists. We do social things together. We have really dynamic meetings once per month.

They now have a discussion group going on. I am finding that I wasn’t alone in what I was searching for; that there are other people in my area who are now starting to advocate more for what we think is possible.

10. Jacobsen: Now, in your role as treasurer in Humanist Canada, what are the tasks and responsibilities coming along with it?

Henrich: [Laughing] I make sure the bills get paid. I look after all the bookkeeping. I also do contract management and financial management. I am an active member of the board. I also have input into policy.

11. Jacobsen: If you’re looking at policy, how does your input play out?

Henrich: In terms of making policy, it comes down to what is our strategic plan and is this within the strategic plan. It is about developing a plan, as we’re developing the new strategic plan.

I also make sure the money is being spent properly. So, we have the money to undertake those projects. My goal as treasurer is making sure any fundraising that we’re doing does not go against any CRA regulations or that it does not impede our charitable status.

Jacobsen: How important is the charitable status to the general operation, functioning, scope, and outreach of Humanist Canada?

Henrich: I think it is incredibly important that we have a charitable status. It gives credibility to our aims and the public give more when they get something in return for their giving. It is being able to substantiate what people spend their money on. That is important to people.

12. Jacobsen: Moving into 2019, what are the concerns with – let’s call them – reactionary forces, typically, standing against things humanists, traditionally, stand for, including human rights, science, reproductive health rights for women, and concerns of the more marginalized within society?

Henrich: One of our concerns is going to be: are we attracting members? It is the members that finance all of the things that we are trying to do. It is trying to get our message out. That we do look at things from a human rights perspective and are all about choice, personal choice.

Our main concern as an organization is reaching out to the general public. When I was looking for an organization it was difficult to find. As an organization, we need to ramp this up. We need to let people know what we are doing and why we are doing it.

It is about getting the message out.

13. Jacobsen: Within the history of this country right into the present, what tend to be the main sources of anti-science and anti-human rights?

Henrich: Religion, and the evangelicals, those are one of the biggest sources standing in the way. They can’t do anything that flies in the face of religious virtue or however they are going to term it. Those are our big obstacles.

14. Jacobsen: How is this played out in a legal context?

Henrich: Let’s take an example, the BC Humanists have tried twice to become an organization to license officiants. It is being able to marry people because that is a legal state. They have been denied twice because they are not a religious body.

It is that religious body in the context of the law that is the problem, which is what we need to overcome. When it comes to that sort of thing, there are so many instances of religiosity being part of the law and having protections; those are the things that we need to go after, to get them repealed.

Because humanists, agnostics, secularists, and atheists are now being discriminated against; it comes down to discrimination under the law.

15. Jacobsen: For the younger generations, not only the non-religious and the religious, in general for their health and wellness, what are your concerns with regards to updates and refinements based on evidence of sexual education curricula throughout the country?

Henrich: Oh wow, we had this conversation with family over the dinner table when celebrating together. It is paramount that we have a curriculum that teaches our children. It is not just about sex. It is not just about gender.

It is so much bigger than that. It is what becomes the norm in society. It is how do people face those types of things. It is taking into account that there are so many groups that have a special interest in this; it is being able to be informed and having our children informed.

We can’t leave that kind of thing up to parents, because parents will provide what they think is appropriate. But there is so much, again coming back to the technology and what is available information to our children.

That they need to get the right information and need to make decisions for themselves, which means providing information. That means parents must stand behind the information. I think that is paramount. If we do not do something that is logical in the teaching, we will be in a for a lot of social problems, because we will be going back to the substandard social norms of before.

That is a real problem.

Jacobsen: Those prior norms mean higher teen pregnancy rates and higher STI/STD rates based on simply not being given proper, updated, modernized, evidence-based information from adults.

Henrich: Absolutely, you can anticipate higher levels of sexual predatorships. It is probably the wrong word for it. But there will be more of it. You are going to be seeing more prostitution and more forced prostitution. It will keep happening at a younger and younger age.

We need to equip the children; we, as parents, need to back up the information. As the parents, we are the ones who are teaching how to advance in our world, and what is accepted and what is not accepted. It is taking that stuff out in Ontario that is scary.

It is very scary.

Jacobsen: Given the down the road potential damage to the lives of some non-trivial amount of youth who do not get this information in high school, could this amount to a certain form of criminal negligence.

Henrich: Wow! You know what…

Jacobsen: Sorry to interrupt. But if you look at the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it speaks to the best interests of the child. This could, in a way, be looked at as a regression against the best interests of the child.

Henrich: Yes! Yes, absolutely, would it be criminal? Could it be criminal? Wow, what a question, when you consider the laws, and such, that have been undertaken because they are not in the best interests of the child, it will not be in the best interests of our children to not provide them with information, in my estimation.

Whether or not it will be, that will be up to our legislators, but as Humanist Canada, should we be taking that on as something that we can something about? Perhaps, that needs to be a broader discussion.

16. Jacobsen: What is the Morgentaler Scholarship?

Henrich: It is a partnership with Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics. Henry Morgentaler was our first president and was a driving force and women’s reproductive rights advocate. This scholarship will enable medical students to further their advancement in the study of women’s reproductive health and choice.

It can be anything from obstetrics to gynecology, but it goes beyond that. It has to do with infant mortality. It has to do with women-to-women relations, puberty, adulthood, menopause. It is something that needs to be more prevalent and thought about; women are not a general collective.

There are so many things that have to do with how women are viewed within the medical community. I think this scholarship can help with this. We must change our perspective. We must change how women are perceived in the medical profession.

17. Jacobsen: In your opinion, in a qualitative, reflective, retrospective opinion based on the conversations you have had with women in your life, what are some of the nuanced concerns that women and girls have about the treatment in the medical community? That simply are talked about in the community.

Not necessarily out of conscious negligence but simply missing it.

Henrich: It is access. It is someone who knows what you are asking and know what you are experiencing. It is access without being demeaned. Access without judgment.

18. Jacobsen: What would be an alteration of that within medical ethics of “do no harm” in the Hippocratic Oath with further emphasis on access and on non-demeaning treatment?

Henrich: There must be more training within the medical community itself, at the university level. It has to do with removing your own bias. If you are going to be a medical professional and are going to be taking that oath, then you can identify your bias as yours.

That is becoming a huge problem, not just in women’s health. Not only, how do we live? But also, how do we die? It must permeate down to the university level and in what they are being trained in. it is more than just ethics.

19. Jacobsen: Any concluding thoughts?

Henrich: I am looking forward to what we will accomplish in the next decade. We have dynamic people. And I want to be a part of that! [Laughing]

20. Jacobsen: Any shout outs to affiliates or other organizations?

Henrich: There is the Edmonton Humanists. There is the BC Humanists. There is the Winnipeg Humanists. There is a number in Ontario. SOFREE out of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Guelph. There is the Grey Bruce Humanists. We need more local groups, more groups in the Maritimes, in Nunavut, in the Northwest Territories, and so on. We need it coast-to-coast-to-coast.

If we can get local people doing humanistic things in local ways, then we are here to help.

21. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Ruth.

Henrich: You’re welcome. My pleasure, Scott.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Treasurer, Humanist Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: March 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/henrich; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with John Collins on Branhamism and Abuse (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/15

Abstract

John Collins is an Author, and the Webmaster of Seek The Truth. He discusses: severe forms of abuse in the William Marrion Branham “The Message” community; the different abuse tactics used on men and women to keep them in line; the social control tactics; the lack of critical thinking and critical theology in the “The Message” church of the late William Marrion Branham; and the tragic cases of abuse, and heartwarming ones of those who got out.

Keywords: author, Christianity, faith healing, John Collins, Seek The Truth, The Message, webmaster, William Marrion Branham.

An Interview with John Collins on Branhamism and Abuse (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we are looking at the severe forms of abuse, what are the main ones within community to keep members in line?

John Collins: This is a difficult question to adequately summarize in one single conversation. The “Message” cult following of William Branham has repeatedly evolved and branched after multiple iterations of core doctrine, creating very different sects in multiple regions of multiple countries around the world, and each sect created from each branch in each region of each country has varying levels of abuse. It would be like asking which forms of abuse have been used in the Catholic Church in the past seventy-five years; even with the recent allegations and convictions of abuse in the Catholic Church, each instance of abuse cannot represent the Catholic community as a whole and the sum of all abuse cannot represent the views of the religion. Yet the abuse exists, and in many cases, the predators are protected and will abuse again.

In the United States, the most extreme example of abuse in the “Message” that has been documented happened at a cult commune in Prescott, Arizona, that William Branham called “Goshen” (Referring to the land given to the Hebrews by the Biblical pharaoh of Joseph).[i] Members of the commune ranging in ages from children to adult were emotionally, physically, and sexually abused as a means to control the group.[ii] Leaders of the commune would ostracize people from the community and separate families. Children were forced to march around the compound military-style and were physically beaten if they fell out of line. Some children were sexually abused by Branham’s close associate Leo Mercer, others burned with fire so they would “know what hell felt like”. Parents were instructed to perform acts of abuse upon children or each other, while leaders of the commune acted as a “witness” to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The problem was so widespread that the courts were forced to delicately question cult members in areas of sexual and physical abuse, incest, and homosexuality.

Undeniably, the worst documented cases of abuse happened at Colonia Dignidad in the Maule Region of Chile under the leadership of “Message” pastor Paul Shaefer.[iii] Shaefer preached against “sins of the flesh”, often segregated men and women, and practiced enforced celibacy as religious atonement. Those who did not comply were brutally beaten.[iv] Members of the commune were monitored by armed guard in a military-style compound. After a child escaped and alerted authorities, an investigation led government officials to secret underground chambers where cult members were tortured by electric shock.[v]

When asked about abuse as a means to control, former members of the “Message” have different opinions. Many who experienced abuse have the opinion that their abusers were not aligned with the views of other members of the “Message”, and though abusive to enforce cult doctrine, should be excluded. Others argue that in many cases, leaders of the cult protected and enabled their abusers. Since William Branham himself praised physical abuse[vi], members of the cult often turn a blind eye to predators in positions ranging from leaders[vii] to lay members. Only in the cases where a “Message” cult pastor is exposed after having brainwashed and raped women of the church[viii] under the guise of “spiritual husbandry”[ix] is the abuse as a means to control beyond question.

At the same time, many former members overlook the more obvious forms of abuse. Having spent years and sometimes decades suffering through emotional abuse from figures in authority, they become so familiar with its effects that patterns of abuse turn into a normal part of life. It is not uncommon for members to be persuaded to ostracize friends or family members who question cult doctrine, or to be emasculated from the pulpit for not adhering to cult rules. Often, this persuasion is reinforced using Branham’s praise of corporal punishment for women and children. When it is put into action in the homes of parishioners, emotional abuse is followed by physical and even sexual. Branham praised those who brutally beat unclothed victims to the point of swelling and mutilation of skin[x], and the worst cases of abuse involve stripping females and both shaming and severely beating them.[xi] [xii]

Though the nature and severity of the abuse widely differs between cult churches, there appears to be a common theme. Former members who attended churches led by elders who used Branham’s statements to support emotional and physical abuse seem to have noticed more victims than those who attended churches that avoided those statements. Said one former “Message” member: “Most kids I know including myself were physically abused, all in the name of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ (A statement Branham frequently made in his sermons to support corporal punishment). Interestingly, similar patters appear in testimony from former members who attended “home church” – gathering in homes to listen to Branham’s recorded sermons from 1947-1965 – or who frequently listened to those recordings during the week between services. In a majority of cases described by former members, the abuse was designed to enforce cult rules and doctrine.

2. Jacobsen: How do these tactics differ for men and women?

Collins: Any strategy used to manipulate or control members of a cult that differ between genders is directly related to the way in which gender roles are defined. This is true whether we are discussing William Branham’s “Message” cult based on Pentecostalism, Warren Jeff’s FLDS cult based on Mormonism, or any other religious cult displaying obvious differences in gender roles. The difference in tactics becomes more noticeable in religious groups whose definition of gender roles differs from society, especially when the cult’s definition of gender roles is based upon cult doctrine.

Gender roles in the “Message” have been defined very similarly to that of Christian Fundamentalism during the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. William Branham encouraged the men to be the sole provider for the family unit, the women to be the family cook[xiii], and preached heavily against women who had any ambitions of a career.[xiv] Men are permitted to vote on political decisions, while women are strictly forbidden.[xv] Men keep up with current fashions, for the most part, while women are not allowed.[xvi]

Men are publicly shamed from the pulpit to enforce the control of their spouse,[xvii] inciting men to punish wives who do not adhere to the rules while denigrating women by insinuating they are property to be controlled. If wives disobey cult rules, Branham instructed men to beat them with boards.[xviii] Those who follow Branham’s advice begin a pattern of emotional and physical abuse that in many cases becomes more brutal over time.” [xix]

Many doctrinal teachings in the “Message are specifically designed to manipulate women through emotional abuse. Branham taught his followers to believe that the female part of the human race was designed by Satan, and that Satan was still making adjustments to the design.[xx] He taught that women were designed specifically to deceive, by her beauty, and that the female human was designed to have less morals than females of all other animals.[xxi] According to Branham, women would eventually be the cause of the destruction of the United States.[xxii] Women are emotionally manipulated to suppress their natural desire to be beautiful, to learn, to achieve, and to succeed. This suppression of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ambition is so painful that it pushes some women into depression and suicidal thoughts.[xxiii]

3. Jacobsen: Why do these social control tactics differ in these ways?

Collins: The methods used to manipulate, influence, and control members of any religious cult differs between gender roles, especially within cults that originated before the Women’s Rights movement of the 1960’s having doctrine opposed to change. Outside a destructive cult, the lines separating gender roles have shifted significantly over the past fifty years. In cults based on Christian Fundamentalism of the United States, these lines do not move at the same pace, and sometimes not at all.

In the “Message” cult following of William Branham, the core teaching has been preserved through time by audio sermons recorded prior to Branham’s death in 1965. Though some sects of the cult have deviated from the core doctrine, a majority continue to preach and practice the views and opinions of a Christian Fundamentalist preacher fighting against the rapid pace of change in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. These recordings, without the central figure, have immortalized the cult leader, and the recordings themselves have become the central figure of the cult. As a result, the fight against change continues – even though the “change” has already taken place – and far more difficult to enforce or even fully understand in modern culture.

Many churches that follow Branham’s teachings consider William Branham to be their “pastor”…

…listen to the recordings, and replay Branham’s fight against cultural change every Wednesday and twice on Sunday. Those who do not play the tapes structure their sermons to match Branham’s agenda from the recordings, continuing the battle against gender equality[xxiv] and Civil Rights.[xxv] The typical sermon in a “Message” cult church will contain many references to the recordings, using direct quotes from William Branham to express Branham’s misogynistic views, and use similar patterns of emotional abuse to further enforce the cult’s views.

According to Branham, women were specifically designed by Satan for sex:

“But she is designed to be a sex act, and no other animal is designed like that. No other creature on the earth is designed like that.”

– Branham, 1965, Feb 21. “Marriage and Divorce”

Under Branham’s doctrinal teaching, men are trained to believe that women were a “only a scrap”, made to deceive the men:

“Only a piece, scrap, made of a man, to deceive him by; God made it, right here has proved it. That’s what she was made for.”

– Branham, 1965, Feb 21. “Marriage and Divorce”

Some cult pastors claim that these doctrines only apply to women who do not adhere to the cult’s female dress code, carefully avoiding some of Branham’s statements about the Creation Story. But when combined with Branham’s statements supporting or promoting the physical abuse of women and children, it is a recipe for disaster.

4. Jacobsen: How does the lack of internal support for critical thinking and, in fact, critical theology provide a ripe basis for the members of the community to be taken advantage of, throughout life?

Collins: The most unusual conversation I’ve had with a “Message” believer was when I began identifying several newspaper articles confirming William Branham’s 1907 birth year. One of the core beliefs in the “Message” was that the year 1909 was “spiritually significant”, and that the stars and planets aligned to announce William Branham’s birth. William Branham often described how the year 1909 was spiritually significant, and the majority of cult followers celebrate his birthdate as April 6, 1909.[xxvi] This was the date Branham used on the marriage license to his second wife, Meda.[xxvii]

Yet according to the 1920 Census[xxviii], William Branham’s parents listed his age as 12, placing his birth year in 1907, and newspaper articles I found confirmed the dates listed in the 1920 Census.[xxix] As it turned out, William Branham also used the year 1907 as a “supernatural sign” while speaking to the followers of deceased cult leader John Alexander Dowie in Zion City, IL.[xxx] Making matters even more confusing, William Branham listed his birth year as 1908 on his marriage license to his first wife, Hope.[xxxi]

To the follower of William Branham, I said, “William Branham could not have been born in all three years, 1907, 1908, and 1909. And if 1907 was ‘supernaturally’ significant because of his birth, then 1909 could not be ‘supernaturally’ significant because of his birth.”

His response surprised me: “I don’t understand it, brother, but I believe every word the ‘prophet’ spoke”.

When followers are manipulated into disabling critical thought, they open the door to critical problems. Not only are they allowing themselves to be influenced into believing things they would not ordinarily believe, they are allowing themselves to be persuaded into doing things they would not ordinarily do. While some might argue that abusive personalities would have abused other members of the cult without the emotional abuse Branham used in his sermons or the statements that he made promoting emotional and physical abuse, disabling critical examination of the sermons while giving ultimate authority to Branham’s words turns every statement into an order or action that must be carried out. It is how those orders are carried out that can be debated by members, and unfortunately, the abusive personalities carry them out in literal form. In the extreme cases, they have been combined with Branham’s misogynistic statements and have resulted in sexual abuse.

The problem, of course, is that this danger does not end after escaping the cult. Many escape Branham’s “leadership”, seeking to replace him with another “leader”, and find themselves trading one cult for another. Others, unaware that manipulative personalities exist in all walks of life, find themselves taken advantage of at home, in the workplace, on the streets, or even in new churches by other members. Though the non-cult situations are far less extreme, they could have been prevented simply by applying critical thought.

5. Jacobsen: What have been some – without names – more tragic cases of those who were hurt within community? What are some more heartening ones where people got out and started healthy lives outside of the myopic worldview of the purported “Message”?

Collins: For many years, current and former members of the “Message” were largely unaware of the abuse that existed in the cult. There were rumors, obviously, that spread whenever an elder or leader of a cult church stepped down due to sexual misconduct, but for the most part, leaders of the “Message” have been largely successful in suppressing information regarding abuse.

Beyond the horrific cases I’ve already mentioned, the abuse is seldom talked about even by former members. Victims who speak out are often further victimized, and some of them have reconciled with their predators or abusers. To speak out would be to re-open wounds that are in the process of healing and expose others whose victims believe the abuse has ended. The predators and abusers were also victims of the cult, manipulated in ways that are difficult for anyone to understand, and some former members have sympathy for both the abuser and the abused.

It wasn’t until recently that former members began speaking publicly about their abuse in the “Message” cult. A former member with a passion to help the victims setup a website, Casting Pearls Project (http://castingpearlsproject.com), and began publishing testimonies by former members who had escaped the abuse and reclaimed their lives. This led to several others stepping forward, both publicly and in private, allowing those outside the cult to catch a personal glimpse into what it was like to be an abused female in the “Message”.

On the website, there are stories describing nine-year-old girls that were psychologically, physically, and sexually abused for years.[xxxii] Multiple women were often forced to strip their clothes off to be shamed or molested while fully nude.[xxxiii] Some were brutalized while nude, one of which was beaten with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.[xxxiv] In one case, a child was murdered by a sexual predator whose crimes had been covered up.[xxxv] The testimonies given by former members are horrific. It would be impossible to rate them as to which are less tragic, and which are more. Each victim, each form of abuse, carries just as much weight when one former member reaches out to help another. For them, their pain was the worst.

The beauty of the Casting Pearls Project is that there are happy new beginnings. Each person will carry a burden for a lifetime but have been able to start healthy lives. One is an author who is actively helping other victims as a volunteer speaker in the Arizona Department of Corrections for the Impact of Crime on its Victims Classes (ICVC), discussing the murder of children, the impact of child abuse on children, and the impact of domestic violence on women.[xxxvi] Women, who were trained from birth to believe that women should not enter the workforce, have started successful careers.[xxxvii] Some have found new and healthy churches to attend,[xxxviii] while others will never trust religion again.[xxxix]

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Webmaster, Seek The Truth.

[2] Individual Publication Date: March 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/collins-two; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[i] Branham, William. 1964, May 31. The Oddball. “And to come here this morning and look, this fine little Jerusalem setting out here, little, what I called, it Goshen, I believe, when we come over this morning. Remember, Goshen was one of the places that they worshipped, one of the first places the tent was pitched.”

[ii] People vs Keith Thomas Loker. 44 CAL. 4TH 691, 188 P.3D 580, 80 CAL. RPTR. 3D 630. Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/people-v-loker-33137#opinion

[iii] Ellrodt, Oliver. Brown, Stephen. Insight: German sect victims seek escape from Chilean nightmare past. “Schaefer followed the teachings of American preacher William M. Branham, one of the founders of the “faith healing” movement in the 1940s and ‘50s. Born in a log cabin in Kentucky, Branham said he had been visited by angels and attracted tens of thousands of followers with sermons that advocated a strict adherence to the Bible, a woman’s duty to obey her husband and apocalyptic visions, such as Los Angeles sinking beneath the ocean.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-chile-sect-idUSBRE8480MN20120509

[iv] Ellrodt, Brown. “Former members of the sect say that Schaefer preached against “sins of the flesh.” He also segregated men and women, they say, subjecting all but a few to enforced celibacy. Anyone who disobeyed was brutally punished, often by Schaefer personally.”

[v] Collns, John. Colonia Dignidad and Jonestown. Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=67352

[vi] Example: Branham, William. 1958, Mar 24. Hear Ye Him. “Now, you can take some of these little two-by-fours if you want to, but that’s what God said. That’s what Christ said. Now, that’s the truth. Oh, God be merciful. What must the great Holy Spirit think when He comes before the Father? You say, “Why you picking on us women?” All right, men, here you are. Any man that’ll let his wife smoke cigarettes and wear them kind of clothes, shows what he’s made out of. He’s not very much of a man. That’s exactly right. True. He don’t love her or he’d take a board and blister her with it.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from http://seekyethetruth.com/Branham/resources-deep-abuse.aspx

[vii] G. Sarah. Brain Hurt. “It was very difficult as well to attend a church when you knew the pastor had been convicted of sexually molesting a young girl. He went to prison, yet, when he was released he didn’t want to give up his church. If that wasn’t bad enough, just a few years later, this same man was caught in another country with a prostitute in his hotel room shower. Still to this day he has a church following.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/brain-hurt

[viii] Example: Chikafa-Chipiro, Rosemary. Discoursing women, Christianity and security: The framing of women in the Gumbura case in Zimbabwean media. Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/kMIYBeS8G7jwRU5CEbdz/full

[ix] William Branham Pastor Convicted of Rape and Pornography. Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq0NYcrl94o

[x] Branham, William. 1956, July 28. Making the Valley Full of Ditches. “She’d beat her till she’d be so full of welts, you couldn’t get the clothes over the top of them. That’s what needs to be done tonight.”

[xi] Example: A. Anna-Lisa. Turning Pain Into Power. “The abuse included the most degrading forms of humiliation. I was locked in a basement cellar for hours or even days, naked, with no food. I was forced to walk around my home completing chores, not a stitch of clothing on my body. I was coerced into performing various exercise routines, naked, my parents laughing while they picked apart and ridiculed my body. My legs were scarred from where my mother grabbed me and dug her nails into me. Handprints and nail marks were left on my face after being slapped or pinched on the nose and drug wherever I was wanted. Punishments also included beatings with a belt and a Louisville Slugger, the resulting welts impossible to describe.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/turning-pain-into-power.

[xii] Example: Layton, Martha. Psalm 147:3. “We started listening to Message tapes. I believe the Message pushed him over the edge. I was beaten, thrown out naked into the streets, choked, and almost killed.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/psalm-147%3A3

[xiii] Branham, William. 1956, Oct 3. Painted-Face Jezebel. “listen, sister dear, God made you for one place, the kitchen. When you get out of there, you’re out of His will. Remember that. Women was made to be a helpmate at the house. She never was made for office work. And it’s caused more disgrace and divorces and things.”

[xiv] Branham, William. 1957, Oct 6. Questions and Answers on Hebrews #3. “Our nation has come so little until they’ve even taken the jobs away from the man, and put women out here in these places, till ninety percent of them, nearly, are prostitutes. And talk about men being gone, sure, it’s because they got women out there in their jobs. And they got so low-down till they put women as peace officers on the street. That’s a disgrace to any nation!”

[xv] Branham, William. 1960, Nov 13. Condemnation by Representation. “It shall also…has been an evil thing done in this country, they have permitted women to vote. This is a woman’s nation, and she will pollute this nation as Eve did Eden.”

[xvi] Branham, William. 1960, Feb 21. Hearing, Recognizing, Acting on the Word of God. “Morals, there’s no moral to it no more. Women, dressing evil; come through television, all kinds of impersonations of evil people of Hollywood, all kinds of stuff, fashions.”

[xvii] Example: Branham, William. 1954, May 9. The Invasion of the United States. “You say, “Well, the women.” Yes, and you men that’ll permit your wives to do that, that shows what you’re made out of.”

[xviii] Branham, William. 1958, Mar 24. Hear Ye Him. “All right, men, here you are. Any man that’ll let his wife smoke cigarettes and wear them kind of clothes, shows what he’s made out of. He’s not very much of a man. That’s exactly right. True. He don’t love her or he’d take a board and blister her with it.”

[xix] Example: Lefler, Joyce A. From Miracle to Murder. Accessed 2019, Feb 27 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/from-miracle-to-murder

[xxi] Branham, William. 1965, Feb 21. Marriage and Divorce. “Notice, there is nothing designed to stoop so low, or be filthy, but a woman. A dog can’t do it, a hog can’t do it, a bird can’t do it. No animal is immoral, nor it can be, for it is not designed so it can be. A female hog can’t be immoral, a female dog can’t be immoral, a female bird can’t be immoral. A woman is the only thing can do it. 116 Now you see where Satan went?”

[xxii] Branham, William. 1960, Nov 13. Condemnation by Representation. “Women, given the right to vote, elected President-elect Kennedy, was the woman’s vote, the wrong man; which will finally lead to full control, of the Catholic church, in United States. Then the bomb comes that explodes her.”

[xxiii] Example: H, Jennifer. Unwanted. Accessed 2019, Feb 27 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/unwanted

[xxiv] Branham, William. 1965, Feb 21. Marriage and Divorce. “Only a piece, scrap, made of a man, to deceive him by; God made it, right here has proved it. That’s what she was made for.”

[xxv] Example discussing Integration: Branham, William. 1963, Jun 28. O Lord, Just Once More. “He makes white man, black man, red man. We should never cross that up. It becomes a hybrid. And anything hybrid cannot re-breed itself. You are ruining the race of people. There is some things about a colored man that a white man don’t even possess them traits. A white man is always stewing and worrying; a colored man is satisfied in the state he is in, so they don’t need those things.”

[xxvi] A Special Day. Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://branham.org/en/articles/442017_ASpecialDay

[xxvii] 1941, Oct 23. Marriage License: William Branham and Meda Broy

[xxviii] 1920, Jan 20. Fourteenth Census of the United States.

[xxix] Example confirming William Branham’s age on the 1920 Census: 1924, Jun Mar 21. Hospital Bill Rendered. Courier Journal. “William Branham, 16 years old”

[xxx] Branham, William. 1951, Sept 29. Our Hope is in God. “How Doctor Dowie, in his death, prophesied that I would come to that city forty years from the time that he died. Not knowing nothing about it, he died on one day, and I was borned on the next. And forty years to the day I entered the city, not knowing nothing about it.”

[xxxi] 1934, June 22. Marriage License: William Branham and Hope Brumbach

[xxxii] Lefler, Joyce A. From Miracle to Murder. “No one listened to me while my ex-husband psychologically, physically, and sexually abused her over the years that followed.” Accessed 2019, Feb 27 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/from-miracle-to-murder

[xxxiii] Example: Layton, Martha. Psalm 147:3. “He told us that God had a special message for us. He told us that God wanted us to get naked and pray in a circle together. We proceeded to strip off our clothes and then the lights were turned out. I know I was only four, but I felt a sense of embarrassment having to strip off in front of my dad and brother. As we begin to pray my brother decided to touch me sexually for the very first time.”

[xxxiv] Example: A. Anna-Lisa. Turning Pain into Power. “I was coerced into performing various exercise routines, naked, my parents laughing while they picked apart and ridiculed my body. My legs were scarred from where my mother grabbed me and dug her nails into me. Handprints and nail marks were left on my face after being slapped or pinched on the nose and drug wherever I was wanted. Punishments also included beatings with a belt and a Louisville Slugger, the resulting welts impossible to describe.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/turning-pain-into-power.

[xxxv] Lefler, Joyce A. From Miracle to Murder. “Thanks to two police detectives and a state prosecutor, Adam’s case was finally solved. It was discovered that the coroner had been wrong in the timing and cause of Adam’s death. If there had been a thorough investigation in 1983, the year Adam died, it would have been discovered that Eugene, the babysitter, had a history of domestic violence and vile behavior towards children. He abused his first wife and tried to strangle and sexually molest their son. Eugene sexually molested his second wife’s daughter from her first marriage and then sexually molested the two daughters they had together. Maybe Eugene’s family was aware of his history but didn’t inform me. I was an easy target. The “Message” hadn’t prepared me to think or speak for myself or to question authority.” Accessed 2019, Feb 27 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/from-miracle-to-murder

[xxxvi] Lefler, Joyce A

[xxxvii] Example: A. Anna-Lisa. Turning Pain Into Power. “Fast forward 8 years later: I am 29 and absolutely the most confident I have ever been. I am a single mother with a career that is taking off and will take me places I NEVER imagined I deserved.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/turning-pain-into-power.

[xxxviii] Example: Jennifer H. Unwaned. “After leaving the Message, my husband and I joined a church that was the opposite of the Message. Here we found sound Biblical doctrine, love, and the Celebrate Recovery program.” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/unwanted

[xxxix] Example: Christine H. Breaking the Chains. “I will NEVER trust a religion again. I now rely only on a true God that loves me unconditionally. Broken and scarred, I am still worthy!” Accessed 2019, Feb 26 from https://castingpearlsproject.com/breaking-the-chains

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2023-02-14

Interview with John Collins on William Marrion Branham (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/08

Abstract

John Collins is an Author, and the Webmaster of Seek The Truth. He discusses: William Marrion Branham and his influence; Branham being considered a fraud and cult leader or cult-like leader; ways in which cults or cult-like groups grow; followers of “The Message” extricating or removing themselves from it; and ways to help those individuals or groups trapped in it.

Keywords: author, Christianity, faith healing, John Collins, Seek The Truth, The Message, webmaster, William Marrion Branham.

An Interview with John Collins on William Marrion Branham: Author & Webmaster, Seek The Truth (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We talked before. Let’s reboot the context, in brief, who was William Marrion Branham? Why was he influential?

John Collins: Yes, thank you for having me back again! It’s good to go a bit deeper than we did last time, and I think expanding upon the context we had before will be beneficial. So much information has surfaced since our last conversation that a reboot will help open the door to many topics that are virtually unexplored.

William Marrion Branham was an American “faith healer” recognized for his participation in the Post-World War II Healing Revival that began in the mid-1940s and lasted through the 1950s. It is believed by some that he initiated the revival when his “gift of healing” led to a series of revivals in mid-1946 and that his healing campaigns spawned the modern Charismatic movement.[i] Understanding why he was influential requires an in-depth look into the mechanics of how he was influential. Specifically, it requires an examination of the stage persona that Branham created to influence a nation during an extremely vulnerable time in American history, as well as an examination of the historical timeline of events that created the perfect storm.

Remember, it was a time of fear and unrest. The Second World War had ended, and many people feared that a third was just around the corner. With the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism spreading, and the thought of widespread communist infiltration of America was very frightening. [ii] Trust was a scarce commodity. The Revivalists offered a break from the mental strain of these fears, even if only for a few hours of an evening or weekend. From farmers to stock brokers, working class to executives of large corporations, the revivals attracted a very diverse crowd and participation in the revivals was extremely high. They were more than simply religious meetings; a revival was entertaining and therapeutic, offering a quick release of pressure for those who were about to explode. Branham was not the only revivalist to preach sermons with themes and titles such as “Letting off the Pressure”. Revivals with soothing themes were much needed during this time of distress and were highly popular.[iii]

The stage persona that William Branham created for his revival campaigns was specifically designed to appeal to the senses of those who needed a release. He claimed to be a simple man who spent a large part of his childhood hunting and fishing in the hills of Kentucky[iv], which would have resonated with many people in the rural areas his revivals and marketing material targeted. His usage of Southern slang words[v] and stories of a Huckleberry-Finn-lifestyle[vi] would have reinforced that feeling among his Southern crowds while appealing to the inner-child of even the most refined members of his crowd from the Northern States.

Towards the end of 1945, William Branham renamed his church from “Pentecostal Tabernacle” to “Branham Tabernacle”[vii] and integrated a new theme into his stage persona by claiming to be a Baptist minister newly interested in the Pentecostal experience.[viii] On the heels of a series of healing revivals in spring of that same year,[ix] Branham began claiming to have been recently given his “gift of healing” during an “angelic visitation”[x], and created a heartbreaking story describing the events leading up to the “angel”. This alteration was so successful that Branham would continue to use it for the remainder of his career, only adjusting the stage persona slightly to fit the timeline and fully separate this version from the previous iterations. It is a stage persona that has been immortalized through the hundreds of his recorded sermons from 1947 to 1965[xi] and propagated through the reproduction efforts of Voice of God Recordings in Jeffersonville, Indiana[xii].

Whether it was a predetermined strategy or a skill that would be developed over time, large portions of Branham’s speeches would be focused upon molding this stage persona into a loveable, trustworthy figure that most Americans could relate to. When he told of tragic events he endured during his many “life stories”, his description of those events was formatted in such a way that a majority of his crowd could both relate with and emotionally connect. At the same time, he approached them from a religious platform of “inter-evangelical” [xiii] or “inter-denominational” [xiv], removing any element of skepticism or critical analysis of his doctrine or symbology. Listeners had every reason to trust him, very little reason to question him, and no reason to doubt him. As a result, Branham’s influence was widespread, and his legacy is largely comprised of historical accounts that he himself created for use in his meetings.

2. Jacobsen: Why is he widely considered fraud and leader of a, at least, cult-like movement, which still exists today?

Collins: I cannot speak as to why others may view him as a fraud, but I can speak about the reaction myself and some of my associates have shared as historical information started surfacing that placed many aspects of this religion and stage persona into question. The religious movement as it exists today has been declared to be a destructive cult by both religious[xv] and non-religious[xvi] groups, and when a former member first encounters critical information, it is often followed by waves of emotion.

There are numerous sects and sub-sects of the “Message”, the religious following of William Marrion Branham.[xvii] There are also sects of Pentecostalism and other religious cult followings who place value on the doctrines that Branham introduced or re-introduced.[xviii] Yet in all of their various forms, almost every sect has theology that requires William Branham to be a focal point. In the more extreme sects, Branham’s stage persona has actually embedded itself into fundamental, core doctrines[xix], and leaders of those sects preach apocalyptic theology that is fully dependent upon William Branham as a means to escape Armageddon[xx].

As I slowly uncovered information[xxi] separating the “William Branham” used as a basis for core doctrine from the historical “William Branham”, and slowly began to distinguish the difference between the elements used for the creation of the stage persona and real life, the word “fraud” would have been tame compared to the other words racing through my mind. Not only was I unaware that previous, much different versions of his stage persona existed[xxii], I felt as though I had been manipulated into my religious beliefs through deception. This feeling was exacerbated by the leaders of the movement who had access to this information for decades yet continued to preach doctrines dependent upon the final adjustments to the stage persona while concealing information concerning the earlier iterations.

Once the emotions lifted, curiosity drove me into a research project that would last for several years. I had to know whether or not William Branham could accurately be considered a fraud. With information quickly becoming available that offered glimpses into his past and seeing a much different version of history than had been available to us in the movement, I knew that it was quite possible that his intentions were good – regardless of the destructive nature of their outcome. Was he a fraud? Or was he simply a good man with a passion for helping people during a difficult time in American history?

Our conversation will be unique, as it is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to explore these questions in public, and the historical data used to form my opinion is virtually unpublished.

3. Jacobsen: What are the ways in which cults, cult-like groups, and others, can be created, maintained, and even grown over time? What are the tricks of their trade? How is Branhamism a case in point – in Canada, in Australia, in the United States of America, and elsewhere?

Collins: I recently have had the opportunity to work with former members of another Pentecostal cult that has a strong presence in the United States, Mexico, several countries in Africa, and more. If I were to describe the structural composition of this religious movement to former members of William Branham’s “Message” cult following without mentioning its leader or doctrine, those who escaped Branham’s movement would instantly assume that I was referring to the “Message”. Yet at the same time, former members of both groups contacted me after watching episodes of “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath”, describing similarities they had identified with the inner workings of Scientology and the cults from which they escaped. Each time a destructive cult makes headlines in the news after a destructive episode or exposure, members and former members of other cults often notice similarities.

This is a much different experience for current members of a cult as it is for former. Current members of cults, having been trained to place an unhealthy amount of focus upon their leader, notice the unhealthy level of interest members of the cult making headlines have in their leader. They experience cognitive dissonance as they try to reconcile the conflicting emotions as they realize their situation is so similar and begin suppressing any troubling similarities while taking mental note of the list of any positive attributes of their own cult leader.

Former members, especially those who recently escaped, are more sensitive to the destructive qualities. Like the general population who have never experienced a religious cult, they recognize the harm in placing unhealthy levels of reverence, importance, and power in the leader of the movement, but also recognize deeper observations such as similarities in the creation and control of the group they escaped and the group they are observing.

I find it both fascinating and disturbing that the same scenarios can be applied to the creation, maintenance, and growth of destructive cults. Many cult leaders have emerged after having either experienced or observed the formation and design of other cult followings. Rev. Jim Jones of Peoples Temple, whose cult following ended in mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, was a member of William Branham’s “Message” cult[xxiii] during the time the “Message” was more closely aligned with the “Latter Rain” sect of Pentecostalism. Branham, whose campaign team was comprised of former members from Rev. John Alexander Dowie’s “Zion City” cult, appears to have used many of Dowie’s ideas and theology, including a claim to be the return of “Elijah the prophet” from the Old Testament. Before starting his own cult following and claiming to be another return of “Elijah”, Rev. Charles Fox Parham purposefully observed both Dowie and Rev. Frank Sandford, who also claimed to be the return of “Elijah”. [xxiv] Each of these cult leaders, though only loosely connected, share many similarities in the creation and establishment, maintenance and control, and spreading of their religious movements. All created their religious movements with an open-door policy, claiming participation with other denominations while slowly attracting members out of them. Over time and as their cults were being established, cooperation was slowly replaced with distaste or even hostility towards the outside groups. The two-way open door effectively transitioned into a one-way partially-closed door, and the isolationist mindset was established. Though many different religious cult followings have vastly different origins and beliefs, in their core formation, some level of this transition must occur for them to become destructive.

Once a group of people has placed an unusual amount of control and reverence to a single individual or single group of individuals, i.e. the cult leader(s), and the following has started to become convinced that the leader(s) have supernatural abilities greater than other humans both inside or outside their group, it is difficult to maintain. The leaders of these movements are, as we know, normal human beings, and are subject to all of the types of problems that exist in humanity. Not only must they ensure that their followers continue believing in their “gifts” and their “elevated” status, they must prevent the group from critically examining all aspects of their lifestyle. The group must conform, but they must also be controlled to prevent widespread critical analysis.

Religious cults often manipulate or control behavior patterns, from dress code to entertainment.[xxv] In movies and in television, similar stereotypical clothing is used to depict a cult, and viewers generally agree that they “look like a cult”. This is a direct result of creators noticing similarities in the dress code and behavior of religious movements in the news, and their contrast from other members of society. For people in these groups, it provides a quick-and-easy way to identify members from non-members, but for the leaders, it shifts a great deal of focus away from themselves and onto those who do not conform.

Cult leaders must also limit the amount of information that is available to the group and control the information that has been made available.[xxvi] Leaders who claim to be “prophets” must only allow information about “prophecies” that appear to have been accurate, while concealing or controlling the perception of information available for “prophecies” that were not accurate.[xxvii] Healers must avoid letting the group learn of those who continued to suffer or die after being “healed”, those claiming benevolence must conceal their personal finances, and all must conceal or control information that humanizes themselves or their ministries. This type of control is not limited to external sources. Every group contains a very diverse set of members, many of which have very curious and analytical minds. Thoughts and emotions must also be manipulated and controlled to prevent those minds from questioning and exploring to prevent widespread demotivation.[xxviii]

The difficulty in continuing this type of control leads to the outreach programs we see in Branhamism and other religious cult followings. It is far more effort to maintain this level of manipulation in cities or even countries of origin. Access to critical information is easily available for local members yet almost non-existent for those on distant shores. Many religious cults turn to global outreach to grow their following rather than local campaigns to attract new members.

Thankfully, the information age has leveled the playing field. The digitalization of media archives and social network interaction has managed to bring even the most distant parts of the world together, and the sharing of information has led to mass exodus or implosion of many destructive groups.

4. Jacobsen: How can questioning followers of ‘The Message’ begin to help themselves become extricated from it?

Collins: It is very difficult leaving a destructive cult following, whether it is the “Message” (in its many various forms and leadership) or other. For many former members, the negative effects were felt for several years.[xxix] Ironically, the easiest way for most people to break free from these groups is to heed the advice of the cult leaders: Study the group’s information! If you are in the “Message”, study the “Message”. Study the works, history, and legacy of William Branham. If you are in Scientology, study Scientology! Study the works, history, and legacy of L. Ron Hubbard. Don’t limit yourself to study only the filtered information that the cult has promoted or manipulated, study everything from praise to critical analysis.

A member of one of our support groups recently commented, “It’s funny how we study the ‘Message’ more now that we left than when we were in it!” It is true; many former members find themselves digging through mounds of information to try and piece together the artifacts that explain the last several years or decades of being controlled and manipulated. At the same time, it is very therapeutic. Leaning how and why a cult leader created and maintained their following is important but understanding how it directly affected your psychological makeup demystifies the manipulation and control. It brings release.

5. Jacobsen: How can external agencies, groups, and individuals help those trapped in it?

Collins: There is a huge need for resources of all kinds. There are as many as 5,000 cults in the United States alone[xxx], and very little information is available for most of them. Sadly, a great deal of information exists for groups that have tragically ended in mass suicide[xxxi] but was almost non-existent leading up to their destructive event. Many similar groups, with similar structures and conditions have the same potential outcome, and unfortunately will not be critically examined until their climax.

Counseling is both exhaustive and costly, and many who want to escape or have escaped cannot afford the added expense. Most of their surplus income and even retirement funds have been given to the cult leaders. In many cases, the cult was also their primary source of income. After leaving, former members are starting over in all aspects of life, spiritually, mentally, and financially.

In some parts of the world, former members are clinically diagnosed as having Group Dependence Disorder and are treated for symptoms ranging from significant personal and family impairment to professional and social impairment.[xxxii] In North America, however, these groups are classified generically in the category of “religion”, and the traumatic issues cult escapees face are dismissed incorrectly as simply a “bad experience with a poor choice in religion.” It is critical that cult psychology training be required learning for psychologists and counselors, and that resources are available for those already active in their profession.

There is a wide variety of areas in which those wishing to assist in the escape of cult members could assist, from spreading awareness and assisting in educating cult members to contributing towards the much-needed counseling after their escape. Those wishing to do so can contact us on our website, http://www.seekyethetruth.com.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Webmaster, Seek The Truth.

[2] Individual Publication Date: March 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/collins-one; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[i] Weaver, John. 2016, Mar 23. The New Apostolic Reformation: History of a Modern Charismatic Movement. p34.

[ii] Heale, M. J. 1998. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935-1965. University of Georgia Press.

[iii] Gatewood, Willard B. 1966. Preachers, Pedagogues, and Politicians: The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina, 1920-1927. UNC Press Books. p39.

[iv] Branham, William. 1951, July 22. Life Story. “We were raised in the mountains of Kentucky”

[v] Branham, William. 1954, Aug 29. I Will Restore, Saith the Lord. “I’m just a Kentucky corn-cracker, with my words of, “hit, hain’t, tote, fetch, carry.”

[vi] Branham, William. 1955, Jan 17. How the Angel Came to Me, and His Commission. “Where I used to trap when I was a boy, had a trap line through there, and go up there and fish and stay all night. Just a little old dilapidated cabin sitting over there, been in there for years.”

[vii] First newspaper announcement of “Branham Tabernacle: 1945, Oct 13. Church Listings. Jeffersonville Evening News. Example listing as “Pentecostal Tabernacle”: Rev. Branham to Leave for Summer. 1940, Apr 29. Jeffersonville Evening News.

