Waleed Al-Husseini

Leo Igwe

Marie-Thérèse O’Loughlin

Maryam Namazie

Gina Khan

 … Read the rest

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So in North Dakota, as I mentioned in passing a few hours ago, the legislature has decided to define eggs as people.

North Dakota lawmakers voted on Friday afternoon to pass a “personhood” abortion ban, which would endow fertilized eggs with all the rights of U.S. citizens and effectively outlaw abortion. The measure, which passed the Senate last month, passed the House by a 57-35 vote and now heads to a ballot vote, likely in the next November election.

The fertilized eggs have all the rights of US citizens with the result that their mothers don’t. All rights for the egg, no rights for the woman the egg is in. The egg is everything the woman is nothing. Some … Read the rest

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The Onion…

Supreme Court Justices Brought To Tears By Heartfelt Testimony Of Bigot Who Hates Gay People

WASHINGTON—Listening to oral arguments Wednesday regarding the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, all nine Supreme Court justices were reportedly moved to tears by the heartfelt and highly personal testimony of a bigot who despises homosexuals unreservedly. “It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t spent their whole life in a state of benighted prejudice to know the pain and hardship that people like myself endure every day in our efforts to ensure that gays and lesbians remain oppressed and unequal,” said the immense homophobe, whose stirring, emotional speech about his harrowing daily struggles to impede social progress prompted a weeping Chief Justice John

… Read the rest

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Now look here. Politicians get caricatured. There’s a long and glorious tradition of caricaturing politicians. Right? Right.

Therefore, bloggers should get caricatured too. It’s the same thing, after all – being a politician and being a blogger.

Or is it?

No, actually. It’s not. Being a blogger isn’t the same as being a politician.

Frankly it wouldn’t occur to me to caricature a blogger. It wouldn’t occur to me to caricature anyone (even a pol, actually) because it sails way too close to plain old meanness. It would feel awful, for that reason – it would be like pinching a smiling baby or kicking a friendly dog. It makes me flinch just to imagine doing it.

That’s not to say … Read the rest

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Adam Lee did a post in Amy’s series a week ago and I missed it. (Too busy stuffing my face with cupcakes, probably.)

Most of us became atheists for intellectual reasons, because we find the arguments for theism unconvincing, or for moral reasons, because we find its teachings intolerable. But it seems to me that there’s a small number of men (and a smaller number of women) who are atheists purely because they delight in being offensive, because they believe no one has the right to tell them what to do. They think this community is a place where they can indulge those impulses: where they can be as crass and boorish as they want, where they can leer

… Read the rest

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Anne Marie Waters had a depressing experience a couple of weeks ago.

On Sunday, I spoke at the University of Kent’s Critical Law Society conference under the heading of ‘Equality: Are We There Yet?’

I was invited to speak alongside pro-sharia advocate Aina Khan (more on her later) and a PhD student (more on her later as well) and found myself in a not-too-unfamiliar situation of having to argue against domestic violence in opposition to a room full of “feminists”.

Having described how sharia family law in Britain allows men to beat their wives – as the testimony of women who have been through it confirms – the “feminists” weren’t quite sure whether or not they disapproved. I was met

… Read the rest

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A very pointed Jesus and Mo today.

Aha. It makes him look like Jesus’s wife, and thus his subordinate.

Think about it, Mo.… Read the rest

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Guest post by Tom Foss.

Quoting “vjack”

Harassment involves repeated, unsolicited behavior in which the target is demeaned, threatened, or offended in such a manner that a hostile environment is created for the target.

I wonder if Vjack’s workplace ever includes presentations on sexual harassment. If it does, I wonder if he just spends his time during them sleeping or doodling, because even cursory attentiveness would show what kind of bullshit this is. “Repeated” is often the case (and includes microaggressions that add up to create a hostile environment) but is not a necessary component–and, in fact, the sources I found (like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) don’t include “repeated” as a condition. Instead, the necessary components are … Read the rest

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It’s psychic Surly Amy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj2606dG20

… Read the rest

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It’s still going on, Michael Nugent’s project to create a “dialogue” between harassers and the people they harass. He doesn’t call it that. In fact he doesn’t call it anything – he’s being so carefully neutral that he refers to it as just two “perceived sides.”

