How appropriate, how timely, how right in every way – Jesus and Mo the Book is now available in Danish.

Jesus and og Mo

Jesus og Mo på dansk

De bedste striber udkommer på dansk fredag den 20. februar.

Overskuddet går til at støtte kampen for ytringsfrihed.

Hver uge i 10 år har den anonyme tegner bag ”Jesus and Mo” lagt en ny stribe ud på sin hjemmeside, og i den tid er tegneserien blevet kult i brede kredse i Storbritannien. Nu kommer de bedste på dansk.

Overskuddet går til et godt formål

”Jesus og Mo – de bedste striber” er blevet gjort klar til tryk samtidig med, at to tragiske terrorangreb ramte ført Paris og så København.

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Good god. Chelsea fans (fans of the football club of that name) are caught on video on the Paris Métro pushing a black man off the train and chanting “we are racist and that’s the way we like it.”

The jaw drops. The eyes bug out. What are they thinking? What is wrong with them? What is it about being a Chelsea fan that requires or enables this? Football is hardly a lily-white sport, happily, so…what??

Police are looking at the video in hopes of identifying the perps.

The footage was obtained by the Guardian, which reported that the incident had happened at Richelieu-Drouot station in the centre of the French capital on Tuesday evening.

British expatriate Paul Nolan,

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Here’s a piece of good news for a change – Malawi has said no to child marriage.

Malawi has passed a law banning child marriage, raising the minimum age to 18 in a country where half of girls end up as child brides.

Women rights campaigners hailed the move as “a great day for Malawian girls” and said the law would help boost development in one of the world’s poorest countries.

But they warned Malawi would not end child marriage without concerted efforts to tackle poverty and end harmful traditional practices like early sexual initiations.

The law is an important part though.

Malawi has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage. Half of girls wed before their

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But David Futrelle didn’t mess around with just one stupid meme. David Futrelle got together a whole bunch of stupid memes to admire.

Ian Ironwood, as he calls himself, is the proprietor of the blog The Red Pill Room. He’s also a big fan of retro art.  Alas, he has attempted to combine these two interests, producing a series of baffling “memes” in which he pastes little manosophere lessons on top of artwork borrowed from postwar American magazines and paperbacks.

It’s hard to pick a favorite but I’ll go with this one, partly because it’s so wordy, which is kind of not the point of memes.

By…tinkering with their sodas?… Read the rest

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Lucky me, I just saw a meme on Facebook, with an approving comment.

How lucky for people who hate feminism that ISIS and Boko Haram exist.… Read the rest

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Lars Vilks has indeed gone into hiding now, which is tragic. I’m relieved, though, that he says it’s probably temporary.

Lars Vilks, the controversial cartoonist who escaped unhurt from the café hosting the debate, told Channel 4 News he is now in hiding.

“I am at a secret place, totally unknown. I can’t give you countries or one place. I can only just say that I will remain here until we have a more clear picture of how things are looking and hopefully I will go back into a bit more normal routines within a few days or a week or so.”

By the way Channel 4 News? He’s not really “controversial” – not to reasonable people he’s not.… Read the rest

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The BBC is still at it. This must be a deliberate policy, not mere laziness or habit.

It’s at it in a story on what the Danish domestic intelligence agency knew about El-Hussein. Prison officials told them he was at risk of being radicalized. I would guess they are told that about a lot of people, and can’t closely monitor all of them.

Danish intelligence chief Jens Madsen acknowledged that El-Hussein had been “on the radar” of his services.

Mr Madsen said investigators were working on the theory that he could have been inspired by the shootings in Paris last month.

Lars Vilks told AFP news agency that police “did not step up security on Saturday. It was the

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The BBC reports that a police chief in al-Baghdadi, Iraq reports that IS torched 45 people there.

Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.

Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces.

IS fighters captured much of the town, near Ain al-Asad air base, last week.

Col Obeidi said a compound that houses the families of security personnel and local officials was now under attack.

Shiraz Maher explains why IS does things like torching people to death.

Content warning.

Even by the barbaric standards

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What it’s like to be a child and a mother.

Many of the babies are born with complications, far from the nearest hospital, and the mortality rate for mother and infant is sky-high.

Nor does the future look rosy. The daughters of these child brides are born into a cycle of systemic abuse, violence and poverty.

“I thought I’d have a better life, but at the end, it didn’t turn out that way,” says Aracely, who was married to a 34-year-old when she was 11. When she was four months’ pregnant, her husband left, declaring the child wasn’t his. Now 15, she is raising her son on her own.

“During the time I was pregnant, he didn’t give me

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My friend Sadaf Ali has a post about the fact that far too many activist atheists talk over ex-Muslims and liberal Muslims instead of listening to them and/or helping them get a turn at the mic.