[viii] Branham, William. 1951, July 22. Life Story. “When it come mine I said, ‘Billy Branham, evangelist, Jeffersonville, Indiana,’”

[ix] Branham, William. 1945. I Was Not Disobedient to the Heavenly Vision.

[x] Branham, William. 1955, Jan 17. How the Angel Came to Me, and His Commission.

[xi] The Table. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://table.branham.org

[xii] Voice of God Recordings. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://branham.org/en/aboutus

[xiii] Branham, William. 1948, April. The Voice of Healing: An Inter-Evangelical Publication of the Branham Healing Campaigns.

[xiv] Branham, William. 1954, June 20. Divine Healing. “I never joined any denominational church, and I don’t intend to. I intend to stand between the breach and say we are brothers.”

[xv] Jacobsen, Ken. 2009, Jan 19. A Refutation of William Marrion Branham. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://culteducation.com/group/1289-general-information/7839-a-refutation-of-william-marrion-branham.html

[xvi] The Message. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://old.freedomofmind.com/Info/infoDet.php?id=883

[xvii] Message Sects. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://en.believethesign.com/index.php/Message_Sects

[xviii] 2018, Aug 18. Rev. Beniece Hicks, founder of Christ Gospel Church, dies. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com/2018/08/rev-bernice-hicks-founder-of-christ.html

[xix] Example: The Messenger. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://www.messagechurch.com/message/the-messenger/

[xx] The Mystery of the Rapture. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://endtimemessage.info/rapture.htm

[xxi] The Message: The Series. A Historical Look into William Branham’s “Message”. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://william-branham.org

[xxii] Example: Branham, William. 1945. I Was Not Disobedient to the Heavenly Vision. (Branham’s “gift of healing” came by vision in 1945, as opposed to his later stage persona which claimed the “gift” came during an “angelic visitation in 1946: Branham, William. 1954, Aug 9. The Manifestation of Thy Resurrection to the People of this Day. The very day that Israel was declared a nation again for the first time for twenty-five hundred years, that same night the Angel of the Lord sent me out to pray for the sick, the very same time, May the 6th, 1946, the Lord Jesus did that”

[xxiii] Collins, John. Duyzer, Peter M. The Message Connection of Jim Jones and William Branham. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=65112

[xxiv] Collins, John. 2017. Jim Jones – The Malachi 4 Elijah Prophecy. Dark Mystery Publications.

[xxv] Hassan, Steven. 1988. Combating Cult Mind Control.

[xxvi] Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://freedomofmind.com/bite-model.

[xxvii] Example: Branham, William. 1960, Nov 13. Condemnation by Representation. “By the way, Mr. Mercier and many of them are going to take some of these old prophecies, and dig them out, and revise them a little, or bring them up to date, and put them in papers.”

[xxviii] Collins, Glenn. The Psychology of the Cult Experience. 1982. New York Times. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/15/style/the-psychology-of-the-cult-experience.html

[xxix] Hassan, Steven. 2012. Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs.

[xxx] Clark, Charles S. Cults in America. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1993050700

[xxxi] Example: Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple Search this website. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu

[xxxii] Jansà, Josep, M.D., Perlado, Miguel, PhD. Cults Viewed from a Socio-Addictive Perspective. Accessed 2019, Feb 3 from http://www.ais-info.org/application/uploaded/cults_viewed_from_a_socio-addictive_perspective.pdf

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2023-02-14

Interview with Stacey Piercey on Fundamental Human Rights and the Transgender Community (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/01

Abstract

Stacey Piercey is the Co-Chair of the Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights for CFUW FCFDU and Vice Chair of the National Women’s Liberal Commission for the Liberal Party of Canada. She discusses: fundamental rights and freedoms; implementation of fundamental rights and freedoms; the sources of violations of fundamental rights and freedoms; prominent transgender community individuals; real-life impacts of fundamental rights and freedoms denials; expediting the acknowledgment and instantiation of the fundamental human rights and freedoms of trans individuals and the transgender community around the world; and the regions progressing and regressing.

Keywords: Co-Chair, Liberal Party of Canada, Ministry of Status of Women, Stacey Piercey, Vice Chair.

Interview with Stacey Piercey on Fundamental Human Rights and the Transgender Community: Co-Chair – Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights, CFUW FCFDU; Vice Chair National Women’s Liberal Commission at Liberal Party of Canada | Parti libéral du Canada (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of the rights arguments, what are the fundamental human rights and freedoms trans individuals and the transgender community deserve as human beings?

Stacey Piercey: I have heard all the reasons over the years as to why I should not have any special privileges as a transgender person. At the time when I began my transition, I didn’t want a handout; I needed a hand up to have equal access and opportunity. I suffered being on the outside of society. It was traumatic to know that I was no longer a human.

I did earn my right to be a woman and the respect that comes with my new gender. It is the law too. The courts can now decide on the concept of what is “gender identity and expression.” When I had to re-establish myself, it was difficult, especially when faced with outright discrimination. I heard the word “no” everywhere I went for years. Then the human rights movement started in Canada because there were many of us with similar problems. We were in a system that was unable to deal with a change in gender. It was a legal nightmare, and legislation was needed.

The government at the time wasn’t ready for me. I had complicated problems. I had issues in establishing my identity, and that held me back. I was in a situation where I was incredibly vulnerable, and people were able to take advantage of me. Today’s standards did not exist five years ago, let alone ten or twenty. I should have received help. Institutions that respect fundamental human rights should welcome us, correct past wrongs, and apologize. We all need to move on. I want to see transgender people in my community. My quality of life depends on the human rights that other people grant me as a transgender individual. I prefer to be equal.

2. Jacobsen: What does the implementation of these fundamental rights and freedoms imply for the wider global culture, especially in terms of their current treatment of trans individuals and the transgender community?

Piercey: When the government here introduced and implemented transgender human rights, it did send a message of hope to all those who live in fear due to gender identity and expression. They know in Canada, I am considered an equal citizen with protections under the law. The concept has created a ripple effect around the world and, it sure has inspired transgender people to strive for and obtain similar rights in other places.

I believe countries that pursue inclusion policies are acknowledging a problem in society and are attempting to fix it so that all citizens feel safe to live their lives. As more transgender people come out and establish themselves these communities will thrive. I am always discovering new terminologies, identities and concepts as of late. It will take time to see our contribution to society. I know that I do bring a different perspective to the conversation. I find that nations which are progressive can introduce transgender right with ease. Our constitution, here in Canada, allows for human rights protections of groups. We are people. It was a big deal to add those few words to a piece of paper. It was an easy legal step and a problematic political accomplishment at the same time.

3. Jacobsen: What seems like the central set of sources for the violations of the fundamental rights and freedoms of trans individuals and the transgender community?

Piercey: I will speak from my experience. One violation that I deal with is sexism. It is so strange to watch it happening to me. I treat everyone the same. Then I get dismissed sometimes by men, and women do it too. It is never that I am transgender anymore as it is now a grotesquely overpriced bill, an excuse that doesn’t make sense or someone who pretends they don’t know me.

I get discrimination because I am LGBTQ. I see myself as a straight woman. I don’t get that one at all, yet it happens, and that makes me go to a pride parade. I do have great empathy towards others who are stigmatized or suffer to no fault of there own. To have a normal life and to think of retirement would be nice again.

Another form I see is fear of human rights violations, as it makes people nervous. This I when it isn’t about helping the individual solve a problem as it is more about not violating someone’s human rights. Professionals have no excuse as they are trained to do their job respectfully and cannot legally isolate you because they disagree with your gender identity or expression. It is usually an error in judgement, inadequate training and not malicious. I spotted this fight or flight reaction when I had to say, that the problem is, I am transgender.

4. Jacobsen: Who are some prominent trans individuals who truly set the framework of the modern discussion around trans rights and inclusion of the transgender community into the mainstream cultures?

Piercey: There are many prominent transgender individuals in all aspect of society. I refuse to name anybody. I have a soft spot for all those I met in person. I call them all my brothers and sisters and others. They are leaders in their fields and their communities too. They have all fought their own battles, I have gotten to know many of them well over the years, and they are like family to me.

Here in Canada, it was each one of us that contributed to this human rights fight. It wasn’t a heroic battle. It was about individuals standing up and saying this was wrong. Enough of being taking advantage of because we are transgender. I decided I couldn’t live in fear and I stepped out of the closet. My friends and I all supported each other, and I was never alone.

5. Jacobsen: What are the real-life impacts of the denial of fundamental rights and freedoms of trans individuals in countries around the world?

Piercey: It isn’t a difficult concept to have respect for others. Transgender people are easy targets because they are a vulnerable segment of the population. I wouldn’t travel to a place or work where people are not respected. I don’t believe I am alone in thinking this way. Nobody is comfortable supporting oppression of fundamental rights and freedoms. Transgender people are the preverbal canary in the coal mine for human rights around the globe. That is where Canada has had an impact on other countries. We are sharing our message of human rights. They know our story about what has happened here. They are watching and learning this new way of saying yes and resolving issues. Transgender people are out and very proud to be Canadian. They are influencing change in society.

6. Jacobsen: At the level of the United Nations and human rights organizations, and international non-governmental organizations, what could be done to expedite the acknowledgment and instantiation of the fundamental human rights and freedoms of trans individuals and the transgender community around the world?

Piercey: There are declarations by international organizations that call for fundamental human rights. Governments are changing the laws of their countries to accommodate these protections. Corporations are implementing policies, processes and procedures into everyday operations. I often see now medical advancements, legal victories and the establishment of social supports. Remember there was no infrastructure a few years ago, transgender people were in legal limbo, and nobody had to do a thing; as being neither male or female, could at any time, be used against you. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.

As a new group of recognized people, we are currently having a conversation about the problems we all had and are now trying to fix them. I have learned more being outside of the transgender community as of late, and I bring that back with me every time I drop back in. It is nice to be accepted so openly by other groups as well.

I think it is exciting times and can’t wait to see how this all unfolds. I do know that you will never solve every problem or grant everyone the same freedom that I currently enjoy. I believe education is vital. This world is getting smaller, and we are becoming one community. That is the future I plan to be a part of as a transgender person.

7. Jacobsen: In terms of fundamental rights and freedoms, what regions are progressing? Why? What nations are regressing? Why?

Piercey: I can say that some nations are receiving more media attention dues to legal battles, policy debates and integration issues because of their transgender citizens. I think Canada is a leading example in comparison to some conservative-minded governments. Those tend to struggle more with human rights, valuing social policy and understanding inequality.

I know the younger generation that I met have less of a problem with gender identity or expression than what I remember from growing up. I recently read that twenty percent of the population now identifies as LGBTQ. That is double from what I ever heard. It blew my mind for a few minutes. I expect significant change in the years to come, and I am not worried about it. You can’t stop progress.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: March 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/piercey-four; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Shutting Down Speech, Secular Activism, and Cherished Ideologies (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/22

Abstract

Yasmine Mohammed is an Author and the Founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds. She discusses: shutting down speech; secular activism; and cherished ideologies.

Keywords: FHFM, Islam, Ex-Muslim, Yasmine Mohammed.

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Religion, Fundamentalist, and Denominations of the Left (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview was conducted in early 2018.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some of the individuals, it is not a pervasive phenomenon, but it is individuals who typically would be the centrist or center-right. They cannot be in a platform, for instance.

They are given a platform that is revoked, or they shut it down. There is at least a modicum of truth there that is not being allowed to be said. That someone is succeeding in winning in not being said.

Yasmine Mohammed: Because the narrative is being disrupted, the narrative is minorities are beautiful. People that need to be protected. That is it. If you say anything other than that, you are a racist bigot and Islamophobic, Nazi, blah blah blah.

Jacobsen: Even the value, it is a good value: tolerance and protection of the vulnerable.

Mohammed: It is. This is what I am saying. If liberals understood what they were doing, they would not be doing it. The problem is they do not understand what they are doing. They do not realize that they are supporting.

They think they are supporting a minority and an oppressed group, but they are not. They are supporting the oppressors. When you support the conservatives, the powerful rich theocracies, when you support Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood; they are not being oppressed.

It is the women and the LGBT community, the atheists, and all of these people that are under those people that are being oppressed. It is ridiculous.

Jacobsen: It is also an image thing. We allow it as a culture, not a single person, but as a general phenomenon, so we were talking about fifteen, twenty minutes ago, about the Muslim Brotherhood.

You were saying their century-long plan. They are checking off most of their boxes. Their ‘centennial imperial strategy’ that then becomes a message. Their success sends with us sends a message to them. That we are sufficiently indifferent. That we are going to do your dirty work for you.

Mohammed: It is working beautifully. Another one of their plans. I watched it happen. So, it is an old strategy, divide and conquer. So, old, it has been done. You will think that we would see it a mile away.

When the Black Lives Matter thing happens, I was thinking, “No, there it is. The next line in the strategy. The divide and conquer here it is, it is happening.” But it did not take, everybody was thinking, “My God, civil war is going to happen, black versus white.”

It did not happen, but what ended up happening instead is the Right vs. Left. That is working like a charm. So, if you look back at the media that was pushing things, remember those little videos all the time the AG+ and Vice and Vox and whatever pushing all of the white guilt, pushing all of the Black Lives Matter stuff too, those media like AG+.

What is that? It is Al Jazeera who is funding all of this propaganda that is going through to the millennials and tugging at their heartstrings playing exactly they said they would. What do you have in Germany? People holding up signs, “Refugees welcome.”

Little kids with sandwiches and bottles of water being given to the refugees as they are walking in. They are using the good nature of these people against themselves they are using the white guilt. They are using the guilt of the Germans, especially, because they have a lot of guilt.

Germany was so easy to take over because German people they want too self-flagellate. They want to somehow repent from their past sins, so this is how they help to achieve it. So, they understand all of this.

They know all of this. They get how Western minds work. They understand history. They understand and it is a joke. It is a joke. it is so easy. Taking over Egypt, that is hard. That was their first job. They succeeded because Egyptians are hardcore.

Arabs, in general, they are not in the West. There is no grey area. This is about Arab people. They are black or white. You are in or out: yes-no. If they are going to be a Muslim, they are going to be a hardcore Muslim.

They are going to fly a plane into a building, no problem. That is the way they are so it was difficult to change those minds because they are not open-minded, grey area, wishy-washy people, but they succeeded with the more difficult task.

The West, the mindset of the Liberal values, Enlightenment values, Western values, this idea of equality and all of that stuff. That is easy. There is a thing that they say where they laugh at Jesus because it is mostly a Christian mindset over here.

They laugh. They say things, “Turn the other cheek, so I can chop off your head.” Muslims think of this as Western people. This is all a weakness. The fact that everybody is so good. Help your neighbor, all of this hippy Christian stuff – that is hilarious to them. They are like, “You guys are no problem…”

We are proving them right. Especially if you look at Canada, how we bend over? Someone wants a Bible study in a classroom. We say, “Absolutely not, get the Lord’s Prayer out.” But I want to have a Friday worship and have a congregation: “No problem, of course, absolutely: here is an empty classroom you can use. Oh no worries, nobody is going to keep an eye on what you are saying or what you are doing.”

When I start to think about it, it is quite depressing. It makes me feel I want to move to South America.

Jacobsen: The first case is removing a religious murmuring, statement, or prayer from a public setting. People paying public tax money for that are right. Many of them will probably be non-Catholic, at least, so that is a secular thing.

That is the appropriate thing to do within our values.

Mohammed: Yes, it is.

Jacobsen: But then to allow the others are against that value. It is not that it makes me uncomfortable. It is a violation of a standard, not a norm, but of a standard that is set, that is derivative from the values that we hold.

Mohammed: We need to be unapologetic about our values. We have come to this doubt of progress, not easily. We had to fight for it. People have lost their lives for it. People have suffered for us to enjoy this. Why are we allowing the past to come back and haunt us again?

Jacobsen: Also, religion is young. There is tribal get together. Those are super old, but some religions are four thousand or six thousand years old, tops. This is especially important for things that are new: women’s rights and human rights.

They have barely existed in robust present form for a century or two. This is a particular risk we have been emphasizing. We have had two millennia to fourteen hundred years. How have they been for women? Maybe, a mild argument can be that for the time they were some progressive things, maybe, but not for now.

Mohammed: 6th century.

Jacobsen: Right but now my feeling based on rough knowledge on things is that women’s rights are new and, therefore, fragile, the intervention of this worldview is destabilizing to them.

Mohammed: Totally, and what you are saying is so true, that is what makes me nervous because they are so much hardened and experiences and set. They are in a better position than we are. Christianity in the West anyway. It is being castrated. It is not going to, but Islam is not.

Islam is young and verdant, strong and successful, and rich and powerful, politically and economically. It is a real threat and, as you said, our values are fragile and new compared to their values. However, we are always being killed. We never had power, still do not have power.

In only in the past five years, I have been comfortable saying publicly, “I am an atheist.” I have only been comfortable in using that word after even five years. That estimate is probably being generous.

So, for years, I said I was Agnostic or I said, “I am not religious.” You begin to use euphemisms because you do not want people to think that you are some evil hellion that is going to eat their baby. That is Canada, so imagine areas conservative the U.S. or the Muslim world.

Obviously, how much worse it is for an atheist over there, Atheism is considered terrorism in Saudi Arabia now. That is what it is deemed.

2. Jacobsen: So, if we take a conclusive look at the extensive discussion we had over the last few hours, and if we look at the situation, not through the lens of religion, and religion’s contents and countries, what do you see as the future of secularism and religious activism in general?

Mohammed: So, secularism or irreligious people, you were saying. We are scattered all over the place. We are not supporting each other. We haven’t felt the need to glom on to each other. Somehow, we need to form a political party.

But in the same way that religious people have a central authority: let’s say that Catholics, they have the Pope in the Vatican City. Muslims they have Saudi Arabia. They got Mecca, Medina. We are important. We are relevant.

We are a significant number, what we have to say is valuable and important. This is the first time in history that we can say it publicly, in some areas of the world. We can say it publicly and not be beheaded for it.

It is not blasphemy. It is okay. We can finally have a show of strength and if we are able to do that, if we are able to somehow get together and be something, then we will be able to support all of the secular liberal people in the rest of the world, in the areas of the world where they cannot speak up lest they are killed.

So, at least, they will know that there is some central authority that is willing to help them in some way or to support them in some way or at least to know that we exist and that we can be the change we want to see in the world.

We are complaining that liberals have betrayed us because they are not supporting the liberals in these minority groups, in the Muslim world. We can be that instead. We are saying that liberals are treating Christianity in a sum, differently.

They are, atheists can come forward and say, “Fuck all of your religions, we are not going to treat you any differently. We have CFI. We have the American Atheist Association.” We have this, but it is not good enough.

We need something big and strong and loud and united. I do not know how that is going to happen, but that is what we need.

Jacobsen: We need a Judean People’s Front.

Mohammed: I do not even want to say a political party because it is not a specific country. We are humanist.

Jacobsen: It is long term thinking than political thinking is.

Mohammed: It is long term thinking than political thinking, absolutely. So, what is it going to take? Do we need to – somebody was saying we should – all move to Greenland?

Jacobsen: Iceland is number one.

Mohammed: So, maybe, Iceland can be our new Mecca for humanists or something like that.

Jacobsen: Tops the ranking, it has for years for equality for men and women. A study came out saying that 100% of people under 25 said that they do not believe that the world was created by Creator or divine architect.

Mohammed: So, maybe, that is what we need. Maybe, we need Iceland too, but that is what we need in the short term. What we need to do is we need to support people who have our ideas, we should support people based on their ideas, not their identity. That is what we need.

That is the short term solution. It boggles the mind how many liberals will jump down the throat of anybody that says anything about Christianity, but if somebody says something about Islam it is defended. That is the problem, that is what needs to stop.

We need to stop. We need to be able to differentiate between Islam and Muslims as liberals. We should be supporting minorities. Yes, we should be supporting oppressed people. Yes, people are human being’s and not religions.

That, maybe, the problem is that they think Islam is a culture. They think Muslims are a people. Muslims are not people. There are hundreds of countries. It is saying Catholics are a people. There are Italian Catholics. There are Filipino Catholics. There are Mexican Catholics.

They are all over the world, different Catholics. They do not speak the same language. They do not eat the same food. They do not have the same conditions. They are not the same people. They are different ethnic groups. They are different cultures. They share a religion.

Islam is the same thing. If you are going to support Mexicans or you are going to support Italians or you are going to support Filipinos, then that is fine, wonderful, dandy, do that, but do not support Catholicism.

They do not understand the parallels are perfectly clear. It is there, but maybe it is because the issue is that I am born and raised in this stuff. I was born and raised in Canada, but in a Muslim household of Arab culture.

3. Jacobsen: But you also hear the Platonic argument too. Whenever something bad happens within a person’s cherished ideology or worldview plus practice, or suggested practice, they go, “That is not the real [fill in the blank].”

It is Platonic. I do not care about that. How are the people that believe that stuff in general acting? Most are acting decently. However, what is going on?

Mohammed: Communists can say the same thing, right? How many millions of people have to die before you say, “Maybe, this ideology is not so great”?

Jacobsen: Also, some preachers do it to put all burden of responsibility of belief on the follower, which is a beautiful way of doing it, where “You are not praying sincerely enough” or “You do not have the best belief in the faith and so on…”

Mohammed: So, because I was born in a Western world but in a Muslim household, I am able to see the distinction so clearly, but somebody who is American or Canadian and has had no interaction or understanding about the Muslim world or about Islam, or about Muslims.

It is all so foreign. It is also intricate and confusing. So, you can understand how they confuse the religion with the culture, with the people. All of that. They do not get that there are Pakistani Muslims and Egyptian Muslims, Indonesian Muslims. Maybe, they need to understand the difference between people and religion.

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Yasmine.

Mohammed: No problem, Scott.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds.

[2] Individual Publication Date: February 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mohammed-four; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Religion, Fundamentalist, and Denominations of the Left (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/15

Abstract

Yasmine Mohammed is an Author and the Founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds. She discusses: Dave Rubin and Colin Moriarty; splits of the Left; concerns for Canada; religions plagiarizing from one another; and demographics, rights, and what to do with fundamental beliefs.

Keywords: FHFM, Islam, Ex-Muslim, Yasmine Mohammed.

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Religion, Fundamentalist, and Denominations of the Left: Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview was conducted in early 2018.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what are going to be the topics thematically across them that you will be discussing when you are going to be on stage with people like Dave Rubin and Colin Moriarty?

Yasmine Mohammed: That topic for that speaking tour is all free speech, is all going to be about free speech. So, for someone like me who’s coming, as you said, America has won the privilege to speak freely more than any other country.

There is self-censoring with things like Islamophobia and whatever. What is missing, it is for them to be around them. They are focused so much on themselves. A lot of navel gazing going on in the U.S. You would not believe it.

You have the internet. You do not even have any excuse. We are all connected. However, there are so many other parts in the world where people would literally be killed either by the authorities – in Saudi Arabia, you are considered terrorist by the government if you speak out against Islam – or, in countries like Pakistan, where the people in the public will kill you.

You heard about Marshal Khan. He is a university student.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Mohammed: He asked the question, “So if Adam and Eve were the only two humans, does that mean we are all children of incest?” Which is a basic question, I remember asking that as a child. But, “How dare he ask such a question!”

That was so offensive enough for the people that were living in his dorm with him. They stormed his room, broke down his door, attacked him, took him out to the middle of the quad, and beat him to death.

Hundreds of students, that is what happens in those countries. So, when we talk about free speech and people here do not understand the value of it, they do not understand – you said the privilege – they do not understand people have died for us to be able to speak our mind.

I know what it feels like not to be able to speak my mind in my own house. I cannot even have the thoughts in my own head. Anybody that grew up in a repressively religious household would understand what I am saying.

I remember hearing a girl who escaped from North Korea. They are taught that the bugs and the birds, the mice, everybody, reports back to the fearless leader whenever they see them doing anything.

They are also told that he can read their minds, as we are told that God can read your mind. So, you are even afraid to have the thoughts in your own head. I speak to ex-Muslims all the time that are writing to me, then deleting their accounts.

I cannot even respond to them, but they need to get it. They need to say how they feel. They want somebody to hear them because they can never express their opinions on these matters. People born and raised in some areas of the West so removed from the struggle that they do not understand the privilege that they have and then they squander it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali said, “They spit on freedom because they do not know what it is to not have freedom.” Another said something that was so poignant and perfect. She said, “It is if you have a third generation kid from a wealthy family, where the person that earned the wealth was three generations ago.”

So, you are talking about Paris Hilton or Paris Hilton’s kids. They have no idea what it means to live hand to mouth. They have no idea what it means to work for their money. They have no concept. They cannot have any concept.

So, that is what it feels like when you are talking to some people in the West sometimes about these freedoms and privileges. Those freedoms and privileges that they have. They do not see these reams of privileges. They find reasons to complain. They bitch about mansplaining and manspreading.

How do you – for shame, how do you even consider that feminism when there are women getting their clitorises cut off? There are children, little girls, in China that are being killed. However, your focus is on ridiculous teeny tiny things.

They do not broaden. They do not go around because they are too busy looking at each other. Everyone wants to be oppressed in the States these days. The cool thing to do, right? I would love to give you all of my oppression points.

I would love to trade lives with you and to not have all of this shit to overcome. I would love to. These people want some reason to say, “I am a victim.” You do not understand how lucky you are and instead of appreciating what you have. You are looking for some reasons to claim some victimhood.

Look at Linda Sarsour, talking about how Muslims in American today, because of Islamophobia, they have it worse than the black slaves in the U.S. did!

Jacobsen: That is a stretch.

Mohammed: So, anyway, I could go on and on about this.

2. Jacobsen: To simplify, I want to reflect on both perspectives. One the one hand, you have people concerned about livelihood, wellbeing, so either they are going to be killed or destroyed in some manner, possibly some body parts might disappear.

On the other hand, you have highly developed nations with most of these privileges and rights established. The concerns then become local, prosocial, and limited to their context, where things that would be of mild annoyance. Do not explain: I do not need to have things explained to me that are obvious, or the mansplaining example.

Given the context that people are coming from, they are both valid at the same time. There is legitimacy. You make change relative to your context, but the lack of, at least, awareness of what is going on in other countries, is important and that is the major issue.

Mohammed: Maybe, I should make myself clear. It is important to make myself clear. I am not belittling. Obviously, there is no such thing as a utopia. As human beings, we only grow as we progress. We are always going to have to make things better because that is what we should be doing.

So, yes, let’s always try to make things better, let’s always try to improve our situation, our society, etc., we always have to make things better. My problem is that when those people that are talking about manspreading and mansplaining are standing in the way and prohibiting people that are trying to work on women that are in worst situations.

So, for example, the Far-Left in America. They can be defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Linda Sarsours, the Far-Left, the Hillarys – not always – or the Hillary corner, but that group of people are the same people that will call Ayaan Hirsi Ali an anti-Muslim extremist.

They will shut her down. She was not able to go to Australia and give her talk there because she was called a white supremacist.

Jacobsen: What was the reason given?

Mohammed: Because she is a Nazi. It is a series of slurs. They throw those at a black woman from Somalia, who is a ‘white supremacist’ now. If you say something, if you do not follow the narrative of the Left, therefore, you are a Nazi, white supremacist, Alt-Right bigot, etc.

Jacobsen: It is this branch on the Left.

Mohammed: It is this branch on the Left. However, what I am talking about, if those people on the Left were busy fixing their problems and did not stand in the way of other people fixing their problems, we would be okay.

But instead, when you have somebody talking about women going to prison for being raped in the UAE, the responses from people on the Left are “Now, you are going to be the savior. You are a white man. You do not care about Muslim women.” What?

When they do that thing they are taking the attention away from the woman that is shining a light on this problem, I was born and raised in that world and nobody cared. Nobody cared for so many generations.

It is people in Africa and Asia who are drinking dirty water. Water in our toilets are cleaner than what they have to drink. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares because our water is clean, right? That is the way the Islam problem was for so many generations.

Nobody over here cared because it was over there, so it does not affect us. I understand that we cannot solve all of the world’s problems. Obviously, what is happening in North Korea, let it happen over there, we do not care because it is not affecting our daily lives.

However, Islam now is affecting our day to day lives. Islam affects my life as much as it affects your life. So, for the people who are in the Muslim world who are me, they are glad that somebody pays attention.

They are elated when they see Richard Dawkins writing about the atrocities of Islam. They are happy when they see Maajid Nawaz talking about what Sharia law dictates. They are excited that Adam Princely gives a shit, worries about the fact that ninety-percent of them are victims of FGM.

They are like “Yes, finally, somebody is paying attention.” Then you have these Left-leaning liberals come in and saying, “Shoo! That is Islamophobia. Does not talk about that.” You are relegating these people back all of these generations with everyone ignoring them and not caring about the problems that they are having.

Jacobsen: How do they feel when they have that happen?

Mohammed: A hundred-percent betrayed. So betrayed, you would not believe. They are liberals like you and I. So, imagine being in that country, there, everything is about the Muslim world in a general sense because there are over fifty countries there.

If you look at Canada, which is a bad example, let’s look at the USA, most of America is liberal. However, there is a belt of staunchly conservative people but most people are for Western liberal enlightenment values, right?

In the Muslim world, you have to flip that around. In the Muslim world, your majority are staunch conservatives. You have a belt. They do not usually live together. they are usually fractured and hidden all over the place.

This belt is the open-minded liberal secular-leaning people like you and me. Muslims are not atheists, are not Christians. It is irrelevant. I do not care about what their religion is or what their religion is not.

The point is that they believe in liberal values. They believe in human rights. We have that in common. So, those people over there that cannot even speak to each other because if they speak to each other their neighbors might tell their cops on them.

They all end up in prison for terrorism. That person stuck in that world is trying to speak up. They are being silenced by somebody in the West, in a free country, who should be their ally. When you are a liberal person, where do you look?

When you are a liberal in the Middle East or in the Muslim world, where do you look for allies? Liberals or moderates in the West. “Those are the people that will support me.” Instead, what do you find, those people are telling you to shut up because you are racist and you are a bigot and you are an Islamophobic.

It is the ultimate betrayal and treachery. I cannot explain to you how bad that feels for them. We are supporting the Right-wing conservative Muslims. Even Obama, Obama was friendly with the Muslim Brotherhood, right? How?

They are a terrorist organization deemed by Egypt, deemed by Saudi Arabia, deemed by terrorists. If Saudi Arabia is deeming this organization a terrorist organization, they are probably a terrorist organization. Right? So, then, you got Bernie Sanders who is the most Left-wing person possible in the United States congratulating Linda Sarsour.

Sanders is calling her progress. That is what we have. We have the Left-wing, the conservative Muslims. The Left-wing, the conservative Christians would never be aligning: never.

Jacobsen: They have been perpetual enemies.

Mohammed: Perpetual, they should be perpetual enemies with conservative Muslims as well. They should be aligning with liberal Muslims, but they are doing the opposite. They are supporting conservative Muslims. They are ignoring the liberal Muslims.

Jacobsen: As you are noting even with a scattered population, you have seen the same statistics. You probably know more than I do about this stuff. But, in Saudi Arabia, 5% are atheist. They are not a bloc. They are not organized, obviously.

Mohammed: No. No, they cannot even speak to each other. We had Hana Ahmed on our third episode. She said she lived in Saudi Arabia as an atheist for five years without ever speaking a word to anybody about the fact that she was an atheist.

So, she would be one of the people filling in that hole, saying, “I am an Atheist, but that is it.” Five years of being an atheist and never being able to express that. That is how everybody is over there. They cannot say anything. They have Twitter – they have anonymous Twitter; that is what they have. How do Twitter and Facebook act? Shut them down.

3. Jacobsen: What are your concerns in Canada, where the things arise, for instance, such as blasphemy?

Mohammed: Scott! You are getting the blood boiling today.

Jacobsen: You are going to Vegas soon!

Mohammed: Right, I will relax there, in front of the pool. I was not surprised M103 passed. I was born and raised here. I understand my people. It was unanimously passed in Ontario, so that was a bit of a surprise.

The federal one, there was a little bit of pushback. However, for it to pass unanimously in the Ontario Provincial Court, I was surprised because I did not think it was to that extent. That there is to pushback. I do not understand it.

I have discussions from people of the BC Humanist Association, which are supposed to be humanists. People that are clear. They understand, without a shadow of a doubt, that we should not have Christianity in schools, for example.

That we should not have blasphemy. It is not a law, but it is on its way there. If this motion were about ‘Christianophobia,’ BC Humanist Association for one would be up in arms.

These are the people that are fighting against Trinity Western University, rightly so for their LGBT garbage. However, when it comes to Muslims and Islam, all of a sudden their minds do not work. All of a sudden they cannot treat this religion the same as that religion.

All of a sudden they cannot see that a conservative Christian is no different than a conservative Muslim. These are socially conservative people and we should be standing in the way, of either of these people, allowing their values into the public sphere.

4. Jacobsen: One is an Arabic version of the other anyway, right? In terms of the text, it is plagiarized. It is the same thing.

Mohammed: Same thing!

Jacobsen: It is plagiarized.

Mohammed: That is right. It is plagiarized. We would never take a woman in an Amish bonnet and put a Nike swoosh on it or put her on the cover of Elle Magazine or Vogue or Playboy. It is absolutely ridiculous!

How do they not that it is exactly the same thing? What it is, it is bigotry.

Jacobsen: It is successful marketing. There is a separation of ideas and people in one, and not in the other.

Mohammed: Yes, I do not even know how it is successful marketing to be honest because if you look at the statistics. You will find that less than half of one-percent of Muslim women wear the hijab. One-percent of Muslim in the U.S., let’s say half of them are women, less than fifty-percent of American Muslim women wear hijab

So, it is a small minority of people wearing hijab, of Americans wearing hijabs. So, it is stupid for you to spend that money, putting hijabs in all your magazines and putting that Nike swoosh on it and all that stuff. There is no revenue that is going to come to you from this. It is virtue signaling.

That is the only thing you are going to get.

Jacobsen: Also, there is a market for it too. So, a company that does that. That aims to target virtue signification, signifiers. There is a population of reactionaries that go, “Oh, they are socially conscious!”

Mohammed: Nike, they are so nice and non-racist. However, my frustration is, what it is? It is exactly this. It is when Richard Spencer said: “Hail Trump.” Everybody lost their mind, rightfully so, but when Linda Sarsour talks about a jihad on Trump everybody it is: “Ah, do not worry about it, it is a word. Meh, nothing.”

“Hail” is a word too, but these are trigger words. These are words that have meaning. These are words that have history. These are words that have caused significant damage. Why they can only see that word when it is in German and how wrong it is to be using that but they cannot see that when a word is in Arabic is being used, all of a sudden they belittle it.

That is the thing. Shadi Hamid wrote a book called Islamic Exceptionalism. Shadi Hamid by the

way works for the Brookings Institute, is paid by Qatar, so you can know where the money is coming from. He supports the Muslim Brotherhood blatantly.

This is a man is from Egypt, so a man from Egypt supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. I do not even know what to tell you. It is someone from Afghanistan supporting the Taliban. The Brotherhood has wreaked so much havoc in Egypt for generations.

Everybody hates them. Everybody has a family member that was killed by them or tortured by them. It is not far removed for Egyptians as it is for the rest of the world today – if things will change, if we do not change course.

So, Shadi Hamid wrote a book called Islamic Exceptionalism and in it he is talking about how Islam must be treated differently than all other religions. I was like “fuck you,” but you know what: he is absolutely correct. That is what is happening.

What Muhammad wanted, what the Quran wanted, what Islam wants, which is nobody criticizes the religion, it gets treated with a different set of rules than all other religions. It is superior to all other religions. Muslims are superior to all other people.

All of that is happening. It is happening. Freethinking educated people in the West are doing exactly that. When Hamid says there is a fatwa on his head for writing a book, what do we do? Do we condemn the people that are trying to kill this man for writing this book? No, we do not.

When the Charlie Hebdo people got killed for drawing cartoons what did the Left say, they say, “They were being disrespectful. They shouldn’t have been doing that. That was not nice.”

We are self-imposing the blasphemy laws. We are doing exactly what Mohammed wants. We are following it. This is his decree. We are accepting this. We are not Muslim. We do not need to. There are no laws keeping us in place. There are blasphemy laws over there keeping them in place, over here we are free.

But we are choosing not to, out of fear. I do not know, or out of fear or out of indifference, out of naivety. We think, “Ah, those black savages, what harm can they do. The Christians, however, they are scary.”

“The Christians, however, we have to be afraid of them and we have to keep them out our schools and out of our public sphere.” No, you keep the Christians out, and the Muslims out too. It is the exact same thing.

In fact, Christians do not have powerful, rich, filthy rich theocracies behind them, pushing their agenda. So, if we are going to look at it on a global level, Muslims are the bigger threat than Christians. What do we have? The Vatican City, right?

There is no Saudi Arabia. There is no Qatar. Look at this guy making alliances, look at Trump with his Muslim Ban, blah blah blah. What does he do? He goes over there and kisses their butts. These guys are not new at this, but they do see this is the other thing too. Scott, sorry to go on so many tangents, but I have so much to say.

Jacobsen: It is fine.

Mohammed: In the West, we think in four-year spurts. This is the problem. We think in four-year spurts. Our governments only think about getting re-elected or they think about their turn and after that, they give no fucks.

Over there, they can make literally – they have made – hundred-year plans because they are theocracies. They can do that. If you look at the hundred-year plan of the Muslim Brotherhood, you will find that they are doing exceptionally.

All of the boxes are being ticked. Everything that they promised us they would do, step by step, they’re not even hiding it. Everybody, you can go online. You can read their plan. It is all unfolding beautifully and perfectly.

In the 1950s, Anwar Sadat who was the president of Egypt was approached by the Muslim Brotherhood and they told him, “You need to make sure every woman in your country wears the hijab,” and he laughed at them.

The men in parliament were laughing and one man yells out, “Make him wear it.”

But look at Egypt now, they have succeeded. We were laughing at them too. That is the thing. We also scoffed at this dumb uneducated jihadist. They are never going to be able to do it here…look at Turkey! Turkey scoffed at them too.

In 2014, the pride parade was so full that the streets were packed with people, in 2017 being hit with tear gas. Nobody is allowed to march in the pride parade. So, many fits of rage, I have so much to say. They have switched the country.

They are not new to this process. They have done it so much. They did it throughout the Muslim world. They did it in Egypt. They did it in Iraq. They did it in Syria. They did in Libya. They have done it in Afghanistan. They have done it across the whole side of the planet.

Now, they are moving into Turkey. It is following the movements of the Ottoman Empire. So, what happens: remember all of that area that the Muslims had control over, The Ottoman Empire. When they lost, they lost control of the Ottoman Empire. At that point, they had to recede back into the Middle East again.

They sat together in Egypt. They said, “We need to reconvene. We need to realign. We cannot get our land back again through the sword the way we did the last time because the world has changed.”

By now, it is the 1820s. You cannot go with a sword chopping off heads anymore. So, “We have to find a different way to go about getting back our empire. How can we do that?” They decided at that point that they were going to get back their empire by using their government.

Their policies, they use the policies based on the good nature, basically, of the Europeans and the North Americans against themselves. They are going to use democracy and diplomacy against itself. It has worked like a fucking charm.

Then they have people like Tariq Ramadan, who is the grandson of Hassan al-Bana who started the Muslim Brotherhood. People like him were basically the seedlings. He was cultivated, born, and raised in the West.

He understands how to speak to Westerners. He understands how Westerners think. He was the perfect first one. There are so many like him now and Linda Sarsour is another one. She knows how to speak to Americans.

She is all, “Oh, we are all oppressed together. Black people, yay! I am one of you. Native Americans, I am one of you. White men, ugh!” She knows how to get them riled up. She knows how to speak to them in a language that they are going to respond to.

Exactly Tariq Ramadan, the country, the people, the way they think. She got herself in the fucking White House – that is how good they are. Do not forget the millions of dollars that are coming at them from these theocracies in the Middle East.

So, they have a lot of support. They have a lot of brains behind them. They have a lot of policy makers and they have a lot of thinkers. They are not novices at this, by the time they arrive. They have all of the practiced wisdom in the Muslim World.

They made some mistakes. They learned from their mistakes. They kept going. They did a good track record over there. The internet is full of pictures. If you compare Libya in the 50s, Libya today. Iran in the 50s, Iran today. Afghanistan in the 50s, Afghanistan today. any Muslim country you can think of, Google what it used to look like before and what it looks like now.

The 60s, 70s, every country is a different time because by the time they get to them and by the time they infiltrate them. It depends. A country like the Maldives because it is small: fifteen years. Fifteen years from a secular nation to an Islamic nation. Fifteen, that is all it took.

So, every country depending on how resistant the people are, depending on the number of the population, depending on all sorts of different factors, there is a different amount of time in each country, but they were gaining experience.

Experience, experience, experience. Now, they come into Turkey. Turkey is fucked. Now, it is every thing. They are getting their Ottoman Empire back again. They already infiltrated. It is too late, honest to God. If you heard the podcast with Douglas Murray and Sam Harris, but Germany forget it, gone. Sweden, gone.

France might have a chance. They could pull back. So, many areas of Europe. It is too late. You opened your doors. You did not check papers. You let people in by the millions and now your country has changed. You cannot get it back again.

Sweden has announced that they are shutting down their music festivals because too many women are getting raped. They cannot control it. Whenever they have a music festival, an inordinate number of women are being raped everywhere.

They say, “Fine shut down the music festival.” Then, what happened? One performer said, “Hey, why do not we have gender segregated music festivals?” And what everybody said, “That sounds great!”

So, now, we have gender segregated festivals in Sweden. What is next? Put a woman in a Burka, so she does not get raped? It is literally everything that they want is happening. Because we have oceans, we have borders over at North America and South America, we are still protected somewhat.

We still get to choose who we bring in. Europe, they have no choice. People walk across. So, we can still be, but we have to get it right. We are not getting it right. our mindset still hasn’t changed. Even in Europe, even in Germany, they should be the most alert.

They are still fighting it. They are still saying, “No, it is racism.” There was a woman that was raped. She would not say the ethnicity of the men that raped her because she did not want to come off as racist, so she said he was German. I can send you a link to this.

She did not want to say that he was a refugee. Then she went home after the rape kit, given the police officer’s false information about her rapist. Then she went home and her friend told her, “If you do not say the truth, this man is going to go off and rape another woman. That is going to be on your head.”

So, she went back to the police station and she told the truth. There was another case, with a man in Sweden this time, a man that was raped by his Somalian refugee that he kept in his house. He came to live in his house.

The man raped him and he did not want to press charges because he did not want the man to be sent back to Somalia again. That is how deep this white guilt is. It is insane. I had another story in my head. It went away.

But there are so many of them right. Then the UK, you heard of Rotterdam rape cases, thousands of girls. When you have a chance please listen to the Douglas Murray and Sam Harris podcast that they, what happened in Rotterdam, this is in the UK – many different areas of the UK not one but – this was in Rotterdam the first time that they discovered it. Thousands of girls were going missing.

The families were saying, “Those Muslims are kidnapping our children.” They were like, “That is racist.” Then some of the girls were escaping. They were coming and telling the police, “I was chained to a bed. I was gang raped daily.”

These are children right. These are from ten to sixteen, seventeen. These are the age groups of the girls that they were raping. They go to the police officers. They say, “This is what is happening to me.”

The police officers say, “No, that is racist” They never told the public because they did not want to come off as racist. By the time this story finally broke, thousands of girls were victims of gang rapes.

Then, what happened with Bill Cosby and any other situation? Once one story breaks, all the other cities – all across the UK, stories breaking everywhere. My god, we have a rape gang here too…we have a gang rape here too.

The country is littered with these rape gangs, okay? You are allowing your daughter to be raped rather than being called racist. That is the position we are in. That is how badly, how psychotically, people do not want to be called racist, Islamophobic, or a bigot.

I am like, “Who cares? Who the fuck cares if you have a choice of somebody calling you bad words, or this person being honored killed, this person getting their clitoris cut off, this person being gang raped? Which one is worse?”

The same thing is happening in Sweden. Same thing, they are selling their girls to be raped this is what I was going to tell you. In Sweden, you are not allowed to mention the race of the perpetrator when you are explaining to the police who was the criminal, any eye witness.

You are not allowed to mention race because then it comes off as racist. Have you ever heard anything so stupid in your life?

5. Jacobsen: I heard worse. However, that is absurd, though. If you are dealing with a crime you want, not necessarily demographics, but characteristics for a profile.

Mohammed: …description…

Jacobsen: Maybe, it saves money on ink when they are doing a sketch and printing it, but other than this…

Mohammed: How is that helpful to reduce crime, when you do not even know who the people are that are causing the crimes. How are you going to catch people when you do not know what they look like?

Jacobsen: Yes, and to relate this to our context in British Columbia, what are our issues? Some of them might be “God” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Another one might be if you are to critique religion, especially the dominant one.

