Archive for November, 2008

One Life

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | | No Comments

Norm currently being struck down with illness, it fell to Sophie to lead this week’s session of One Life.

It went quite well, we got a good turn out as usual and the discussion kept rolling on around this week’s topic, science and critical thinking. The lesson I really took from it comparing it to the sessions I led was that you really need a critical mass in order to really get good discussion going which this year we thankfully have always managed.

Lil also did quite a good job as head chef for the evening so all in all things went very well.

Democracy in action

Friday, November 7th, 2008 | | No Comments

Last night was the union council meeting to look at what motions should make it to the referendum or not. Myself, Norm, Nicola, Moz and Gijsbert turned up to support motion 4 and while it’s probably a good job we did, it didn’t do us much good.

I have written a more in depth article for Leeds Student (and anyone else who wants to run it) which we’ll be sending in along with all our other articles in the hope some of it will make it to the next issue, but I will briefly summarise things here.

First of all, amendment 4 passed which removed “this union resolves” part 1, which was to stop stocking Halal and Kosher meat. From a motion to remove Halal and Kosher meat from the union. There is no way that is constitutional! The union council rules state they cannot pass amendments that “significantly alter the nature of the motion.” How could you ever, ever come up with a less appropriate amendment? How could you change it’s nature any more than that?

The amount of open descrimination against the atheist community was also quite clear. It didn’t seem to matter how many times union council members had gone on and on about how this is about whether motions should go forward to referendum, not about the politics of each issue, union council members repeatedly voiced their own opinions and yet hardly any of them mentioned the core issue here - animal welfare.

Finally it would seem important in what is aiming to be a democractic process that union council members are free to vote how they wish. It is interesting then that when Barry abstained from voting on the motion (not even voted for it but simply abstained) he was ridiculed by the chair and asked to give reasons for his decisions.

All of this amounts to showing the clear descrimination that goes on, on campus against the atheist community.

For his noodliness

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | | No Comments

The first formal debate of the year having arrived last night, myself and Tom took it upon ourselves to put forward the case for the Flying Spaghetti Monster being the one true god.

The debate was of quite a high standard with both sides making some excellent points. The motion was ultimately defeated but at a fairly even split of 14 votes to 12 but this is of course just part of his devine plan. Ultimately, it was a really fun debate and one we should definitely run again in the future.

A spooky One Life

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | | No Comments

Last Friday saw another session of One Life come and go, this one on rights and responsibilities. It got off to a rather shaky shart - at five past seven nobody had turned up! But by the end of the session we had 15 of us which is more than a respectable number, especially given it was Halloween.

As predicted the session degraded into a big argument about speciesism which interesting enough seemed to produce positive results. Paul having made a massive rant about it prompted Zoltan to later suggest that maybe the whole speciesism argument didn’t make that much sense after all. So maybe we’re one step closer to thinking rationally about it :D .

The Gijs has been confirmed

Saturday, November 1st, 2008 | | No Comments

We finally have a date fixed for when our guest speaker, Dr. Gijsbert Stoet will be presenting his session of One Life on human needs.

That said is November 21st so mark it down as it will no doubt be an excellent session to attend.
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