Humanist Community member Alex Havasy will present summaries of the California state ballot propositions that will be on the November 2014 ballot.
The summary will include the main arguments in favor of and against each proposition, who is financing it, and how various organizations recommend you vote.
Attendees will be encouraged to add their input.
American women comprise no more than 25% of the decision-makers across sectors in the US (e.g., corporate boards and executives, the US Congress, law firm partners).
The U.S. ranks well below many industrialized nations when it come to the status of women and policies that support them.
Why does that matter and what is the U.S. losing by failing to support the advancement of women? What would the country gain if women were full partners in all aspects of work and civic life?
Mary V. Hughes is a political strategist, author, and the architect of the Close the Gap CA campaign, www.closethegapca.org.
Humanist Community Forum (2014-10-19): Why Women? (Mary V. Hughes) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.
Under what conditions does violation of law have the moral legitimacy of civil disobedience? If Edward Snowden were prosecuted in an American court for leaking classified NSA documents to journalists, for example, would his actions be justified under principles of civil disobedience as articulated by John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of our time? In his third presentation of Rawls’ work to HCSV, Marty Carcieri (Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University) will present Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience and apply it to the case of Edward Snowden.
Humanist Community Forum (2014-06-15): Rawls, Civil Disobedience, and Edward Snowden from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.
When NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden released a trove of documents detailing the extensive and intrusive nature of the covert surveillance of US citizens, politicians and pundits of all stripes called for a national “debate” about the illegal surveillance. President Obama launched an internal investigation into the National Security Agency’s methods and procedures (the investigation has been suspended due to the government shutdown).
The “national debate” has since subsided, but the urgency has not. In this talk, we’ll explore the history of US government surveillance (it goes back a long way), what information is being collected on US citizens and what the government can do with that information. Most importantly, we’ll examine ways ordinary people can and should be involved in the continuing efforts to rein in the NSA.
Our speaker’s main thesis is that out-of-control surveillance has historically been driven by two forces: a national war mentality (as in the current “war on terror”) and advances in technology.
Paul George, is Director of Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, the leading progressive grassroots activist organization on the Peninsula. Paul has been a human rights activist and grassroots organizer for over 45 years. During those years his work has taken on many forms: electoral campaigns (Gene McCarthy for President in 1968 and the single payer healthcare ballot measure in California in 1996); Central American solidarity work, which included several trips to El Salvador in the midst of that country’s civil war; political organizer for a large labor union; and 20+ years at the helm of PPJC.
Paul is frequently invited to speak on a wide range of issues and his public lectures are always well received. For the past 17 years, Paul has hosted a monthly television program called Other Voices and for 15 years he was the host of a radio talk show called Freedom Highway.
Humanist Community Forum (2013-11-03): One Nation Under Surveillance (Paul George) from Humanist Community-SiliconValley on Vimeo.
October 6, 2013
John Rawls is the most influential Anglo-American political theorist of the past three centuries. In bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rawls in 1999, Bill Clinton noted that he had put our liberties on a brilliant new foundation. That foundation is a refined version of the social contract as developed by early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It is of particular interest for Humanists since it provides an objective but workable basis for politics and ethics. It is neither objective, that is, in the sense of some transcendental foundation like God or Nature, nor purely subjective, with the nihilist dead end to which that leads. It is a contract, the basic terms of which, Rawls argues, we would (and do) accept as the basis of our politics and ethics. Besides presenting the basic method and principles for which Rawls argues, Carcieri will also present Rawls’ famous theory of civil disobedience, which builds upon the work of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and others.
Martin Carcieri is an Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, where he teaches courses and seminars on Constitutional Law and Political Theory. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, and has published twenty-five journal articles and book chapters.
Click here to view the Handout for this fascinating and informative talk.