Seven out of 10 people are Christian roughly – four out of ten Catholic, three out of ten Protestant. If you were to critique either of those, it is not, “We are going to completely socially shun you. We will kick you out of the house.”

Mohammed: It is not nice. I would not make fun of people’s belief.

Jacobsen: So, it is a completely different context. There is a spectrum there, but along the spectrum of secular tolerant liberalized freedom. For a country, compared to many of the instances you been describing, they can be countries as theocracies.

For the society, sub-cultures, or sub-enclaves within, for instance, various European countries, or the inverse in some of those theocracies where, for want of a better term, there are pockets of Canada.

People scattered all over the place. They hold those liberal values. You do not talk about the supernatural to those who are secular to some degree, whether agnostic, atheist, or whatever else have you, but they cannot think about it. It is not permitted.

A lot of these issues as you are noting, as you are going from topic to topic, it seems like something with the individual tragic stories, individual rape cases, or even large cases with thousands of adolescent girls or younger, undergoing sexual assault of various forms.

These are related issues that have consequences on real people’s lives. What my sense from what you are telling me, it is (a) that is happening but (b), even more so, it is the indifference or denial that is ongoing.

Mohammed: Protection even, even if you are going to be indifferent and denial that it goes back, I grew up with indifference and denial. That was my whole life. I am used to that. However, on things that are changed, you are preventing criticism.

You are protecting these group of people that are oppressing. So, when you shut-down Maajid Nawaz and others, you are shutting down the receptors. You are shutting down the people that are trying to say, “Help us.” You are saying “Shhh, you are an Islamophobic person. You are an anti-Muslim, bigot.”

So, that is even worse than indifferent. Be indifferent fine, leave us alone, let people fight for their rights, but do not stand in the way and prevent them. Or do not support the people that are suppressing us including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds.

[2] Individual Publication Date: February 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mohammed-three; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Islam, Self-Ownership, and Free Speech and Expression (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/08

Abstract

Yasmine Mohammed is an Author and the Founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds. She discusses: CSIS and personal life; religious history and its influence on her via education; a rising tide of ex-Muslim community and activism; current work; and current teaching.

Keywords: FHFM, Islam, Ex-Muslim, Yasmine Mohammed.

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Islam, Self-Ownership, and Free Speech and Expression: Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview was conducted in early 2018.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to pause and touch upon some themes discussed so far. One, you started with a phrase in the earliest part that “Islam is a religion by men for men.” That might be a direct quote.

Then you mentioned scared, then you mentioned feared, but then you mentioned also, intervention into your life from external forces of benevolence including CSIS or the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service.

It, in some ways, seems to energize and say, “I can get out of this,” to get away from the husband and your mother who had their own different forms of abuse if I can say. However, when it comes to a course, so it is the primal response of fear.

Then it is followed by you wanting to be free. That is another word you used, of that release and so you left. Then it was becoming more intellectual, which was the world religion or History of Religion course with the Lebanese professor.

First, it was instinct, then it was intellectual. My suspicion is that the next stage then would be working through a lot more of the emotional stuff?

Yasmine Mohammed: Definitely. So, on everything, I did not mention something that adds to those themes. I wanted to get away from that house and get away from him, but I was really scared. Then I found out I was pregnant again.

Then, I was depressed because I felt that I had lost my opportunity. I was disappointed in myself that I did not leave as quickly as I could because now here I was pregnant again. So, I started accepting that this was my life.

I was not going to be a single mom with two kids. I will never survive. I have a high school education, so this is it. I sealed my fate because I was not courageous enough to leave. Then when I went to my first doctor appointment, it turns out the baby did not have a heartbeat, so it is what they called a missed miscarriage.

So, I had to go in for a DNC – which is a procedure to get the baby out. When I did the DNC, I had general anesthesia. The nurse told me you have a young baby. You are going to be groggy and stuff, so we are going to need you to go with somebody that can help you with your little baby when you go home.

Then I said, “Good, I will go to my mom.” Because obviously, he is not going to help me with our kids. So, I said to him, “Can I go stay with my mom for a few days?” He said, “Sure, no problem.”

When I talk about getting away from him and getting away from my mom, that was the last time I ever saw him. I realized this was my opportunity to get out. I was not going to miss it. So when I went to my mom’s after the DNC, she got up the next morning and went to work.

She is the head of the Islamic Studies department at the local Islamic school. I took my kid, sorted through the yellow pages and found a lawyer, a female lawyer because she would be more empathetic with my struggle.

Having to go out all in black gloves everything, with a baby, I only realize now how ridiculous. I remember them reacting strongly, but I only now understand why. I walked into the office that day and I said, “I need to leave quickly. I have to get back before my mom gets back.”

I took the bus. This was in the days before the Skytrain. As soon as possible, I needed a restraining order, full custody, and a divorce. You cannot call the house. You cannot send any letters.

You cannot contact me, so any information you have to ask for it now because I will never be able to see you again. They said, “Done, it is fine. Do not even worry about it. Everything is okay. Do you need to get back?”

I was like, “No, no, no, I am fine.” I had no idea how dire the whole situation was. I went back and waited. For those few days, I did not know. I had no idea what I had started was going to work then, a couple days later he came.

My mom was living in an apartment building. There was security, so you had to get buzzed. I heard him downstairs screaming in Arabic, “Give me back my wife,” all this stuff.

Jacobsen: “Give me back my wife,” those two terms, “me” and “my,” are terms of being property.

Mohammed: Without a doubt, totally.

Jacobsen: He thought he owned you.

Mohammed: That is what he was angry about. He was angry that I had some agency to make my own decisions.

Jacobsen: You saw these videos of men getting mad about losing their car or their prized guns.

Mohammed: Same thing.

Jacobsen: I interrupted, please.

Mohammed: So, this guy, he is six foot four, Egyptian, dark haired, dark skinned, yelling in Arabic at the building. So, it did not take long for people to call the cops. There is some guy screaming at the building.

I was so afraid someone would leave. Then he would be able to slip, but nobody did. Then the cops came and told him this is your restraining order. You are not allowed to come near the building anymore.

They told me that we can tell him that he cannot come to this building, but we cannot restrict him out in the world. All we can say is that he cannot go within a certain number of meters, in the places you are going to be in, but that does not protect you if you happened to be in the mall and he happened to be there.

So, I stayed in the house. I was not about to risk bumping into him somewhere. I stayed in the house all the way until CSIS contacted me again. They brought me a picture of him behind bars in Egypt and asked if that was him.

I said, “That was him.” I started to get my college loans and started to go to university. So, it was not until I knew he was not going to come and get me and my daughter.

Jacobsen: So, then more positive emotions probably come into your life and assuming your child’s life as well.

Mohammed: So, at this point, my mom was so upset and so angry at me because she dis not want me to go to school. She wants to get me into another marriage, married quickly. So, she is telling me how hard it is going to be a single mom.

She is trying, pushing all of these men on me because she wants to grab the opportunity. I did not care. None of that mattered. It was not the first time around. The first time around I was scared and nervous, and her threats meant something to me.

This time around I was like, “Throw me out in the streets, please, I want nothing to do with you. I would love that.” So, I knew I was all on my own anyway. She went to visit my sister in Florida. That is when I grabbed my daughter and packed the bags.

I left her house. So, it was all happy days. I did not care. Nothing was going to bring me down, I was not sad or upset or even worried about the potential idea that my mom would not approve about what I was doing.

I do not care, but all this time I was still Muslim. I was still asking Allah for guidance to escape my mom. I do not know how to explain it. It did not even cross my mind that that belief could be wrong. It was absolute truth, like talking about: does the Sun rise in the morning? Of course, it does.

The Sun is not something you talk about. It was obvious. So, I did not take that history course a couple of years later. It is amazing that I did not question religion. It was him. I was my mom. I did not connect the dots.

Then after I stopped believing in Islam anymore, I was free to criticize Islam. When you are raised, you are not allowed to ever question. You are raised that Muslims can do bad things, but Islam is perfect, Allah is perfect, and Muhammad is perfect.

So, you do not even criticize it. I remember being a young child and finding out he was 50 something and raped a 9-year-old girl. I was like “How are we supposed to revere this? How is he a perfect man?” My mom got so angry at me because who was I?

Some kid questioning the Prophet of Allah. He was so much more than me. I could not possibly understand how divine he is. She made me feel that I could never question anything after that. She tore me down. I was at a young age. I was young when I learned that.

So, questioning is not encouraged. It is punished and that keeps on happening until you finally stop questioning. Punished so the idea that this could be the fault of the religion was not going to enter my mind.

Of course, now, the line between everything that happened to me and this scripture it is clear as day. There is evidence that everything that happened to me in the way it says to do this. My mom was a good follower.

She believed in this stuff. One thing I did not tell you is that she was raised in a secular household in Egypt. She was not even raised religious, so what happened is she was married to my dad who was agnostic.

It was fine because she did not care about religion. It was not until he left her with three children that she was looking for something. She is in Canada. So, she is looking for her community support, so she found a mosque, the local mosque, and she jumped into it.

She was a born-again Muslim. She found some guy at the mosque who was already married, but who offered to take her in as her second wife and that is what she did.

Jacobsen: Is this in BC, Canada?

Mohammed: Yes, this is in British Columbia, Canada.

Jacobsen: Bountiful BC has many aspects.

Mohammed: Yes, that is right.

2. Jacobsen: It is that old phrase: “variations of a theme.” You mentioned Ali Rizvi. He and Armin are the somewhat more prominent names in the ex-Muslim community now.

In Britain, one of the more prominent is Maryam Namazie, associated with the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. So, there is a rising tide. When did you become part of that wave?

Mohammed: It was in the now infamous episode of the Bill Maher show when he had Ben Affleck and Sam Harris. So, that was the catalyst for me because after the episode aired the next day my Facebook was covered with people praising Ben Affleck, and how awesome he was for shutting down that racist Sam Harris.

I was like – hold on a minute, everything Sam Harris said was spot on. How are you guys happy about Ben Affleck? He basically had a hissy fit. He was incoherent. What is going on in this world? Have you all gone mad? So, I had to speak up.

So, it made me speak up. I started to discover things and got a face-full. I discovered the whole global secular humanist movement. I did not even hear the term ex-Muslim. I did not know it existed. At this point, I had even been identifying myself as an atheist for over a decade.

So, all that stuff was behind me. There were a lot of people that knew me that would not have known that I had been a Muslim. Even if my non-belief had never come up because I did not want it to, I wanted to leave that world behind. I want to push it down as far as possible.

3. Jacobsen: So, what is your current work that you are doing now?

Mohammed: So, I have a few irons in the fire. Everything that takes up most of my time is the podcast that I am doing with Ali Rizvi, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, and Armin Navabi, the Secular Jihadist. So, we booked Maajid Nawaz, so that is awesome.

We are going to have him on soon. We are trying to get some bigger names, so I contacted Ben Shapiro and Tommy Robinson. We are trying to get some different sides of the political spectrum, speaking to each other and trying to bridge that gap.

We will see. We will see how things turn out. If you have ever listened to our podcast, we are not aligning in thought, so it makes it difficult to get guests sometimes because they know some of us.

But they do not know others or they had a bad experience with one of us or something like that. So, when there are four of us, we have to find a guest that is with all the four of us. Sometimes, that is hard to do, so that has taken up a lot of my time.

Also, involved in a documentary, which the whole focus is to talk about the Left-Islamist alliance and try to separate those two because our thinking is that if the liberals or if the Left wing Americans, especially atheists, understood that they were supporting a religion and not a people, they would automatically get rid of that alliance that is going on there.

So, it is heartening to see things this morning. There was an article in the New York Times of all places. It said that the hypocritical leftists are willing to give Muslim extremists a pass and this has a lot to do with Maajid Nawaz suing the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center).

So, it is showing that this alliance between the Muslim and the Left-wing is not a good thing. For the Muslim Extremist or the Left wing, it is not a good thing for the average Muslim. So, we will see how that turns out.

That documentary is still in its beginning stages. I am involved in speaking at the Ayaan Hirsi Ali campus tour. So, what that means, we are trying to get a bunch of students from different universities across the U.S., not Canada yet but we are hoping to exit to Canada soon, (we have different politics in our two countries, we have different needs), but the purpose of the campus tour is to get people who are part of the secular groups in their universities to come to listen to us speak.

It is going to be me, and Ali and Aisha, Aisha is Ali’s wife. There will be shared platforms with a bunch of people and then the students will take what they learned from us. Then spread that into their home universities.

They can also invite us to come to speak at their universities too. Ex-Muslims of North America are doing the exact same thing. They are doing a campus tour, except theirs are only ex- Muslims. The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation is for secular-minded people, so it is more much inclusive.

So, I might get involved in the Ex-Muslims of North American one. I might not. I am not sure because I am also teaching full time in September. I do not have any classes scheduled on Friday so we will see how things turn out.

What else am I doing? I am going to be in Ohio this summer speaking at a CFI conference. I am also going to be speaking in Portland in September. I am going to be sharing the stage with Dave Rubin and Steve Simpson.

We are going to be speaking about free speech. We are going to go around talking about free speech with her, not with her obviously, with her foundation.

This is an exciting program because I watched him onstage. I went when he was in LA. I got a chance to watch Dave Rubin, and Colin Moriarty was on stage with him and Steve too. Then I also watched a video with Faisal and Dave and Steve.

So, it is exciting to watch it and then get to be a part of it. Colin Moriarty, if you do not know him, he is the guy who tweeted. It was No Women Work Day or something like that and he tweeted: “ah Day of Silence” or “ah! finally silence.” Which come on, is funny!

So, his girlfriend laughs. He thought, “This is not going to be a problem.” He did not realize. The whole world, everything, blew up in his face. He lost his jobs. His friends turned on him. It was a bomb that blew up. You’d think that he tweeted something horrible. So, he is a great person to talk about free speech.

Jacobsen: It is the digital era. In America, where probably the freest speech has been won or the right to, the privilege to, free expression and speech have been won to the greatest extent.

With the digital era, people can disperse the single worst thing about you in one sentence, which, by definition, most often will be out of context. So, for instance, if he is talking with his wife privately and he tells that joke, they both laugh. It is a bonding thing.

Then it is on Twitter. It is part of a Twitter compilation of thoughts: “I am having coffee today,” “look at this big guy,” “look at that guy wearing spandex in the middle of the day,” “oh, it is ‘No Women Work Day’… so no more complaining.”

But now it’s broadcast so not only the easily offended but those that want to be offended can be, they can find a reason for it or people can deliver the reason to them.

Mohammed: It is shocking. He broke down in tears with his conversation talking with Dave Rubin. That is how bad it was. His life fell apart over a tweet, so silly. Honest to God, I did laugh at it. It was funny. I am a woman. I am not offended by it.

It is hilarious. I get over it. However, you said people want to be offended.

4. Jacobsen: It is almost, not the lowest common denominator but, something close to it, where the variables being counted are those with the thinnest skin who then determine discourse.

That is the problem, so it is one of those new communications technologies. With all of its benefits, it is one of the negatives. So, you are teaching at a university in the Fall, in September. What will you be teaching?

Mohammed: So, I teach different things in different places. At the University of Victoria, I teach teachers how to teach. So, it is because I have an education background, most university professors are knowledgeable in the field and are experts in what they research, what they teach, but do not necessarily have any pedagogy or any education experience understanding of how to teach the stuff that they know.

That is where I come in. I do that at UVic. I do this at Camosun College as well. However, that is half of my job. The other half is teaching in the arts and humanities. So, I teach mostly academic English writing, boring research skills, but, sometimes, I get to teach literature and more fun things.

Most of the time, it is research skills and academic writing. Those basic courses for the second year on how to write an essay, what is citing your source, and so on.

Jacobsen: All of the foundational stuff.

Mohammed: That is right.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds.

[2] Individual Publication Date: February 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mohammed-two; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Choosing Apostasy, Endorsing Ex-Muslims, and Living in Freedom (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/01

Abstract

Yasmine Mohammed is an Author and the Founder of Free Hearts, Free Minds. She discusses: family background; the tone of growing up; being a Muslim girl; people who stop believing in Islam; emotions of having no one to go to; building a new community or finding a new one; going about doing so; and being forced into marriage.

Keywords: FHFM, Islam, Ex-Muslim, Yasmine Mohammed.

Interview with Yasmine Mohammed on Choosing Apostasy, Endorsing Ex-Muslims, and Living in Freedom: Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This interview was conducted in early 2018.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, to begin, was there a family background in both religion and irreligion or simply religion?

Yasmine Mohammed: Wow, that is a good question. No one has ever asked me that before! There was a family background in both, but I never knew my dad. My parents divorced when I was about 2-years-old.

I saw him a few times up until I was probably about eight, but only little visits. So, I never had that father-daughter relationship with him. After that, I never saw him or had any contact with him at all.

But I knew that he was not Muslim. I knew he was not religious. I knew he was not a practicing Muslim. I knew that he did not identify as a Muslim. So, some Muslims, they identify as a Muslim, but they do not practice!

But, even he was like, “No, I do not like all that garbage.” But he was not the influence in my life, my mom was the influence in my life because she is the one who raised me.

She raised me to believe that my dad was evil and he is going to burn in hell. So, if we were being bad, she would threaten us with “I am going to send you to go live with your father,” which was the worst thing because she was going to send us to live with a non-believer.

2. Jacobsen: I want to freeze frame on the tone there, the emotional tone. You described that as the worst thing: to be with your father, not because of your father, but because he would burn in hell.

Is this a common theme that you hear in conversations with friends and others growing up? Not if non-Muslims will burn in hell, but if a threat is either tacit, or explicit, as per your mother’s statement about your father that they will burn in hell – as a threat to keep kids in line, for instance.

Mohammed: It is not a threat. It is the best way to describe it. For somebody who did not live in that world, it is when you are little. Your parents say that Santa is not going to bring you any presents.

If you believe in Santa Claus, and if you would think that you are being bad, he is not going to bring you presents. It was like that, but much worse. It was that, but it was not real. You felt it as real. Your parents thought it was real too.

So, Santa Claus is not a good parallel because parents know that they are joking, but it was these stories about what would happen to you in the grave. The punishments on the Day of Judgment. Punishments that would happen for eternity.

We are not told threats or stories. They were absolute. They were definite. These things would happen to you. It is the default. It was going to happen to you and only if you were able to do something amazing and wonderful and serve God in an over the top way would you be able to protect yourself from that.

So it is the opposite of Christianity, which has forgiveness and your people are inherently good. If they do something wrong, then they can ask for forgiveness. However, for Muslims, it is the opposite.

3. Jacobsen: As a girl and an adolescent young woman growing up in a Muslim family, what was the experience of that for you? Did you notice differences in treatment between boys and girls?

Mohammed: So, there is a difference in treatment. Islam is a religion by men for men. it is created by men for men, so it is male-centered. The female’s rule is simply to serve men, so even as a child you are raised this way.

I have a video that I shared on my Facebook, recently, with girl who is probably a seven or eight-year-old. She is wearing a niqab. Then they show her cooking and bringing drinks on a tray to serve her brother and cleaning the kitchen.

The song that is being sung is, while she is doing all this, about how wonderful she is and how she is going to go to heaven because she is such a good girl. That is how we were raised. Your whole purpose is to be a good wife one day. That is how you serve Allah.

That is the best person you could possibly be. It is to be able to serve your husband and make him happy and make babies, make more Muslims. Those kids have to be religious.

4. Jacobsen: What happens to people in the family if they stop believing in Islam?

Mohammed: I do not have any experiences of knowing anybody that has stopped believing, so I did not when I stopped believing. It is a long story. I separated myself completely from my family, from my community, from everybody because I knew the punishment for leaving Islam was death.

So, I severed all ties. I suspect that probably other people have done that too. That is why you never hear about them in the community. There is no talk about this person that left the religion.

They do not exist, so a common thing you will hear from many ex-Muslims is “I was the only one.” Then they say something like, “Me too!” I thought that I was the only one because you are raised to think that it does not happen.

It is not possible. You are raised to feel it is an identity. It is who you are, so you cannot ever decide to be non-Muslim because it is who you are. So, now that I am open, I meet many ex-Muslims all the time from all over the world. A lot of them have similar stories to mine, where they had to cut ties with their family, their friends, and everything else.

They came out and then they were ostracized and had to cut ties anyways. At the end of the day, it is a negative experience. Ali Rizvi is one of the only people that told his parents that he was not going to be Muslim anymore.

They said, “That is okay. We still love you.” I was like, “What?!” But it is mostly because they were extremely nominal Muslims anyway. They were Muslim by culture, by heritage. They are not practicing.

So, it is not that big a deal. It is a small step. My family was hardcore. So, I was more like a Mormon. He was more of a universalist. A Unitarian or something, it is not that big of a deal for him, but it is a big deal for my family.

5. Jacobsen: If there is an identity that is implicated from a young age, and you are leaving that behind when you stop believing it yourself, but you have no one to go to, what are some of the emotions and feelings that come up?

Mohammed: These are such good questions. That was one of the hardest parts of leaving the religion. It is re-discovering and re-building who I am from the ground-up. I was always told who I was, what to think, how to act, what to say, and what to wear.

Everything is outlined in your life: how you eat, how to drink, how you go to the bathroom, how you eat, how you put on shoes, how you cut your toenails, and so on. Literally, the stuff of your life is outlined for you, so when you walk away from that it is not cold turkey. It is weird. It takes time.

It is scary. However, I did a lot of reading in those days faked it until I made it. This is who I want to be. These are the values for me. In the beginning, it was doing the opposite of what I was taught, to be honest.

If I was not sure by default, I would do the opposite. Then I would take some time to think about it. It was weird. It was one of the hardest parts of leaving Islam.

6. Jacobsen: That sounds like a reaction from an interview with the Temple of Satan, a chapter leader and spokesperson, Michelle Short and Stewart “Stu” De Haan, respectively.

They noted different branches including the Church of Satan, the Temple of Satan, and the general category of the Theistic Satanist. They noted that the Theistic Satanists are not what they are, and almost impossible, because they amount to an opposing reaction to Christianity.

They are Christianity inverted rather than something non-supernaturalist and that takes Satan as a metaphor. So, even in a different context, I see a similar development there.

Even if you have those emotions coming up, of fear and others, which is an ancient emotion evolutionarily, what becomes of you when you are trying to build a new community or at least find a community?

Mohammed: My case was different because I had a daughter. I had a baby when I ran away, so I did not have time to do much soul searching. I had to get my shit together as quickly as possible because I had to raise her.

So, when I was talking about doing a lot of reading back then, I was in university. Anytime, I could take an elective. I would take child psychology or something. I wanted to make sure that I raised my daughter in the right way.

7. Jacobsen: With those associated motions, how do you go about building or finding a community?

Mohammed: So, building or finding a community did not happen, I did not find or build a community. I lived a double life. I do not think I ever replaced that community that I lost, or even if it can be replaced.

That is a thing that a lot of ex-religious are missing. that social community connection. That tribal part is comforting and dangerous because you always have ‘the other.’ But I did not find a replacement for it.

It was scary. I was lonely, but I figured it out step by step. I do not have a good answer for that.

8. Jacobsen: You gave a completely appropriate answer as far as I am concerned, because you described the personal context. You ran away with a child. You needed to get your “shit together” as fast as possible. It is reasonable.

But there is a gap. Your father not being in the picture. Your mother said, “I am going to send you to his house and he is going to hell.” All of the sudden, you are leaving the community and escaping with your child.

What is the gap? What is in-between there?

Mohammed: That is a big gap. So, my mom has been trying to force me into marriage after marriage, ever since I finished high school. There is no option of going to college or anything.

But I did not want to get married, so I kept on sabotaging it.

So, I would not get married. She kept on getting new people and different people. Eventually, there was this one guy, she was adamant about him.

She said, “I am kicking you out to the street if you do not marry this guy. I am done with you. I am tired of you. You are marrying him, whether you like it or not.” So, these are the days before Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. So, I had no connection to my friends that I went to high school with.

I lost all the connections because I had been in Egypt for two years. That was another issue. We went to Egypt to visit as a family. Then she left me there because she wanted me to be fixed. She wanted to leave me in a Muslim Society, so I could stop being so Western.

I did not know that I was going to be staying there for two years. So, one day I woke up and my family was gone. In those two years, I had lost contact. My friends all started traveling Europe and going to university.

Anyway, they were not living at home anymore, so I had no way of contacting them. When she forced me to marry this guy, I did not think I had much choice anyway. What was I going to do? Even if I did find a friend, I had not spoken to them in two years.

So, I eventually gave in, married the guy, and got pregnant almost immediately. I did not realize until later into the marriage that he was an Al-Qaeda member because I was contacted by CSIS, who is the Canadian CIA.

They contacted me when my mom had an emergency. She started bleeding from her nose. She was coughing up blood at the same time. So, I called 911 for an ambulance. I went with her to the hospital.

Up until that moment, I had never been away. I had never been alone without my mom or him. That was the first time. CSIS, they swept into the scene. They were there, so they have been monitoring him and trying to get to me for some time.

This was the opportunity they finally got. So, when my mom was with the doctor, they came into the waiting room. Then they asked me to go into a private room together. We talked about it. They told me. He was a member of Al-Qaeda.

They started asking me about Osama bin Laden. None of these things sounded familiar to me because it was pre 9/11, so I had no idea. None of it sounded familiar to me. I knew that he had been in Afghanistan because he always talked about Peshawar.

How much he wanted to be back there, he loved it. I knew that he might have been involved in some jihad-ist activity, but it is not like he ever talked to me about it. My role was to cook, clean, and get raped. There was no actual relationship there.

So, once I realized who he was and what he was a part of, they told me that he was in Canada to be part of something. They did not know what, but there was something brewing and he was part of the network.

It turns out it was for 9/11. However, that is when I decided I needed to get out of this relationship, get away from this man and get my daughter out of this life because I realized I did not want my daughter to live the same life.

Everything was repeating itself. I was condemning her to live the same life. She is what propelled me to have the courage to get out. It was a two-step process: I had to get away from him and then I had to get away from my mother.

Because my mom, she is the same ideology as him. The only difference is that she is a woman and he is a man. She would throw things at me, but she is not as physically scary. So, I got away from him.

Then I got away from my mom eventually. That is when I started university because I am lucky enough to be living in Canada. I am able to get student loans and start my life. That is when I took a History of Religion course.

In that course, it is when I learned that this divine text that was supposedly the word of God. That was so poetic and perfect. I find out it is plagiarized, from Christianity and Judaism and Pagan stories before that.

It took away all of the divinity. All of the respect that I ever had for it. It was a joke. I was happy to learn because people talk about the sadness that they felt when they realized they have been lied to all these years.

I felt anger that I was lied to. However, initially, my first reaction, “I am so glad I do not have to follow this shit anymore,” because I was only doing it because I was so scared. I have been scared from a young age.

I was terrified about what would happen to me if I did not do what I was supposed to do and say what I was supposed to say and wear what I was supposed to wear, etc. So, I only did that stuff out of complete fear.

So, it is the Wizard of Oz once you lift the curtain. You find out that there is nothing to fear. I was elated. However, that is cognitively right. I understood logically that this was not right, but I still had all of this fear that was programmed into me.

It took me a long time to stop thinking about it, to stop worrying about it, to stop questioning myself, “What if I am wrong?” I had to own it. That took a long time. A lot of ex-Muslims that flipped. They went straight, as soon as they found out it was lies.

They went straight into outright blasphemy, bringing in the Quran. However, I did not have the need to do that. Even now, I did not find the need to do that.

I wanted to be free. I wanted to free myself. So, that History of Religion course. That was an elective. I took it because the professor was Lebanese, so I assumed he would be Muslim. So, I thought this would be an easy course because it is all about Islam.

I went to Islamic schools my whole my life. My mom was a student at a university in Medina. I am going to ace this course. It turns out he was a Lebanese Christian, but because he was a Lebanese Christian. He knew so much about my experience.

He understood Arab Muslims because he was raised in that society. Not only that, he did not have any of the apologetics that a regular Canadian professor would have had because he was Arab.

He did not care. He would say what he needed to say. He would talk with honesty about all of the issues with the religions. So, I was lucky to have taken that course. It changed my life.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Founder, Free Hearts, Free Minds.

[2] Individual Publication Date: February 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/mohammed; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

Interview with Terri Hope on Humanism

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/22

Abstract

Terri Hope is the Founder and Leader of the Grey Bruce Humanists and a former Humanist Officiant. She discusses: personal background; family and community reactions to a non-belief in God; being on the board of Humanist Canada; women in community; equal representation; the main attraction for women humanists; things to keep in mind for the secular community; the veracity of traditional arguments for God; upcoming events; demographics; humanists as atheists; kinds of atheists; fun conversations; humanism and humanitarianism; humanism and feminism; gender gap in humanism; #MeToo; substantive forms of behavior; science and ethics in humanism; and final feelings and thoughts.

Keywords: Grey Bruce Humanists, Humanism, humanist officiant, Terri Hope.

Interview with Terri Hope on Humanism: Founder and Leader, Grey Bruce Humanists; Former Humanist Officiant[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

*This is a relatively accurate transcription and edit of the text, but not completely.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is personal background?

Terri Hope: I grew up with some of the practices and important values of Judaism, like education and family, but not super religious. I went to Hebrew school. By the time I was in late high school, I did not get religion. I did not understand how that could work. Then I became more interested in other things.

I had a God belief still, for a while. But then, I had to accept that I do not believe in God.

2. Jacobsen: Did family or community react when you announced this lack of belief or the belief in the non-God?

Hope: In high school, I do not think that I announced this belief. I was not as passionate about those things. I did not do any of that stuff. Besides, I moved away, from New York to Canada at age 21. I was married then. My husband was not religious either.

He was not from a religious tradition. It was not until after a while that we became somewhat interested. I did not know that there was such a thing; that there were people who talked the way I did. Then later, my husband became interested too.

We were both involved with the Humanist Association of Toronto and then on the board of Humanist Canada. In Ontario, we started up here with humanism. I did not expect anyone here. Because it is a traditional town.

3. Jacobsen: When were you working on the board Humanist Canada and orienting towards leadership within the humanist community?

Hope: I wanted a place at the table when religious groups said one thing or another. I was not much of an activist. I had a young family. I did other things as well. I was doing it for participation and for some sense of community rather than activism work.

It was for the community. I do not know if younger people with families are interested in those things because of their other responsibilities. My children are grown and have lives of their own now.

4. Jacobsen: In some of the non-religious community and noted for a long time about the religious community, women tend to have less of a say, at the table where it counts. What was it like in the earlier years coming into the humanist community?

Hope: That is true. There were fewer women. It was more men who were very serious. We tried to offer a wider range of things to do. We had groups of people visiting others who could not come for one reason or another. We tried to have movie nights.

We tried to widen the range from serious discussion groups. Now, I do not think this is a problem. Right now, we have an equal number.

5. Jacobsen: Was this a conscious effort or not?

Hope: Interesting, at one point, we talked about it. How can we get more women involved? I think adding more options to what we did not, maybe, changing the subject a little bit. There was a conscious effort to attract more women.

Because the serious and heavy topics tended to attract more women. But now, maybe because of our age and what we were involved with before, we must involve more young people. But young people may not be as interested in joining something.

We do not have things for kids. We do not attract younger people, for sure.

6. Jacobsen: What do you find as the main attraction for different women humanists now?

Hope: Women want an opportunity to get out and talk about very interesting topics that women who are out of university are not talking about as often now. They want to share food and seeing the same people across time. They want to share and learn different and interesting things.

It is very much the affiliation and community sense. It is to learn new things. When you are no longer in university and no longer need to be available to children all the time, it is wonderful to be involved with people and talk about a variety of topics and to read books. It does attract women for those reasons.

7. Jacobsen: In a secular community, what are some of the things people must keep in mind?

Hope: Lots of things, building it up here, I started with people here. I was a non-religious officiant. I asked them if they wanted to participate in a group. We do not try to convert people or encourage membership.

When someone was here one time, people who were sitting around the living room and saying, “Sure, we can try. We can find people in the area and see if they want to give it a try.” Over the years, between 10 and 30 people are coming out to meetings, other things to keep in mind.

One of them is the non-proselytization. I like to keep it totally open. Anyone is welcome. However, if they are coming to convert us or to present their personal religious view, that really does not work because our purpose is to have people talking comfortably with one another and to not worry that they will step on someone’s toes.

What I do, if I know someone has religious beliefs, because I have no interest in converting them if they have found what works for them, I speak with them about what our meetings are about. If they want to see come, great! If they want to see what we are about, then stay on the list and see what we are up to.

If they want to continue, fabulous, it is those kinds of things that we need to be sure that our members are comfortable, because it is a place where you can be an agnostic or an atheist, or say something that is not favorable about religion and then not have to feel as if you’re insulting or not demeaning some else who finds that important or as something positive in their life.

That is important to me. There are humanists who are very stalwart about it. Religion is idiocy. We need to let people know it. I am not that. But then there are others who are questioning, “I am not too sure.” Then there is this whole spiritual thing, “I am spiritual but not religion.” I do not know what it means. It could mean crystals or some vague sense.

But they can come. Those people do not come to think God is directing everything. Do I know whether there is a God or not? Of course not, I am assuming because I have not had any experience. Science says, “The things we don’t know, we don’t know.” That is okay.

8. Jacobsen: What do you think of these traditional arguments in religions for the veracity of some intervening God?

Hope: I would probably say, “I am happy for you. That you have found that experience of a reality of a God. But that has never happened to me.” That is probably what I would say. If they say, “God cured her cancer.” I would say, ‘I would rather trust doctors and scientists than faith.” Usually, I say, “That’s good for you.”

I am probably only different with children. When you teach your child and do not allow science into the classroom, and if you teach the faith in the church as though it were fact, that, I have a problem with.

9. Jacobsen: Since you are coming into your 12^th/13^th year for Grey Bruce Humanists, what are some events upcoming that we can look forward to? That come humanist or secular groups could replicate where they are at.

Hope: We have those three types of programs. We have a lot of volunteers and diverse programs. We have our roster of speakers coming up through the year. Anything from elder abuse to Gretta Vosper and being an atheist minister.

We have environmental ethics or medical ethics. We have different topics throughout the year with speakers. They can come to the library on the first Wednesday of every month. The third thing that we offer, every third month or so, is a community get together. We go to a restaurant and then have a get-together, a social. It is purely social.

We donate books or magazines to the library. We make donations. It is mostly local organizations rather than Doctors Without Borders. People, at this point, can look forward to a program. We have a lot to work with here.

10. Jacobsen: In terms of the demographics for Grey Bruce Humanists, does this population tends towards the more educated and progressive?

Hope: Yes, it tends towards the educated. People who love discussing things and ethics, and politics. I think there are some who may not have a lot of formal education. But most of them do, though. They look forward to an opportunity to discuss stuff.

We do not have many people without formal education. It is an older population as well. Those who are not consumed with kids or school as parents. Our demographics do manage Grey Bruce as Grey Bruce is an older population.

We have no programs to recruit people. We really do not want to do it. Considering, it is not a city We do not need to get bigger and bigger. We are happy to have the members that find out about us. We are happy for people who find out about us through the Facebook page. We get some members through that.

But we do not work hard to get members.

11. Jacobsen: Do most humanists identify as atheists?

Hope: We have never discussed it. But I would say, “Yes.” Atheism, the word has such a bad rap. It does mean no god. It is saying, “I know there’s no god.” Fine! A lot of people are comfortable with that. I would rather say, “Yes, I am an atheist, because there is no god in my life.”

But if I were to learn later in my life that there was some overpowering force, then, maybe, I would change. I would tend to say, “No, that would not happen. It is mythology.” I can say, “I am an atheist,” but I do not go around to other people and say, “I am an atheist. I am a nonbeliever.”

I fear that it turns people off immediately when I say, “I am atheist.” I do not want to destroy the conversation before we get into it. So, that is just me, though. Other people say, “I am an agnostic,” which makes sense. That I do not know. Most humanists identify as atheists, probably.

That would be a good meeting and conversation. It would be very interesting. Thanks! [Laughing]

12. Jacobsen: It also raises a question, “What kind of atheist, to what extent?”

Hope: That would be the question. Are you an atheist that says, “There is no god”? Or do you say, “I have no evidence of there being a God?” I guess [Laughing]. It would be interesting to ask people where they are coming from. Most of us, the vast majority, have come from or grown up in a religion.

I know in Toronto. There were people who had atheist parents. But most of us have not.

13. Jacobsen: If we look at the history of science, every generation harbors a set of findings and theories to fit those findings together. But, at some point, those findings and theories with the evidence hit a certain scope or level of fidelity, based on the framework or the level of evidence.

It is those edges and level of fidelity that we find the fun conversations. Where do you see the fun conversations?

Hope: Oh yes, absolutely, I would love to dig into that. I do not know. I maybe do not know enough science to get deeply into that subject. I tend to say, “I don’t know,” and then live with the “I don’t know.” Or I would choose to find a scientist on that subject that I respect and who has spent many years studying the subject and then go with them on it, rather than make a statement on my own.

My husband may have some different things to say about it. There are some interesting questions about science.

14. Jacobsen: Do humanists tend to be more interested in humanitarian efforts?

Hope: I would say, “Yes.” Remember, not all members identify as humanists, I do. Are they interested in compassion, giving, and sharing? I would say, “Yes.” Most of them tend to be more left of center or interested in the legislation guarding poor people, immigrants, refugees. We do have a few conservative new members.

You will find some of the conservative new members are atheists and not humanists. Rob Buckman was part of a “Can you be good without God?” presentation. It was with pastors, priests, and rabbis, and Bob was a humanist.

Someone from the Evangelical Right said, “Stalin was an atheist.” But Rob Buckman said, “But he was not a humanist” [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Most Germans in the 1940s were Christian, the vast majority.

Hope: Oh sure!

Jacobsen: It amounts to saying, “There is no true German Christian,” or no true Scotsman. It amounts to a logical fallacy in the assertion.

Hope: It is interesting how we define ourselves in so many ways. How we mesh politically, because of how we define humanism, we are interested in animal rights. But our vegan members would say, “We are not interested enough as we eat meat.” So, you have a lot of acceptable ways to be a humanist.

15. Jacobsen: Given the present politics with a sprinkling or a peppering of conservatives, do most humanists ally with feminist viewpoints, policy recommendations, and so on?

Hope: We have several members who would not call themselves feminists and who become annoyed with some of the MeToo stuff. The majority, particularly the women, are aware of those issues and would identify with it.

We are talking about caring. We are talking about compassion. We are talking about equity. We are talking about kindness. So, how do you treat a woman or a refugee, anyone struggling? If you are a humanist, you care about those things.

If you do not care about those things, you may be an atheist, but you may not be a humanist.

16. Jacobsen: What is the explanatory gap or filter for the gender-based split between humanism and feminism? Men are far less likely to be than women.

Hope: Yes, I think experience or the typically privileged groups have not experienced what it feels like to be a female in our culture. Some have gone to fabulous heights and others are trapped in male domination. More women are thinking about these issues.

If women come together and talk about what happened to them, and feeling about them, they can talk about things. They can say, “I can’t believe that we actually put up with that.” Men have not experienced that. Tonight, we will be having a meeting talking about the “Baby it’s cold outside” phenomenon or the Christmas card of the man with the tape over the family member’s mouths. He is saying how peaceful Christmas comes from this.

So many things that are “ha, ha, ha,” funny are not now. We are talking more about it. We are not accepting being treated as a lesser being. It is talking about it. Those of us who are older are. What accounts for the gap between men and women, and they are older, they are probably used to a world of comfort and not having been used to not walking around in a position of power.

They do not see their endemic privilege. Of course, white people have the same issue. I am a white person. Do we recognize our privilege as white people? We should! Because that is a very big issue. Any black person can talk to you about what it means to walk the streets as a black person, and how different that is.

If we have not experienced something, then the more likely we are to hold onto our privilege. It may go unrecognized.

17. Jacobsen: If we look to the earlier portion of that response, the #MeToo phenomenon starting from Tarana Burke in 2006. The statistics are only 8%, which is relatively high even in the other ranges given in terms of false claims [ed. False rape claims at 8%]. There, yes, may be the Rolling Stone case.

Hope: I do not think there is any question about there being false claims. But there are far more women who have never made claims about what has happened to them than ones who have made claims and are making false claims.

The ones who are out for some money and to get some guy back. I am sure that they happen. But just as women claim who have been sexually abused, I am sure there is a false memory. But is that the highest percentage? No, I do not think so.

Jacobsen: I would go back to two basic sources. One is the FBI with only 12.5 to 1 being false claims. Then the World Health Organization having 1/3 women having sexual or physical violence in their lifetime.

Hope: Oh, my heavens, it goes so much further than that. In my own case, a friend’s father; in my own case, a man got into my car and starts fondled my legs. Neither of them really hurts me, but they did scare the living daylights out of me.

They never really hurt me. I never went after them. If this happened today, I would be at the police station. My mother would never. I would say millions of women. When women get together, they talk about those things. They never report it.

Not trivial things too, because they did not damage us for life, but they did affect us. [Laughing] There is a feeling of entitlement. We have not studied male sexuality to really understand male sexuality and, particularly, young men. [Laughing] Well, no we have plenty of examples of them too.

But we do not want to do that. Because we do not want to pretend, we are them. Because we are not! My husband and I have been married for 50 years. [Laughing] So, it is not like I am anti-male. But they have their bit. The endless, endless examples of male privilege and feeling of privilege as an entitlement. Yes, absolutely!

Do all men acknowledge it, I do not think so? Not all, some do.

18. Jacobsen: Does the acknowledgment come in the more substantive form of behavior or only in the signifiers of words?

Hope: It would be saying, “You know, we’re not all bad. He went overboard.” I do not know. In the humanist group, it will be different. On Fox News, it will be different. I thought that when I saw Donald Trump make his statement about grabbing women that that would be it. I thought he would be finished.

When he made fun of the person with Cerebral Palsy, I thought, “He’s finished.” But he was not. What is the evidence? In our groups, the evidence of that would be a little more speaking out, “Come one, you’re going too far with that.”

Some strong women would say, “You can say that. But this is what happened to me.”

19. Jacobsen: Given the linkage of science and evidence with ethics in humanism, how can this new wave of information that may be novel to many, many men of women’s experiences in general with men in their lives create or inform new ethic and behavior question in humanist groups?

Hope: You start introducing this in elementary school. Being kind to people, being considerate of people and not just girls and women, all people should be treated respectfully and fairly. You start that in elementary school.

Boys start growing up understanding their own proclivities. I can say. Males are programmed to spread the seed from the time that they are 16. They will be looking for opportunities. Girls need to understand that. Boys need to understand that and need to fulfill those needs that are not assaulting girls.

That is a really, big question. I think it has a lot to do with education, teachers, and parents. Parents sometimes do not know as they do not have a glimpse of that. It is going to be a generational thing to start, right now, with little kids. It is to treat all people well.

I mean, the same technique used with teaching kids about handling people who are different than you: the other. Gay people who are very often teased in school. That should never be tolerated. No teacher should tolerate it if he or she hears it. But it was.

So, it is all part, to me, of learning to be a decent human being.

20. Jacobsen: Any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today?

Hope: I wish there was more of it. If there were more discussions like this in the mainstream, if we had a place at the table in the media more and could help people understand where we are coming from, it is not to destroy their history of Christianity and whatever traditions.

It is not to destroy their whole way of life, but to introduce and to induce a more compassionate future. But it does not sell.

Jacobsen: People want magic in the same way they want easy answers, ethically, scientifically, and otherwise.

Hope: Yeah, I guess you are right. I can see how fun it would be to believe in magic. But somehow, I do not have that gene. I think 7% of us are like this. It should start very early. It is harder. You lose out on certain things. But I do not believe for any of that stuff and do not see any evidence for it.

So, what can I do about that?

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Terri.

Hope: [Laughing] You’re very welcome.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder and Leader, Grey Bruce Humanists; Former Humanist Officiant.

[2] Individual Publication Date: January 22, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/hope; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with Stacey Piercey on the Transgender Canadian Citizens, the Media, and Health Concerns (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/15

Abstract

Stacey Piercey is the Co-Chair of the Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights for CFUW FCFDU and Vice Chair of the National Women’s Liberal Commission for the Liberal Party of Canada. She discusses: opinions about the transgender citizens in Canada by some of the media and some movements; the impacts on transgender youth in Canada in hearing neutral and curiosity-driven news; the impact on transgender youth in Canada in hearing mean-spirited news; moving into 2020 for acceptance of the transgender community; help for transgender individuals moving into the 2020s; and transgender health issues being addressed and respected.

Keywords: Co-Chair, Liberal Party of Canada, Ministry of Status of Women, Stacey Piercey, Vice Chair.

An Interview with Stacey Piercey on the Transgender Canadian Citizens, the Media, and Health Concerns: Co-Chair – Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights, CFUW FCFDU; Vice Chair National Women’s Liberal Commission at Liberal Party of Canada | Parti libéral du Canada (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In the public conversation now, we can observe a wide variety of reactionary, not movements but, outspoken individuals or small coalitions with platforms on the moderate fringe expressing opinions on the transgender community varying degrees of veracity. With or without mentioning individuals or small coalitions, what tend to be the modern expressed opinions coming from them?