I find the whole thing rebarbative, because nearly all the participation so far is by people who have been harassing me and others for months–>almost two years now. I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to talk to them on the forum they set up to harass me and others, I don’t want to talk to them here, I don’t want to talk to them on Twitter, I don’t want to … Read the rest

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Desperate Syrian women who find themselves refugees in Jordan can…sell themselves or their daughters, for usually a very small sum of money.

Her daughter Aya is their best hope.

“My daughter is willing to sacrifice herself for her family,” Nezar says. “If the war had not happened I would not marry my daughter to a Saudi. But the Syrians here are poor and have no money.”

Nezar’s daughter is 17. The Saudi groom is 70.

Maybe he’ll turn out to be a nice guy.

The surplus of desperate Syrian refugees means marriage has become a buyer’s market with some grooms offering as little as $100 cash for a bride.

The legal age of marriage in Jordan is 18

… Read the rest

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David Robert Grimes has the unmitigated temerity to consider evidence for claims that guns make us safer.

Academics such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have long claimed that more firearms reduce crime. But is this really the case? Stripped of machismo bluster, this is at heart a testable claim that merely requires sturdy epidemiological analysis. And this was precisely what Prof Charles Branas and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania examined in their 2009 paper investigating the link between gun possession and gun assault. They compared 677 cases in which people were injured in a shooting incident with 684 people living in the same area that had not suffered a gun injury. The researchers matched these “controls”

… Read the rest

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Remember the Islamic University of Gaza? That the LSE Student Union twinned with a few days ago? The Boston Globe did quite a flattering piece on it in February 2010.

The first sign that this is a different place from the Western universities it resembles comes when a bell rings in the library. Quickly the students on odd-numbered floors  – all men  – gather their books and file into the stairwells. Women file in to take their turn. In keeping with a puritanical interpretation of Islamic law, men and women aren’t allowed to study together, so they switch floors every two hours. They lounge in separate student unions and eat in separate cafeterias. At intervals during the day, the call

… Read the rest

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Ah yes – the ever-popular “random man tells woman to smile” number.

When I did not smile (I continued looking for my keys in my purse and avoided all eye contact, in fact), he told me my “pretty face was going to waste.”

Ah, no. It’s not. It’s being put to good use keeping her eyes in their right place so that she can see to find her keys and make her way around, and keeping her mouth where it belongs so that she can eat. It’s not going to waste at all. Its function isn’t to provide something for that random man.

There are lots of comments. Some are interesting.

• A guy did this to me recently

… Read the rest

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It can be so puzzling, looking back at even quite recent history, trying to figure out “what were they thinking?” What were the people who ran Irish industrial “schools” thinking when they treated the children like shit? What were the people who screamed abuse outside Little Rock High School in 1957 thinking? What were the people who owned slaves thinking? What were the people who sold slaves thinking? What were the people who captured human beings and sold them into slavery thinking?

What were the people who stole children from unmarried mothers in Australia thinking?

Hundreds of mothers and their families gathered yesterday to hear a historic national apology from Australia’s prime minister Julia Gillard. Forced to give up their

… Read the rest

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I’m reading a little book published in 1982: Vision and Realism: a hundred years of The Freethinker, by Jim Herrick.

There are some things that sound very familiar, amusingly so.

Foote joined with G.J. Holyoake when the two of them started the Secularist in 1876. They parted after two months, differing over the extent to which religion should be attacked…[p 6]

Oh yes? So it’s not just us, and it’s not just Paul Kurtz and Madalyn Murray O’Hair. It feels vaguely reassuring to know that.

The extent to which freethought journals should be aggressively anti-Christian was – and has remained – contentious. [p 9]

And in Foote’s case it was so contentious that he was sent to prison for … Read the rest

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