I was recently quote in Allie Conti’s article for VICE on this issue:

But Sadaf Ali, a Muslim turned atheist activist, says that many New Atheists are just grown-up version of the bullies who called her a “terrorist” as a kid.

“I’ve had to debate people often who make gross generalizations of Muslims and Muslim cultures,” she told me. “People hide their bigotry behind their promotion of atheism, and I think it’s disturbing.” She has a pretty easy solution to changing the movement’s alleged-racism

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There was a rally for free speech in Copenhagen tonight.

Via Twitter –

… Read the rest

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Via Grammarly –

… Read the rest

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Tom Gjelten at NPR did a typically NPR passive-aggressive story on “extreme” atheists and Craig Hicks and yadda yadda. I’ve been doing the same sort of thing ever since last Wednesday, but…I think without the passive-aggressive aspects. That’s been my intention at least. I’m up front about it – Craig Hicks freaks me out because we had friends in common, because his Facebook wall looks exactly like the walls of countless other bro atheists, because I don’t know but I fear his anti-theism – which I share – may have had something to do with the three murders he apparently confessed to. I don’t like the idea, and that’s exactly why I’ve been poking at it so hard.

But Gjelten…well … Read the rest

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Some people in Izmir protested the growing influence of Islam in schools in Turkey on Friday. They were dispersed by water cannons.

Education is the latest flashpoint between the administration of President Tayyip Erdogan, and secularist Turks who accuse him of overseeing creeping ‘Islamization’ in the NATO member state.

Riot police were out in force on Izmir’s streets, with water cannon being used to disperse banner-waving demonstrators who had gathered in the center of the city, according to pictures from Dogan news agency. At least one person was seen being led away by plain clothes security officers.

Parts of some regular schools have been requisitioned to create more places for students in “Imam Hatip” religious schools championed by Erdogan,

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I wrote this month’s column for the Freethinker yesterday. It’s a rather heated rejection of the “we must be responsible if we want to live in harmony with horrible ideas” approach. I don’t want to live in harmony with horrible ideas; I want to reject them, and explain my reasons for rejecting them.

It’s not always immediately clear which ideas are horrible. Sometimes it takes extended discussion and illustration and listing of examples to make the horribleness of a particular idea clear. That’s one major reason free speech is important, and why it often trumps other goods.

But some ideas we already know are horrible. We don’t need to keep reopening the question every hour, because we already know and … Read the rest

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Brilliant cartoon by Kevin Moore at The Nib – Parking Space Atheists.… Read the rest

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More on Turkey’s Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam via an article in Today’s Zaman last November.

An activist who was kicked out of the Women and Justice Summit organized by the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) on Monday has said Erdoğan committed an unconstitutional act by saying men and women are not equal.

On the first day of the conference activist Fikriye Yılmaz was silenced and forcibly removed from the room by security at the request of Family and Social Policy Minister Ayşenur İslam after Yılmaz attempted to ask a question during a speech by the minister.

Yılmaz, a member of the We Will Stop the Murders of Women Platform, spoke with Today’s Zaman about her experience

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Speaking of people being murdered for terrible petty self-regarding narcissistic reasons – in Turkey 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan was murdered for having the audacity to resist being raped.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS in Turkey took to the streets yesterday in protest at the murder of a young woman after she resisted an alleged attempt to rape her, local media reported.

Hundreds of women gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim square chanting slogans such as “You will never walk alone!”.

The protesters also demanded that family and social policies minister Aysenur Islam, a woman, step down.

See if you can find someone whose name isn’t Submission.

On Friday, police discovered the burned body of 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan in a riverbed in southern Turkey.

She

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About the Copenhagen shooter.

Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein has been widely named as the gunman who killed two people and wounded five at a cultural centre and synagogue in the Danish capital.

El-Hussein was not an immigrant. He was of Palestinian descent but his parents settled in Denmark before he was born. Like the gunmen in Paris, he turned against the country of his birth.

…

Classmates who spoke to the Ekstra Bladet newspaper (in Danish) remembered a loner with a hot temper who loved to discuss Islam and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He was not afraid to voice a hatred of Jews, said one.

So he was on the path to becoming a thoroughly terrible person, one with no … Read the rest

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In Dhaka today, a publisher’s stall at a book fair was shut down for displaying a biography of Mohammed.

Bangla Academy has shut down the Rodela Prokashani stall on the allegation of publishing and selling a translated book on Prophet Muhammad’s biography, which “hurts religious sentiment of people.”

Dr Jalal Ahmed, member secretary of the Amar Ekushey Book Fair, said: “The stall of Rodela Prokashani was shut down on Monday for publishing and selling a book [translated], Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, which allegedly hurts people’s religious sentiments.”

“According to article 13.13 of Fair Regulations 2015, none is allowed to sell books at the fair that can hurt religious sentiments. The

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)