Piercey: I see significantly less negativity in the media as I did years ago. Everyday life is pleasant for the most part. There have been changes for the better as of late. I do hear, and it is seldom, a message from those who have concerns, and from those who have an issue with transgender people. It is often one of fear of the unknown or a resistance to change.

They are seldom transgender or are affected by the fact someone transitioned genders. I think you should always be your best self, let alone be afraid to be yourself. I find most people are friendly and efforts are made to be accommodating. Many have gone through the transition process with the knowledge gained. I believe everyone heard about the problems that we encountered, from all the transgender advocates the last several years. It is important to note. This is not a priority in most people’s lives. It was, for a time, in mine.

2. Jacobsen: What seems like the impact on the lives of the young in the transgender community who see or hear the more benign, inquiring, and curiosity-driven opinions expressed in the public sphere?

Piercey: The generation of younger transgender adults that I do encounter. Most have healthy lives; some are open about being transgender, some are not. It isn’t that big of a deal. People are not bound as much by gender roles as I was growing up in the seventies. I changed with the times. I honestly don’t think about gender that much.

I do see more positive media regarding transgender people. That was missing for me to have good role models when I started. There are shows, celebrities, and stories with happy endings now. It is not all doom and gloom. I see other transgender people when I am about town, not often, but you do notice when you get served by or pass each other on the street.

3. Jacobsen: What seems like the impact on the lives of the young in the transgender community who see or hear the more aggressive, judgmental, and denialist opinions expressed in the public sphere?

Piercey: It is terrible, I don’t understand why anyone would want to scare or hurt anybody. This kind of rhetoric does tremendous harm. Once you start believing another person’s opinion of you, you lost who you are, your identity or individuality. Imagine living with being judged all the time, discriminated against or harassed. That is not a life and shouldn’t be tolerated by anybody. There is no room for hate. There is no argument if transgender is real or acceptable. It is. Now it is time to help transgender people integrate into everyday society not fight with them.

4. Jacobsen: Moving forward into the 2020s, what would best help the public acceptance of the transgender community?

Piercey: Education is vital. It isn’t difficult to be kind to others. People are people. I never saw transgender people as different. For me, it would have helped to move through the system much quicker. I lost years in comparison back then. My problems are behind me now. I transitioned, and I have a normal life. I get to contribute back to society. The public accepts me. I can take care of myself. I am independent. That is what was important on my journey. I am now on to the next step. Life as a woman, problem solved. That is what the public needs to hear to help acceptance.

5. Jacobsen: Moving forward into the 2020s, what would best help the transition of the trans individuals within the transgender community in coordination with their medical provider?

Piercey: Supports should be in place. Your doctor is one aspect of your life, what about housing, employment, poverty and other issues faced. This is about productive lives and providing the help needed for these individuals to move forward. There are unique challenges that are to be addressed and can no longer be dismissed or misunderstood. Removing the need for advocacy will improve lives.

When opportunities are available for services provided such as surgeries, counselling or other requirements, then you will see less of urgency in the community. Transitioning at an older age, may be rare in the future. It will be diagnosed and monitored earlier. Then like most health decisions, they are made by families or the individual. People may never know about a prolonged period of transitioning, dealing with a stigma or being outside of the system.

6. Jacobsen: What medical and other options are becoming better, more precise, safer, and so on, for the transgender community? Typically, as technology gets better and wider spread, it becomes cheaper and comes with fewer complications.

Piercey: Access to the current medical system will be profound. Forget about new technologies. Transgender health issues are now being addressed and respected. We are all going to learn from each other and over time improve the delivery of services. That is a start.

The excuses of the past about the costs and lack of adequate professionals available with expertise in transgender health will eventually be solved. Most transgender surgeries are the same procedures performed for other reasons. It is not necessary to label transgender health as different. With social acceptance, we can get back to helping people become healthy. If a surgery can help you, and doctors do it all the time, why not help people. Transgender people shouldn’t have to wait five to ten years to get a surgery that others can get in six months for a different reason in a government hospital.

In the past to have my gender change recognized I had to go through the government medical system, and I did. If you went out of the country or had it done by an uncertified medical profession your application to change gender could be rejected. Today, you can change your gender on your identification by filling out a form. The government shouldn’t make life harder for anybody. If someone is living as the opposite sex than they were born in, they get to have a valid id. It is undeniably essential to have proper identification. Changes like this are all relatively new and will help over time.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: January 15, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/piercey-three; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with Joseph Emmanuel Yaba on Youth Sustainable Development in Africa

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/08

Abstract

Joseph Emmanuel Yaba is the CEO of Youth Initiative for Sustainable Human Development in Africa (YiSHDA). He discusses: background; sustainability; the reason for the focus on the young; building human capacity for young people; providing a bigger net of support; feedback; difficulties in the midst of the work of YiSHDA; and moving into 2019.

Keywords: Africa, CEO, Joseph Emmanuel Yaba, sustainability, Youth Initiative for Sustainable Human Development in Africa (YiSHDA).

An Interview with Joseph Emmanuel Yaba on Youth Sustainable Development in Africa: CEO, Youth Initiative for Sustainable Human Development in Africa (YiSHDA)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us simply start on some of the background for you.

Joseph Emmanuel Yaba: Thank you very much. My story proves that every young person can succeed and help others get there. I was not born with a silver spoon and I grew up in a home where I was taught that the best service one can give is service to humanity and that influenced my decision and calling into the civil society sector and has also impacted my work.

2. Jacobsen: In terms of sustainability, why is this such a particularly important goal or objective currently?

Yaba: For sustainability, we believe that the best form of sustainability is building the human capacity. There is a need to build human capacity, to continue to advocate for policies and programs that will impact positively in the society. Sustainability is key because it enables us to build tomorrow’s leader today so that they can meet the needs of the present without compromising the future.

3. Jacobsen: Is that the reason for the focus on the young as well?

Yaba: Yes, because there is a need for young people to be empowered and to harness their potential. For sustainable development to be achieved, young people need to be at the center of sustainable development and to be prepared also to work across all the thematic areas of sustainability and value creation.

As I said, human capacity is the best form of sustainability. Yes, we can build infrastructure. But it will, in time, go away, which is why human capacity in the most important. It is important for young people to take on leadership positions and to be part of the value creation.

4. Jacobsen: When you are trying to build the human capacity of young people, how are you going about doing that?

Yaba: We have carved a niche for ourselves in the areas of design and implementation of programs, especially in the areas of economic empowerment as our key special area. When people are empowered economically, they will be able to build a sustainable livelihood for themselves, families and the immediate community.

We have also carved a niche in governance and civic engagement. There is a need for young people to get into governance and work on accountability and transparency. Young people need to question why things are not working and how they should work.

We have also identified health and environmental sustainability. Our organization builds the human capacity through the above thematic areas.

5. Jacobsen: With this global emphasis or this emphasis on humanity, how does this provide a bigger net of not only support within a specific country or region, but also within the general populace and potential investors and supporters?

Yaba: Of course, Sustainable Development Goals is the center now, it is what the world is pursuing now. Our programs and projects have been designed to also aim at achieving the bigger goals, which is the SDGs. It is what the world leaders have set aside to achieve by 2030 and it is our collective responsibility to work towards it attainment.

It is not only the SDGs we are targeting. We are also targeting the African Union Agenda 2063. We are not just implementing on the smaller scale; we are also looking at the bigger picture. We call it working and acting locally but also making a global impact.

6. Jacobsen: What has been the feedback from people around the program involved in it, directly or indirectly?

Yaba: The feedback has been amazing. Of course, we have one or two challenges, but we are always committed regardless of the challenge. We are very much committed as an organization; we are very optimistic and very encouraged with the feedback from most of the beneficiaries.

It would be important to note that through our programs and activities we have impacted cumulatively a total of 20,000 young people. These are young people who are currently empowered, who have found something worthwhile. They are currently doing well in most of the fields that they have found themselves. We have track records of success with the young people who have been in the programs.

We have success stories and are still optimistic about still attaining more success stories.

7. Jacobsen: In terms of the difficulties, what have they been? How have you overcome them?

Yaba: As an organization, the number one challenge has always been the issue of funding. But we are not discouraged by the funding issue that we do not get too often. We still go ahead and make sure that we squeeze resources because we must keep the activities and programs running and maintained.

Regardless of our challenges, our organization takes pride in having young people who have tremendous skills. We use our skills to break our barriers. We use our skills as young people to push ahead. We take responsibility for our actions, for our beneficiaries and partner organization. We never let things weigh us down. We still go ahead to make sure we achieve our goals and our aims.

8. Jacobsen: Looking into 2019, what are some of the targeted objectives now?

Yaba: 2019 is a year of expansion and growth and leveraging on some of our success stories and to work on some of our programs as well. We are trying to see how we can explore better opportunities, leverage partnerships, leverage collaborations more; no organization or nobody is an island.

We all need collaboration. We all need assistance. To us, 2019 will be a year where we will expand and leverage on some of our success stories while, at the same time, looking for even better opportunities and also to achieve better results in terms of working on some of our programs and to getting into more community schools as well.

9. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Joseph.

Yaba: Thank you very much, Scott, and thank you for the opportunity.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] CEO, Youth Initiative for Sustainable Human Development in Africa (YiSHDA).

[2] Individual Publication Date: January 8, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/yaba; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with Imam Soharwardy on Creationism, Evolution, and Islam

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/01

Abstract

Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy is the Founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Founder of the Muslims Against Terrorism. He discusses: opening on creationism, evolution, and Islam; science and Islam; Christian young earth creationism; cosmology and textual analysis; Jinn; and Sufi Islam.

Keywords: Islam, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, Jinn, Muslim, Muslims Against Terrorism, Sufi, Syed Soharwardy, young earth creationism.

An Interview with Sufi Imam Syed Soharwardy on Creationism, Evolution, and Islam: Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism[1]^,[2]^,[3]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk creationism, evolution, and Islam.

Imam Soharwardy: It is the difference between the modern theory of evolution and Islamic Sufi theology. This is what we believe Islam is all about. It is an interpretation of some scholars of Islam over the past 14 centuries and in this last century or two.

There are new sects. They refer to new interpretations. Creation: Islam says there is the first point of creation. Science calls it Big Bang. We believe it, too. So, there was a big bang. It all started from a small, tiny particle.

It does not conflict with the teachings of Islam. But after that, once that big bang or starting point of creation, there is evolution. Evolution is the new transformation and creation of new species via Almighty Allah, into new shapes and forms.

But we also believe humans are not people from apes. We do not believe that. Science also rejected that theory. That human came from them. But we definitely believe everything that has started; they began as creations from Almighty God.

That’s what we call God. But the creation of things or species, or various types of the creation of God evolved from a point. That is what Sufiism gives. It is a beautiful description.

That the starting point is Almighty God Himself. He started God from this one big bang, and then it evolved into many, many millions and countless forms of God or species. If you reverse your creation process back to the original point, then that’s what it is all about.

It is what Sufis call going back to Almighty God. You will return to Him. This is what the Holy Quran says. The “return to Him” means that we will not exist and He will still exist. God will still exist. He is the starting point and the end of all creation.

But He Himself does not have any beginning or end.

2. Jacobsen: That’s interesting. The only stated that would not necessarily be within the mainstream biologists of all religious and non-religious stripes is, basically, human beings are another branch of an animal within the Great Primates.

We share a common ancestry with chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos, and other primates. That would be the only thing. In terms of the statement, ‘Human beings did not come from apes.’

It would be insofar as a Sufi understanding, or as an Islamic, as you noted more general understanding, would take it. In terms of creation from a point and so on, none of that would contradict the modern scientific understanding in any way.

Soharwardy: We believe humans are a separate species. The animals, the fish, and all kinds of living things; they are separate creations of God. But if you go back in a reverse cycle from now until the beginning of creation, you will see they started from one single point.

God is the Creator. God is the one point. That is the Big Bang.

3. Jacobsen: In North America, this tends to come more from the Christian community. They have various institutes. They have arks. They build creationism museums. Often, they will more likely take a young earth creationist view of the world.

It comes from Bishop James Ussher, who argued the world was about 6,000 years old. Of course, the estimates can range from 6,000-to-10,000-years-old in Young Earth Creationism.

Also, this can come from some other areas of the world, where Islam is more dominant than Christianity. For instance, one individual is Harun Yahya or Adnan Oktar who wrote The Atlas of Creation (2006).

So, what would be a proper understanding, insofar as you have it, of Islam to talk to those who may have more of a young earth creationist view of the world: Christian or Islam?

Soharwardy: I think this 5,000, 6,000, or 10,000, in terms of the teachings of the Bible, can look at Noah living to 950 years old. [Laughing] So, those who say a few thousand years old Earth. It is from the point of view of scripture an incorrect theory.

In the Holy Quran, there is no contradiction with the Quran or the Islamic theology, or what the Prophet said (PBUH).

Before Adam came to the planet Earth, there was life on the planet. There were trees. There were animals. Good existed for millions, millions, and millions of years. But we definitely believe the Earth is very, very old – millions of years.

Those who say 6,000, 10,000; it is in direct contradiction from my reading. It is not correct. It has to read millions of years.

4. Jacobsen: In terms of the Islamic cosmology with theological implications, what are some of the details other than creation from a point that comes from textual analysis of the Quran and the Hadith?

Soharwardy: According to some of the Sufis, though no exact numbers, and other smaller sects, there are 18,000 galaxies. But this is some scholars’ opinion or their observation. But the Quran counts of countless millions of galaxies.

That Allah says this is My own creation. Not my own galaxy but countless galaxies. Some, in Islamic theology, believe 18,000 galaxies, though.

5. Jacobsen: Also, for those who do not know, what are Jinnwithin Islamic theology? What other entities are mentioned as well?

Soharwardy: There are two kinds of creations. Through the Quran and the Bible, there are angels. There are Jinns. The Al-Malaa’ikah are made of light. They are not visible to us. Jinns are made of fire. They are also not visible to humans.

Jinns live in the world. There are good jinn and bad jinn just like human beings [Laughing]. One is called Lucifer or Iblis in Islam. It is the same thing. He was a Jinni made of a fire, not an angel. He lived among angels and was in the image of God before humans.

6. Jacobsen: If someone is Sufi Muslim, or if someone is Muslim generally, how would they perceive Jinn, Al-Malaa’ikah, orIblis influencing their daily lives?

Soharwardy: Jinn, we Muslim, based on the Holy Quran, believe in Jinn based on a whole chapter in the Holy Quran called Surah Jinn. It mentions in the Holy Quran that Satan, Lucifer, or Iblis was a Jinn. So, we believe these exist.

However, as with most stories in the Western world, or the Eastern world, we do not believe that those stories are wholly real; they are fiction. Islamic belief is a human, a righteous human being – not every human being, of course – is stronger than any Jinn.

That is why humans are higher in respect and honour in the sight of God than even of the angels.

7. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Imam Soharwardy.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Founder, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada; Founder, Muslims Against Terrorism.

[2] Individual Publication Date: January 1, 2019: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/soharwardy; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

[3] Image Credit: Imam Syed Soharwardy.

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2023-02-14

An Interview with Professor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/22

Abstract

Professor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam is a Professor at Universitetet i Oslo (UiO) and the Founder of ‎Iran Human Rights. He discusses: Iranian juvenile offenders are given the death penalty; religion as a political tool; countries telling women what they can and can’t wear; justifying the death penalty; advanced postsecondary training and neuroscientific research; problems in the brain; substantia nigra; and different cells having problems.

Keywords: Human Rights, Iran, Iran Human Rights, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, neuroscience, professor.

An Interview with Professor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam: Professor, Universitetet i Oslo (UiO); Founder, ‎Iran Human Rights[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With respect to some human rights issues in Iran, as you founded Iran Human Rights, there are particular issues to do with juvenile offenders who are given the death penalty. Why? How does this compare to the international context?

Professor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam: To answer the second question first, Iran has ratified several international conventions such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which clearly bans the death penalty for offenses committed under 18 years of age.

So, it is illegal. But they still do it. Why do they do it? I would say, in general, victims of the death penalty in Iran and, probably, in many other countries belong to the weakest groups of society.

I think that it is the same in Iran. These are normally children from marginalized groups because of poverty or other socioeconomic factors. Basically, they don’t have a voice. During the last 40 years, Iran has been among the countries issuing the death sentence for juveniles, and in the last 5 years Iran has been the only country implementing death sentences for juvenile offenders, in 2018, at least 6 juveniles have been executed by the Iranian authorities.

I think the first time this issue started getting serious attention was the after 2000, thanks to the internet and the emergence of new human rights groups. So, people started focusing on issues of juvenile execution.

I think, at the same time as we started, several other rights groups started focusing on juveniles on the death row. One was in Canada, Stop Child Executions – founded by Nazanin Afshin-Jam. This (the issue of juvenile executions) has been an important issue when it comes to Iran’s international partners or countries having a dialogue with Iran, e.g., the European Union.

The death penalty is not banned by international law but the execution of children is banned. It has been on the agenda. The Iranian authorities have been subjected to lots of pressure, international pressure. But they still keep doing it.

It is, I think, because they have different excuses for the use of the death penalty. I call it “excuses.” Because I think the death penalty is a political instrument, regardless of what the person sentenced to death has done, whether it is a normal crime or anything.

But the instrument is political. It is, in my view, what Iran uses to spread fear in the society. You remember when ISIS took over parts of Syria and Iraq? What most people remember were the scenes of the executions.

It is the most powerful instrument to spread terror and fear and keep the control of a country or of a people. Iranian authorities, since they don’t have popular support, depend on instruments like the death penalty.

Until recently, the majority of those executed were charged with drug offenses. There were years when we had 1 to 2 people executed each day for drug offenses, like 2015. Iran has executed several thousand in the last 7 or 8 years.

Again, because of increasing international pressure, they had to pass new legislation that restricts the use of the death penalty for drug offenses. When it comes to the death penalty, related to the juveniles – because they have allegedly committed murder, murder, according to Iranian law and what Iranian authorities say, is punishable by retribution in kind.

If the family of the murder victim wants retribution, which is the death penalty, then they do it. That way, they put away the execution responsibility on the shoulders of the plaintiffs. So, why does Iran continue juvenile executions?

Because they use the same excuse. Their excuse is that this is according to Islam or Sharia. We cannot change it. According to Sharia, a boy has a criminal responsibility when he is 15 and girl when she is 9.

They say, “We can’t change Sharia. That’s why we have to continue these punishments.” Because once they step back from Sharia, the next step would be to back off from many of the punishments, inhumane punishments, used in Iran which are based on Sharia.

It means they could be able to back off all those punishments. Most people are sentenced to death for murder charges. If they say that they can start using 18 years of age for criminal responsibility, it means that they can make, basically, any changes in their version of Sharia.

For them, it is a kind of red line. They have already been pushed by the international community to pass the legislation to limit the use of the death penalty for drug charges. They can’t execute political opponents as easily as they used to do in the 1980s because of the high political price. It would lead to international outrage. Now, the only thing left is for them to say, “We follow the religion.” Unfortunately, juvenile execution is also part of it. They are using the religion to keep on with the policy of the death penalty, which has nothing to do with the religion.

But it is a political tool. There are so many Muslim countries that do not practice the death penalty and as I mentioned, in the past few years Iran has been the only country in the world implementing the death penalty for juveniles.

On the other hand, the age limit to get a passport or a driving license in Iran is 18, like in other countries. The authorities do not regard a 15 years old boy mature enough to get a driver’s license. But when it comes to the death penalty the age of criminal responsibility becomes 15. So, the Iranian authorities can change the age of criminal responsibility to 18, but it requires much stronger and more long-lasting international pressure.

2. Jacobsen: So, you mentioned religion in its theocratic form used as a political tool, as a last-ditch political tool, for “justification” for the death penalty. However, this probably represents a disjunction between the general population and the religious leadership.

Is there a disjunction there? How much? Why?

Amiry-Moghaddam: Absolutely, first of all, ordinary people do not think the way the authorities do, even in murder cases. For example, for the past few years, we have been monitoring many of these retribution cases.

Since the law allows plaintiffs to either forgive or ask for retribution. There are a significant number of families who choose forgiveness. According to our statistics kept for a few years, the numbers of families who choose forgiveness over the death penalty via retribution is much higher.

That’s one thing. Iran probably has the biggest or the largest abolitionist movement in the Middle East, at least in the countries practicing the death penalty. One of the reasons is people see the authorities using the death penalty as a political tool.

The authorities’ way of using religion; the whole issue of political Islam arrived to Iran 40 years ago. Before that, it was only among a small group of the priests or the clergy. So, many people were not familiar with that.

Let’s say my grandfather or other people who were practicing Muslims, who were believers, they never shared the authorities’ idea of combining religion with politics the way they do it. So, I think that it is a paradox that Iran, which was probably the least religious country of the Middle East, has had an Islamic state over the last 40 years.

This is also one of the reasons why they have to use force to enforce the rules. For example, you have for the compulsory hijab. They have thousands of specific police forces to go around and make sure people are following the hijab rules.

You have probably seen the pictures. When ordinary people have the chance, they violate these rules. I would say Iranians do not share the authorities’ opinion. Not all, some have the same views. But I would say a larger group or, maybe, a majority do not share the authorities’ view on it, or on the tools used to continue their rule.

3. Jacobsen: As a caveat or an add-on to that [Laughing], we see some countries in the world with either an interest in telling women what they have to wear or [Laughing] what they can’t wear [Laughing].

Amiry-Moghaddam: Right, that’s the thing. It is when what you wear becomes the main issue. It is for all sides [Laughing]. The real issue is much different than what people wear. The clothing becomes a symbol of something.

People forget that it is just a symbol. For them, it becomes a real thing.

4. Jacobsen: Outside of juvenile cases and the death penalty as a political tool through religious excuses, fundamentalist religious excuses, what cases, either in history or at present, would the death penalty seem justifiable to you, as you know more about this than me?

Amiry-Moghaddam: To me, the death penalty is not justifiable in any cases. First of all, it is an inhumane punishment. I can come back to that. Another thing, there is no indication or there are no studies showing that it has a preemptive effect on crimes.

It’s not reversible. We have seen so many cases where many years later; they find the person was innocent. I think that the law is responsible for the values that we’re transferring to our children and society.

When the law says, “Violence is not good. Murder is not good,” they cannot have exceptions for themselves. Not talking about self-defense, the law says, “It (killing) is wrong,” but when they practice the death penalty that is what they are doing.

Basically, it means that there are exceptions to things that are our deepest values, “Killing is wrong; unless, I decide it.” It sends the wrong signal. There are so many negative sides to the death penalty. It outnumbers the possible benefits if any.

So, that’s why. For example, in Norway, where I live, you probably remember. There was this guy who first put a bomb in a government office. Then, he went to an island and started killing young people. He shot to death 69 people. Most of them were teenagers.

In some countries, he would probably have been executed. So, what happened to him? The Norwegian judicial system spent thousands of Norwegian Kroner to have a proper trial for him. He could choose his lawyer.

It took several months. He could appeal again. Finally, he was sentenced to a lifetime in prison. I think, let’s say, what this process did to the society was extremely important, also with regards to healing the wounds of those directly injured or those who lost loved ones, it says, “This man did not manage to change our values.”

The society showed it has much stronger values than what one man can do to them. Probably, there were some people who wanted to see him dead. A good thing about a society with rule of law is that the authorities do not put the responsibility of the decision on the shoulders of someone who is a victim of violence. They do not have to think about it.

They have their grief. That is more than enough responsibility. Imagine if, in addition to what they went through, they had also to decide if this person should live or die; eventually, it is for the benefit of anyone, including those directly affected by violence or crime.

I don’t say that we should not have punishments, but the punishments we have should not violate our deepest values, the respect for the right to life and that killing is wrong.

5. Jacobsen: To pivot into the other research work, you are highly trained. You have a Ph.D. and an M.D. You worked at Harvard Medical School. It comes from an interesting background as a refugee and then went to Norway, as a kid.

This leads to questions about interesting work and background, and the diverse set of education. Most people do not have that level of education. So, what is the main question you’re asking in the neuroscientific research?

Amiry-Moghaddam: Right now, we are working at what we call the neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Those diseases that affect the central nervous system. Mainly, as we get older, but these diseases can affect younger people as well.

We do not have any preemptive treatment. We don’t have any cure. The reason for that is we still do not know enough about how our brain works and what happens to the brain when these diseases occur.

If I simplify it, in Parkinson’s disease, a hallmark is a loss of a specific population of brain cells, neurons, at a specific part of the brain called substantia nigra. Nobody knows why exactly those cells start dying. By the time people are diagnosed, more than 60-70% of the cells are dead. We do not have a cure.

Despite several decades of research, we don’t know enough about it. The brain is fascinating enough as an organ. I find research on these diseases meaningful, because I know there are so many people who suffer because of those diseases.

That is what we are focusing on right now. But I think, as a scientist, we are very privileged because my job is to be curious and try to make new discoveries in one of our most complex organs. I really feel privileged for that.

6. Jacobsen: If you look at the substantia nigra, and if I remember right, it produces dopamine. So, in a way, this amounts to a dopamine depletion syndrome, Parkinson’s Disease. As with any evolved system, it will have flaws.

Anyone can look at the list of cognitive biases of the human mind to know how many are known just about the mind. We also know in other organs the failures which arise. We see this with diabetes. We see this with eyes. We see this with auditory disorders.

But people get mechanical devices to replace some of the function that is lost. Not to the same degree, but to some sufficient level for functionality in the world. I am thinking of people who take insulin, diabetics.

Others who need hearing aids. Others, such as you and I, who get glasses because our eyesight is bad in some way. Others that I remember or recall reading about, which were fascinating, and shoed a potential line, not necessarily solving but, of alleviating the problems for some people who have Parkinson’s.

Something akin to the pacemaker for the heart, a Parkinson’s pacemaker. Is this an area of newer research? Is it a hopeful area for research? Or is it, more or less, going off the rail? What is its status?

Amiry-Moghaddam: Yes, there are some, let’s say, more modern attempts to help people with Parkinson’s. First of all, let’s call it the dopamine pacemaker, we don’t have it. It wouldn’t stop or cure the disease.

Because, right now, the most efficient treatment, which has been helping many patients for many, many years is giving medication that increases the levels of released dopamine in the affected areas of the brain.

6. Jacobsen: That’s intriguing.

Amiry-Moghaddam: Yes, but it works as long as there are dopamine-producing neurons. When there are no more dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, this medication does not help so much. After that, people are trying. Things are still going on regarding the use of stem cells because the regeneration of new dopamine-generating neurons is something fascinating.

There are some trials. There is also deep brain stimulation. But in my field, it is much more basic. What I am trying to look at, why these specific neurons are vulnerable? Because there is something else interesting about Parkinson’s.

One finds a clear link with environmental toxins and Parkinson’s disease. That’s interesting. It means that these neurons are selectively vulnerable to toxins. What makes them vulnerable? Let’s say, my research goes much more back to basics. Why? What is the reason?

But, of course, we believe the knowledge about that would help us to find a cure or contribute to thinking differently about Parkinson’s disease. With all respects to all those who are at the same time trying to find a treatment, an efficient treatment with the current knowledge. I think both of them are necessary.

So, we haven’t been looking into how to increase the dopamine levels in the brain. We wonder why the dopaminergic neurons start dying. Specifically, the reasons for why they are vulnerable to particular toxins and why other neurons in the brain are not.

7. Jacobsen: When the substantia nigra begins to deteriorate, or to 60-70% fewer than the original number this may have cascade effects. If this is the case, what other systems deteriorate alongside it over time?

Amiry-Moghaddam: When the dopamine release falls below a certain level, the connections between the substantia nigra and other parts of the brain do not function as they should. These dopaminergic connections are among others important for modulation of our movements. That’s why some of the most apparent symptoms are related to our movements. The symptoms typically start at around 50-60 years of age, which is not old, but it gets worse with aging. There is also an increase in the prevalence of Parkinson’s disease as people get older.

Age is an important risk factor. As people get older, we see there is comorbidity between Parkinson’s disease and other kinds of dementia. That’s the reason. Parkinson’s, whether some people have several of the diseases at the same time. One of them starts first; we do not know much about it.

But there is comorbidity. At the very minimum, the higher the age, the more we see general dementia but also specific types like Alzheimer’s Disease.

There are also several common features among Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, even ALS.

You have an accumulation of specific kinds of protein, either inside or outside the cells, e.g. beta-amyloid in Alzheimer’s Disease. In Parkinson’s Disease, we have α-Synuclein. It gets too specialized for a general reader.

But other parts of the brain and other organs of the body are also affected. We still don’t know as much about that. As science develops or progresses, we find out more about how the disease affects other parts of the body, like the gut and other parts of the brain.

But the reason we haven’t been looking at it or focusing on it, previously, is that it is typical for us looking at the areas that give the stronger symptoms – or more characteristic symptoms. Because of the dopaminergic neuronal loss.

The Parkinson’s patients have a very specific way they walk. You have probably seen the way they walk. It is similar to other parts of the body. I would say that the more we dig into these diseases; we find that there is a lot more to find out and learn.

Another focus of my research. It is looking at the other cell types in the brain other than the neurons. It is called neurology or neuroscience because most of the focus or activity has been on the principal cells of the brain, the neurons. We want to see how the other cell types contribute to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease.

8. Jacobsen: So, for instance, compared to the glial cells or something like this?

Amiry-Moghaddam: Yes, especially the astrocytes, the star-like cells.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Amiry-Moghaddam: According to some studies, they are the most abundant cell type in the brain. I think they play a more important role than previously anticipated. I think one of the reasons we lag behind when it comes to finding treatments for neurological disorders – compared to other parts of the body – is that the focus has been too neurocentric.

My main focus is on astrocytes or much of my research is on astrocytes.

9. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Professor Amiry-Moghaddam.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Professor, Universitetet i Oslo (UiO) Founder, ‎Iran Human Rights – سازمان حقوق بشر ایران‎.

[2] Individual Publication Date: December 22, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/amiry-moghaddam; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Rahma Rodaah

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/15

Abstract

Rahma Rodaah is the Self Published Author of Muhiima’s Quest. She discusses: life prior to the Somalian civil war; coming to Canada at age 8; the experience being the only black girl; enduring and recovering from bullying; the assumed responsibilities as the eldest in the family; the move to Edmonton in 2001; international business at the University of Ottawa; current position, and tasks and responsibilities; the reason for motto “where there is a will there is a way”; having a child; being a self-published author of children’s books and a Muslim; feedback on the books; and plans on a next book.

Keywords: author, Islam, Muhiima’s Quest, Muslim, Rahma Rodaah, Self-Published Author, writer.

An Interview with Rahma Rodaah: Self Published Author[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Being born in Somalia, what was life like prior to the civil war?

Rahma Rodaah: Life for us was very comfortable. My father worked in the Financial sector, but he often traveled so most time it was just my mother, my two siblings and my grandmother at home. I just remember spending my days outside and being surrounded with a large family. That’s the one thing we don’t have here in Canada, our extended family.

2. Jacobsen: You moved to Canada at the age of 8. How was building a life in Quebec and starting to learn French?

Rodaah: Our transition to life in Canada has not been an easy one. It took us a long time to get here, including a detour in the USA before we crossed the border. We left everything behind so it was initially very hard for my parents. The language barrier, getting used to a new surrounding and the climate were the biggest struggles we had to overcome.

3. Jacobsen: What was the experience of being the only black girl, the only Somali in the French classrooms?

Rodaah: It’s only recently that I have started uncovering memories of this period in my life. The bullying I endured in those years was very traumatic. There was even an incident where a teacher tied me to a chair because she thought I was too “disruptive” I was unable to speak the language, and I struggled immensely because of this.

Children pull down my pants; they would taunt me and tease me endlessly. They were most curious about my skin color and my hair which I had never seen as an issue before. It was, and my parents didn’t understand, or rather they had their own battles to overcome.

4. Jacobsen: How did you endure and recover from the bullying?

Rodaah: The bullying did not stop until we moved to Ottawa two years later. Ottawa offered more diversity due to more immigrants settling there, and for the first time, I was no longer the only black or Somali girl in class.

I was able to speak a little French, and I was able to make friends. After some time in a shelter for new immigrants we moved into a neighborhood were a lot of Somalis lived and therefore we found a sense of community, and it started to feel like home for the first time since we arrived.

5. Jacobsen: As the eldest in the family, how did this affect assumed responsibilities within the family?

Rodaah: I always thought of myself as the third parent. My father constantly worked to support us, and therefore my mother relied on me to help with my siblings as well as to help her overcome her inability to speak the language.

I also felt compelled to set an example for my younger siblings. A lot was riding on my education and my success. I was the first to graduate university in my household which for my parent meant their sacrifice and migration worth it.

6. Jacobsen: In 2001, why did you move to Edmonton?

Rodaah: You know at first we had no idea why our parents decided to move us from a place where we felt comfortable and had tons of friends. But years later my mother told us she decided to move to Alberta for better work opportunity for both our father and us.

Edmonton in early 2000 looked nothing like it does today in term of its diversity and number of Somali in its population. In fact, our family was one of the first Somali family to enroll in our French High school. But we quickly got used to it, and we now love being here.

7. Jacobsen: Why did you choose international business in university and to complete a degree at the University of Ottawa?

Rodaah: I actually enrolled in the program of International business with the University of Alberta, but after two years I realized it wasn’t the right program for me. I applied to many universities in Canada, but I decided to move back to Ottawa, and I received a degree in International Development and globalization from the University of Ottawa.

8. Jacobsen: What is your current position? What tasks and responsibilities come with the position?

Rodaah: I am currently working with the Government of Alberta where I work as an income support adviser. We help Albertans receive information and apply to funded programs such as Health benefit and funeral benefits.

9. Jacobsen: Why is your motto “where there is a will there is a way”?

Rodaah: I value hard work and determination. My parent’s journey and their will to get here has always fuel that belief in me. I knew that if I wanted it bad enough and I worked hard for it, anything would be attainable.

10. Jacobsen: How did having a child or becoming a mother influence personal perspective on time, life, and responsibilities in life?

Rodaah: Once I became a mother, I began to reflect more on the things I had gone through and overcome during my childhood. Both my husband and were plucked from our home country due to the Civil war. We had to leave so much behind and forge a new identity and life.

I noticed that my kids are still being asked where they are from even though they are the first generation born in Canada. They have not been or seen Somalia so as far as they are concerned Canada is the only country they know.

I also noticed that as a black Muslim my children would have to overcome these two marginalized identities. Things such as bullying and racism are still prevalent, and I want my kids to have enough confidence to defend themselves and enough knowledge to educate these ignorant views.

11. Jacobsen: As a self-published author of children’s books and a Muslim, what is your hope in portraying characters to the young through the books?

Rodaah: My goal is to showcase black Muslim in a positive light. These two identities are often time the most stereotyped, and it’s important for me to change that narrative. Positive imagery can have a significant impact on children and its one of the biggest reason I choose to write children books.

I hope my books will enable children the opportunity to see themselves in books they also enjoy to read. I also want to show that as Black Muslim we also have stories to tell and often we go through the same things as others do.

12. Jacobsen: What has been the general feedback on them?

Rodaah: I have received an enormous amount of positive response. I have had a lot of none Muslim advise me they learn something about our culture and faith. So many kids have told me they were extremely delighted to see themselves in the characters.

Parents have commented that the message of inclusion and embracing our differences is an important one they have enjoyed discussing with their children.

13. Jacobsen: What is your next planned book?

Rodaah: I am currently working on two new pictures books, but I also plan on writing a chapter book for teen and early readers in the future. I just had my third child, however, and it is taking me longer to complete any work.

14. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Rahma.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author.

[2] Individual Publication Date: December 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/rodaah; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Greg Vogel (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/08

Abstract

Greg Vogel is the Chairman of Mensa France. He discusses: family and personal background; influence on him; giftedness as a child; giftedness in primary and secondary school; and working as a community on gifted children.

Keywords: France, German, Greg Vogel, intelligence, IQ, Mensa France.

An Interview with Greg Vogel: Chairman, Mensa France (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of geography, culture, language, and religion/irreligion, what is family background? What is personal background?

Greg Vogel: I was born in Strasbourg (France), a city which was in German side during WW2. My grandparents were forcibly incorporated in the German army, so we have a specific culture “between France and Germany.”

All my grandparents and parents talked french and also German. About myself, I’m not as good as I would be in German. I think all members of my family were baptized, not me. My mother refused and tell that it would be me who will decide my religion. So still not baptized now [Smiles].

2. Jacobsen: How did the family background feed into early life for you? How were these an influence on you, either directly or indirectly?

Greg: Well, to be honest, I was not the desired child. My mother thought she was a barren woman (hope this is the good expression). She was no more in a couple with my father when they “slept together.” My father did not want to have me, but my mother assumed myself.

So I’ve been raised at 80% by my mother; I lived with her and having her name. We were very poor. We have the equivalent of 7.50 Euro to buy food for a week for me, my mother, 2 dogs and the cat (the cat was necessary as we had mice in the flat). My mother usually said that the animals ate better than us [Laughing].

Our apartment did not have any shower, bathroom, heating, flush (we had a seal) and hot water. It was horribly cold in winter; I was sleeping dressed even with gloves sometimes. Once I brought a thermometer in my room it was -4° Celsius and, as it was too easy, I had a stepfather, who was violent.

About my father, he has some quality; but even after 38 years, he still does not know my birthdate and still does not know how to write my first name (I promise this is not a joke). Well, I could continue like that, but I prefer keep it for my future autobiography book [Laughing].

So, I think that all of this contributes to offering me a special vision of life, as I do have different references than most of the people. It helps me a lot now.

3. Jacobsen: When did giftedness become a fact of life for you, explicitly? Of course, you lived and live with it. When was the high general intelligence formally measured, acknowledged, and integrated into personal identity, and family and friends’ perception of you?

Greg: I was 15-years-old. I was doing a woman’s homework at my father’s apartment, a friend of him was here too. She looked at my work and said: “It’s the handwriting of a very intelligent person.”

So, we talked a bit. My father talked about Mensa. But it was in 1995, so no internet and everything we have now with it. It’s only in 2006 that I joined the association. At this time, I was in the university, but it was a bit complicated with my classmates as usually when I was talking with them, most parts of they did not understand – or told me that I was wrong.

So I thought, “Well, 2 possibilities, I’m dumb, or they are dumb.” So, I contacted my local Mensa to pass the test. In my mind, I went to the test session to pass the test, not to make the test.

It was a very personal process, so no one knew that I was in Mensa. Little by little, I told my friends and my family. It did not change anything in our relations. I’m still watching soccer, wrestling, making sports, martial arts, playing video games, etc. So, my friends accepted this specificity. Just my father does not understand why I’m a national chairman if I’m not paid for it. Sigh.

4. Jacobsen: Did personal giftedness get nurtured throughout primary and secondary school?

Greg: No, lol.

Life was too tough at this time for my giftedness to be exploited. When I talked about my problems, people may think that I was lying, but whatever. If you have problems, you’re just a problem for the others that are not necessary to solve.

A problem that you can let down. It’s also a fact that you will more likely be rich people than poor people, and my teachers thought also like that when I was in college. It did not nurture my giftedness, but it helped me to understand more about life and people.

5. Jacobsen: Why should governments and communities invest in the gifted, identification and education? Where can communities and governments disserve the gifted – do them wrong? What are the consequences in either case?

Greg: Governments should do all they can for education, not even for gifted but for all. The more your people will be educated (not the same thing than cultured which is also very important), then the more people will accept differences (sexual, religion, “color”, giftedness, and so on), so the smart people will understand that gifted people can make great things for humanity.

He’s not a Mensa member, but Elon Musk is making, in a few years, what N.A.S.A. never did. He’s just proving that if you have the intelligence and the financial resources you can make great things. Hell, I want to travel in space before I die! So go Elon! [Smiles]

The smarter you are, the faster you can find a solution to your problems.

6. Jacobsen: How can families and friends help prevent gifted kids from a) acting arrogant and b) becoming social car crashes (with a) and b) being related, of course)?

Greg: Well, the same answer, you have to educate people. Maybe, I’m factually smarter than some of my friends, so what? Do I know everything? No. Do my friends know a lot of things that I don’t know? Yes.

Your kid is arrogant? OK, let him fill in your tax form or just let him explain to you what is love. 😉

Life is not only about intelligence, but it’s also about relations that you will have with your family, your friends, your love(s), and your children. Making experiences of traveling, working, having children, enjoying life is not necessarily something in correlation with intelligence.

Thinking because you can answer well at some IQ tests makes you Superman is the best way to have it all wrong. IQ is like the body: you have to use it well to make great things and it’s not because you have facilities that you will be always on top; it’s all about work.

You have to make understand at your kids that being smart and/or strong is a gift, but a gift that you should train as much as possible. If you stay all your life alone without talking to anyone and making nothing of your day, it’s useless to have high IQ.

And whoever you are and whatever you’ve done, there always be someone who will do better than you. But if you’re kids is a real genius and that he’s done everything well so send him at Elon Musk and tell him to build a spaceship and some people on Earth really want to travel in space [Laughing].

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Chairman, Mensa France.

[2] Individual Publication Date: December 8, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/vogel-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Blair T. Longley (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/01

Abstract

Blair T. Longley is the Party Leader for the Marijuana Party of Canada. He discusses: regressive policies in the nation’s history regarding marijuana; responsibilities with public exposure; and those deserving more exposure.

Keywords: Blair T. Longley, Canadian Society, Cannabis, Marijuana Party of Canada.

An Interview with Blair T. Longley: Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What have been the most regressive policies in provincial, territorial, and national history from your perspective for the legalization and regulation of marijuana?

Blair T. Longley: The total criminalization of the cultivation of cannabis, which took effect in Canada in 1938, wiped out the hemp industries which could have grown hemp for food and fiber. We are living inside of Wonderland Matrix Bizarro Worlds, where everything has become as absurdly backward as possible, due to society actually being controlled by enforced frauds. Everything regarding the history of how hemp became marijuana, and thus, cannabis became completely criminalized, is but one of the tiny tips of an immense iceberg of integrated systems of legalized lies backed by legalized violence, which almost totally dominate Globalized Neolithic Civilization. The ruling classes, the pyramidion people in those entrenched social pyramid systems, are becoming increasingly psychotic psychopaths, while most of the people they rule over are matching that by becoming increasingly impotent political idiots. People who do not know anything but what their schools and the mass media tell them know nothing but bullshit, which they have been brainwashed to believe in their whole lives. They may be told relative truths about trivial facts, but otherwise they are massively LIED TO BY OMISSION regarding the most important facts, as well as generally misinformed about everything, in proportion to how important those things are. Again, the ways in which the schools and mass media, operated by professional hypocrites, have presented grossly disproportional and irrational risk analysis regarding the exaggerated harms and dangers of marijuana, simply symbolized the ways in which the vast majority of people were brainwashed to believe in bullshit, in ways which have become more and more scientific brainwashing, as manifested within the context of an oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, which has primarily applied progress in science and technology in order to get better at enforcing frauds, while adamantly refusing to become more genuinely scientific about itself.

The biggest bullies’ bullshit world views have been built into the basic structure of the dominate natural languages and philosophy of science, such that almost everyone thinks and communicates in ways which are absurdly backwards, and moreover, are tending to actually become exponentially more absurdly backwards, as the progress in physical science and technology continue to be applied through sociopolitical systems based upon being able to enforce frauds, which are thereby becoming exponentially more fraudulent. Since the most socially successful people living within systems based upon enforcing frauds are the best available professional hypocrites, there are no practically possible ways to prevent that from continuing to get worse, faster… Although the laws of nature are never going to stop working, and therefore, nothing that depends upon the laws of nature is going to stop working, natural selection pressures have driven the development of artificial selection systems to become based on the maximum possible dishonesties, which are not getting better in any publicly significant ways, but rather, are actually becoming exponentially more dishonest. Globalized Neolithic Civilization is headed towards series of psychotic breakdowns, a tiny component of which is the psychotic breakdown of pot prohibition.

2. Jacobsen: You have moderate exposure in the media. What responsibilities come with this public recognition?

Longley: The public opinions regarding the Marijuana Party tend to be similar to the rest of the systems of public opinions, which are based upon generation after generation being brainwashed to believe in the biggest bullies’ bullshit world views by their schools and mass media. The general public opinions of the Marijuana Party could hardly be lowered by anything that I could possibly do. In my view, the vast majority of Canadians, literally more than 99%, always behave like incompetent political idiots, (while the fraction of 1% that are the pyramidion people in those social pyramid systems are more competently malicious.) Inside that context, I tend to not want to volunteer to be a performing clown, who can be drafted into the narratives which are presented by the mass media. Meanwhile, I regard those people who have been made become more relatively famous by their greater mass media coverage publicity as being mainstream morons and reactionary revolutionaries.

While I may still somewhat entertain vain fantasies that I should promote more radical truths, including more radical hemp truths, from any overall objective point of view society has become too terminally sick and insane to recover from the degree to which that has become the case. One tiny manifestation of that are those ways that the “legalization” is currently indicated to become based on compromises with the same old huge lies, while more radical hemp truths are not expected to be able to change that. Therefore, “legalizing” marijuana now looks like it is headed toward becoming ridiculously restrictive regulations, which will actually amount to “Pot Prohibition 2.0” based on “Reefer Madness 2.0.”

3. Jacobsen: Who are activists, authors, bloggers, writers, and so on, that influence you, and deserve greater exposure?

Longley: I am not aware of any particular sources which I would unreservedly recommend. My opinions are due to sifting through vast amounts of information, such that what I have distilled is nothing like anything which was similar to what was originally presented in those sources. In my view, it is politically impossible for any publicly significant opposition to not be controlled. I am not aware of any “alternatives” that are more than “alternative bullshit.” The best one gets is relatively superficial analyses, which are correct on those levels, but which then tend to collapse back to the same old-fashioned bogus “solutions” based upon impossible ideals. It is barely possible to exaggerate the degree to which almost everyone takes for granted the DUALITIES of false fundamental dichotomies, and the related impossible ideals. I am not aware of any publicly significant “opposition” that is not controlled by the ways that they continue to almost completely take for granted thinking in those ways. (Of course, that includes the publicly significant groups that the mass media have most recognized as those who have campaigned to “legalize” marijuana.)

Ideally, we should go through series of intellectual scientific revolutions and profound paradigm shifts. Primarily that means we should attempt to better understand how human beings and civilization live as manifestations of general energy systems, and therefore, we should attempt to use more UNITARY MECHANISMS to better understand how human beings and civilization actually live as entropic pumps of environmental energy flows. However, I am not aware of anyone who is publicly significant that sufficiently does that, especially because going through such series of profound paradigms becomes like going through level after level of more radical truths, which amounts to going through the fringe, then the fringe of the fringe, and then the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, etc. … I present what I call the Radical Marijuana positions as being those Fringe Cubed positions, which are based upon attempting to recognize the degree to which almost everyone currently almost totally takes for granted thinking and communicating through the uses of the dominate natural languages and philosophical presumptions, which became dominate due to those being the bullshit which was backed up by bullies for generation after generation, for thousands of years.

Not only has civilization been based on thousands of years of being able to back up lies with violence, while progress in physical science has enabled those systems to become exponentially bigger and BIGGER, but also, those few who superficially recognize that then still tend to recommend bogus “solutions” which continue to be absurdly backwards, because they do not engage in deeper analysis regarding how and why natural selection pressures drove the development of artificial selection systems to become most socially successful by becoming the most deceitful and treacherous that those could possibly become. Since those are the facts, everything that matters most is becoming worse, faster … Within that context, the bogus “legalization” of marijuana, based upon recycled huge lies, is too little, too late, and too trivial to matter much. Rather, what is happening is that the Grand Canyon Chasms between physical science and political science are becoming wider and WIDER!

Human beings and civilization have developed in ways whereby they deliberately deny and misunderstand themselves living as entropic pumps of environmental energy flows in the most absurdly backward ways possible, while yet, almost everyone continues to take that for granted, which includes the degree to which the central core of triumphant organized crime, namely, banker dominated governments, are surrounded by layers of controlled “opposition” groups, which stay within the same bullshit-based frame of reference. There is almost no genuine opposition, but rather, the only publicly significant “opposition” is controlled by the ways that they continue to think and communicate using the dominate natural languages and philosophy of science, without being critical of those. Of course, that characterizes the controlled “opposition” groups, which have been campaigning to “legalize” marijuana. As those campaigns have become more mainstream, those campaigns have become less radical, and therefore, have tended to even more be able and willing to compromise with the same old recycled huge lies. Therefore, in general, one is watching the “legalization” of marijuana turn into a mockery of itself, whereby what is actually happening is becoming more and more absurdly backwards to what was originally being promoted by those who long ago were campaigning to try to “legalize” on the basis of promoting more radical hemp truths. Instead, “legalized” marijuana is being more and more forced back to fit inside the established monetary and taxation systems, which are almost totally based upon public governments enforcing frauds by private banks. The current news trends indicate that “legalized” marijuana is only happening INSIDE the systems that criminalized cannabis in the first place. Hence, overall, the campaigns to “legalize” marijuana are more and more being betrayed, such that what is most probably going to actually happen are sets of ridiculously restrictive regulations. (Of course, we will have to wait and watch to see what finally happens in those regards during the next couple of years. However, there are no good grounds to be genuinely optimistic about that at the present time.)

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: December 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/longley-three; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Blair T. Longley (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/22

Abstract

Blair T. Longley is the Party Leader for the Marijuana Party of Canada. He discusses: being the leader of the Marijuana Party of Canada; derivative policies; the advancement of society; important individuals; and the research on marijuana.

Keywords: Blair T. Longley, Canadian Society, Cannabis, Marijuana Party of Canada.

An Interview with Blair T. Longley: Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are the Leader of the Marijuana Party of Canada. What is the primary policy of the Marijuana Party of Canada?

Blair T. Longley: The Marijuana Party was primarily founded as a single issue party, based upon the related aspects of “legalizing marijuana.” The only founding policy beyond those related to “marijuana legalization” was to change the voting system, such that there would be better representation achieved than the existing first-past-the-post electoral systems, which tends to wipe out smaller parties, while possibly giving total power to the dominant minority.

Of course, I have always, without making any effort to do so, been riding along with the waves of events that were happening during the historical times and places where I happened to exist. Hence, it is consistent with my continuing to surf the waves of change that the current Liberal Party Canadian government is currently working upon both those issues, of “legalizing marijuana” and “electoral reform.”

2. Jacobsen: What derivative policies, which have details and acts as sub-clauses to the primary policy, follow from the primary policy?

Longley: That depends upon to what degree one is able and willing to accept and integrate the more radical hemp truths, that hemp is the single best plant on the planet for people, for food, fiber, fun, and medicine. Neolithic Civilization has always been based upon being able to enforce frauds. Within that overall context, marijuana laws are the single simplest symbol, and most extreme particular example, of the general pattern of social facts: only a civilization which was completely crazy, and corrupt to the core, could have criminalized cannabis.

3. Jacobsen: Do cults, ideologies, and religions restrict the advancement of society to greater technological, socio-cultural, and spiritual levels?

Longley: That is quite the hyper-complicated question! One of the first sociologists, Emile Durkheim, explained some of the various ways that paradigm shifts are achieved, which have been restated by many others, such as represented in these quotes from Gandhi & Schopenhauer: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” & “Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized: In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.”

Those patterns were documented happening over and over again by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Similarly, there is a famous quote from John Stuart Mill regarding how: “Yet it is as evident in itself as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is many, once general, are rejected by the present.”

Within that context, Globalized Neolithic Civilization is running out of enough time to be able to change enough to adapt. The facts are that sociopolitical systems based upon being able to enforce frauds are becoming exponentially more fraudulent, while there appears to be nothing else which is happening which is remotely close to being in the same order of magnitude of changes to be able to adapt to that happening, because Globalized Neolithic Civilization is the manifestation of the excessive successfulness of being controlled by applications of the methods of organized crime through the political processes, in ways which overall are manifesting as runaway criminal insanities. That society appears to have become too sick and insane to be able to recover from how serious that has become. Marijuana laws illustrated the ways that the repetitions of huge lies, backed by lots of violence, controlled civilization, despite that doing so never stopped those lies from being fundamentally false. Everything that Globalized Neolithic Civilization is doing is based upon the history of social pyramid systems of power, whereby some people controlled other people through being able to back up lies with violence. The history of successful warfare was the history of organized crime on larger and larger scales. Being able to back up deceits with destruction gradually morphed to become the history of successful finance based upon public governments enforcing frauds by private banks. It was within that overall context that it was possible for a whole host of other sorts of legalized lies to become backed by legalized violence, which included the example of criminalizing cannabis.

4. Jacobsen: Who are important individuals in the party of the aim of the legalization of marijuana apart from you – or general statements about the membership at large?

Longley: A registered political party can not exist without individual members. Each and every individual who agrees to become a registered member is vital to the overall existence of the party. After having 250+ members, during general elections, the party has to have 1 officially nominated candidate for election. The Marijuana Party operates in totally decentralized ways. Our candidates are practically in the same situation as independent candidates. Our electoral district associations are as autonomous as the elections laws allow them to be.

5. Jacobsen: What does the research state about the benefits and harms of marijuana – by any means of intake such as smoked, ingested, and so on?

Longley: The overall answer continues to be the same as the Royal Commission reported in 1972, that marijuana is the safest of drugs. The history of pot prohibition was always based upon huge lies, which grossly exaggerated the harmfulness of marijuana, which set of lies may be referred to as “Reefer Madness.” In my opinion, smoking marijuana is the worst way to consume cannabis. My view is that smoking should only be done ritually and ceremonially. Due to the history of the criminalization of cannabis, cannabis culture became similar to a slave society, within which context many people became proud of the relatively stupid social habits that they developed during those decades of prohibition. Cannabis should be food, first and foremost. Vapourization is a superior alternative to smoking.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 22, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/longley-two; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Blair T. Longley (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15

Abstract

Blair T. Longley is the Party Leader for the Marijuana Party of Canada. He discusses: background; influence on development; and early involvements in activism and politics prior to the Marijuana Party of Canada.

Keywords: Blair T. Longley, Canadian Society, Cannabis, Marijuana Party of Canada.

An Interview with Blair T. Longley: Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of culture, family, geography, language, and religion/irreligion, what is your background?

Blair T. Longley: I was born on the barbaric fringe of the British Empire, i.e., Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1950. I grew up in Dollarton, North Vancouver. In retrospect, it was sort of “frozen in history” when I was young. The natives had been genocidally wiped out by viral diseases, and then relegated to small reservations, many miles away from Dollarton. The area was only beginning to be developed when I was young. There were many miles of beaches and forests that I could explore around my home, where there were almost no other people. Those areas are developed now, such that it is no longer possible for me to go back “home.”

The community I grew up in was almost totally White Anglo Saxon Protestant (there were a few Catholics.) Up until the year 1971, when I was 21 years old, Dollarton had a clause in its property titles which explicitly stated that those properties could not be sold to anyone who was not Caucasian. Therefore, the elementary and high schools that I went to had zero “diversity,” as people would now think of that kind of multiculturalism. I grew up in a family that may be referred to as “third generation atheists,” inasmuch as for three generations nobody in my family had believed in any of the established religious dogmas.When I went through the academic and technical educations of the British Columbian schools systems I was taught to respect rational evidence of facts and logical arguments. In high school, I did best in science courses. Therefore, my primary ways of thinking were based on mathematical physics. My first philosophy was statistical materialism.

2. Jacobsen: How did this influence development?

Longley: When one pursues the prodigious progress made in mathematical physics, one learns about the history of scientific revolutions, whereby there were series of intellectual revolutions, and profound paradigms shifts. Those trends that follow from attempting to more seriously consider what mathematical physics is telling us about the “real” world. One finds that those more and more re-converge with ancient mysticism. I have spent several decades pursuing those convergences between mathematical physics and mysticism, with particular emphasis upon attempting to reconcile physical science with political science.

3. Jacobsen: What were your early involvements in activism and politics prior to the Marijuana Party of Canada?

Longley: My first participation in registered political activities was going to the founding convention of the Green Party of Canada in Ottawa, in 1983. In 1984, I became a Green Party candidate in the General Federal Elections, in order to help the Green Party become a registered party under the Canada Elections Act. At that time, my main concern was the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR, which became quite insane during the 1980s, and reached its most insane point in 1986.

(Of course, now, that situation after getting somewhat better for a while, has now become worse than it has ever been before.) Back at that time, the Green Party was tending to become more mainstream, and therefore, my kinds of radical politics were not approved of by the more mainstream members of the Green Party. That ended up with my also being endorsed as a Rhinoceros Party candidate on the last day of the nomination period, which made national news, due to my becoming a Green Rhino.

During the 1984 General Federal Elections, one of the most important turning points in my life took place when I attended an election expenses seminar given by Elections Canada official, where the political contribution tax credit was explained. I realized the awesome potential of that tax credit, and spent the next few decades attempting to realize that potential. I became a registered agent of the Rhinoceros Party, which enabled me to work on using the tax credit, as political experiments that enabled me to build the factual basis for a court case against the government of Canada regarding the uses of political contribution funds.

From 1982 to 1987, I was publicly cultivating cannabis plants in university family housing gardens, first on SFU’s campus, and then on UBC’s campus. During 1986 I engaged in substantial correspondence with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and some of his other ministers, regarding the criminalization of cannabis. In 1987 I was growing several dozen marijuana plants in the center of the family housing garden, in order to gain standing to challenge the constitutional validity of the marijuana laws.

However, when I went to court, the RCMP witness, crown prosecutor, and judge, conspired to make deliberate errors in laws, so that they could summarily acquit me, and therefore, not have to bother to look at the evidence nor listen to the legal arguments that I had prepared for that case. In other words, that court case ended in a completely goofy way. Since then, it has been repeated, over and over again, that Canadian courts were too corrupt to engage in a proper Charter of Rights examination of the original purpose and subsequent effects of the laws that criminalized cannabis.

After my own efforts had resulted in clearly demonstrating that was going to be the case, I stopped doing any more activism on that topic, but rather, devoted all my time and energy, from 1988 to 2000, in working on my court case against the Canadian governments regarding the political contribution tax credit. After I finally won that case, by proving that the government had been arrogantly dishonest about the legal used of that tax credit, in 2000, I attempted to interest all the other registered political parties in adopting my ideas.

NONE of the other registered parties were willing to adopt my ideas regarding the possible uses of that tax credit, EXCEPT the newly registered Marijuana Party. Therefore, the reason that I became associated with the Marijuana Party is that it was the ONLY registered party that was willing to attempt to realize the full potential of the political contribution tax credit.

In 2004, the Canada Elections Laws were changed in ways which deliberately decimated the Marijuana Party. After the Marijuana Party had been effectively destroyed by those changes in the Elections Laws, I became Party Leader, because there was nobody else who was willing and able to do so at that time. I primarily did so in order to continue to work on the political contribution tax credit potential, by finding ways to work around the changes in the Elections Laws which summarily criminalized most of what the Marijuana Party had been successfully doing from 2000 to 2003.

(That is what I continue to do now through authorizing autonomous Marijuana Party Electoral District Associations.) Becoming Party Leader enabled me to have another court case against the Canadian government regarding Elections Laws that made votes for big parties be worth about $2 per vote, per year, for the big political parties, while votes were worth nothing to smaller political parties. We originally won at trial, however, we lost under appeal in 2008, which effectively made sure that the Marijuana Party could not compete with the bigger political parties.

The big parties actually made money from participating in General Federal Elections, while the smaller parties went broke by attempting to do so. The Elections Laws are set up in every possible way to favour the big parties, while screwing the smaller parties. However, since the big parties also appoint the judges, the typical patterns are for the courts to uphold as constitutionally valid the laws regarding the funding of the political processes which accumulate to result in Canada NOT being a “free and democratic society,” but rather, being a runaway fascist plutocracy juggernaut. Overall, Canada is deteriorating from colonialism towards neofeudalism, while the vicious spirals of the funding of all facets of the political processes are the main factors driving that to happen…

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Mr. Longley.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Party Leader, Marijuana Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/longley-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Aynsley Pescitelli M.A., B.A. (First Class Hons.)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15

Abstract

Aynsley Pescitelli M.A., B.A. (First Class Hons.) is a doctoral candidate with some research into cyberbullying, transphobia, and homophobia. She discusses: cyberbullying; prevalence data; and transphobia and homophobia.

Keywords: Aynsley Pescitelli, cyberbullying, homophobia, transphobia.

An Interview with Aynsley Pescitelli M.A., B.A. (First Class Hons.)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You work on cyberbullying. What defines it?

Aynsley Pescitelli M.A., B.A.: My interest in the topic has always been on the groups that are understudied or have not previously been given a voice in the research literature. Both postsecondary students and LGBTQ+ persons fit into this research gap; the bulk of the work in this area continues to focus on elementary, middle, and high school populations, and students are examined in large-scale quantitative studies that either do not include LGBTQ+ students or include them as an afterthought or comparison point for non-LGBTQ+ individuals.

I was interested in adding rich, detailed, individual-level data about the experiences of LGBTQ+ postsecondary students to this area of research to examine how their experiences compared to younger samples and the existing limited information about postsecondary populations to hopefully start to fill that glaring gap in the literature.

2. Jacobsen: What ranges of prevalence exist throughout the world based on the best data available

Pescitelli: This is a tough question. In terms of the LGBTQ+ experience specifically (and more explicitly in the postsecondary arena), there really is not enough research to provide a clear answer to this question. There just has not been enough of a focus on LGBTQ+ students specifically, so incidence rates are either absent or tough to quantify due to missing data and problems with operationalization in large-scale datasets.

In terms of my own work I cannot really speak to this, since my study was a small-scale qualitative one and one of the criteria for inclusion was that participants had experienced cybervictimization. So, everyone in my sample had been cyberbullied in one form or another since starting college or university.

In terms of the general postsecondary population, as Chantal mentioned at the book launch, the rates vary greatly from study to study based on definitions employed and other study characteristics (e.g. who was sampled, what the research questions were, time of victimization (lifetime vs within a specified time), etc).

Even within the book, the rates vary greatly from chapter to chapter (ranging from 12.5% in the Chilean sample to over 50% in the chapter from France; other authors found rates somewhere in between). It certainly appears to be an issue that continues beyond secondary school, regardless of location, but the degree of cyberbullying varies quite a bit throughout the world (at least in terms of the studies conducted to date).

3. Jacobsen: What defines transphobia and homophobia? Why focus on these topics within the research on cyberbullying, as this seems niche subject matter?

Pescitelli: The definitions I employed in my study were as follows:

Homophobia is often referred to as a “fear or hatred or homosexuality and gays and lesbians in general” (Pickett, 2009, p. 93). It is also often used to explain orientation-based discrimination experienced by bisexual, pansexual, and questioning individuals (Blackburn, 2012; Conoley, 2008; Weiss, 2003).

While homosexuality and bisexuality relate to sexual orientation, transgender relates to gender roles and identities (Nagoshi et al., 2008). Transgender is likely often subsumed under the wider LGB category because it has only been distinguished from homosexuality within the past century (Pickett, 2009; Weiss, 2003). Transphobia is described as “fear and/or emotional disgust towards individuals who do not conform to society’s gender expectations” (Watjen & Mitchell, 2013, p. 135).

I think it is important to focus on populations that are understudied or have not previously been afforded research attention. I would not personally describe it as a niche, but I can understand it appears as such. The research that does exist points to LGBTQ+ individuals experiencing higher than average rates of both in-person and cyberbullying in postsecondary settings.

So that was what initially drew me to the research area; while this group may be a small one (depending on the institution or location), existing research at all levels of education indicated that this group experienced higher rates of online victimization when compared to their non-LGBTQ+ peers.

So, I wondered why, despite the persistence of this finding, there continued to be such a dearth of research in the area. Most of the studies that included LGBTQ+ students did so in what felt like an ad hoc fashion (e.g. they noticed there was a difference in experiences, but the sample of students within that group was too small for them to unpack those differences), where the difference was acknowledged but not expanded upon.

Or it was used as a simple comparison point among a large sample of students but, again, not really explained or properly unpacked. This led me to wonder what similarities and differences existed, and to want to focus an in-depth study on this under-researched group so that I could perhaps start to expand on some of the earlier findings that had little explanatory value

While I was not able to comment on overall incidence rates due to my small sample with a qualitative focus, I was able to learn a lot about the individuals I interviewed and their recent and historical experiences with homophobia and/or transphobia in online settings. They had all experienced cyberbullying of this nature at very high rates and in various locations.

This was not a new experience to any of them; while they continued to experience online bullying frequently, they also had experienced such victimization prior to starting their postsecondary studies. As I mentioned when we chatted in person, the forms of cyberbullying (e.g. modes of perpetration, location of bullying) did not seem to differ a great deal from non-LGBTQ+ individuals studied in related research, but there were some differences in the focus of the bullying, the perceived or known motives for the bullying, and some of the ways the bullying was experienced.

So certainly, many similarities, but some unique factors that lead me to believe that a one-size-fits-all approach to combating cyberbullying might not work to eliminate all instances of online homophobia and transphobia. So, I think more research needs to be conducted with various groups (including members of the LBGTQ+ community) to determine if there are specialized needs or differences in the ways they experience online victimization if such actions are ever to be fully addressed.

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Aynsley.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Ph.D. Candidate, Criminology, Simon Fraser University.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/pescitelli; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Catherine Broomfield (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08

Abstract

Catherine Broomfield is the Executive Director of iHuman Youth Society. She discusses: the narratives of iHuman; belief systems and ways of life; initiatives for 2018/19; ways to become involved; and other organizations.

Keywords: Catherine Broomfield, Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society, Indigenous, youth.

An Interview with Catherine Broomfield: Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Before I touch on the topic of belonging, I have observed something in life. People who have the self-worth void. That perpetual feeling of lack. One group will go into the path of not really knowing what to do with themselves and their negative feelings.

Another group become super high achievers. But they hit a wall. Because this stops working in terms of dealing with the fundamental emotional and self-esteem issues that they might be harbouring. It is a reaction as a driver, but an unhealthy driver.

Does that path come forward in narratives through iHuman or elsewhere?

Broomfield: Honestly, I can only speak to observing the youth here, not those who do not come here. There is an observation that some people are able to use their early life as a motivator. Yet, that still has its limits. I think that’s true.

There are so many barriers, deficits, and challenges that the young people at iHuman come to us with; that’s why they come to iHuman is actually the belonging, which is expressed by their peers, and out in the community.

It is our street credibility. It is the word of mouth to say, “Hey, come here. I found a place where it is safe. People know my name. They know what I’m up to. Let me introduce you to iHuman.” Maybe, the belonging is the first route to being at iHuman and to us being given the gift of trust by the youth.

Trust is so invaluable. It is risky to be at an organization, to share your story, acknowledge that you need help. At iHuman, they recognize peers’ similarities in the traumas that they’ve faced. Also, their experience of being somewhere safe is in some ways unnerving.

iHuman is an experience in belonging. It is a gateway in. We have a guiding principle: we are relational. The relationship with the youth is the driver of the organization. It is not something that we compromise on. Therefore, we do things differently.

We look to the youth to tell us, “How would you solve the problem? How would you do it?” We build what they want us to build. For example, the way in which a meeting, sharing your story can feel safe and so on.

2. Jacobsen: Youth live in a context with parents and grandparents with trauma. That trauma coming from formal institutions within a nation. Those, basically, get passed on as avoidance stories, “Do not get involved in that institution. Distrust it.”

You mentioned earlier on the Residential schools as well as the ‘60s scoop. With regards to the Residential school system, it is 150,000 kids for over a century. It was both the mandate of the Government of Canada and the Christian religious sects in the country.

I know there’s an admixture now. Because I note that there are Indigenous spiritual beliefs around Creator and creation. There are also Indigenous Christian beliefs. It is a new phenomenon. But it is a certain form of reconciliation.

There are new Native American and Indigenous theologians cropping up, who work to reconcile the Indigenous spiritual beliefs and their Christianity. There are others who reject the Indigenous spiritual beliefs and something enforced through family lineage with Christian belief heritage.

So, youth, not necessarily a belief in a Creator or not – Indigenous or Christian – but a kind of cultural milieu that comes with both, coming in without a belief in either of those.

Do you try to bring back some of those beliefs or work with the youth where they’re at? They don’t want that belief system in their manner of being, in their way of life, moving into the future.

Broomfield: We work from a place of where those youths are at. Not only in the spiritual sense but holistically, “Where are they at emotionally? Where are they at intellectually? Where are they socially?” We are providing a space for that exploration, those realizations, or expressions of needs to be shared.

From that, we are individualizing an approach for the young person, which may include our creative studios and spaces that we have. It would be both from an art as therapy approach or art as an expression for creativity.

It could also be that the young person is interested in our caring services, which would be more focus on the basic needs, e.g., mental health working in partnership with the local health unit that comes and works with the social workers.

Or the other way we weave all this together is through the authenticity pillar of our portfolio. We, as we say, “Keep it real.” It could be from a cultural safety perspective. We are offering to the young person an opening to reconnect and re-identify with their culture.

However, [Indigenous cultural opportunities] is not something that we actively offer because we are a non-Indigenous organization working primarily with Indigenious young people. We invite exploration through role-modelling. It is through the youth who will identify, acknowledge, or ask questions to be able to learn and to understand, to talk things through.

Because you’re right.

There could be a mix of shame, guilt, resentment, exclusion. There are many layers there. It, certainly, isn’t something that can be generalized. That every person comes to that question in a different way. They will seek out the answers in a different way.

We are here to encourage or support or provide something if we can; if not, then that’s the need for a provision of a referral in order to help this young person find answers.

3. Jacobsen: Moving into 2018/19, what are some of the initiatives that you’re hoping to build on or found for iHuman?

Broomfield: We have recently gone through a weeklong closure at iHuman. The youth acknowledged that we need some training. We spent some time looking at the values and principles. We have not examined them, since 23/24 years ago. We wanted to examine them.

Do these still fit for us? We have trained around attachment theory and how this may manifest in behaviours that we see in youth, and in us as staff because we’re are fallible humans too. We have trigger points and so on.

How can we recognize when we cross that boundary of being here as an advocate to a young person versus satisfying our own ego or some other need?

It has to be about what we do for the kids and what they need. One of the things that we are looking to continue out of the week is implementing a review of our entire programming structure using social design and how the outcomes we’re after can be implemented in the best possible way in order to get to those outcomes.

Something that we also learned and are exploring is Principles Focused Evaluation. How can we use the principles of the organization to evaluate the quality of the impact on young people and to share the story? For the next few years, we will look under the rocks of what we do: is it useful? Does it honour the youth and our principles?

It is to evaluate ourselves and make ourselves efficient. It is to get some funders and resource streams to see what we do here is unique and provides for young people who come here. To understand the value and appreciate how transformative it is that these young people attain goals that they have.

That is the aim of us being here. Society has already invested millions of dollars in each of these children/youth: education, the court system, police, and so on. All these institutional structures are pouring money. But that is a model about the negative and the punitive approach.

We are a strengths-based approach. What are the gifts this person has, if they can see it, they can go back to the sense of purpose and worth? They make the journey with self-affirmation rather than some outside source saying, “You’re only good enough for this.” ‘This’ being jail, incarceration of some other kind, wandering the streets homeless or dead.

There is so much that these young people have to share if given the opportunity. They can turn down a different path and then have a different outcome. They are contributing to reconciliation in a lived way. They can have healthy families with their kids and break the cycle.

The violence and intimate partner violence and these things; it starts with giving young people a platform where they can work on some things while having role models.

4. Jacobsen: What are some ways to be involved with iHuman?

Broomfield: We have opportunities for volunteers, champions out in the community. We are selective. Because we want to make sure safe people come here, for the volunteers and the youth. We have board positions available, staff positions available, and so on.

We need to be sure people connected to iHuman know where these young people are coming from. What brought them to this situation? There are structures and institutions in society that have helped create this situation. So, it is understanding that.

It is being aware, fundamentally, that there are things wrong in society and communities. People informing themselves about our national history around the genocide of the Indigenous people. Our failure in honouring the treaties that were signed. It is educating yourself about that.

That is a start. If you know, it will be less likely to happen again. That, in itself, will be positive.

5. Jacobsen: Any other organizations? Also, any books or authors who write on this topic for a lay public in a clear, concise but educated way?

Broomfield: Any organization that is doing good work. That fits with your values; you can align with them. That is a good use of anyone’s time to support in the community. In terms of writers and researchers, I think there are a number of Indigenous writers, who we can look to and their stories and narratives.

Richard Wagamese is an author I’d recommend especially the book “One Story. One Song”. “Speaking my Truth: Reflections on Reconciliation & Residential School” is a collection of stories well worth reading.

Also, there are a couple of textbooks that touch on relevant aspects to iHuman’s work. A text was written by a colleague, Peter Smyth “Working with High-Risk Youth: A Relationship-based Practice Framework”.

While I don’t like or use the term “high-risk youth” because it isn’t the youth that is high-risk it’s their behaviours, their choices, their associates and networks; the book is descriptive of this demographic or this population.

Peter has worked within the sector for many years – he knows what he’s talking about. The book is trauma-informed and strengths-based. Another is “Learning Social Literacy” by Joyce Bellous & Jean Clinton.

Anything by Brené Brown – I especially like “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead”.

6. Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time, Catherine.

Broomfield: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate our conversation. Usually, it is not the case where you get reciprocal conversation. I appreciate that. Thank you, too.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 8, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/broomfield-two; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Gissou Nia

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08

Abstract

Gissou Nia is the Strategy Director of Purpose. She discusses: family and personal background; interest in world politics; and religion as a force for good and religion as a force for bad.

Keywords: executive director, Gissou Nia, international relations, law, politics, Purpose, religion.

An Interview with Gissou Nia: Strategy Director, Purpose[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family background and personal background – geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?

Gissou Nia: I am Iranian. I am Iranian-American. I was born in the US. Usually, people of my age were born in Iran after the Revolution and made their way out during the Iran-Iraq War.

We wanted to move back to the country when I was young. But it was during the war. In the end, we decided it was best to stay in the US. My work has been focused on Iran and looking at the human rights situation in Iran.

I grew up in the US. I have since then lived in many places and live here. Nothing remarkable in terms of upbringing [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Nia: I went to law school because the people doing the most impactful human rights work were attorneys. I got my J.D. I worked in the Hague and worked war crimes and crimes against humanity trials for many years.

While there, there was a disputed election in Iran, in June 2009. I found myself unable to think about anything but the unfolding situation there. The fact that there was a peaceful protest and then there was the violent crackdown on those protestors, who were simply asking for their votes to count in an election – in free and fair elections.

That was the extent of those demands. Those demands were not taken seriously and were, instead, met with violence. That left an impression on me. Twitter was a new platform. It was the first example of people organizing on Twitter discussing what was happening on the ground in Farsi tweets and English tweets.

I was gaining a sense of what was happening on the ground. I realized the skills I gained in The Hague in terms of investigating human rights abuses, preparing an evidentiary case to established grave human rights violations.

All that could be really helpful in the Iran context. Because I spoke the language. It could be helpful in gathering the evidence and preparing dossiers, essentially, against perpetrators of human rights violations there.

That motivated me wanting to work in Iran-specific work. I did that for 6 years. More recently, I have been working on refugee and migrant issues. That came out of the Iran work.

In the sense that a lot of individuals I would interview, a lot of the Iranians I would interview about human right abuses that they were subjected to while in Iran had fled Iran and were living in Iraq, Turkey, and Malaysia, wherever Iranians do not need a visa.

It is where folks do not need to seek asylum or be in the UNHCR process to get refugee status and be resettled in a new country. Being in that experience, it really showed me the gaps in the refugee resettlement process.

The fact that so few people who are seeking protection are afforded that ability to be resettled elsewhere and to escape violence & persecution. That motivated me. That field experience with Iranian refugees made me want to look globally and holistically at the people and helping them find resettlement throughout the entire journey.

2. Jacobsen: You lived in Iran shortly but also travelled around the world quite a bit. Did the travel around the world influence the international, global perspective and interest in world politics?

Nia: For sure, there are different labels for it, like Third Culture Kid. When you’re a product of East and West, you are going to not view things as black and white. I think there is a growing sense of that among everybody, especially with the fact that more and more of us are digital native.

They will be exposed to the world based on what they see online. It is different than two decades ago, where there would be real barriers to exploring that. When you’re the product of different cultures and speaking different languages – and fluent in that in-between space or acting as a bridge between cultures; it is going to shape you, no matter what.

You will notice people are very similar regardless of where they come from. It sounds cliche, but there is so much more that we have in common than different. Unless you’re intimately familiar with it.

It can be hard to understand. Anybody who grows as a “Third Culture Kid” gets a very innate sense. In my particular case, I am the product of two governments that have for the duration of my life been hostile to one another.

That influences my perspective in terms of seeing people as separate from the government. That is not always the case in the way people view different countries and people within them.

Oftentimes, they see them synonymous with who the rulers are, or this somehow speaks to the character of the people. That is even less so in countries where the leaders are not democratically elected.

They are not seen as representative of the people because the people did not express the will to vote them in via the ballot box. We shouldn’t view the people of the country through what the leaders decide to do or not to do.

That has been impressed upon me because the two countries that I am a product of. Certainly, if everyone around the world viewed Americans as synonymous with Donald Trump, it would make one half of the population unhappy.

It is similar to no other country’s people wanting to be viewed that way.

3. Jacobsen: In terms of looking at these two governments, religion influences politics in different ways. Looking at these two countries that have different majority religious groups, and the different forms in which religion influences politics, what do you note in terms the ways religion can be a force for good in terms of politics as well as a force for bad?

Nia: That is an interesting question. Obviously, in the case of Iran, Iran is a theocracy, so religious platitudes are written into the law. Where, in the US, it is influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition but, of course, is secular. It is a secular democracy.

That feels different what is official policy versus what is done in practice. The thing that I think is distinct about the US, which I think we’re all aware of, is how it may differ culturally than states in Northern Europe, for example.

It appears to be relevant, in the US, if somebody who is running for office is a person of faith; whereas, I don’t know how relevant that is in Norway, for example. I do think there is a bit of a distinction there.

There is certainly much more that is ascribed to morality in the US, personal morality – how somebody conducts themselves in their personal lives. Personally, we are seeing this on display with the Kavanaugh hearings and what he is doing.

It wades into the criminal. So, that is a separate thing. But it speaks to how important that is to our evaluations of who should be in positions of power in this country. I think there is a deeply influential stream of religion, culturally, in terms of how we do politics here in the US.

So, that is not enshrined in the law. It is relevant. It is certainly relevant. As a force for good, in the work that I do with refugee and migrant populations, I think one huge target audience in our work has been communities of faith, actually.

Because, although, members of some of those communities in the US might, actually, vote for conservative candidates in office who, sometimes – it depends, are more often supporting policies that restrict the number of newcomers coming to the US.

Although, they might support those policies. These folks that are voting for those candidates for other reasons might be welcoming to refugees. They feel that their faith calls upon them to serve those who are in need of protection.

You see, certainly, among Catholics who believe in this right to work and freedom of movement philosophy and this idea of providing for one’s family. You see these strong currents. Some of the most activated audiences, engaged populations, and motivated to deeply help, have been those from a faith background.

I think religion can be harnessed as a force for good. But any time it is used for an exclusionary purpose or used to divide, I think that is where we run into trouble.

4. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Gissou.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Strategy Director, Purpose.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 8, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/nia; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

An Interview with Tim Moen (Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. He discusses: Bill C-51, Bill C-13, or the TPP; overarching mission; proper limit and role of government; vision for Canada; principles; activists, authors, bloggers, writers, and so on, that influence him and deserve greater exposure; and philosophers and books that most influenced him.

Keywords: Libertarianism, Libertarian Party of Canada, Tim Moen.

An Interview with Tim Moen: Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Would the Libertarian Party of Canada replace Bill C-51, Bill C-13, or the TPP (in part or whole) with other bills or trade partnerships or repeal them then leave things with those actions?

Tim Moen: Yes, we would repeal all of these.

A proper international trade agreement is between two people or businesses that agree to trade with each other.

Of course, governments who are beholden to special interest groups (i.e. ideologues, a business lobby, union lobby) make it their business to introduce trade barriers and interfere with these agreements and so then other governments retaliate with economic and trade policy to punish unfavourable trade conditions for their people.

My approach would be to work on eliminating all trade barriers that were in my power to eliminate so that Canadians could trade with whomever they want to be unencumbered by the Canadian government.

I would then lean on other governments to remove the trade barriers they put in place that make it difficult for Canadians to trade with citizens in their nation.

2. Jacobsen: What is the overarching mission of the Libertarian Party of Canada?

Moen: Our overarching mission is to limit government and decrease the amount of institutionalized initiatory violence being used against the very people government is supposed to protect form initiatory violence.

3. Jacobsen: What is the proper limit and role of government?

Moen: The proper role of government is to protect individuals from initiatory violence. The government gets its authority delegated from us (in theory) and since no human has the right to initiate violence then we can’t properly delegate that right to government, but we do have the right to defend ourselves and others and so it is reasonable to delegate that role to government.

Not everyone is equipped or competent to use violence to defend themselves and so this is the role government takes on as well as dispute resolution.

Anytime a person is in an involuntary position of power the proper thing to do is to eliminate the need for that involuntary relationship by empowering others. As a parent, I want fully actualized children that aren’t yoked to me through dependence as they enter their adult years. I want our relationship to transition to a voluntary one.

I personally think that the future of mankind will look very different and that our relationships with institutions like the government will eventually transition from involuntary to voluntary. I think it is limited thinking to imagine that there are some services that can only ever be provided through involuntary means.

4. Jacobsen: What is the vision for Canada through the Libertarian Party of Canada?

Moen: We are not utopians, we don’t have a central plan or vision for Canadians. Our vision would be for a Canada that is full of people who are free to pursue the destiny and vision they choose for their lives.

Amazing positive unexpected consequences occur when people are free and it is our belief that Canada will flourish in a way that we can’t imagine or predict.

5. Jacobsen: What other principles besides freedom contribute to, or would contribute to, the flourishing of Canadians within the Libertarian Party of Canada’s view?

Moen: Beyond the obvious benefits of having an economy on steroids, there would be immense social benefits. Liberty implies that you are self-owned and so you own both the positive and negative effects of your actions in this world.

People often forget that liberty doesn’t just denote freedom but also accountability. If you do harm it is your job to make things right. So, for example, we believe justice ought to focus on restoration of victims by criminals as well as protecting society.

Personal accountability also means that you have a greater sense of duty to your fellow citizens. That if you have a neighbour that falls on hard times you help them out as opposed to outsourcing their care to a soulless institution.

More closely connected communities and families, more charity, a greater sense of civic pride, an internal locus of morality and control, and far less anxiety are all things that I believe emerge in a culture that embraces liberty.

6. Jacobsen: Who are activists, authors, bloggers, writers, and so on, that influence you, and deserve greater exposure?

Moen: On various liberty subjects I recommend Murray Rothbard, Frederic Bastiat, Ron Paul, Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Nassim Taleb, Peter Jaworski, Tom Woods, Jeffrey Tucker, Stefan Kinsella, Dr. Carl Hart, Butler Shaffer, John Taylor Gatto, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith.

A few authors that have been particularly helpful to me in my personal development are Marshall Rosenberg, Michael Shermer, and Tony Robbins.

7. Jacobsen: What philosophers and books most influence you? Why?

Moen: Ayn Rand’s writings had a big influence on me. The logic and precision of her writing and ideas helped me understand the reasoning from first principles. Thinking from principles instead of intuitions has helped me develop my political philosophy.

Marshall Rosenbergs’ book “Nonviolent Communication” had a huge impact on my personal life and relationships. I see this book as taking the principle of non-aggression and applying it to communication.

Being able to engage in conversations, not as battles of domination, but as a way of having our needs mutually met had huge benefits in both strengthening relationships with the people I love but also being able to communicate more effectively with audiences and constituents.

8. Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Mr. Moen.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 8, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/moen-four; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-13

Pith 109: Deardry tad angleeyb

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/13

Deardry tad angleeyb: Quadskreeliterall, a tat in tale on tit an’ late elated detail railed depair non despair ainonannon; non.

See “V”.

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2023-02-13

Pith 108: Pietry

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/13

Pietry: Berdin the coup d’etat of day tete-e-tete; a bard in the bed rebelling against the day with the night, bed on back.

See “Joyouc”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 107: Departed and Parted

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Departed and Parted: Neither truly gone for the dead nor a forever night for the living, apart; distance is psychology.

See “Re-parted”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 106: Prayer

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Prayer: Signification of ignorance or desperation in the face of reality’s existentialist vicissitudes; delusion.

See “Pain and Unknown”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 105: Sequince

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Sequince: Two tatsy too patsy to Gatsby; wHence Soonsdie, Moonshigh, Truesdie, Weddedsknigh, Thirstdie, Frightwhy, Satyousdie.

See “Line”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 104: We Are Legion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

We Are Legion: Bijection, injected surjection, surjected injection: bijected; distributed mentation and valence.

See “self all in selves”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 103: Externalities

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Externalities: Is all Euclidean, not just math now? Where are we, The Orthogonal, to find non-local place in spaces?

See “Time, due time”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 102: Blasphemy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Blasphemy: To tell truth, forsooth, to cut covenants, revenants, to desacralize, realize; to kill God Almighty, rightly.

See “Profanity”.

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2023-02-12

Pith 101: Kiss Remembered

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/02/12

Kiss remembered: As softening as the sight of Winter snowflakes falling, aimless, on Fall’s roses’ last, fallen, petals.

See “Enamored”.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Catherine Broomfield (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

Abstract

Catherine Broomfield is the Executive Director of iHuman Youth Society. She discusses: family and personal background; mentors; first work in the non-profit world; touching stories in the non-profit world; situations and difficulties of youth; finding; iHuman Youth Society; reasons for lack of purpose in youth; big negative effects happening to some vulnerable youth; and self-efficacy and self-esteem concerns manifesting in youth.

Keywords: Catherine Broomfield, Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society, Indigenous, youth.

An Interview with Catherine Broomfield: Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family background? What was personal background?

Catherine Broomfield: I was born in England and immigrated to Canada in the mid-1970s. My parents, younger siblings, and I arrived in the dead of a winter snowstorm. It was a big transition, to a new country.

2. Jacobsen: When it comes to community-oriented work? Were there pivotal mentors who inspired you?

Broomfield: Not specifically that I can think of, except, I had the experience of leaving family, being adrift in terms of having no family network other than my own immediate one, e.g., no aunties and uncles. It made me more in tune with the needs of others, more in need of the community, and always being someone who is a helper and a doer.

It led its way into the non-profit world.

3. Jacobsen: What was some of the first work while in the non-profit world?

Broomfield: My first job was as an executive director for a boys and girls club in Alberta. I have been involved in non-profit activities through sports events like Winter Games, Alberta Summer Games.

These were community engagement roles I had been involved in. Then I stepped away from them for quite a few years. I did some GIS mapping work, marketing. Working at the university, I coordinated international exchanges and worked with international students and post-secondary schools.

4. Jacobsen: In the experience in the non-profit world, what were some of the stories that you found touching?

Broomfield: In my experience with the girls and boys club as the first non-profit, there was a lot of interest and need by the young people in the community in which I was working, to have opportunity, to be introduced to new things, which they, otherwise, would not have been able to experience.

Given the economic situation of their families, it was an opportunity to introduce those young people to experiences, which they wouldn’t have otherwise. Secondly, to support a community/sense of belonging for the young people who came regularly, who shared learning and opportunities with one another?

I do not have a specific story from back then other than what many of the young people expressed about how they felt coming to the Club every day.

Now at iHuman, there are similarities to that earlier experience though there are 25 years between them. Young people still looking to fit in and belong somewhere. Still need a sense of purpose, identity and self-worth.

I’ve had many touching experiences of young people sharing their realizations and successes like getting their children back from out of children’s services care, anniversaries for sobriety, getting the first place or finding out they’re going to be parents for the first time, getting accepted for school or job.

These are everyday milestones in life and what is touching is that the youth identify iHuman as the place where they come first to share their news. This tells me we’ve created a space where a young person feels valued and witnessed and that’s about as touching as it can get.

5. Jacobsen: When it comes to some of the statistical data about parenting, internationally, we rank high in terms of single parent homes. Those kids have a harder time. What are some of the situations and difficulties for some of the kids coming into it?

Broomfield: I was, myself, a teenager mother. At the time, going through university, I was a single parent with a 2-year-old. I was working 2 jobs. After I graduated, I was still working and parenting alone. When my son was7-8 I had to make a difficult decision to take a contract job in the North and send my son to his auntie’s while I did that job. Single parents and their children make a lot of sacrifices in order to survive.

Certainly, I can appreciate the experience from both sides. Because my son was in daycare while I was running a program for other youngsters whose parents were also working full time and could not afford daycare.

There were times during that job when my son came with me.

He participated alongside the other children. We did things over the summer months, where we were doing camping trips and outings around Alberta, Drumheller for example. There is and continues to be a dilemma for parents who are needing to work but also wanting their children to have meaningful, safe activities for their children to participate in. Single parenting is not an easy situation. I think most people are trying to make the best of it that they can.

That experience [single parenting] certainly lends itself to the work that I do with iHuman. The youth that are here. They have experienced a lot of trauma, whether that be primarily because of the youth being Indigenous people or otherwise such as familial or high-risk situations.

Indigenous intergenerational trauma is based on the erasure of culture. For the youth, it is a loss of identity and sense of belonging and sense of purpose and self-worth. This is why these are the outcomes we’re trying to support youth through iHuman to achieve and reconnect the young person to those things.

I am not saying the experience of all single-parent families is why young people end up needing a place like iHuman for support. It is common, however, that there is a breakdown of a relationship in the family.

For the Indigenous youth, there is intergenerational legacies; addiction, gang affiliation, and so on. It is really complex. It sets people feeling as if they have no place to be.

No sense of place. Therefore, a person becomes more attracted to [belongingness]. They go to where they can find it, e.g., drugs, affiliation with gangs. They are looking to fill a need.

And unfortunately, there are people who are there who will fill it, even if it is not healthy.

6. Jacobsen: How did you find yourself iHuman?

Broomfield: It is a combination of the universe [Laughing]…

Jacobsen: …[Laughing]…

Broomfield: …I had a crisis in my personal life, “What am I doing? What am I working for?” I heard about an organization that needed an executive director who could make a commitment for several years. Someone who desired to help and support young people who do not have services and supports.

I realized have those skills. It seemed like a good fit. My values align with the values of the youth and the agency. Being on board, being a leader for this organization is a natural alignment for me.

7. Jacobsen: In connection to some of the difficulties some of the youth face, one experience stands out to me. The purpose void of youth. That’s key to unlocking the door to meaning in life, to get some meaning from life.

What are the factors that building into the lack of purpose?

Broomfield: I am speaking as an observer, obviously. It is not my experience. It is the youths’ experience. So, it is my interpretation of what I see or what they express. I think the key factor is the erasure of Indigenous culture.

The young people here have nothing to tether to. Because of factors stemming from policies such as Residential schools, ‘60s scoop. Those activities of the government have eroded or outright devastated the community.

So, the current generation of young people are seeing their parents and grandparents struggle with addiction, mental health, poverty, lack of employment, lack of education or skills.

Then that is what they observe; if you don’t see others having a purpose or being able to work towards a goal and accomplish a goal, then approaching life this way is something foreign to you. That is an experience of the many of the youth to not have the role modelling.

Then they don’t even know that it is something that is missing, or even know how to describe it. At iHuman, we ask, “What is your purpose? Why do you think you’re here? What is a path for you?” It is often something the youth have not thought of.

Thinking about these things requires being vulnerable. And for iHuman youth to be vulnerable is dangerous because it means you’ll probably end up being exploited in some way.

They have the same dreams as other young people, “I want a car, job, children. I want a family. I want a house with a fence,” but it is not something that they have seen modelled for them.

To have that [purpose] identified for them to see, it is an unknown to them.

8. Jacobsen: What are some of the other big effects on some of the youth?

Broomfield: Many have not been in school for a long time. Their experiences within any institutional structure tend to be critical and traumatic. They may have struggled with reading, literacy, numeracy, and so on.

They may be at the principal’s office or in the hallway, or at the desk doing little, because the engagement isn’t there. People talk about them. Being critical against them. They feel stupid. This is how they speak about their experience in school.

So, the opportunity or chance to leave school becomes a relief, I think. A sad byproduct though is it also fractures the opportunity to dream or think, “What can I do with this subject for my life? I really like that subject in school. Maybe, I will be a marine biologist.”

The environment where that stimulation can happen, is gone. You have one less environment where the young person is reinforced as being valuable, or as having done something good. The lack of that; they will seek this in some other way.

It tends to be the ripe environment for people waiting to take advantage of them in some way or other. It is “here, I will befriend you.” The youth are looking for it, the connection. All of our human needs are based on the connection; it is hardwired into us.

If we do not find this in good environments, then we will seek this out in unhealthy ones.

9. Jacobsen: Not only the education gap but these kids will also have self-efficacy and self-esteem concerns. How will those manifest?

Broomfield: I think, again, because of the environment that many of the youth have been experiencing. Those histories and legacies of trauma passed from generation to generation. They could be seen scientifically in terms of attachment theory.

If a young person does not attach healthily with a parent or caregiver, the strategies that they’ve used as an infant in order to get their needs met; those strategies carry forward in life. If you have not been able to have a safe and caring bond as a child, when you find those, it can feel foreign.

“This person wants something from me”; you can also feel not good enough. Even if you have goals and dreams, you can feel, “I am not good enough to have those.” It is common to see self-sabotage when youth find those opportunities or opportunities come their way.

The identity, purpose, and belonging, they are so innately tied to what the youth need. That they do not even know it. We’re trying to support them, encourage them, and show the youth that those are things that they can find in themselves and use the capacity to then go where they want to go in life.

It is not necessarily something that they have in life. You can find a sense of belonging at iHuman and elsewhere. You can find a sense of purpose. You can explore. You can gain strength and power.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Executive Director, iHuman Youth Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/broomfield-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Dr. Katherine Bullock

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/09

Abstract

Dr. Katherine Bullock is the Chair of the Islamic Society of North America-Canada and Lecturer at the University of Toronto. She discusses: family background regarding culture, geography, language, and religion; personal life and upbringing in the early years; first woman Chair of the Islamic Society of North America – Canada; the next generation of Muslim women leaders in Canada; Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes (2007); prejudice and bigotry; freedom of religion; the perceptions of the capabilities and roles of women; advancement and empowerment of women within the Canadian Islamic communities; prevention of those; some women Muslim scholars representative of the future and current leadership of Muslim women in Canada; and recommended books or organizations.

Keywords: Chair, Islam, Islamic Society of North America-Canada, Katherine Bullock, Lecturer, University of Toronto.

An Interview with Dr. Katherine Bullock: Chair, Islamic Society of North America-Canada; Lecturer, the University of Toronto[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is family background regarding culture, geography, language, and religion?

Dr. Katherine Bullock: I was born in Australia to an Anglo heritage. I was raised in the Anglican Church and attended the Presbyterian Ladies College for high school. In Australia, the PLC is part of the United Church. I think it’s different in the US/Canada.

2. Jacobsen: How did this build into personal life and upbringing in the early years for you? When did Islam become the proper way of life for you?

Bullock: The Church, and especially the all-girls high school, instilled some very important values in me, which I recognize today as also being Islamic – respect for others, commitment to excellence in work, the importance of family and community, being resilient and persistent through difficulties and hardship, and living an ordered and disciplined life. I converted to Islam in the 2^nd year of my Ph.D. studies at the University of Toronto.

3. Jacobsen: You are the first woman Chair of the Islamic Society of North America – Canada and were its Executive Director of Education, Media, and Community Outreach. What tasks and responsibilities come with these stations?

Bullock: I was the Executive Director of Education, Media and Community Outreach for a couple of years in 2004. That position no longer exists. As the Chair, the main task and responsibility are to see to the proper running of the board and to be the main point of contact with the Executive Director.

The board deals with ensuring legal compliance, setting the organization’s policies, strategic visioning and planning, and financial policies and budgeting.

4. Jacobsen: How might this inspire the next generation of Muslim women leaders in Canada?

Bullock: Hopefully just seeing a woman in this position will inspire another woman to imagine that possibility for herself. Although we’ve been a bit busy with all the duties I previously mentioned, I hope to establish a women’s group that can contribute to leadership development before my term expires.

5. Jacobsen: You authored a number of books with some emphasis on Muslim women in particular. In Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes (2007), what were the main questions, the central thesis, and the answer to the questions within the framework of the thesis of the text?

Bullock: Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil was born directly of my experience of converting to Islam and starting to wear hijab. I received so many unexpected negative comments from people around me, from strangers on the subway, to colleagues in my department where I was pursuing graduate studies.

I couldn’t understand why my friends and I had such a positive view on wearing the hijab and yet it is viewed so negatively by the wider society. I decided to investigate the origins of the Western notion of hijab as oppression and to compare that with Muslim women’s own perspectives and opinions.

6. Jacobsen: Muslims and other Canadian citizens undergo undue prejudice and bigotry. At times, this can include scapegoating and becoming targets of cynical political rhetoric or disproportionately negative media coverage, as far as I can observe.

Ordinary religious and non-religious people of conscience, typically, are appalled by this behaviour by politicians and others to demonize minority sectors of the Canadian population. First question, what is the source of this xenophobia and ethnic-nationalist hatred of the other and, in particular, Muslim women (and men) in Canada?

Bullock: First of all, I want to thank you and others like you who can see through the smear campaigns and for reaching out to gain more understanding. Muslims really need allies like that. I believe that the source of this xenophobia is actually quite complex.

It involves a sense of fear of loss of status and place; some white/Anglo/Franco nationalists feel that immigration is pushing them out of ‘their” society, and will change its values for the worse.

Second, I believe anti-Muslim prejudice is deeply rooted in Western cultural discourses. We can trace negative portrayals as far back as the eighth century when Christendom feared Islam as a Christian heresy.

Some thought Muhammad had wanted to be Pope and failed, then breaking off to found a rival and schismatic group. While we now live in a secular world, many of the early themes mentioned in these folktales are still around, such as barbaric men and oppressed women.

They passed on from Christian writers to missionaries, to colonizers, to secular publics.

7. Jacobsen: Second question, what can reduce and eventually – ideally – eliminate the rhetoric of division and hate? I realize some non-religious people want to eliminate religion altogether or stop the freedom of religion of others by implication.

I disagree with those non-religious people. I consider the freedom to religion and freedom from religion as equal rights for the religious and non-religious to mutually enjoy.

In particular, I note the emphasis among this sub-section of the non-religious population on hypervigilance on Islam as a set of beliefs and suggested practices, and Muslim communities and Muslims as individual citizens in their respective countries.

Bullock: This obviously is a very big and important question. It seems, most, unfortunately, that some forms of hatred will always exist as part of the human condition.

I have recently learnt how anti-Semitism in Canada has lasted for over 100 years. I think the best we can do is try and make as many friends as possible amongst the different religious and non-religious groups, and take a “live and let live” attitude, as you suggest.

We should learn about each other through dialogue and shared activities. We ought to be able to understand our differences with respect, remind ourselves constantly what we have in common, and work in solidarity on issues we share concern over, like the environment, good employment, affordable housing, and good education for our children.

8. Jacobsen: Now, within the Islamic communities in North America, what tend to be the problems in terms of the perceptions of the capabilities and roles of women? This links to larger issues within societies in the refusal to implement the rights of women, and the advancement and empowerment of women, in global culture.

Bullock: There is so much diversity in Muslim communities this question is hard to answer. There are those that see total equality between men and women as being normal, those who favour a patriarchal attitude, and many shades in between.

There are those who think Muslim women should not lead, nor work outside the home and those who think the opposite. Social workers, lawyers, women’s groups and community activists, both male and female, have raised the plight of women in situations of domestic violence, issues of mental health and parenting.

There are Muslim women teaching things such as self-defence, literacy, and know-your-rights to try and advance and empower Muslim women.

9. Jacobsen: What is being done to advance and empower women within the Canadian Islamic communities?

Bullock: In addition to what I just said, there are many activities, projects, and education plans to advance and empower women, both spiritually and secularly.

To name a few, there are groups that teach Arabic, Qur’an and Islamic studies; storytelling and art to boost self-esteem; sports and good nutrition; and leadership development and volunteer recruitment to increase civic engagement.

10. Jacobsen: What is being done to prevent the advancement and empowerment of women within the Canadian Islamic communities?

Bullock: What prevents the advancement and empowerment of women in Canadian Islamic communities are cultural practices, customs, habits and religious interpretations that say a woman should only be a wife and mother, and not have any other role outside the home.

I do not mean to downplay these roles. I have children and I understand completely the special honour and role of these traditionally female roles. I also know the exhaustion that can come with multi-tasking “inside” and “outside” roles.

But it is quite clear that Scripture intended for women more than the “home-based” role only. Women have many skills and talents that can and should benefit society.

11. Jacobsen: Who are some women Muslim scholars representative of the future and current leadership of Muslim women in Canada?

Bullock: Dr. Ingrid Mattson is a much-admired Canadian Muslim scholar. In Critical Muslim and anti-racism studies, Dr. Jasmin Zine stands out, and in Muslim chaplaincy development, Dr. Nevin Reda is providing leadership.

As for the next generation, I know several very smart Ph.D. students who will take their place as leaders in the next decade.

12. Jacobsen: Any recommended books or organizations?

Bullock: One of my favourite books that I think most people would enjoy is the autobiography of Zarqa Nawaz, called Laughing all the Way to the Mosque. Zarqa Nawaz helped produce the first Muslim sitcom on Canadian television called Little Mosque on the Prairie.

She used comedy and television to try and give a better image of Muslims to the wider society. Her book is inspiring as it talks about her life journey and how she made it to that high point.

Anyone who wants an inspiring book about Muslim women scholars should read Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam, by Muhammad Akram Nadwi.

It is a bit academic in places, but it is inspiring for how it reminds us of Muslim women’s scholarship in our history so that we can reclaim that role with confidence, and know that we are not innovating something, but restoring something that has been lost.

13. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Bullock.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Chair, Islamic Society of North America-Canada; Lecturer, the University of Toronto.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 8, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/bullock; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Stacey Piercey (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

Abstract

Stacey Piercey is the Co-Chair of the Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights for CFUW FCFDU and Vice Chair of the National Women’s Liberal Commission for the Liberal Party of Canada. She discusses: paths of misunderstanding transgender individuals; misinformation and disinformation campaigns; best definition of a transgender individual; definitions and misunderstandings over time; what is the same in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood in those who are trans women and who are not trans; what is different in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood compared to someone who is not a trans woman; what are the disproportionately negative life outcomes for trans women in different domains of their lives; and the different paths and shades of those paths available to trans women in terms of making the transition in Canada.

Keywords: Co-Chair, Liberal Party of Canada, Ministry of Status of Women, Stacey Piercey, Vice Chair.

An Interview with Stacey Piercey: Co-Chair – Ministry of Status of Women Sub-Committee of Human Rights, CFUW FCFDU; Vice Chair National Women’s Liberal Commission at Liberal Party of Canada | Parti libéral du Canada (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To set some more of the theoretical and empirical groundwork of the extended educational conversation over the coming weeks, I see two streams of misunderstanding about trans individuals. One is simple, relatively benign ignorance; another is deliberate misinformation and disinformation campaigns, through multiple media and social media channels, to scapegoat vulnerable members of society for cultural-political points. To the simple, relatively benign ignorance, what seems like the source of this? What are the individual and interpersonal consequences for trans-Canadians?

Stacey Piercey: You are right to say that there exist two streams of misunderstanding about transgender individuals. There is ignorance, and that is understandable to a degree, not everyone is aware of what it is like to be transgender. It is a unique experience to the transgender individual. I can relate to you some common themes that I have observed. I can share as much information as humanly possible. If it was easy to explain, I guess there wouldn’t be such a need for advocacy or education.

As you know, this is not something that everyone will encounter. There will always be a lack of knowledge and some ignorance. Just like how I don’t know everything about other groups in society. I do trust that their experience is real, and I can understand to a degree the issues that are faced in other communities by relating my experiences. We are talking about intersectionality, overcoming our differences and the knowledge gained from being able to connect with others. That requires empathy. I learned a while ago to relate to people by addressing common interests and not pointing out differences. I like to connect with others and learn from them. That is my style, to find common ground and solutions were ever possible. I see myself often having conversations about being transgender and answering questions asked of me. People do want to understand and want to help, especially since this has become a relevant social issue.

The other type of ignorance has hurt me, and that is the deliberate misinformation and disinformation campaign that seems to be ongoing. I don’t understand the motives, yet it does exist. Sometimes it is political, sometimes they are exclusionary and sometimes this is outright hate. You may say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but there is, what someone sees in media affects me. I find myself judged unfairly, asked to defend myself or explain myself. I sometimes struggle, as I am seen only as a transgender individual. It is hard when every day all you see are these negative stories. And I know the difference, so I can’t imagine the opinions being formed by others as they watch or read these stories. In Canada, we have moved further along in the conversation when it comes to transgender issues. Our policies are about inclusion and integration. It is no longer about our right to exist. That is happening in other countries, such as the USA and Great Britain right now, as they are having a national conversation. It is a big media machine that has overtaken our story to a degree. I feel like I when back in time watching this unfold, I even forget this is not relevant to me as a Canadian. But it is. You see stories that use outright fear, to pray on these individuals and to make life harder for transgender people in general. We are such a small portion of the population, we have never had privileges, steady jobs, housing or opportunities likes others, and transpeople suffer this incredible onslaught in the media that doesn’t make it easy to live a normal life. My only explanation is that there is money to be made hating transgender people, or there is joy in abusing and oppressing a small minority. It is all beyond me; I was raised to help people, not to hurt them. I honestly have to say I struggle to find good positive stories. And that is wrong.

2. Jacobsen: For the misinformation and disinformation campaigns, what seems like the source for this? What are the individual and interpersonal consequences for trans Canadians?

Piercey: If I was the venture a guess, it is political. For any change to occur for transgender people, we need the support of the media. Good and bad stories bring awareness to the issues. I don’t know if there is a dividing line among groups when it comes to transgender individuals. I have met so many people despite their background, and once they come to know I am transgender, they always say I have a friend, a relative that is transgender. It is a tough life they have, can you help or have any advice. My experience is everyone knows of someone who is transgender in a way. Therefore when it comes to transgender issues, you get every political background creating awareness, some views are extreme, over the top and sensationalized, but it is always someones else’s interpretation of transgender people. In Canada, during our campaign for human rights, we wanted them to come out of the closet, be seen and know it is okay to be transgender. It was time to step forward and say there is a problem that needed to be solved. There were no government statistics; there were no supports, and often these issues were not classified as transgender.

There is another side to this campaign against transgender people, and that is some are not ready for a change in society. They don’t help you; they want you to go away and keep you out of sight. Or worse as I found, I was used, I would work hard, and I ran into empire building. I would have these great ideas and solutions, and others would take credit. I was not respected. Thus not everyone is supportive. In this country, I have seen change occur very shortly through government and businesses. How I am received now is different than it was years ago. The thing is, as a community, we don’t have the population to instill change; we don’t have the experts, we don’t have the representation and are reliant on others to help. We are small in numbers; we are not in control of the conversation, often we are not included, and there is no consensus. I am into policy, and the problem I see, is that this is very expensive to put a gender-neutral washroom in every building, it is expensive to paint a rainbow crosswalk, and it is advanced law, and advanced medicine. Not everybody is ready to deal with this, it is complex, and it needs viable solutions. There is not enough research, legal precedents and medical history to adequately deal with the problems at hand.

3. Jacobsen: Now, those amount to not knowing/being unaware or having imbibed illusory knowledge. To the factual basis of being transgender or a trans person, what best defines a trans individual – or the type of trans individuals – within the modern context?

Piercey: When I grew up it was simple. It was very binary. You were either a man or a woman. You were born as one gender on the outside and felt like another on the inside. Then you went about the process of transitioning from one gender to another. You go through a transition phase where you are for me as an example, male, not male or female, then female. In my mind that was transgender, it was a term that defined people who transitioned, had their surgeries, did their paperwork and changed their lives from one gender to another.

It isn’t like that anymore; it has become non-binary. We have a third gender concept where people who are gender non conforming that fit into the terminology of transgender. I have heard over 50 classifications for gender. For many there is no desire to seek surgeries, they are okay with who they are, and I would say this new generation or new perspective is what you are seeing more of today. I met fewer people who have the same background or experience as I once did. They are out there, living opposite from the gender they are born in, you don’t notice them because they live stealth.

For me, that shared experience of transitioning, living a point in your life as neither gender, going through that process of change is what makes a transgender person different. It is not about, sexuality, it is about gender and questioning it and living with the knowledge that gender is a social construct. And at the same time, gender it is a big defining point for many individuals. When you remove gender from the individual, what is left but only the person? I see it now as a very open community, that is inclusionary to anyone questioning gender.

4. Jacobsen: How has the definition changed of “trans” or “transgender” over time into the present if at all? How have the misunderstandings changed over time if at all, too?

Piercey: I think in my life the definition of transgender has changed in that has gone from binary to a non-binary. That breaks down any traditional views of gender. I see transgender people as more gender fluid now whereas before it was about going from one gender to another. I am old school in a sense I live female, that is me. But I am floored by some on the new ideas that I have seen. I will be honest I find some of the new terminology and concepts difficult even for me to understand. I am okay with it; I think you should be yourself in this life. I can remember when this was simpler, it was discrete, and not political. That was before the internet and social media. We had support groups. Now it is all over the media; everyone has an opinion on gender. Everyone is sharing what they think. I believe we are watching a gender revolution. And transgender has changed just like society did with technology. I expect what it means to be transgender will continue to follow this evolution. I am all for new ideas, and I believe change is good.

Interestingly enough, the misunderstandings have not changed, for me. It is still the case where I am the representative of everything transgender. If someone sees a transgender story, they think I am like that too. How do you say, I am an individual and not some glorified stereotype.

5. Jacobsen: From your perspective and observations, as you relayed being identified as an elder – an elder trans woman, recently, what is the same in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood in those who are trans women and who are not trans?

Piercey: I am an elder, and I understand it is a term of endearment and respect. It is something I have been called personally many times, it is not a cultural thing for the transgender community. For me, it is more about being a survivor. For them, I am a role model, a faux parent, someone who is there with experience and guidance. You see, there are not many people like myself who have transitioned in life and have lived a long time. I have 20 years of experience and stories. A problem that exists is that there is little-recorded history. Whereas I have watched this grow, and I have watched a whole new generation come into the scene. I was always involved with the public, and I am in the transgender community too. People know I am the transgender Liberal, if they got a problem with the government, I will hear it first. Now if you want to know what it was like years ago, you have to ask my friends or me. In that sense I am an elder, I have within me the culture, the history and I can see the changes that have occurred. Another reason is that I have been called an elder is that I have made friends over the years with two spirited people from the indigenous population. That has grounded me, as I know transgender has been around forever, not a mainstream part of society, but it has always been there. And in other cultures, it is very respected. In Newfoundland and the Indigenous community, there is an oral tradition, and I share in these ways. I have all the knowledge of how to navigate the system, as I helped create it and how to transition legally. I can offer great advice and have over the years to many transgender people. And if you want to know something about transgender rights in this world I have one of the better networks, there is to access information. I am a responsible adult, and I like the term elder, and I have taken it too.

6. Jacobsen: Within the same question background, what is different in the life-arc of a trans woman from youth to elderhood compared to someone who is not a trans woman?

Piercey: I am in my forties. Now I have forty plus years of life experience. But that is not what makes me an elder. You can be older than me it doesn’t mean you are an elder in the trans community. Let’s start with the years of transition. Day one, you are transgender, you are brand new to this world. You may know about life, but you don’t know anything about transitioning. These are trans years, I have 20 of those years, and it is that experience that counts. What you may know about life is irrelevant to a degree when you change genders. People have always come to me at this point needing my help. More so in the past, before services were available, I am an expert in the trans community.

The experience is relatively the same for everyone medically speaking. You want and need to be supervised by a doctor. You have to live full time integrating into society for a year. Then you start hormone. Then you go through a second puberty. Living full time is a real test, and taking hormones that is permanent. If you make it this far, following the doctor’s orders and have no complications with the introduction of hormones and no adverse effects to your body you are on your way to transitioning. Hormones scare away a lot of people, and some people can’t take them, especially the male testosterone. It is a weird time, in a transgender person life. It is when they are most vulnerable, and hormones are new, and everything they thought about the other gender is now real to them. It is a learning and growing phases. Eventually, you settle in and find your way. You may have surgery, which again is a significant change, most of my friends are post operation. Therefore, we can relate to each other. Then you wake up one morning and your body after years now matches the image in your mind. You adjust, and you move on with life, everything is normal, gender is not an issue anymore. All is good. Transgender doesn’t solve problems; it is not an escape from your life, it creates tonnes of difficulties. The whole process takes time; it took me probably ten years to regain my confidence and to be good with who I am. It is very similar to a non-transgender woman entering puberty, and the issues faced, it just happens to them when you are younger, and as with them it takes years being a teenager to come into your own.

7. Jacobsen: In terms of the social issues in the lives of trans women, what are the disproportionately negative life outcomes for trans women in different domains of their lives? How does each of these disproportionately negative outcomes play out in concrete terms?

Piercey: I can easily say, that if I was with hundred people who identify as transgender twenty years ago. Fifty would not be able to change their lives. This door is not open to them. I would say twenty of them would be murdered or commit suicide or incarcerated. It was a big deal to be passible for safety reasons alone. Now I would say of the thirty left, fifteen have entered prostitution for survival, ten are on income assistant, and I would say you have five who are working, transitioned and you will never know they transitioned. That was me, I was lucky, educated, in a relationship, and I knew how to take care of myself. I came out again later in life because I was tired of seeing what happened to the community and its fight for rights and it was overwhelming me trying to help others. I know there are not a lot of transgender people who live long lives after transitioning. I was given seven years by one professional, it was said to me this is a rough life ahead if I do this. Now, I have some friends who have transitioned as long as I have or longer and I know of some individuals older than me too. The truth is we are a science experiment. There aren’t that many people who have done this. I am one of those at the forefront.

8. Jacobsen: What is the process of making the transition? Also, this is a nuanced area. What are the different paths and shades of those paths available to trans women in terms of making the transition in Canada?

Piercey: For me, this was a very regulated medical process to transition. As well, legally it is a real pain in the neck to change all of my documentation. It was not fun; it was hard work. Back in the day, the government would only recognize gender change surgeries, if they occurred within the medical system. Without your surgery, you couldn’t change your identity. These rules do not apply as much anymore. It is good, and it is terrible too, I liked all the supervision and supported I received. I was monitored as if I was part of a military experiment. If anything was wrong with me, I knew right away. It was reassuring. I remember transitioning was the scariest time in my life, going from male to female was a stage that I wanted to go through as fast as I could. It takes times to transition. I wanted to travel, get a good job, or have access to credit, I needed everything to be in order. I thought coming out was hard; I found socializing difficult as I was relearning many skills, and it took me a while. What works for me as a man didn’t necessarily work for me as a woman. I was taken care of, supported and helped to transition completely through the medical system in Canada. I have the best doctors.

Today you can now transition, or be gender non-conforming or gender neutral. It is not so much about taking a pill as it is more about changing your identity to reflect who you are. The rules don’t apply anymore as they once did for me, you can start hormones, and you don’t have to transition fully, you don’t have to have your surgery. A lot of people live gender neutral or some other gender that is not traditional male or female. I can’t imagine how different it is now, there are so many supports, and people are safe to be themselves at a young age, and the social stigma is going away. Part of the transgender experience was in hiding, ashamed and coming out, living underground, and outside of the system. I had to develop social skills, political skills, to fight for my rights, I had to know the law, the medical system and government policy as it was all needed to get by in life. Now, if was 15 and felt like there was something wrong with me. I can tell my doctor, and my teacher and I can transition with help. Whereas for me it took years to find answers, and help and support. In a way, transgender, as I understand it will be extinct.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/piercey-two; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Hasan Zuberi, M.B.A. (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

Abstract

Hasan Zuberi, M.B.A. is the Chairman for Mensa Pakistan. He discusses: time frame for events; vigorous and respectful debates; the one rule in discussions; keeping debates on topic; punishments for poor behaviour; some interactions Mensa Pakistan members can get in-person but not online; similar interactions online as in person but the interactions are simply better, richer experiences for the participants than online; expansions of Mensa Pakistan’s in-person provisions for the membership; technology and online environments improving in-person experiences; and in-person experiences enhancing experiences in the virtual environments.

Keywords: Hasan Zuberi, Islam, Mensa Pakistan, Muslim, Pakistan.

An Interview with Hasan Zuberi, M.B.A.: Chairman, Mensa Pakistan (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How long is the standard time frame given in the announcement and organization of an event or meeting prior to its coming to fruition?

Hasan Zuberi, M.B.A.: Standard time frame is usually at least 2 weeks, so that the members are well informed in advance and can manage their availability.

2. Jacobsen: How can vigorous, respectful debates on various political, philosophical, mathematical, ethical, scientific, and so on, happen more easily through electronic media?

I ask because, I know, most people, or everybody, experiences – or has experienced – intense and unpleasant debates, or even simply sour dialogues and discussions, on a number of topics.

Zuberi: Well, simply: Every day, we have a members group on WhatsApp, and there we discuss (not debate) on all topics at hand, be it political, religious, and even social issues. Since it is not a debate, it becomes more engaging and informative.

3. Jacobsen: What seems like reasonable ground rules to set in an online forum to prevent vitriol and maintain respectful communication between the parties involved in them, especially in the cognitively highly capable?

Zuberi: Guess, it’s simply one rule: “Respect others’ opinion.” Senior members, play the role of moderators (if they are not the initiators) and keep the environment to the topic and if there is anything that can be deemed intense, it is politely discouraged.

So far we have not seen getting things out of control, and the credit goes to the fine diversified group of people we have.

4. Jacobsen: In online environments, women and girls get more harassment. Indeed, they receive more harsh criticism and ad hominem attacks, even if their statements remain, functionally in content and tone, the same as a man or a boy – not in all cases but, from qualitative reportage and complaints of women, probably most cases.

Any tips for women and girls, especially the highly gifted and talented to stay on topic, in self-protection of cyberbullying, stalking, and harassment?

Zuberi: Well, if I talk about our circle, it is very much protected and anything below the line can be communicated to the senior management for immediate action. We encourage our female members to speak up, and often appoint, senior female members/or our national psychologist to be at the listening end.

5. Jacobsen: What is the importance of an online moderator in the prevention of these behaviours by many men and boys – or some women and girls?

What seems like the appropriate punishments, reactions, or mechanisms to acquire justice in the cases of legitimate cyberbullying, stalking, and harassment? That is, how can the bullied, stalked, and harassed deal with these individuals?

Zuberi: Well in our system, as stated above, are the senior members, who are on senior and powerful positions and volunteer for the cause, they serve as the elders and advise on issues, referred to them.

Punishments, if required, are mostly related to warning the culprit at first and so far it has been enough just to let members know that Seniors are there to provide all help.

If required further, it can result in suspension and/or expulsion from the organization, and registering a case with Cyber Crime Cell of Federal Investigation Authority (FIA). Fortunately, Pakistan has a very string Cyber Crime Unit, called NR3C.

6. Jacobsen: Now, to the second aspect, the in-person environment has been the main form of interaction of the highly intelligent in a relatively tight locale. What are some interactions Mensa Pakistan members can get in-person but not online?

Zuberi: It is mostly in our meet-ups, and or other SIG activities, which provides a chance for in-person interaction.

7. Jacobsen: What about similar interactions online as in person but the interactions are simply better, richer experiences for the participants than online?

Zuberi: Well, obviously with technology in hands now, it has become easier for everyone to interact online, than offline, so it is normal.

8. Jacobsen: In the future, what would be wonderful expansions of Mensa Pakistan’s in-person provisions for the membership? I mean wildest dreams, wonderful, and dreamy ideas – pie-in-the-sky.

Zuberi: Culturally speaking, in our part of the world, the in-person meetups are still considered formal and respectful. We as a platform, try to provide our members with the opportunity to come, meet their peers, to share their learning and experiences with others, and to learn from each other.

We are also planning to collaborate with other organizations that provide positive learning opportunities, scholarships, activities etc., for our members.

9. Jacobsen: To the third facet, the nature of the interaction between the two. How do technology and online environments improve in-person experiences of the Mensa Pakistan group?

Zuberi: Above all, the technology and online environment has helped us to engage our long-lost old members who have migrated from Pakistan; or left the country for studies, family, work, to connect with the members back home. It also helps to connect and broaden their social networks.

10. Jacobsen: How do in-person experiences provide the basis for enhanced experiences in the virtual environments of the Mensa Pakistan group?

Zuberi: It serves as the basis. People understand others, especially when they meet them and express themselves in person, and in the online environment; it becomes easier to understand their words.

11. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Hasan.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Chairman, Mensa Pakistan.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/zuberi-three; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15

Abstract

Keywords: actuarial science, America, Erik Haereid, Norway, Rick Rosner, statistics, Scott Douglas Jacobsen.

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us talk about good and evil, what defines good? What defines evil? Do these terms suffice in the representation of the reality?

Or do these terms carry metaphysics and ethical baggage, which detracts from the reality of proper notions of morality? In a discussion on good and evil, we can analyze the topic from multiple levels.

Let us talk about the small acts and thoughts, the little world of good and evil, then the next session can engage on a micro-level foundation into dialogue on the medium- and macro-level forms of good and evil.

What seems like quintessential small acts of good and evil – everyday acts of kindness? Also, as an aside, does religious belief or faith influence personal conceptions of good and evil?

Erik Haereid: I have experienced a strong connection to others based on mutual feelings and empathy.

One time I met a stranger, a man, on the street downtown, crowded with a lot of people walking in their own thoughts, and he looked me in my eyes and I did the same and both smiled warmly.

It was nothing sexual (I am heterosexual, and I guess he was too), only a friendly empathic mutual silent confirmation (“Hey, I see you”). I felt good the rest of the day.

Small actions like that are good because they enhance something in us. We did both, I am quite sure he did too, became better persons after that moment. I smiled warmly to some others, become more tolerant, friendly and inviting.

Most people, at least in my country, do not understand warmly smiles; they misinterpret it in mistrust. Many, not all, of course, think you want something from them that they don’t have or don’t want to give to you.

The mistrust is basic in our culture. We want the kind smiles and friendly behaviour, but we mix things up. Either we make it sexual, or we think it’s irony and contempt. Trust is essential here; you have to believe in yourself to receive good deeds and implement it into your personality and self-image.

When curiosity is replaced by judging people for their genes or personality, we have a problem as a group, if you ask me. Individual freedom has to be supported by respect for every individual in the crowd.

If not, some maybe gain a lot, but society is polarized, and this implies more conflicts. But, as we can see from for instance my country, the lack of winners strangles each individual; you are forced into an average (the average is the winner).

If you are outside the standard, the average tends to attack you. This system creates polarization too; you have to fit into the average to be accepted by the society.

A good deed or thought is when it makes the other person feel better, also in the long-term. It’s trusting in it. We have to believe in the behaviour. And the same with evil actions; it has to be pointed at us, and we have to believe that the person wants to harm us.

A good thought and deed are one that strengthens the other person’s self-esteem and self-image in a way that does not make him, her or them more extreme egocentric (narcissistic). Evilness is the same with the opposite sign.

In this context, I believe that good and evil deeds (and thoughts) have to make perpetual influences on the object’s mentality. If you save a person from drowning, you make changes to that person’s mentality for the rest of his life.

If you make a person feel bad about herself as part of her perpetual self-esteem, you make eternal changes to her mind. A rape is such a deed. Being bystander to for instance a school-killing, too.

The deeds and thoughts have to be meant; deeds, where the outcome is good/bad for the object, is not good/bad deeds if it is not intended to be. If it’s by chance, by impulse, it’s something else. A condition for good deeds is that the sender has empathy with the other person(s).

To hate or scorn someone for their genes and natural behaviour is evil, even though it’s impulsive and one can’t control the impulse at the moment. This is so, I believe because hate and contempt also are products of some nurturing processes.

You can choose to reflect on your impulsive thoughts, feelings and actions. If you nurture your impulses, you act evil/good. The fact that you have impulses doesn’t make them acceptable or true; they can be worked on and changed.

You can blame the forces of evolution, that something is cemented and not possible to change, and then fasten your immediate emotional experiences.

Or you can believe, as I do, in the elasticity of our brains, and that almost everything is possible beyond the present stringent scientific discrimination and reduction; that we in the future with help from AI, nano- and biotechnology will find a way.

It’s easier to act bad and evil, than good. Then you control your feelings. But the price is high; you also teach others to act the same way to you.

I think the best good act and deed one can do is to open up, and not close others out from your feelings or thoughts and invite others to express their feelings and thoughts whatever they are. This is, of course, more difficult than it sounds.

It assumes that we can handle our own feelings among other reactions and that we really are open-minded towards all other people. As soon we start discriminating, in thoughts or actions (normative, not descriptive), the tense and stress among all in that social realm increases.

Rick Rosner: I wanted one more comment on statistics. Now, it is frustrating because I have many, many years of college courses and extensive training in statistics. But statistics is beyond me now, in terms of being able to do it, because statistics is so coding based that I cannot do anything productive in the field anymore. Because I do not code.

I understand statistics and probability super well, but, at this point, I am nothing but a rank amateur because I cannot build databases, statistical apps, or work with statistical apps.

Now, in terms of good and evil, I look at good and evil as the preservation of order versus the destruction of order, order versus chaos.

Generally, everything is dressed in story and detail, but, basically, when people are fighting for good; they are fighting for the preservation of structure and order and, usually, higher order.

Star Wars is probably our most prominent good versus evil story now. You can see good as being a higher order that includes individuality and liberty, and the ability to do high-level things. That to be fully developed people who are free to pursue their lives.

The Empire is a suppressive force, which will blow up your planet if you defy them. It is a lower level of order. It is draconian and rule-based and is based on a few simple rules.

The people who are in favour of liberty, the Jedi and the Rebels, stand for a higher level of, say, information processing. The ability to look at the world and address it in sophisticated and creative ways rather than having to reduce the world into a few simple rules as The Empire does.

Good versus evil is about higher-level information processing versus chaos and lower level information processing. The increase in information and order in the world is basically good.

To further clarify based on the questions from you, Scott, evil is associated with the destruction of higher order, whether it is killing a living being, where the living being is higher order, or destroying works of art that are reflections of higher order and so on.

These terms carry ethical baggage, sure, because the ideas are usually brought to us within a philosophical framework that is often obsolete to some extent and has developed its own repressive and not innovative characteristics.

For instance, America is based on, or a lot of American politics is rooted in, the Constitution is the highest level of rule-giving order.

What we have been running into in today’s stupid American politics, the dumber forces in politics trying to justify whatever they do that is reactionary or repressive by saying that it is based on the originalist conception of the Constitution.

That this is immutable. You must let people have as many guns as they want given the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Then people on the Liberal side arguing less persuasively because they do not have the infrastructure and ruthlessness of the Conservative side.

That our understanding of the Constitution must be tempered by 225 years of history. That the Constitution is centuries old and it is not going to adequately address every possible thing.

So, the Constitution of this embodiment or this symbol of good, but it is obsolete in a lot of ways. So, yes, conceptions of good and evil can have ethical and historical baggage that fuck things up.

[Addendum from Rick.]

As an addendum, I have said this at greater length, and so have a lot of other people elsewhere. To quickly point out the political situation in the US, due to some demographic game playing that began with the Republicans 30/35/40 years ago – before Reagan, well-funded Republican thinktanks began to research how to wrangle voters.

They found that dumb voters are easier to wrangle. The current situation in American politics is the result of one party spending two generations getting better and better at manipulating dumb voters.

The Republicans, who started out as a respectable major political party, are, now, at their nadir. Because they have become a party of dumb assholes. Once you start herding dumb people, you have to keep going dumber.

You end with a base and elected officials being more and more amoral/immoral. The values that get lost in the demographic push further and further right. To quickly sum up, it is like smokers.

When I was a kid, a huge percentage of adults smoked, probably well over half. It was in planes and restaurants. Planes would be a bit blue with smoke because so many people smoked cigarettes. Nobody thought anything of it.

I worked in a bar in 1980. 2/3rds of the people smoked. The air was blue-ish with smoke. Over the past 30 years, more and more people have gotten the message about how terrible smoking is – for people and animals around them.

What was widely spread around the general population in 1984, the person who smokes in 2018 is more likely to be either a dick or an idiot. They are like, “Fuck you! I will keep smoking.” They either didn’t get the message.

Or if they did, they don’t care. It is a smaller segment of the population. But in a Bayesian way, as that population shrinks, it keeps proportionately more of the idiots and the assholes. That is basically what has happened with the shrinkage of the Republican base.

If people want a more in-depth conversation on gerrymandering and electoral politics, then they can go elsewhere on other things you and I, Scott, have talked about.

Haereid:I have corrected my view on the evolution process; I see it as brutal, not evil. That’s an important distinction. The evolution process seems evil because it (for humans) contains a lot of evil actions, like manipulations that harm others to gain possession. But in a pure form it’s basically honest and egocentric. I clarify this below.

First a short comment on statistics and data. I also think that statistical methods and math will benefit more in the future, not least because of the huge access to data, such as Google and other big companies has. Greater storage capacity, stronger processors, and “infinite” data access (AI) in the computers will make statisticians’ biggest nightmares, not getting enough data, history.

But, I am not aware of how much and where statistics is used today, but know it’s used in many areas (like medicine and psychology).

Back to the topic: I agree that the development and freedom of the individual must be at the center and that we can and should mature to a higher order; as through a Hegelian dialectic.

It is the outcome of a creative, individual free will. This is what I mean when I say that egoism is altruism (see below); that the good exists in individual freedom and not in the appearance of a straightjacket of conformity and normality.

Egoism is altruism in practice (cf. Aristotle’s Eudaimonia); I use altruism in the sense that all actions we make lead to a win-win situation or any other outcome where one or all loses, and where altruistic actions create win-win situations. I do not believe in complete self-sacrifice. Therefore, I do not use the term altruism in the strictest, most rigid sense.

The best example of altruism is when we feel better after doing others well. Since I feel better, I did it for me, even if you also felt better afterwards. Win-win. You could criticize it and say that it is lack of empathy. But I don’t think so, because the feelings and emotions are contagious.

I do not use egoism and altruism as opposites. When we nurture ourselves, according to our own abilities, opportunities, in freedom, we influence others to do the same, and thus society becomes good (theoretically).

Altruism in the usual meaning of the word, i.e. complete self-sacrifice, often leads to the opposite of intentional intent; violence, war, assault, exploitation, pecking order… It may be a good purpose, but by suppressing your own needs and abilities, your own opportunity to get the best out of your life, and be brainwashed to believe that an overall system, a culture, trumps your own preferences and opportunities, you develop evil.

We become evil of being hindered in our individual growth and development (this is also theoretical: of course not all become evil to others, but perhaps to themselves; self-destructive). The sense of belonging is conditional on being allowed to be oneself in that culture.

In Scandinavia we have a well-developed welfare model, something that I’m a fan of to some extent. And we also have a culture that cultivates equality; by nurturing an egalitarian society everyone gets the same possibilities, worth and we get a good community. This is the doctrine. In practice, it’s almost the opposite.

By cultivating differences, people find each other in mutual respect, and then people act good against each other. It’s about accepting the strengths of others, and using them as inspiration. When we focus on the weaknesses of others, we spend our time on others and not our own abilities and opportunities.

In short, it is not about being equal but about equal worth, and that equal worth is created through acceptance and respect of inequalities. This is good.

At a macro level, such as nations and global societies, one should (to act good) prepare for individual freedom, safety net for those who, for various reasons, should be abandoned, general healthcare, police, etc. (welfare model), and the right to be different; being ourselves (since everyone is different).

When the focus is on equality, the culture undermines the individual’s needs; to develop their abilities, talent, opportunities. Thus, people get frustrated and attack each other.

Egoism (in my sense of the term) is about respecting each other, narcissism about not doing so. An egoist knows how to develop his abilities, but also to see what he is capable of and not. A narcissist believes he is God, Lord above others, and that others obey him.

Competition is important to acknowledge and see how far it is possible to develop. You are not competing to make the others worse, but to make the others even better so you have more to aspire after.

Appendix I: Footnotes

From the last decade, where I used more time doing other stuff than writing, for instance work, to mention is my book from 2011, the IQ-blog and some other stuff I don’t think is interesting here.

Rick G. Rosner: “According to semi-reputable sources, Rick Rosner has the world’s second-highest IQ. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writer’s Guild Award and Emmy nominations, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Registry.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmy Awards, The Grammy Awards, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He has also worked as a stripper, a bouncer, a roller-skating waiter, and a nude model. In a TV commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the World’s Smartest Man. He was also named Best Bouncer in the Denver Area by Westwood Magazine.

He spent the disco era as an undercover high school student. 25 years as a bar bouncer, American fake ID-catcher, 25+ years as a stripper, and nude art model, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television.

He lost on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire over a bad question, and lost the lawsuit. He spent 35+ years on a modified version of Big Bang Theory. Now, he mostly sits around tweeting in a towel. He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and daughter.

You can send an email or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.”

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/haereid-rosner-three; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Tim Moen (Part Three)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. He discusses: attenuation of the loss of an authentic self while in the midst of more, and more, public recognition; tasks and responsibilities come with this station with being the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada; honest mistakes as a leader; how an elected leader demarcates the vision for the political party and conveys the image to the leader’s constituency; the more heartening experiences in political life; the more disheartening experiences in political life; the primary policy of the Libertarian Party of Canada; egregious examples of government overreach in Canada; model of consent; the individual as the basic unit of society; the bad, the good, and government, individuals, and groups; preventing government from harming society; and sub-clauses to the primary policy.

Keywords: Libertarianism, Libertarian Party of Canada, Tim Moen.

An Interview with Tim Moen: Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada (Part Three)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What attenuates the loss of an authentic self while in the midst of more, and more, public recognition?

Tim Moen: This is actually a huge question that to properly answer would require pages, but I’ll try and be concise.

A few years ago I was disoriented and alone in a structure fire. The heat was rising very quickly and was unbearable and I knew for a fact that I was going to die. Obviously, I made it out, but the man that emerged was not the same man that went in. I realized I had been wasting so much of my time and not devoting time and energy to the things in my life that mattered most to me.

Having a purpose driven life is the most important part of maintaining a sense of self. I don’t just mean having a purpose like winning an election, I mean having a clear understanding of what I want my life to have meant after my time here is done. Combine this sense of purpose with remembering I’m going to die is probably the biggest force that keeps me honest. Sometimes I find myself saying words because it’s the path of least resistance or because I know people will react favourably and having that clear image in my mind of my life ending and what it felt like having left so much undone and allowing others to control my destiny snaps me back to my purpose.

The other prerequisites to staying authentic and grounded are; having a strong degree of self-knowledge, and having a trusted group of friends and family who are willing to help you check your ego.

2. Jacobsen: A purpose to life brings popular mega-church pastor, Rick Warren, to mind, for me. He speaks to purpose in life within a theological framework. Many like him; some don’t. Your experience exists in or out of the theological interpretation, though. A realization of the profound nature of death and the proportional reinvigoration of meaning this imports to life. What practical steps follow from the experience (examples) – for staying grounded, gaining more self-knowledge, and developing a close, trusted group?

You are the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada. What tasks and responsibilities come with this station?

Moen: My job is to be the public face of the party and to speak on its behalf. I believe its also my job to help discover the vision and strategy of our party with our members and communicate it to our members. Ultimately it is my job to serve the needs of our members and our candidates.

3. Jacobsen: What have been honest mistakes as a leader? How does on confront them, admit them in public, and solve them for better performance in the future? All in the ‘public eye.’ How does a federal political party leader remain on amicable and friendly terms with other federal political party members in spite of differences about desires for the direction of the country?

Moen: I’ve met and enjoyed the company of people of all political persuasions. It is easy to ostracize and divide but I think its more productive to look for common ground and then engage in constructive conflict. It is easy for me to do because most people are libertarians in their private lives. They would never hurt someone or steal from them. Generally speaking, I think we all have the same goals and so as long as we can engage in civil discourse and can agree that we want to achieve the same things then we can have constructive conflict and work our way through the haze of cognitive dissonance together. Doing this requires that you view other people not as combatants to fight but rather as other people who share my goal of having a constructive conversation. If they don’t want to hurt people or take their stuff in their private lives yet they think that winning an election gives them new rights then the problem isn’t that they are bad people wanting to do bad things, the problem is that they are good people being led to do bad things because of a bad mental model or idea. On the other hand, it could be that I have a bad mental model and I would value having that mental model corrected so that I don’t do something bad.

The frame or lens through which we view these conversations with people who have different mental models largely determines how successful the conversation will be. I like to think of poor mental models as mind viruses, they spread and cause otherwise good people to do bad things. I am as susceptible to a mind virus as anyone else and conversations with people who challenge my mental models are valuable because at worst they cause me to ensure I have thought deeply enough about a position I hold to have good reasons for holding it and at best they cause me to change my mind and eliminate a mind virus.

4. Jacobsen: How does an elected leader demarcate the vision for the political party and convey the image to the leader’s constituency? Inspiration remains important for collective action.

Moen: At the end of the day my vision can’t part with the vision of my party or I’m not the right person for the job. I travel around Canada meeting with party members and listening to them and drawing inspiration from them and communicating my vision. I try and communicate why I am involved in the party and what gets me out of bed and motivates me to action. It is something that I’m really passionate about and I don’t think it takes much to motivate or inspire other people. When people see a bit of courage and authenticity that is often all they need to take action themselves.

5. Jacobsen: What have been the more heartening experiences in political life?

Moen: When I see people coming together to work for a common goal and see that we are having an impact on public discourse and culture that is very heartening. Meeting so many passionate and committed people is very motivating. Having earnest conversations with people genuinely interested in the conversation and seeing a mind change as a result of that conversation is very gratifying as well.

6. Jacobsen: What have been the more disheartening experiences in political life?

Moen: The most disheartening experiences are when people are focused on tearing each other down rather than putting aside differences in philosophy and personality for the good of achieving team goals. This is an ongoing problem with libertarians. We are very good at picking apart poor mental models and finding systemic flaws and this strength can turn into a weakness when we fixate on problems rather than focus on solutions. I’ve seen many good people leave in anger. I’ve lost a few people I considered friends because of mistakes I’ve made as a leader. People invest a lot in me as a leader and it really sucks disappointing them.

7. Jacobsen: What is the primary policy of the Libertarian Party of Canada?

Moen: The primary policy of our party is to restrain government from hurting people or taking their stuff and limit its role to protecting individuals. We recognize that government is an institution that has a monopoly on and a mandate to use force and that the only proper use of force is to protect people from the initiatory force (ie murder, assault, rape, theft, fraud). Basically, we think the government should not violate consent and should protect people from violations of consent. People in government don’t get a special exemption from behaving ethically.

8. Jacobsen: What have been egregious examples of government overreach in Canada to you?

Moen: Taxation, the drug war, the growing surveillance state and healthcare stand out as big issues for me. The carbon tax strikes me as particularly horrific in that it is not just confiscating money under threat of force, it is punishing people for consuming the very thing that allows them to survive and flourish. The drug war has ruined lives and created a demand for violent criminals. Bill C-13, Bill C-51 and now the TPP are artefacts of a growing surveillance state that collects data on citizens by invading our private sphere. Our healthcare system is a gigantic point of failure and when it fails the poor and marginalized will be the first to feel the effects.

9. Jacobsen: Within this model of consent, what suffices to amount to consent?

Moen: By consent, I mean the standard legal definition. Consent means that another person should have your permission to enter your private realm. Consent is the difference between lovemaking and rape, or boxing and assault, or charity and taxation. If I tell you that I do not want you to do something to my body or my property and you do it anyways you have clearly violated consent.

10. Jacobsen: With respect to the individual, does the individual form the basic unit of society to you?

Moen: Yes. Society is a group of individuals. Institutions like government are abstract mental models that are often confused as entities that exist in material reality, what really exists are a bunch of individuals acting in accordance with mental models that may or may not lead to otherwise good people doing bad things.

11. Jacobsen: What defines the bad? What defines the good? How can the government increase the good and decrease the bad? How can individuals and groups in society increase the good and decrease the bad?

Moen: “The bad” can be broadly defined as violating consent. “The good” can be broadly defined as that which serves the needs of individuals and leads to flourishing. A proper government can create an environment for the good to emerge if it focuses on its job of protecting individuals from the bad. Humans are generally self-interested and behave in ways that maximize their personal well, being. For the maximum good to emerge it is necessary for the self-interest of an individual be tied to their ability to serve the needs of others and help them flourish. If self-interest is tied to violating consent one would expect the good would have a difficult time emerging and the bad would have an easier time emerging. So a free market where individuals can profit by serving the needs of others seems like the best place for the good to emerge and big government where individuals can profit by violating consent seems like a good place, for the bad to emerge.

12. Jacobsen: Furthermore, how can the government be prevented from harming individual citizens? Of course, no government can be protected from in its entirety. Nothing is full proof.

Moen: Government, as I just pointed out, is an abstraction, not an entity that exists in material reality that can cause harm. If by “government” you mean the specific group of individuals that people imagine have special rights then the question becomes, “how do we prevent these people from harming individual citizens?” To my mind, the answer is to get rid of the demand for a group of individuals to use force in immoral ways. The demand for a government that imposes on individuals comes from a lack of understanding of governments proper function and comes from a place of fear. At the end of the day, people the demand government action because they don’t see it as immoral and they are frightened of some particular hobgoblin and so they demand a government that alleviates their anxiety. So to prevent the government from harming individual citizens is a bit like getting drug dealers to stop harming drug users. Ultimately the problem would largely go away if the addiction was treated. So I see this as a very similar process to treating addiction. There is no legislative lever that will protect people from the government without a will from people for it to happen. Constitutions, bills, charters of rights are helpful insofar as citizens understand them and inscribe these principles on their hearts and minds but they are only pieces of paper with ink if people don’t embrace them. If people don’t believe in or want the government to be limited then it won’t…no matter what.

13. Jacobsen: What derivative policies, which have details and acts as sub-clauses to the primary policy, follow from the primary policy?

Moen: Since all law represents threats of violence for non-compliance our goal is to limit laws to only those that protect individuals. This means that activity between consenting adults that doesn’t harm anybody else should not be interfered with by threats of violence, even by people in government. So as an example we would repeal prohibitions on drug use and sex work.

Another area the government overreaches with force is on the financial lives of citizens. Taking money forcibly (or through threats of force) ought to be limited or eliminated. This means we want to dramatically reduce or eliminate taxation and find non-coercive ways to fund the government and eliminate all non-necessary government departments and spending. We also take issue with onerous regulation on individuals owning and running businesses and working for businesses. Raising the bar to enter the marketplace creates an unfair advantage to crony capitalists at the expense of consumers and start-up entrepreneurs.

We also want to improve property rights. Property rights give individuals immediate access to justice and dispute resolution. This includes our comprehensive policy on indigenous sovereignty which gives indigenous people sovereignty over their territory and allows them to push back against government appropriation of resources on their property and allows them to develop or not develop resources in a manner that is determined by them.

Our military is there to protect Canadians and not as a proxy for US imperialism or UN “Peace Keeping”. We would ensure our military isn’t used for a political agenda but to establish Canadian sovereignty and particularly to find ways of ensuring our Arctic sovereignty is established and protected.

A key element of liberty is the ability to exclude others from your private realm and so we would eliminate warrantless spying, repeal Bill C-51 and C-13, and the TPP in whole or in part.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/moen-three; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Dr. Madeline Weld (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02

Abstract

Dr. Madeline Weld is President of Population Institute Canada. She discusses: impact on policy from religion; consequences of blocking family planning; efforts to reduce women’s ability to make informed choices; the most stunning fact about demographics and birth rates; and if we ruin the planet, will we Disnify it (?).

Keywords: Madeline Weld, Population Institute Canada, president.

An Interview with Dr. Madeline Weld: President, Population Institute Canada (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When I think about something mentioned at the start of the conversation, it was the impact of some religious organizations, sometimes quite big, who stand against family planning. One of them tends to be the Roman Catholic Church.

The largest religious segment of Canadian society is Roman Catholicism. How does this impact policy?

Dr. Madeline Weld: Roman Catholics in countries with birth control access do not listen to the Vatican. Because Catholics in Canada use birth control and abortion at the same rate as everyone else. But, historically, I do not think there is any other organization that has caused more damage…

Jacobsen: …wow…

Weld: …to the population movement than the Vatican, which is a political organization. I look at it as a political organization intent on its own preservation rather than a spiritual organization. When the UN was being formed after WWII, the head of the World Health Organization was a Canadian named Brock Chisholm, a Canadian humanist.

He was in favour of family planning. He thought overpopulation would be a problem. He wanted to make family planning part of the WHO’s umbrella services, like child immunization, and so on. The Vatican got together a group of Catholic countries and they said that they would withdraw from the UN if this happened.

They bullied the WHO into dropping family planning from their agenda. This is described by Milton Siegel, who was the second to the chair or the vice-chair of the WHO [he was Deputy Director]– and who attended every meeting, as something they simply dropped as a topic.

The Catholic Church for all environmental things; it has been consistent in opposing family planning. The president of Ceylon now Sri Lanka was concerned about overpopulation: on his small island.

The Vatican was at the conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 [UN Conference on Environment and Development] also got family planning off the agenda. Then the Cairo conference in 1994: The International Conference on Population and Development had both the Vatican and the progressive feminists being against population control.

They talked about racism, colonialism, and so on. They talked about people freely and responsibly choosing the size of their family. But they did not speak about a woman living in a pro-natalist country, where her religion, mother-in-law, and husband say that she must have a lot of kids.

By not initiating any programs or ideas for programs for governments to take for this sort of thing, it fell by the wayside. The amount of money for family planning as a percentage of total population assistance fell dramatically. It went to AIDS.

The point is the Vatican interfered a lot [Laughing]. I do not think there is any organization in the UN that did more damage. We have the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, which is 56 Islamic countries plus the Palestinian Authority.

I am not sure how supportive they will be of family planning. They are a powerful block. I agree that religion [Laughing] does not help with family planning. In Canada and all over Europe, even Spain and Italy, they do not listen to the Vatican. Spain and Italy have some of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

Jacobsen: However, this came from the secularization of the organization of the outside rather than from the inside.

Weld: Yes, I think women benefitted from the secularization of society with more freedom and so on. There is a reform movement in the Catholic Church too. There is a strong contingent of pro-choice people in the Catholic Church too.

Jacobsen: I did an interview with the president of Catholics for Choice.

Weld: A lot of Catholic women disagree with the Catholic anti-abortion stance. There was a commission in the Catholic church to look at their stance on family planning. They had 56 lay people and 16 clergy representatives looking at it. [FYI: This was Pope Paul VI’s Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, which produced its report in 1966: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Commission_on_Birth_Control. And there were 56, not 54 laypeople on it.]

They were supposed to see whether changing the Vatican’s stance on abortion would harm the organization and whether the Vatican should do it. The commission looked at it, decided it would (harm the authority of the Vatican), but said it is the right thing to do anyway.

Basically, all the lay people agreed to it. 9 out of the 16 clergy representatives agreed that the Catholic Church should change its stance. A dissenting decision was made that if the Catholic Church changed its stance then it would look like the Holy Spirit would not have been guiding the Catholic Church all along.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Weld: But it has been instead with the Protestant groups, where birth control was okay.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Weld: What was a mortal sin would now be okay, it could not do that. Guess, who wrote much of the dissenting opinion? Karol Wojtyla who later became Pope John Paull II. It prevailed, the dissenting opinion. That is an unfortunate thing. [https://epdf.tips/the-catholic-church-on-marital-intercourse-from-st-paul-to-pope-john-paul-ii.html]

There were two times when birth control could come into the fore. One was when the UN was formed with the WHO led by Brock Chisholm and another was when the Catholic Church looked to reform on birth control positions. Neither happened.

2. Jacobsen: Now, I look at this as one of those ethical splits. One from a transcendentalist traditionalist religious perspective on the source of ethics. Another on international secular human rights. When I look at those things, I recall Human Rights Watch stating equitable and safe access to abortion is primarily a human right.

Of course, it lists the consequences of not providing the safe and equitable access to abortion. So, if some of these religious organizations and some progressive feminist groups are blocking family planning and potentially abortion too, what are the consequences of doing this for women?

Weld: They are higher abortion rates. If women cannot use birth control, a bunch will seek abortions, and if illegal then illegal abortions, which means an increased rate of abortions and an increased rate of deaths from illegal abortions.

I can understand but do not agree with being anti-abortion. But if you are anti-abortion, then you should be pro-birth control, right [Laughing]?

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Weld: Some people think women should not have those rights. I do not see why a sensible person would be against birth control.

Jacobsen: We have come to the same conclusion. If someone is pro-life in a strict and realistic sense, they should be pro-choice because the consequences would be pro-infant life, pro-maternal life, and pro-human right.

Weld: Right. I think the most awful case that made the news was this woman from India, who was in Ireland. Her fetus was dying. It was not viable. But the Irish doctors refused to abort because they were terrified at the time that the Irish draconian laws of the time may make them go to prison if they perform it.

The woman died because by the time the fetal heartrate died; she died of septicemia. It was a sad story. That was about five years ago. I forget when. Because Irish abortion laws were voted to be changed very recently.

3. Jacobsen: Now, in open societies in Karl Popper’s terms, such as Canada, the notion of the restriction of women’s bodily autonomy through various legal or fundamentalist religious measures cannot be done or, at least, as easily.

So, the people who try to do that or want to do that – and, to be frank, some people probably want that in this country – must work through coercion and culture.

Do you note any attempts within the culture or arguments made socially/culturally to either guilt women or shame women, or talk women, into being against contraception – trying to reduce their ability to make proper and informed choices about family planning?

Weld: I know in Ottawa the Morgentaler Clinic prevented people from demonstrating in front of the clinic. It is not advertised. You cannot tell looking at it from the outside. They cannot protest with 50 metres now.

That is some protection. There are organizations. I see their ads on the bus, advertising to pregnant women. Something like Melinda House or Maryam House, where you can go and have your baby. They have outreach.

They try to discourage abortions by women. I do not know of any attempts. The Catholic Church is always preaching against it. But I do not know of any coercive attempts. I do not know if they can without breaking the law. But they try.

They try to influence their legislatures and stuff like that. It is entrenched in Canada, though. Maybe, they can limit it to a certain number of weeks. I do not think even Henry Morgentaler did abortions after 22 weeks; unless there was a medical cause to do it.

I do not think they are going to give up. I think they have a pretty good turnout at their pro-life rallies in Ottawa. But they bus all the high school kids there. They beef it up [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing] something heard by me. The idea, “What will you do after you’re 35? What will you do in the latter part of your life? Oh, don’t worry, you’ll change.” These said to women.

These to negatively associate singlehood or non-motherhood, and to get them to have children or get married and have children. Tiny guilt and shaming tactics over time. They may not be conscious of it.

Weld: People, in general, or humans are pro-child. I think it is natural to want children for a lot of people. But people must make their own decisions. If life is too complicated, I know that more women now who are trying to freeze their eggs – or have their kids later in life.

Sure, they have a right to do so. But from my perspective, imagine looking after a toddler when you are 45 or something, I have two sons. They are 31 and 29. I was 31/32 and 34 when I had my kids. I am glad I had my youngish energy to chase around after them.

Because your energy levels decrease as you get older. You might have a rebellious teenager when you are 60 [Laughing]. Right now, I am 63 and independent. My kids have moved out and have their own life. The freedom is great.

It is something that people want to consider when they put off having their kids. They will be looking after kids into their old age. Do they want to be doing that? Of course, you will not see your grandchildren if you have huge distances between the generations.

Anyway, I think society must figure it out. Given that we have so many people already, I think small families is a good thing. The longer you wait then the less the population is, because parents do not die instantly when they have kids.

I am thinking in terms of biological realities. There might be an optimum-maximum age. There was a case of an Italian woman. She had a kid when she was 65. It was a few years ago. It made the news. I thought, “Why would you do that?”

Jacobsen: Did she have any kids prior?

Weld: I do not recall. You can read cases of old women or an old woman who want to have kids. It is weird.

4. Jacobsen: What is the single most stunning fact about demographics and birth rates, and so on, encountered in your entire career, even post-retirement included?

Weld: I guess that there are 1 billion more people every 12 years. It is 9 zeroes. It is stunning. Since 9:58, my time, this morning, 13,319 more people have been added to the world. That is the net increase since I have been sitting at this computer.

So, in an hour and a half, we have thirteen and a half thousand new people, which is a lot.

Jacobsen: Is it considering the deaths?

Weld: Yes, it is births minuses deaths. We have this population clock on the website. I guess that is the most stunning fact. Also, humans have taken over 2/3rds of the land surface of the Earth for their uses and only the parts that are difficult to get to are a little safe from us.

It raises the question, “Do we want to turn the planet into a feed lot for humanity? If so, why?”

5. Jacobsen: Will we Disnify the planet if we ruin it?

Weld: I think we are to a degree. I think we delude ourselves if we think we are in control. If the soils are impoverished and cannot support high-yielding plants, and if the rivers are depleted if the aquifers are depleted and it is happening, what will we do now?

They are trying to breed plants that do not require much water. But we are always scrambling to solve some other problem. It is always something. The increase in food production has slowed down. There is always a maximum that can be produced.

It cannot be done forever. A lot of our food production depends on cheap fertilizer, which depends on oil; as the price of oil increases, the price of fertilizer will increase. We should limit our numbers before things naturally self-limit and make things unpleasant for us and other animals.

We could be a blip. It happened when the meteor wiped the dinosaurs out. Why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we cause this transformation and this depletion when we can avoid doing it?

Jacobsen: Because intelligence may be a lethal mutation as per the words of Noam Chomsky.

Weld: [Laughing] Yes, I think that is true.

Jacobsen: Alan Watts used to joke – the Eastern scholar from the 60s-70s – about what if the eventual state of a species is to produce a new star by discovering nuclear energy and then blowing themselves up.

Weld: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Of course, he was being facetious. But what if?

Weld: Yes.

Jacobsen: It is similar what if in a concrete sense of our intelligence allowing us to manipulate the environment very well and over a short, brief time – a “blip” as you noted.

Weld: I think we need to develop a new ethics called Ecological Ethics that have been promoted for a while now. Because most ethics only consider human to human interactions. I think we need to consider that we are part of a bigger system and what we are doing to our support system, ecological system.

I think that may be done willy-nilly because it will happen whether we like it or not.

That is my hope anyway.

6. Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Weld.

Weld: Thanks for the interview, Scott.

Jacobsen: That was a lot of fun.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] President, Population Institute Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: November 1, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/weld-two; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23

Abstract

Keywords: actuarial science, America, Erik Haereid, Norway, Rick Rosner, statistics, Scott Douglas Jacobsen.

Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner (Part Four)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With a moderate pivot from good and evil, and morality, into religion and theology, what defines religion to each of you? What defines theology to each of you?

Within the definitions given, and in general, what seems reasonable and unreasonable in theology and religion? What seems true and false in theology and religion? What seems functional and dysfunctional in theology and religion?

Rick Rosner: The problem with theology and religion in general: it was designed to answer questions via making up stuff that were not yet answerable throughout history by actual understanding of how the world worked.

Religion has been and is a comfort. It has been a means of exercising social control and concentrating power. It contains a lot of guesses about the nature of things that have turned out, as we have learned more, not to be true.

It does not mean that you have to throw out the entire exercise. Because, to some extent, theologizing and building religions. That is practicing philosophy. It is just that philosophy, especially with it is theological, eventually turns out to be disproven.

On the other hand, as we have recently talked about, there is no guarantee that what we believe as supposedly scientific objective people will not be undermined by discoveries in the future.

I have been saying a lot, lately, that cold random universe is a misunderstanding and will be undermined by an order-based universe. A universe that where everything that exists and emerges from increasing order rather than the universe playing out as a kind of random bunch of collisions among particles bouncing off each other.

Who knows what philosophical implications will be of an order-based universe? But the older religions, the book, Homo Deus, talked about some of the reasons for the way that the religions of the time meshed with the economic and social structures of the time to reinforce them, to help things function smoothly.

That the monotheistic religions, where Man in God’s image, functions great for a farming society, where we have to believe that we have souls, but we cannot believe that animals have souls because that is too brutal.

Because look at what we do to animals, Man being created in the image of God and everything else being created for use by Man helps agricultural societies function. Then the earlier gods with dozens of gods and spirits and stuff.

Those were helpful in pre-literate periods, where those gods were probably more improvised. It did not matter because no one wrote anything down yet, because there was not language yet – 60,000-70,000 years ago.

So, I like the argument the author makes in the book. Religion is a tool of its era. Each type of religion is a tool of its era to support or provide mental buttressing and societal buttressing for the necessary structures of that society.

But most of religions guesses about the nature of things have been wrong except in the most generous, general terms. It would be weird to think that everything was wrong until now we have science and then we are right about everything.

That seems deluded, arrogant, and counter historical. At the same time, we have all this feedback that we are getting things right because science is so effective at manipulating the world.

So, it is a mix. Where lots of evidence that science is correct, lots of historical evidence that our beliefs at any point in time will be disproven later, my best guess is that the specifics of science, most of them, will survive.

There are definitely 100 or so elements made of protons, electrons, and neutrons. All that is not getting thrown out. It is not some made up a belief system that will be overthrown 200 years from now.

What might get overthrown are the philosophical underpinnings why science works and math works, there’s always the chance that what we perceive as protons, neutrons, and electrons will get tweaked to the point that we barely recognize the later versions that people in the 1930s had a hard time adjusting to the quantum mechanical versions of the elements that make up the world.

Einstein famously hated the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics. He worked hard to overthrow it. 90 years later, we are kind of okay with it. In the ‘70s, there was an ad for a Palm Olive Liquid, which was a dish soap that was emerald green.

It was supposed to be kind to your hands. So, there is a whole series of ads about Mash the Manicurist.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: She would talk about how Palm Olive is gentle on your hands. The housewife she is talking to in the nail salon says, “Oh, psha!” Mash would always say, “Well, you’re soaking in it!”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: The woman would look down and her fingers were in this green liquid making them all nice.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: It is kind of what Quantum Mechanics is like. We have kind of been soaking in it culturally for almost a century now. What made people crazy in the 1920s and 30s, people say, “Oh, alright.”

Nobody is freaking out about a single photon being able to travel through more than a single slit at a time. We have plenty of freak-outs to come, philosophically, as we move into the future.

One thing that is coming is the era of big data and the discovery of previously unrecognized relationships among aspects of the world that we could not find out because our brains are too small, and our data processing apparatuses are too primitive.

We will get hit with a bunch of new relationships to try to understand. Also, we will get hit with a bunch of black box relationships that will be tough to understand because the correlations will be made within systems that we cannot get at.

With the handiest example being, all the sudden: AI schema that has made computers the unbeatable champions of Chess and Go. We do not know what principles they have developed within their architecture.

We do not know what algorithms that are working off. I think there is a similar thing happening with Google Translate. It has developed a metalanguage within itself. That is not any human language but facilitates the translation among human languages.

That is a big scary black box deal. We will have our big data apparatuses. They will be coming up with all sorts of relationships and discovering new aspects of the world, and correlations.

Why those correlations are, they may be beyond us. I read some science fiction story. Maybe, it as by Chang. The guy who wrote the short story that became the Amy Adams movie.

Anyway, it concerns scientists 150 years from now. I do not know. They write for the Journal of Human Science, which is a completely bullshit journal because humans can no longer do science because it has moved beyond regular humans.

It is all being done by massive information processing AI entities. So, what used to be the chief or the noblest pursuit of humanity, it is now this little hobbyist magazine, which would be the equivalent of a model railroad magazine today.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

We will continue to be surprised. Those surprises will continue to be in philosophical, existential, and theological terms will be good and bad surprises. Theology got hit by bad surprises during the past 2,000 years.

Earth got knocked out of the center of the universe. The Star System got knocked out of the center of the universe. Humans got knocked out of the center of God’s Creation. God got knocked out as the creator of the universe. Theology’s ass got kicked.

In some ways, we have gone as far as we can go to kick ourselves to the corner of the universe. Although, I would argue that IC further kicks us, by establishing a super long timeline. So, we are not even favoured by having our own special place in time.

We got kicked out of our special place in space. Then IC kicks us out of our special place in time. A Big Bang universe, every moment of a Big Bang universe is its own unique moment.

But a universe that kind of keeps going as a rolling boil across trillions and octillions of years. There is no favoured place in time really either. But once we have taken it as far as we can go to kick humans and human consciousness into insignificance, there are surprises that will pull consciousness back to a pretty important role in the business of the universe

Erik Haereid: To me, religion is about people, imaginations and metaphysics. It’s about what people in general need to believe in beyond their narrowed perceptions, and their struggle between conviction and if their perceptions are true or false.

Religion is also the history about all these imaginations, the doctrines, through history and in every culture that exists and ever has existed.

It’s a broad conglomerate of fictions, in the space where we have needs, doubts, we are uncertain and scared, where we are children even though we are grown up. Religion contains our absent or dead father and mother.

Religion fills, for a majority of people, the mental gap people tend to get when they don’t feel whole. But it departs from fictional movies and novels because its task is more existential; while ordinary fictions that we know are false are entertaining, religion is nurture and mental food.

Theology is the study of such religious belief. It’s the investigation of those histories, trying to prove if it’s true or false. To me, it’s also associated with the priest, who spoke at school and in the church, and represented an alternative truth and path.

And therefore it’s more like telling us the truth, like a teacher in history or geography, more than asking critical questions about if it’s true or false. I can’t remember much self-criticism from my childhood’s priests.

They told us a truth, with conviction and aura. I can’t remember that they said something like “…but, maybe what I tell you now is not true”. So, theology is, to me, the beginning of and cause to religion wars (Here I link theology to every religion, not only Christianity).

It’s the foundation of centuries with quarrels and unnecessary fights. Because it does not contain any doubt. And since religion contains several gods and texts which do not fit into a single truth, theology’s lack of respect and humility creates violence and wars.

God does not exist, other than a need, a wish, as comfort, to reduce personal responsibility and emotional baggage. A type like Jesus may have existed. That’s possible, and likely.

But most of the figures from the texts are mythical, and some of them may have existed in some way; the texts exaggerate them to fit the reader’s needs, the aim of the text.

To me the Bible, Koran and the history of any God is a manmade project, well written, superb actually, fictions that fulfills many people’s needs. In addition, it’s an edifice of doctrines that force people into certain beliefs and ways of thinking.

It’s a “dictator’s” voice speaking to his audience, his uncertain and unsafe people, promising them safety and prosperity. And the people, in lack of independence and belief in themselves, listen, grasp and take it for granted.

To me, this castle of fantasies reminds me about how fragile we humans are, emotionally, and how dominating emotions like anxiety, guilt and shame, are. Religions are a tool for humans to abide by in their lives.

Therefore, theology in the sense that it tries to prove Gods existence, or at least to make arguments for Gods existence, is close to nonsense. The main problem is that some really think the text is true, whether it’s the Bible, Koran or Vedas. But as fictions, the texts can be rewarding.

What is meaningful is discussing human’s fantasy abilities. And our immense needs to build these kinds of illusions and imaginary worlds. And of course our inclination to let us convince; believe in such castles of words, symbols, actions, meaning, even though most people at some deep level understand that this can’t be true.

The history of religions is more like a testimony of a wonderful creative human brain. It’s absolutely amazing what abilities we have, to let us lead into such fantasy worlds, let us be seduced and directed.

And especially let the imaginations, or rather the people who manipulate, convince us that the imaginations are real. What I think is most interesting, which psychologists certainly can answer better, is where the boundary goes, that’s where we let go of the imagination and think it’s real.

I don’t believe in any God, but in the creative power, human abilities and will that faith triggers in people. The downside is the hate that also often appears.

Faith makes us creative; think of all the monumental temples, churches, mosques, and other buildings and monuments that people have built to worship their God. And all the beautiful texts. And all the complex and wonderful rites and ceremonies. The problem is not all these manmade constructions, but the dogmatic and sometimes hateful content.

What are functional and not? I think there are some moral compasses in some biblical texts that are functional, for instance, the story of Jesus Christ. The Ten Commandments is another example. People use it, and also to the good.

To people who have faith, religious texts, rituals, spiritual leaders and monuments have functioned as a safety net, social acceptance, and as a beam through their lives.

To us who don’t have faith, the monuments and rites can be affecting and beautiful. And the music. I have visited churches to calm down, to find inner peace. I like to walk on cemeteries. I feel quiet and peaceful when doing so. When I travel I often visit a church or two, because of its monumental and at the same time tranquil environment. It’s relaxing.

Religions are dysfunctional as extreme dogmas, brainwashers, messing up people’s perception of reality (in the sense that there is a reality), as inspiration to violence, and as motivation to perpetual religious wars.

A main problem in some religions is the double standard, like the situation in the Catholic Church with the Catholic priests abusing children. And when the theology doesn’t open up for new and other interpretations of the texts.

Religions are a lot about extremities. When parents and other authorities teach their children to kill in the name of God, with great promises both in life and after, it’s quite obvious that this becomes dangerous when it’s systemized. As we can see.

Belief in prosperity or at least a nice continuation after death could be functional to a lot of people, because it reduces the anxiety connected to the thought of the scary and unknown phenomenon death.

On the other hand, most religions demand some strict behaviour to achieve the nice continuation, e.g. Karma. This could also motivate people to act good in life.

There is for sure some functionality in religions like Buddhism, where one uses contemplation and meditation techniques and rituals to achieve inner peace. In the secular world, we have adapted it as yoga and learned meditation techniques trying to get the same effects.

One way to conviction is when the belief in God helps you substantially in a traumatic situation in life. If a dogma, a faith, a strong belief in whatever it is, can bring you through the most severe trauma, alive, I guess you lean toward believing that this God or whatever exists in one or another way, even though it’s maybe possible to explain the phenomenon via biochemistry, psychology or something.

I agree with Rick in that religion is an explanation of what people need to know, don’t know, and based on an inner pressure of having to know. It’s about human needs.

And why can’t we live without knowing, without gaining complete control? Curiosity? Anxiety? Probably both based on a need to understand and see the whole picture that makes meaning and sense, and make us survive.

Humans try to explain their lives and the world they perceive, the Universe, based on various reasons. On this road, we get stuck, locked, because we tend to be convinced (because it pleases us).

When something feels odd or dangerous or dislikeable, people tend to reject it even if it’s based on data, science, logic, and everything humans see as truth. These obstacles postpone a smooth understanding of how things work.

We need to feel safe in our environment, before we move on. Rick mentions Einstein’s resistance to the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics.

I am sure it took people some time, then back in 1543 (I had to look up the year) when Copernicus draw the new picture of where the earth stood in the Universe, and changed people’s consciousness from a geo- to heliocentric view, before they accepted that the Earth orbits around the Sun and not the opposite.

We often choose what pleases us; fulfill our needs, even if it’s false; even if it’s plausible that it’s false, and sometimes even if we know that it’s false. Then our subjective truth becomes something else than an objective truth.

The irrational nature of us is a part of the truth. We can choose to call this nature whatever we like, for instance, a part of a deterministic Universe that we don’t know yet, or that exists beyond what we are capable of ever knowing.

When people find peace, some other, alternative truth can be disturbing. Also, truths based on enormous amounts of data, information, and smart black boxes inside AI-agents. Maybe this is temporary, because we don’t know or understand yet.

Maybe there exists an objective truth that is good and not bad, where every human brain and body on the planet fits into a higher level of consciousness. We’ll see. Until then we are all more or less separated, with our own, individual truth, and in groups where each individual seemingly fit into some dogmatic truth.

If the absolute truth is a higher level of human consciousness, a summary of all individual truths, then the objective truth is the present truth, including science and religions, knowing, doubting and believing. Knowing can, after all, be reduced to a mental process. Maybe our own technology one day will help us to gain a common truth.

Religion is not wrong in the sense that it’s not functional, on the contrary. It’s, as Rick says, a tool, like eyeglasses, cars and computers. We always look for the best tool, the most correct map, and adjust it all the time.

It’s interesting and rewarding to read Ricks thoughts, like when he says that we, humans, are captured in theology, philosophy and existential questions and definitions, because we can never collect or reach science.

In the future, it’s contained in the CI’s black boxes with unknown algorithms finding new relationships and correlations to events and phenomenon. We will never be the Masters we dream about, gaining the total control we try to, understanding everything, being superior as we are to other animals.

Because on this road we invent things that prevent us from achieving this. Like AI and black boxes. And because this will happen perpetually, we will always turn us to theology and religion and spirituality, because we can’t accept that we do not know everything! If I understand you right, Rick.

2. Jacobsen: Also, to close the Part Three add-ons, we talked about the little world of good and evil. In relation to religion or the lack thereof, what comprises the middle world and big world of good and evil?

Rosner: You have been asking questions about various levels of evil over the last few weeks and days. Good and evil on a small scale. This reminds me of a diatribe I went on with you. It was under a different topical umbrella about companies that suck and people who are assholes.

I assume this falls under little evil. Things that do not directly threaten people’s welfare but make life a little bit more unpleasant for everyone. That can include microaggressions and even the refusal to grant cognitive credit to animals.

It allows us to, in America, to kill 10-20 billion chickens per year. We raise meat animals under terrible conditions. Also, milk cows don’t have the greatest time. I assume that will be looked at as a greater evil when we have a better understanding of consciousness.

Although maybe not, because the kinds of consciousness that will be more commonplace, more complicated, and more powerful than ours in the future, the life of a chicken may not be any more important than we often view it.

Medium evils are acts that directly harm other people. That threatens their lives. That takes away their money or freedom. That discount their opinions. Right now, we are 18 days away from the mid-term elections.

There is massive voter suppression in the country. That seems like it is, at least, medium evil. The Republicans, or even each party, doing it. But the Republicans have been much more successful and ruthless about it, since 2010.

That is, at least, medium evil. Big evil would be things like war. In discussing all these, you have to discuss whether the actions that lead to the goodnesses and evils are intentional or just a matter of generalized incompetence and not being able to resist our own tendencies.

Also, under big evil, I guess, you would have situations of which we are not yet aware that impinge larger structures than just our planet. It is reasonable to assume that there are other conscious species out there.

That many of them are going to be much, much older than us. That their actions might encompass much larger things. There is the possibility of Star Wars level of evil. Then there is the possibility that the universe has some intentionality.

It implies the possibility for universe level good and evil. I realized that talked about evil with all my examples…

Jacobsen: …[Laughing]…

Rosner: …and no examples of good at various levels. But having decent manners counts as a little good, some Jewish people joke, including us, about Mitzvoth.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: When I talk about them, it is about something really trivial I did. Nothing comes to mind like holding a door open for somebody. A medium good might be working to be less of a dick in a long-term relationship.

My wife and I, as a precautionary measure and not because we have a lot of conflicts, have been going to couples counselling for decades, about once per month. It is like doing maintenance on the relationship and then helping to build an emotional framework.

Where if there is something that annoys me, I can look at it, then decide, “Is this something I can let go because it has no real importance? Or is it something I need to call her on because it has the potential to impact our relationship? Also, are there things I need to work on myself that be annoying and whether I can lose them in the context of the relationship?”

Then there are medium goods, overt acts that have actual impacts on other people and also on you, like giving to charity. Since I have been unemployed, I have been crappy at it. Giving up money or time has a real impact on your life and someone else’s life, it seems like a medium thing

It seems like something that you have to do. But it is not simply opening doors as an activity that you’re used to, e.g., I was a doorman for years. I am very cognizant of doors. That’s all I have time for.

Haereid: I believe that one main reason to evilness on all levels, from person to person, with groups like organizations involved, religious, political and others, and with states, big, medium or little evil, is overregulation (suppression, brainwashing, dogmatizing…).

When people are diminished or overruled by someone else beyond their own needs and opportunities, we seem to produce violence and evil actions, physically and psychologically, against ourselves and others.

We are kind of forced into a tyranny of egality, and of course, we hate it because it’s not natural for us. But everyone (my exaggeration) tells us that we need to fit in by being egalitarian. No one (another exaggeration) sees that to fit in and be good we need to be different.

When I talk about equality and egality I mean equal in almost everything else than worth and quality; to achieve a perception and feelings of that humans have the same quality and worth, we have to incarnate that we are substantially different. That’s my point.

A little evil could be to be rude by not answer a colleague or neighbour when it’s natural to be polite, and you are not distracted by something else. And in general being rude to someone you just don’t like, without any constructive criticism.

A little good could be to be more than polite to that neighbour or stranger you meet at the store, and say hello and smile or something like that.

I would say that if you torture one person to death, knowing that this person died under severe pain, it’s big evil because of the severity of the pain, even though no state or government or religious organization is involved, and even though no other persons are seemingly influenced.

If the evil is medium or big depends on the amount of the pain, for how long this affects that person(s) and of how many persons this affect. If one person damages a world (by for instance creating and spreading a harmful internet virus, starting a war or intentionally spread an AI-agent that is programmed to kill or hurt as many people as possible), that is big evil.

And if a group of people, like a religious fanatic group as Daesh, creates violence by torturing and killing people, that is big evil.

If you kill a bird because you are hungry, it’s not evil but brutal and necessary; it’s life, it’s natural. But if you catch a bird and make it suffers in some kind of pain some time before you kill it, it’s evil. It’s, as Rick says, the conditions before killing the animal whether it’s by hunting or raising that matters.

Regimes, both secular and religious, and groups like political or religious movements, are good when they teach people to think for themselves, let them act as they want to (to some extent) and evolve as themselves and not necessarily to be approved by others (persons, regimes, groups, organizations…).

When we get what we basically need we tend to accept that other people think and act otherwise than us, and we also approve it and learn from it.

Goodness is about getting opportunities, evilness about not. Religious texts, rituals, cultures can both reveal opportunities and not. The same about secular societies; the regimes, the culture, the organizations need to facilitate, so that each person get these optimal opportunities. This is big good; the freedom to choose, the number of possibilities.

A Norwegian priest said recently that God gives her a bigger perspective of life, and a room to express all her difficult emotions and feelings. Then God is good, for her and her surroundings.

I also believe that faith can raise one’s consciousness over and beyond the levels people with no faith usually possess; faith can under certain circumstances make us more intelligent and embrace our emotions in a better way.

Its evil intentionally to focus on others flaws to gain position oneself. This is so on personal level, between groups and states.

Goodness is when for instance a political leader acknowledges and shows respect to an opponent. Such as John McCain did in the 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama, when a woman said Obama was “Arab”. McCain stopped her, and said that “Obama is a decent family man…”. McCain defended his political opponent.

Goodness is to embrace others by confirming them, and make the others see their own opportunities and abilities, talent, like a trainer.

I will also mention the decadence of the western world, illustrated in, for instance, the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”. This becomes evil when it escalates and harms people severely, because we are intelligent enough to know the consequences. I think it’s qualified when religions criticize this kind of behaviour.

This decadence can be illustrated by let’s say drinking two bottles of liquor containing 40 % alcohol each day instead of two-three glasses of wine to your Saturday dinner. It’s about moderation.

Appendix I: Footnotes

From the last decade, where I used more time doing other stuff than writing, for instance work, to mention is my book from 2011, the IQ-blog and some other stuff I don’t think is interesting here.

Rick G. Rosner: “According to semi-reputable sources, Rick Rosner has the world’s second-highest IQ. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writer’s Guild Award and Emmy nominations, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Registry.

You can send an email or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.”

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/haereid-rosner-four; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Dr. Madeline Weld (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23

Abstract

Dr. Madeline Weld is President of Population Institute Canada. She discusses: family background; factors in birth rate; ethical rightness of human rights; rape as a weapon of war; climate change and overpopulation; authoritarianism and xenophobia; and a rational approach to immigration policy.

Keywords: Madeline Weld, Population Institute Canada, president.

An Interview with Dr. Madeline Weld: President, Population Institute Canada (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of family background, what was it?

Dr. Madeline Weld: My dad was an English Canadian. My mom was originally from Germany. He was working at the military mission in Berlin [and she was one of the local staff], choosing to marry her was unpopular with the Canadian government and his parents [Laughing].

He was a diplomat. We travelled a lot. Up until I was 15, I only spent 4 years in Canada. I lived in Brazil between 4 and 8. I lived in Pakistan from 10 to 12. Then we went to Switzerland and then came back here when I was 15.

As it happens, I was born in the United States. My father was posted in New York when I was born. So, I was born in White Plains, New York. Anyway, my childhood was constantly travelling every few years and returning to Canada after a posting abroad.

From an early age, I was aware of the population issue. I remember in Brazil seeing the Favelas and thinking, “Oh my goodness.” I was also aware, even though I was short of 5 when we went, of the contrast between how I was living, and they were living.

I got interested in population growth and the human population was growing rapidly. I remember thinking in Pakistan at pretty places, “Is this still going to be here? Or will it be deforested?”

That is how I got interested. I always have been aware of it for as long as I can remember [Laughing]. That is my family background [Laughing].

I have a bachelor’s degree from Guelph in Zoology. Then I have a master’s and Ph.D. in Physiology from Louisiana University in Baton Rouge. My most recent work was at Health Canada. I am retired. Yay!

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Weld: [Laughing] I worked for Health Canada for 14 ½ years up until October 2015.

2. Jacobsen: When it comes to demographics and population statistics or analysis, what are some of the top factors that are strongly negatively or positively correlated with the birth rate of a nation or a region of the world?

Weld: Certainly, the education level is strongly correlated. The higher the education level in the country. The more likely women are to have smaller families. That is strongly correlated, so is culture. Because in strongly pro-natalist places, where tribalism is also strong, it is harder to get acceptance of birth control.

I would say correct information too. Part of the problem in Africa is there are incorrect myths of birth control: the harms, causes of infertility, and so on, or that it is a Western plot. It is the case in some Muslim countries and some imams have been saying it. Then we have, in Tanzania, the president, Magufuli, who is pro-natalist. [He said people should have as many children as possible and those who don’t want a lot of children are lazy.]

The other very important thing is availability. Bangladesh got its total fertility rate close to 2.0. It made a concerted government effort to provide family planning for women in the villages in a culturally appropriate way.

Family planning and government-political will to do something are helpful. Thailand, for instance, in 1970 – and the Philippines – had the same poverty level and population. Then Thailand promoted family planning quite vigorously, but not coercively as in China.

The Philippines had the Roman Catholic Church that was against family planning. Thailand’s total fertility rate fell. Now, it is a net exporter of rice; whereas, the Philippines must import rice. Thailand is doing better economically. The work of Jane O’Sullivan in Australia showed something interesting.

Usually, we say, “Birth rates fall when a nation accumulates a certain amount of wealth.” But what happens is the reverse, when the birth rates fall, especially when they have 2-3 children, the wealth of the nations increases. So, individuals become richer.

I think we are putting the cart before the horse when we say, “If we bring wealth to a certain level, we will get a particular birth rate drop.” I think the most pernicious myth is the demographic transition theory. It assumes all nations will go through the same stages Europe went through.

That when wealth increases then the total fertility rate will fall. It has not happened on the continent of Africa, and a few other countries. People need to speak to the benefits of small families. Both to societies and to the environment.

Some have done this in an appropriate and effective way.

3. Jacobsen: On the last point, if someone argues for the ethical rightness of human rights – in other words, the implementation of reproductive rights for women, and if one looks at the economic development of a society as a result of family planning and other things like this, could an easy argument be made that it is both morally and economically the right choice to have family planning and reproductive health rights for women respected and implemented?

Weld: Yes, I agree. Even if the world were not overpopulated, I am in favour of women’s rights, education, and the right to choose to have kids or not. I believe that is a choice best made by a woman and, preferably, her partner [Laughing]. That they raise a family together.

So, I think the choice is important, and the informed choice depends on being independent. Because a lot of women in these surveys say that they are not the ones to decide. It is their husbands or their mother-in-law. They think it is a duty.

It would be educating them that they have their own rights and rights to self-determination, and so on. That is not the case for a lot of them. Right now, we have the resurgent Islamism. That is one of the things there. They become very pro-natalist.

The more fundamentalist the place – regardless of religion, but some more than others – then the more kids they will have; the less choice and economic independence that they will have. So, I would say. It is, as of right now, people have as a right to have as many kids as they want, even if they cannot afford them.

But they will have the consequences. In a lot of these overpopulated places, where there is conflict and women are raped, even unhealthy family planning, no family planning has imposed the horrors that they experience in conflict zones, overpopulated conflict zones like Darfur.

It is partly ethnic. It is partly Jihadi. Even if you have ethnic groups that do not get along, the more there are economic and resource pressures, then the worse they will be.

4. Jacobsen: Also, the trend right into the present with rape as a weapon of war.

Weld: I hate to say it, “Humans are not perfect. They are a mixed bag based on evolution. Maybe, that behaviour is evolutionary, which is not something that I would support from an ideological point of view. But, maybe it is.

It takes a moral code to behave decently if you are the conqueror or the winner of a war – not to abuse the women. I wouldn’t want to be the women in a conquered nation or a conquered tribe [Laughing]. Some call them primitive societies and not technological societies.

In some cases, there is a lot of raiding and kidnapping of a woman, as has been described by Napoleon Chagnon in some South American tribes. But from that perspective, when the population is low and not technologically advanced, the damage is limited, especially environmental damage.

With our population, we can cause a huge amount of damage. The progressive movement ignores the impact of population growth, “It’s Capitalism or overconsumption.” [Laughing] But all these people, the question is, “Do they want to live on a subsistence level or consume some more?”

The Chinese started to develop and eat more meat. Can anyone blame them? They could not before. Once they got the chance, they did. As a human, we should not expect people to behave like ascetics once they have the chance to consume more.

They will continue to consume, not at a minimum level. The more people there are then the less likely they are to be able to attain a higher economic level. Right now, we are depleting the oceans. We are overfishing.

In Africa, most of the cause of deforestation is subsistence farming. They cut down trees, need more fields as the population grows but the fields might not last very long (erosion, depletion of soil).

5. Jacobsen: I agree with you. On that strain of the progressive movement or their arguments, I disagree with them. I agree with the arguments and evidence that population and overpopulation is problem number one.

It relates to another problem of our time, which is climate change.

Weld: China in absolute terms produces more greenhouses gases than the US. It has the population. Some pollution in places in China is unbelievable. They do not have the same environmental protections [Laughing] as we do.

I guess protestors can be more easily dealt with by the Chinese government.

6. Jacobsen: [Laughing] If we look at some of the leaders, some would be the Tanzanian leader. It would be the religious leaders of theocratic states.

It would also be some rising in Western Europe and North America with a certain zeal, tendency toward to authoritarian thinking, and xenophobia with attempts to try and return women to the home.

Weld: What is happening in Europe now, and starting to happen in Canada, there is too much immigration before integration; the population is not happy with it, with some of the cultural things happening. They are starting to react.

With the massive immigration in Australia, in Britain, in the US, it does not benefit the people economically. We do not need this amount of immigration from an economic perspective. It benefits developers. It benefits bankers who get more mortgages. It benefits some businesses who get cheap labour. They have strong political influence.

Also, politicians want the ethnic vote. One way to do it through more immigration. It is what Mulroney’s Immigration Minister, Barbara Jean McDougall, did when she vastly increased the amount of immigration coming to Canada to a minimum of 250,000 per year.

Every government has done this. (Justin) Trudeau upped it. Finance Minister Bill Morneau pointed out young people face a job insecurity problem. If young people are having trouble and immigrants are too, why bring in vastly more? There is no justification for doing this.

Immigration has not lowered the average age. Because we bring in such a large number of immigrants (including parents in the family reunification category). This has been shown by several studies and known for a long time. But the issue of “our aging population” is continually brought up as an argument for more immigration.

If immigrants cannot get a decent job, and get more in public services than they pay back in government taxes, and two mainstream economists estimated this at $30 billion per year, how are they going to pay our pensions?

We have Canada’s policy of mass migration benefitting a few and the costs are borne by all. They include more congestion, more smog in cities, lost time in traffic, and so on.

7. Jacobsen: What would be a rational approach to immigration policy for societies that already have a lot of infrastructures?

Weld: Our infrastructure is under stress. You can see that in big cities including Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa. I can see the quality of the roads going down. We keep increasing the population. But we need to put more into infrastructure because they are being used more.

There is a lot of pressure on infrastructure. We should have balanced migration. There is no reason that we should be constantly increasing the population. When is it going to be enough, when we have 1.3 billion like China? The argument about big space is bogus. Because much of Canada is chilly and mostly rock like the Canadian Shield.

We should be realistic and incorporate ecological considerations. We should help people where we are. Whenever we bring an immigrant to Canada, we spend a lot of money on that person; we could spend more on people in place, including refugees – help them where they are and help them return to cultures more familiar to them.

Basically, we are finding all excuses to increase the population. The Prime Minister says, “We are strong because of diversity.” No sociological studies support that. In fact, they show there is less cohesion in mixed neighbourhoods.

Robert Putnam’s study (E Pluribus Unum, 2007) found that. Putnam is liberal. He was dismayed by his findings. He could not find confounding factors that changed his results. Whatever he did, his conclusions were the same.

There is no need to increase our population. We should support countries – not Tanzania – that are trying to implement rational family planning policies.

Population control has become a dirty phrase. Norman Borlaug, who launched the Green Revolution, which saved India from starvation that Paul Ehrlich predicted, said the problem of hunger will not be won until the people working for food production and those working for population control work together.

He recognized that a continually growing population will run out of food. We are turning Earth into a feedlot for humanity, in Paul Ehrlich’s words. I think it is what we are doing. We are cutting down trees and making forests into fields.

Everything for human consumption. Even green energy, like these miles of solar panels. That is not a place where birds can nest, or Cariboo can run.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] President, Population Institute Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 22, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/weld-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Dr. Christopher DiCarlo (Part Six)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23

Abstract

Dr. Christopher DiCarlo is an Author, Educator, and Philosopher of Science and Ethics. He discusses: in vitro meats; ignorance and getting along; and final thoughts.

Keywords: author, Christopher DiCarlo, educator, philosopher.

An Interview with Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: Author, Educator, Philosopher of Science and Ethics (Part Six)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: Do you know what in vitro meats are?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are those the ones that are grown in a lab or on sheets? They are thinking of doing it like with 3D farming with plants but with meat cells or muscle cells.

DiCarlo: Yes, exactly, but it is all private, no government in Canada or the states are putting any money into this. We know why. You are going to piss off the dairy, pork, and chicken producers. Agriculture is huge money. A lot of money went into that hamburger. It costs 250 grand to make one burger.

Obviously, they have to raise their capital by any means. In a perfect world, if we can create in vitro meats, animals do not have to suffer. It makes sense to me. If we have the technology to do this, then do we have to continue the mass slaughter of other sentient beings in order to continue to feed us?

I do not see why especially if we can control for the disease. We do not need hormones, steroids, or antibiotics. It all comes down to taste. In vitro meats are at a stage right now, where they are not particularly favourable. I cannot hold people’s feet to the fire. They make their own choices. We have to evolve culturally.

I hope that at some point in the future humans get a level of technology, where it is pretty much Star Trek. I would like an 8-ounce steak and want to talk to the replicator. It makes you the 8-ounce steak and no animal ever has to suffer.

We can transform matter and energy in a way so that we are a lot more compassionate to living, breathing, and sentient beings. We are not there yet; we are still in post-caveman days. So, how we should behave?

The supernaturalists have top-down Divine Command Theory and the naturalists have a ground-up ethics. Let’s figure out the best possible mechanisms we can.

That is why we developed Relational Systemics. If we wish to treat people fairly, we have to take in as many considerations within systemic relationships as we possibly can: “What is to come of me?”

This works in 2 different ways: “What is to come of me as I am alive? What is to become of me in my lifetime? What choices do I make that result in certain consequences? And what is to become of me after I die?”

So, the supernaturalist, obviously, what is to become of me in this life, it depends what type of person you’ve been in the eyes of God. That will determine what type of fate you are going to have while living and after your death. A naturalist says, “I have no idea what is to become of me after I die. I do not have any compelling evidence to think that I may continue.”

However, if you are a good skeptic and a good naturalist, you would say, “I remain agnostic.” Now some people, some hardcore positive atheists might say, “You are belying your worldview, your ideology, as an atheist thinking that something could possibly happen after you die,” to which my son and I had this conversation for years.

We know so little about multiple universes. We know so little about time and probability. Let’s say you and I die simultaneously, we both get struck by lightning. Somehow, where you are and where I am, you and I both die.

We get buried and cremated, and whatnot. Our lives end. It seems like our lives have ended forever. My students keep saying, “But I cannot even imagine what that would be like!” I said, “Really? Do you remember what it was like 10 years before you were born? It would be like that.”

“So, you could imagine what that is like and after you die you won’t be able to imagine it,” Socrates said this. He said, “Life is either going to continue or it is not.” If it does not, you are not around to piss and moan about it.

That makes this life all the more important: get as much out of this life as you can without harming others, get as much as you can out of this life as possible.

Then my son and I thought, “There does not have to be a God in order for us to somehow have our existence continue after we die. All there has to be is enough time, an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of possibility.”

If those two things exist, then it is theoretically possible that you and I are going to have this conversation again at some point in time.

Given an infinite amount of time and the multiple worlds/multiple universe theory, and based on how little we know about aspects of causality, it is theoretically possible that all of the components, all of the stardust that has made you and me, Scott Jacobsen and Chris DiCarlo, have somehow come together in particular ways; I am saying, “You cannot imagine the amount of time.”

Trillions of years are unfathomable to us. However, to a dead person, the passage will be instantaneous. Because if consciousness ceases, and if they are somehow regenerated, their matter reproduces that consciousness to recognize themselves in some other way again or even in not in different ways, then death will be an illusion.

Either we will never experience consciousness again, ever, or we will, but it will take a shit load of time to materialize.

When people come to me and say, “Atheism is so bleak.” I say, “No, you are selling it short. Reflect on your own ignorance. Our ignorance is so incredibly vast as to the true nature of what is actually going on there should there be an actual multiverse.”

I try to take my students from the level of subatomic physics to String Theory all the way through to the levels of cosmology and the expanse of our known universe. The 13.7 billion years that our Big Bang period. To the fact, that now M-theory maintains this may not be our only universe.

There may be an infinite number of universes. This bubble structure or bubble theory/model that they have outside of our own.

If that is the case, this is what Sagan talked about in terms of awe. I am in awe of the natural universe and what could actually be going on with my puny little brain. My insignificant little being in this magnificent huge backyard of a universe that we have.

So, I try to tell people, “What is to come of me?” Ultimately, I have no idea. However, if the answer is nothing, and if I cannot figure out a way to upload my brain as a digital copy like the great Kurzweil thinks we can do in 40 years, then that is it.

However, if I can gain immortality that way, by uploading my brain, digitally copying it then downloading it into an autonomous titanium robotic exoskeletal being, I would do that tomorrow if I could.

The last debate I had with this Christian guy. So, people told me there were Christians in the lobby crying because of what I had said and that it woke them up. That, maybe, that is all there is to the universe that it is all ultimately meaningless.

But like I said, we have what I call Proximal Meaning. Our lives are short and meaningful here. However, in the expanse of space and over an infinite period of time, we are nothing. We are nothing. That affects a lot of Christians. It made some of them cry, which I did not want to do. I do not want people to feel hurt.

But suffering is inevitable and even epistemic emancipation can put people through times in which they are going to suffer because you are trying to think in ways your brain has never allowed you to think before.

So, I try to tell people if the universe is ultimately meaningless, and if that is all there is and when we die that is it, then you are not going to change it.

You are not going to change through thought or through your actions the way the universe actually is. So, why do not we all live as if this may be the only life we have, okay? And whatever happens afterward, as long as you live a life, as a life as your systemic self will allow you to live, then you have nothing to worry about.

You have nothing to worry about. Try to make the world where you are a little bit better for others, especially if you can pay it forward. If you can do that, then I think that is about as much as we can expect of you given what the state of your brain is.

You are not a serial killer; you are not someone who is incapable of acting that way. Enjoy this life as much as you possibly can because we have absolutely no idea how long we have to live at any given time. What’s around the next corner? What’s hurtling through space that might be headed towards this planet?

What idiot might be elected president who has their finger on the button of how many nuclear warheads? None of it is certain so appreciate what we have and try to live the best life you can.

This is what Socrates said, “There is nothing more important than thinking about how we ought to live.” I think you and I have come back full circle to where this conversation began.

2. Jacobsen: Any thoughts or feelings in conclusion?

DiCarlo: I am hopeful for education that it will take a turn out of this bizarre, post-modernist, wacky notion that no ideas are any better than any other ideas.

That we can actually see for ourselves that, at least in terms of pragmatic benefit, that there are better and worse ways of thinking based on how it is we wish to behave towards others.

If we are to be compassionate beings, not to ourselves but to other species as well, then hopefully the turn is coming now, where people can have meaningful dialogue and can be diametrically opposed to one another but see the importance of still getting along.

That is the final message we take from critical thinking and education. We are always going to disagree, but it is extremely important to know why we have these disagreements and still figure out reconciliation techniques to be able to get along. So, that is what I am very hopeful for in the future.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Dr. DiCarlo.

DiCarlo: No problem, thank you.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Educator; Philosopher; Fellow, Society of Ontario Freethinkers; Board Advisor, Freethought TV; Advisory Fellow, Center for Inquiry Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 22, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/dicarlo-six; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Tim Moen (Part Two)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. He discusses: activism and the Libertarian Party of Canada; election and feelings; media exposure and responsibility to the public; and great wisdom from the Lord of the Rings.

Keywords: Libertarianism, Libertarian Party of Canada, Tim Moen.

An Interview with Tim Moen: Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada (Part Two)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were your early involvements in activism and politics prior to the Libertarian Party of Canada?

Tim Moen: I started writing and expressing a political opinion about a decade ago. I didn’t have much of a political opinion before and generally went along with TV pundits like Bill Maher and his 90’s show “Politically Incorrect”. About 10 years ago I went through a period of self-exploration where I examined my faith and realized I had not reasoned my way into this belief system.

I realized that if I had been born in another country my view about the nature of reality would be completely different and I’d be worshipping a completely different deity. My beliefs had been a product of my environment, my culture, my family more than anything else. This was very disconcerting and left me feeling like I couldn’t trust that many beliefs and I started examining my worldview through the lens of skeptic trying to parse out truth from falsehood.

Examining political beliefs through this lens caused me to realize that politics was essentially a set of implicit and explicit claims about the morality of using force. I started blogging, making videos and appearing on podcasts to promote clearer thinking and skepticism towards extraordinary claims about government and the use of force.

In 2009 the Province embarked on centralizing control of Emergency Medical Services taking control away from communities and local practitioners. My first foray into the political sphere was appearing as a panellist at a local town hall meeting trying to alert the public to what we could clearly see was going to hurt them.

In the fall of 2013, I wrote an article about my experience working with Neil Young on a film project about the Oil Sands and what I saw as some hypocrisy and unclear thinking. The article went viral and was noticed by some libertarian activists who started trying to convince me to run as a candidate for the Libertarian Party of Canada (LPoC) in the 2015 general election. I was very resistant to that idea at first, I saw involvement in politics as implicitly supporting an idea I found immoral, but ultimately they convinced me that I’d be missing out on an opportunity to connect a lot of people to important ideas.

A few days after committing to run for office in 2015 my MP resigned and I was thrown into a by-election in early 2014 with zero clues about how to even file candidacy paperwork or run a campaign. I had a number of volunteers sign up to help me including a guy who moved across the country to volunteer for my campaign. We threw a lot of things at the wall including a meme that said, “I want gay married couples to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns.”

That meme went viral and got me a lot of attention. I was interviewed on Fox, CNN and “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” made fun of me. This wave of attention led to me being nominated for the leader of the LPoC in May 2014.

One of my goals as a leader was to expand the party and get more people involved. We worked hard for a year and a half and had our best result in 43 years in the past election.

2. Jacobsen: Following election to the leadership, what were the feelings for you?

Moen: I felt very honoured to be given the trust of my fellow party members. This was followed by an immediate weight on my shoulders as I came to realize the fact that I carried a responsibility to be a competent caretaker and communicator of a message we all felt tremendous passion for.

3. Jacobsen: You have moderate exposure in the media. What responsibilities come with this public recognition?

Moen: Whenever you start getting a bigger audience there is a temptation to tell people what they want to hear. This is particularly true when you are a politician who is in the business of trying to win popularity contests. This is why so many politicians seem like vacuous and soulless caricatures of what voters want rather than their authentic selves. It is understandable, it’s really cool to be held in high esteem and have adoring fans who see you as the answer to all their problems and it really sucks being the villain that everybody hates and be seen as the antithesis to everything good.

I understood this when I agreed to get involved in politics and it was a real concern. I was really concerned about this toxic pull to bury my authentic self in exchange for popularity. In fact, I wear a replica of the Lord of the Rings ring of power to remind myself of this corrupting influence.

So with all that said the responsibility that comes with public recognition is to hold on to my humanity, my authentic self, to not portray myself as something I’m not. This is first and foremost a responsibility to my self, then my family and friends, and finally as a responsibility to the public. Then there is also an incredible responsibility to my party and people who I speak on behalf of to present the message that is so important to all of us in the most genuine, authentic, and grounded way possible. The by-product of speaking from an authentic, grounded place is that the message has much more integrity and is far more difficult to dismiss. Our message can seem shocking to some people and I think it’s important to be sympathetic and connected with listeners as I am delivering the message.

4. Jacobsen: What great wisdom comes from Lord of the Rings, besides insights into the potential corrupting nature of power, for you?

Moen: Power should only be entrusted to those who view it as a burden not as a tool to achieve some noble end. I think it also provides a path forward for fellowship and cooperation among dramatically different cultures. In todays divisive political and cultural milieu, it offers a demonstration that different cultures can be against globalism or imperialism, the idea that a particular culture ought to be the dominant one, and that they can work together for the common goal of guarding against the desire to dominate while maintaining their own cultural identity. It reveals that real leadership and fellowship emerges when courage is combined with a servant’s heart.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 22, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/moen-two; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Dr. Christopher DiCarlo (Part Five)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15

Abstract

Dr. Christopher DiCarlo is an Author, Educator, and Philosopher of Science and Ethics. He discusses: Religulous; and foundational questions for naturalists and supernaturalists.

Keywords: author, Christopher DiCarlo, educator, philosopher.

An Interview with Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: Author, Educator, Philosopher of Science and Ethics (Part Five)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you remember that line from Bill Maher in Religulous when he’s interviewing ex-Mormons? Familial, basically it is social suicide, that reminds me of this narrative you are telling me.

Dr. Christopher DiCarlo: When I was in grade 6, we knew our teacher was gay. We knew he was gay. He was the poster boy for homosexuality but we were Catholic. So, we said, “No, he cannot be a fag, right? He married whatever her name is. Her Grade 1 teacher. He had kids. No, he’s not a fag.”

Turns out, he was gay. However, he was Catholic. It was the 1970s. He comes out. He gets excommunicated. To a Catholic, you cannot be buried in consecrated ground. You are forever in limbo. You are never getting into heaven with your family.

So, he stayed in the closet. He did what so many gay men of the time did: they lived a lie. He finally came out. His wife accepted it. His sons accepted it. Now, his community accepted it, but it took decades for people to realize this. His whole life was a lie because of a belief system.

To me, that is harm; therefore, it is wrong. Therefore, guys like me have a right to say, “No, I am going to speak out against it. I am going to try to be more compassionate to others who might be going through that same situation.” Ideally, in the perfect world, we do not want people to suffer needlessly.

We are all going to suffer. We have to suffer, but that seems so needless. Today, Muslim communities are even worse than what the Catholic community was like in the 70s. In Saudi Arabia, places like that, people get thrown off buildings, get stoned, get executed all the time.

Simply, through no fault of their own, for being homosexual, it is medieval. I have a right to speak up against it. It would be interesting for you to know that some of the work I am doing in critical thinking. I am meeting with people from Iran. He has to be smuggled into Iran.

I might be on a hit list [Laughing]. That I do not know about, but I do not think I can visit Iran like I did with Guatemala and what I will do with other countries. So, we are going to do it by Skype and by smuggling the information and allowing teachers to take over at an underground level.

Jacobsen: It is going to be hard because the kids can report back to parents or authorities.

DiCarlo: I know and then the teachers will be in trouble.

Jacobsen: But these are also individual choices to make.

DiCarlo: That is it. That level moves very slowly, creeps. However, we have to try it. You have a mission in life. Philosophers have missions in life. If they are not trying to make the world better in some ways, I mean that is audacious as hell, but if we do nothing than we are doing a disservice to our calling.

Which is the love of wisdom, is the capacity to educate and to offer people more than what their particular code system is telling them is right and just. So, it is like an “emancipation,” for lack of a better word, to free up their minds to think in a more liberated way.

I understand this is extremely audacious of me to believe. That I am a liberator in that context, but whether I am pie in the sky misguided or not. That has become my calling and that is the type of thing I am finding myself to be most passionate about. That is what I am going to continue to do.

2. Jacobsen: How might hypothetical naturalist and supernaturalist respond to each of the 5 foundational questions of life?

DiCarlo: We get of them sent to us. Publishers want us to use them in our courses. None of them would talk about the elephants in the room.

They all talk about, “We can think about this, here is a Venn diagram, here is a truth tablet, here is propositional logic, there is formal and informal logic and fallacies and what not.” of them have great stuff in them, but none of them dealt with the nuts and bolts of thinking. Which is: let’s look at the 5 most important questions that people try to answer that sum up the meaning of life.

Then we can look at the two major ways people try to answer them: naturally and supernaturally. I try to be fair in the book and treat both sides as fairly as possible and not tell you what side you should believe and put it out there for both of these sides.

In terms of the question, what can I know? The ancient skeptics, like Socrates, were so adept at identifying. To me, this is one of the most important distinctions that humankind has ever made. It is to be aware of the fact that you do not know absolute truth.

To me, this is probably the greatest understanding of our epistemic state that any human has been able to do at any time in the history of thought. By absolute truth, I mean knowing from a God’s eye view thing. So, the supernaturalists maintain that they are in possession of absolute truth.

So, it is not as though an Orthodox Jew, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, or whatever, get up in the morning and say, ” I could be very misguided in my views. I should question why I believe this stuff.”

No, I mean when you are a true believer, it follows that the information in your head is about how the universe is and that God answers very those other 4 questions and that gives you a certain feeling.

To me, the brain evolved in order to get you to do certain things in certain ways: largely to reproduce. However, along the way, your brain in eating and having sex releases certain chemicals that feel really good. Evolution has modified your brain over time to make you feel good by doing certain things.

What does that mean? That means that our brains get us high. Lots of things that we do get us high.

Watching a good movie, voting for the right candidate that we think will take this country to the next stage, watching the Raptors do as they did, or Milos Raonic doing so at Wimbledon, or swinging on a swing, or watching the birth of your child, these things get us high.

They are incredible experiences. Religious belief is the granddaddy of all highs. If you have got those big 5 answers supernaturally, things are going along and can get you through some rough times.

Not only is it going to feed you dopamine and serotonin and other types of neurotransmitters that make you feel wonderful; they are also going to produce endorphins for when you are stressed and will reduce your stress. So, the work that I did in Harvard looked at the neuropsychological factors of religious beliefs along this evolutionary model that I developed.

So, when you say, “What can I know?” To be consistent, a supernaturalist would say, “I know absolute truth. I am in possession of the information, which is absolutely true. That which cannot possibly be misguided or mistaken.”

When you are making a claim like that, man, it is not an easy thing to deal with that level of dogmatism. The number one question I get from students and people who interview me is: what do you do with a pig-headed person who is so dogmatic that they simply will not listen to reason? Do you give up on them?

I say, “Obviously, it depends not on the circumstances. Who is it? Do you want them to give up on it?” My mother was a Catholic until the day she died.

We would have conversations. She knew I was an atheist. She would hold a rose up and said, “What a beautiful thing God has made!” I would say, “Glorious accident mother, absolutely amazing.”

However, nothing more than that. A wonderful, genetic freak accident of nature. As she approached death, I called the dogs off, essentially. Because you have to exercise a level of diplomacy and critical thinking when answering those big 5.

I thought the greatest thing for my mother as she is approaching death is to think she is going to meet St. Peter at the pearly gates. She is going to see Jesus. All of her dogmatic beliefs will be proven right.

She will be up in Heaven looking down on me praying for me to come back to the fold. Even though, we had our disagreements; I would never raise the issue of God. I let her go to her grave believing that what she knew was absolutely true.

However, for others who are dogmatic, who wish to engage in conversation, how I do it is less, less in your face, “What an idiot you are for believing this stuff. Here is all the evidence. Why cannot you see it?”

I tend to be far more Socratic. So, initially, I will not necessarily agree with them, but feign ignorance as Socrates did and say, “This God that you believe in, sounds like a quite an amazing character.”

They respond, “He is, let me tell you more about him.” So know, you have put them at ease. Now, you have made them more comfortable and let them know you are open to listening to their side. So, then I say, “Tell me more. What else can this God do?”

Give them enough time, I will ask questions, which will much force them to think about things like “How do you reconcile omniscience with free will? How can they reconcile, if they are Christian, an all intelligent God with the capacity to see original sin?”

That is a no-brainer. That he didn’t see that. He had to make a part of himself flesh to die to himself to alleviate original sins from what he created, of what he should have known would be sin in the first place.

So, I get people to walk through the inconsistencies and contradictions, so that they see it. Instead of me hammering them like a Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, type of approach, I say to them, “I want to believe in this God, so convince me.”

It puts them at ease. It makes them talk; the more they talk, the more you throw in some questions that allow them to realize, “Oh, huh… I never thought of that.” Then you leave them for a while and let them mull all that over.

Dan Barker told me, “Chris if I had someone like you who showed me the inconsistencies and contradictions, I would have changed my views in a day.” I said “No, you would not have. You were hardcore Christian. It would have taken you weeks, months, and, maybe, years.”

You and I know: we talk to former theists who are now atheists. They tell us their story and sometimes – although, it is rare – there is that flash of epiphany. That secular epiphany, “How could I have been so stupid?”

To me, those are people who were along that path, already questioning things, to begin with. They were the ones who were already thinking, “What am I believing here?” So, they read The God Delusion or looked up Sam Harris online or read Dennett’s books or whatever.

But it is the ones who are hardcore dogmatic who are firmly entrenched, digging the heels; if you come at them in an adversarial way, they are only going to become more entrenched and dislike you all the more for it.

I am trying to teach people how to have intelligent, adult conversations and disagree and still get along. Because that is your neighbour, that is your kids’ teacher, that is a cop who pulled you over. We want to make sure people are treated fairly. So, when people say, “What can I know?”

The naturalist says, “I know that I do not know what absolute truth is.” So, that, immediately, puts me into a pragmatic level of lessening my epistemic requirements and saying, “What do I know about cause and effect relationships?” It comes under the rubric of the scientific method and the sciences. That is what I will say I know.

But that knowledge is perhaps limited to being pragmatic, useful, and beneficial. It may turn out to be absolutely true, what physicists are telling us about matter or energy and biologists about function and mechanisms, may, ultimately, turn out to be absolutely true.

But all my colleagues and I are not in that businesses. We are not here to worry about it. That is what the worry is about. We are all humans. Does it work? Does it cure cancer or put people on the moon?

Vaccines cause the recognition of certain types of pathogens and kill them before it gets a chance to kill our children. Pragmatic truth is really good. It has helped our species and many other species.

That is the difference between the natural and the supernatural claims to knowledge. Why am I here? The naturalist – I am here – one answer: luck. Luck that is why we are here.

If the world happened in any other ways and functioned differently, that comets, meteors, didn’t crash into the Earth at the right, specific time to wipe out the dinosaurs to give the mammals the shot that caused the line of descent from ground squirrels to simians to primates to the split divergence of orangutans from the rest of the great apes to us, then we are not having this conversation.

We are not here. Why are we all here? Luck: that is my explanation. Luck by way of natural forces. Supernatural? Depends on the particular flavour of the day. “By the divine grace of God. We are here because God wanted us to be here.”

What am I? A natural explanation, “I am a descendant of the African ape. Prior to, that more than likely, a reptilian, prior to that fish, prior to that much pond scum, blue-green algae.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I love that phrase.

DiCarlo: Prior to that, every atom inside of us was once inside of stars. Joni Mitchell was right; we are stardust, billion-year-old carbon. That is it! Nothing more special to us than that and why we are here is of lucky episodes.

Supernaturalists, whatever. “I am a physical being but I am also a spiritual being. I am often a dualist. That means there is some corporeal aspect to me that will survive bodily death and will maybe be recycled and maybe not recycled depending on the flavour.” That is the thing within us that does the choosing.

That is not somehow affected by the natural law and that is a tricky one to reconcile. However, none the less, this cosmic goo or this spiritual fog or whatever it is you want to call our essence and continues on after we die somehow in some other realm.

I have no evidence for that so I stay over on the natural side. Supernaturalists, they believe it for their various reasons and like I said, as long as that is not generating verb harm, you go ahead and you believe that to the cows come home.

I am not, but you go ahead. How should I behave? this is the field of ethics; most supernaturalists will have some divine command theories.

God has created us for a particular reason, wants us to behave a particular way and out of that emerges somehow a free choice. Out of your choices, you get the black checks or the red hearts from God who is watching your behaviour.

If you get enough red hearts over black checks, you get rewarded in some particular way. If you do not, it is not going to favour your protoplasmic goo after you have shuffled off the mortal coil. For a naturalist, we are on our own. We are in a big old cold universe. I am an ultimate nihilist. That means I have found no ultimate universal rules for behaviour, but I am a proximal ethicist. That means we have to come up with the rules. It seems like we have indicators that help us.

We try to avoid pain and suffering. We tend towards comfort and approval in certain areas. So, maybe, those connect as guides. Maybe what good and bad is coming from biology, and what is good and bad for an organism than can come from the bottom up rather than top-down, it will give us some capacity.

It will then make rules, which will favour our comfort and disfavour our discomfort. It will extend to another species as well. Because other mammals clearly can experience pain and pleasure; therefore, we owe them rights or must extend rights to them as well.

Nothing in the universe tells me in any way that I am more privileged than a squirrel. If you can show me that, please do. I am more conscious, maybe than a squirrel, but a squirrel is way better at other things, e.g., walking on a wire, than I am.

So, why do I get to value my life more than that of a squirrel? Or we can talk about hierarchies if you want but that would get into a criteria problem. What criteria now? Is that entirely arbitrary and favours ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism?

So, I, basically, want humans to get along as much as we possibly can so we can get as much as what we want, but that cannot be at the expense of other species and other humans. I am not saying this is easy to figure out.

This is what social and political theory is about, trying to make sure people have the lives that they want, but not at the cost of so many others. That means another species as well.

That goes right to the level: I am an omnivore; I enjoy eating meat as much as I enjoy eating plant products. However, I do not eat as much pork anymore because I drive into Toronto and see those huge trucks carrying pigs.

I know how intelligent they are. I see they are going to the slaughter. I would rather not see them die, so I am going to try to cut that out as much as I can. I am a little bothered that there has not been more attention paid to.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Author; Educator; Philosopher; Fellow, Society of Ontario Freethinkers; Board Advisor, Freethought TV; Advisory Fellow, Center for Inquiry Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/dicarlo-four; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Monika Orski (Part Six)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15

Abstract

Monika Orski is the Ordförande/Chairman, Mensa Sverige/Mensa Sweden. She discusses: the fun of the super smart; researchers of the gifted and talented; theories of creativity and genius; other demographics of Mensa Sweden; and the old “nature” argument.

Keywords: chairman, Mensa Sverige, Mensa Sweden, Monika Orski, Ordförande.

An Interview with Monika Orski: Ordförande/Chairman, Mensa Sverige/Mensa Sweden (Part Six)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Now, if the super smart are anything like ordinary people, where their higher general intelligence simply implies a bigger hammer or a stronger ox, they must have a friendly competition with some of the other chapters of the super smart groups. You mentioned some within the definition of Western Europe. How do some of the Mensa chapters have some competitive fun? How do smart people compete with one another, simply in a more amplified and varied set of ways?

Monika Orski: Probably in lots of ways I am not aware of, but of course I know of some kinds of competitive fun.

I am not a particular fan of board games myself, although I occasionally enjoy one at some Mensa meeting. There is a quite large group within Mensa who are very much into board games of different kinds, mostly with a preference for the strategic games where you need to think fast. No large Mensa gathering feels entirely complete without a games room, and some participants will spend almost all of their time in it, while others might step in for an hour or two in between other activities.

At EMAGs, the European meetings, there is usually also a football (soccer) tournament, where mensans from different national groups form teams – sometimes mixed nations teams, to get enough players.

Some national gatherings, including the AG of Mensa Sweden, often include a poker tournament. Only small money stakes, of course, as it’s purely intended for friendly competition for the fun of it.

There has also been a logic puzzles competition with national teams from the four Nordic Mensas. It’s been a while since anyone organized one of those, though. If I remember correctly, Sweden lost the finals to Denmark the latest time we had it. It might be time for us to try and organize a re-match.

2. Jacobsen: In the European context, who are some researchers with a great deal of experience and research into the gifted and talented community there?

Orski: This is a question where I need to resort to an excuse: I’m an engineer, not a psychologist. I don’t have the deeper knowledge of psychological research needed to provide a good answer.

From my own reading, I would pick the names Ian Deary and Robert Plomin. In the more local, Swedish context, I know that Roland Persson has done a lot of interesting research regarding gifted children, and there is also some interesting work by Berit Carlstedt on intelligence and intelligence testing. But those happen to be some names I know of, I’m sure there are many others.

3. Jacobsen: In the European context, who are individual, establishment or independent, researchers with interesting or unique take on creativity and, indeed, genius? Any personal theory or theories, from reading and observation, as to what comprises the roots necessary for genius to flourish – with, of course, a definition of genius as a bulwark for the theory or theories?

Orski: As above, I have no particular knowledge of the foremost research into creativity or genius. I think my reading is too amateur too really allow me in good conscience to point to anyone.

I know that there is a continuing debate on whether genius is a useful term at all. But if we are still going to use it, I think the definition used on the English language Wikipedia page for the subject “genius” is a good one: “A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge.”

Thus, I think it important to remember that gifted rarely means genius. There are few geniuses, while gifted is a label used for a fast-thinking part of the population – be it the 2% allowed Mensa membership, or 5% as is often set as an estimate of the number of gifted children, or something in between. This is not a large minority, but it is not truly rare, as genius is.

How can we help genius to flourish? My theory, or maybe rather my guess, would be to follow the same principles as to help anyone gifted to flourish, only the genius would probably need more of it and at a much faster pace. Let people learn things, and keep learning. Leave room for creativity. Don’t be afraid to give a young person space to explore things in solitary occupations. Keep teaching them new things. Let them find their multiple talents, even if they chose to pursue one of them more than others. Allow them to create positions for themselves to keep exploring, and to keep learning also when they are no longer young.

4. Jacobsen: Also, I am curious. What are the religious demographics, if known or even simply surmised, of Mensa Sweden? What are the political demographics? How does this, potentially, reflect the international data on intelligence and political orientation & religious beliefs?

Orski: The simple answer is, I don’t know. We do not keep records of religious, ethnical, or political characteristics of our members. I might add that I would find it quite repugnant if a society like ours did.

Religion is not particularly present in Swedish everyday discourse. Many people would rather define themselves as of no particular religion at all. This makes it a bit hard to define. Also, it’s not a particularly common topic in everyday talk.

Regarding politics, some people tend to talk much more about it than others, especially on social media. Those are usually not the level headed, middle of the road types. But from what I know of the politics of the mensans I meet, I have no reason to believe there is any significant difference to the general political demographic. There might be reason to take into account that the educated part of the population is probably overrepresented in Mensa, but other than that – we have all sorts, just like everywhere else.

Which leads me to another demographic, where I have no statistics but a qualified guess based on who I meet in Mensa. While we have people from all walks of life, there is an overrepresentation of those with university education. Seems quite natural, especially if you take into account that in our part of the world, access to education is not limited by the financial means of your family.

5. Jacobsen: Occasionally, in the early 21st century less than the 20th century but still, we find individuals, internationally speaking, who crop up. They, at times, hold great stations of power and influence, and prestige.

They proclaim science as a male thing, not as a female thing; science only built, statistically speaking, for the male brain, in their some time terminology; even, that women simply are intellectually inferior to men and, therefore, should have a pre-ascribed role within society based on, what they see and argue, innate differences in not only abilities but also preferences based on temperaments.

Ironically, temperaments seen as innate in which they feel the need to encourage through all systems and channels reaching mass audiences in society, especially reflected in the reactions to non-traditional roles for women in representations within films and television, for example.

Even so, or while saying these things, often, these individuals will lose their jobs and be lambasted in public. Others, at the same time, will see them as pariahs of the genetic truth of the human species in sex differences – full stop, end of story, exclamation point.

What seems like the proper interpretation of the situation here? How can one respond to the arguments about innate differences and prescribed roles for women in society? Why do these individual make these arguments?

How do – in your lifetime of as one and in conversations with them – women tend to react to these individuals when speaking with one another, which may not be the same manner in which women speak in public or to men for that matter?

When they bring data forward, or historic examples of more men than women as the listed discoverers or inventors, what seems like a proper retort?

Orski: The old “nature” argument. Of course, if this was in fact a matter of nature, there would be no need to try to force that conviction on anyone, and even less to put it into laws, as those authoritarian sexists often will. No one seems to see it necessary to make laws to prevent that humans photosynthesize, or that we fly by way of flapping our arms. Why? Because there are truly innate traits of human nature that make those acts impossible.

My recipe for a proper retort is usually to simple say that is not true, and go on do something productive, nice, or both. There is usually no way you can reason with people like this. They obviously have a need to cling to some sense of being superior, no matter how unrealistic. Unless you are a psychologist they came to in order to get help with the inferiority complex that is likely to be somewhere at the bottom of this attitude, it is not your job to make them understand how the world works.

For those who are simply unaware of the different expectations men and women still live under, even in relatively equal societies, I recommend a little mind game. Next time you think a man is well qualified for a position, ask yourself if you would also think a woman of exactly the same merits and exactly the same level of professional behaviour qualified. Also ask yourself the corresponding question next time you think a woman might not be quite qualified for a position.

Lastly, for all the decent men with true merits of their own who encourage women to make sure they do not get positions based on gender: Ask yourself whether you would be in your current position if you were a woman with exactly the same qualifications. If your honest answer is yes, assuming you have a realistic assessment of your qualifications, then you can congratulate yourself on being hired on merit, and not on the all to common male quota.

References

Mensa International. (2018). Mensa Sweden. Retrieved from https://www.mensa.org/country/sweden.
Mensa Sverige. (2018). Mensa Sverige. Retrieved from https://www.mensa.se/.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Ordförande/Chairman, Mensa Sverige/Mensa Sweden.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/orski-six; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.

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2023-02-12

An Interview with Tim Moen (Part One)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15

Abstract

Tim Moen is the President of the Libertarian Party of Canada. He discusses: family background, culture, family, geography, language, and religion/irreligion; religion and God; and arguments for God.

Keywords: Libertarianism, Libertarian Party of Canada, Tim Moen.

An Interview with Tim Moen: Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada (Part One)[1]^,[2]

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of culture, family, geography, language, and religion/irreligion, what is your background?

I grew up on a farm in Northern Alberta about 80 km NE of Grande Prairie with my mom and dad and younger brother. My grandparents were Mennonite Brethren who were branded Kulaks and fled Stalinist Russia and settled in Southern Alberta around Lethbridge. They worked hard to build a life in Canada and I’m grateful for their legacy of hard work, responsibility and sense of connection to something greater than one’s self.

Our family went to a non-denominational Church and I was a very involved and earnest evangelical Christian and truth seeker. I spent a year in Bible College immediately after high school studying theology with an eye towards serving as a pastor. That year left me with the impression that there were no real answers to be found and I realized I’d have a difficult time being a pastor selling any kind of certainty so I moved on to a career in Emergency Services.

I’ve spent over 22 years working in Emergency Services in various roles and still work today as a Firefighter/Paramedic. I love helping people and I consider my primary purpose in life to protect people from destructive forces whether its acute illness, fire, trauma, authoritarian force, or unclear thinking.

2. Jacobsen: At the time, what images of religion and God were in mind for you?

My image of God at the time was one of an omnipotent, omniscient, mostly compassionate celestial dictator. A God that knew my every thought and desire and had a plan for me. Religion to me was the institution where one became educated in order to obtain salvation and more closely align one’s beliefs with a very real spiritual realm.

3. What argument and evidence seemed the strongest in favour of the God of evangelical Christianity to you? This can include traditional arguments such as the Cosmological Argument (from contingency), Kalam Cosmological Argument
(based on the beginning of the universe), Moral Argument (based upon
moral values and duties), Teleological Argument (from fine-tuning), and the Ontological Argument (from the possibility of God’s existence to His actuality).

The most compelling argument I’ve heard for a God is probably the Unmoved Mover argument. The way Tom Woods explained it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ2oY7nvM-M is very compelling to me. I’d always thought of the Unmoved Mover as a way of saying that there must be a beginning to the universe ergo God most have started it, which seems fairly easy to dismiss, but Woods explains that it that this view of the Unmoved Mover is a straw man and further explains that bringing potentiality into actuality is an ongoing process and demands a God. In other words; for reality to continue to exist requires a supreme being. If one then takes a layman’s interpretation of the quantum realm and how strange and difficult to explain the substrate of reality becomes it becomes compelling to imagine a supreme being there. It satisfies a deep psychological longing to explain reality in a way that is easier to understand and also a longing to never cease existing. In fairness I haven’t thought very deeply on these issues for years so I haven’t delved into the arguments for or against the Unmoved Mover in any depth.

Once you have a compelling argument for the existence of a supreme being you still have all your work ahead of you to argue for the “God of evangelical Christianity”. There are as many interpretations and conceptions of God as there are believers so its difficult to know how one would go about proving the existence of a particular conception. For example, what is the null hypothesis for a Young Earth Creationists argument that the Earth is only 10,000 years old? What about Evangelicals that believe in an old Earth and evolution? Are we expected to believe that God ignored humanity for its first 100,000 years, essentially sentencing them to eternal torment, and then suddenly showed up with a bunch of rules and then sent his son to die and offered everyone in the past 2000 years another path to salvation that didn’t exist before? These types of questions are ones that vexed me in the past and essentially turned me into an anti-theist for a period of time, but I now think this is probably not helpful to try and demand a literal description of material reality from scripture in the same way it is not helpful to propagate the idea that the scripture is a literal description of material reality.

I have considerably softened my view of Christianity over the years. My mind started to change towards Christianity after reading the writing of Michael Dowd who is a Christian pastor and author of the book “Thank God for Evolution” has a completely different conception of evangelical Christianity that doesn’t require belief in the sort of supernatural person in the sky I believed in as a child. It was further softened as I went through grad-school and read research on optimal mind states and started practicing some forms of meditation, based on peer reviewed research, that looked very similar to how I was taught to pray. Expressing gratitude is peer reviewed and is also happens to be how many religious practices teach to begin prayer. So when I’ve attended religious ceremonies and church over the last few years I’ve come to view them through a different lens. There are likely good evolutionary reasons these institutions emerge and there are very good things going on here and they fill a deep human need.

In summary, I think there are some compelling reasons to believe in a supreme being although I remain unconvinced. I think that Evangelical Christianity can comport with these compelling reasons to believe in a supreme being if it isn’t taken as a literal description of material reality.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada.

[2] Individual Publication Date: October 15, 2018: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/moen-one; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2019: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.