Behold the gruesome corruption, sleaze, and all-round disgustingness of US politics.

Back when Dodd-Frank mandated the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency proposed by Elizabeth Warren with the goal of protecting American families from predatory lending practices, few probably imagined the agency would face pushback from the chair of the Democratic National Committee. And yet, here we are in 2016, in the midst of one of the most bizarre election seasons on record, and Wasserman Schultz, along with several other Floridians in Congress, is challenging the CFPB’s forthcoming payday lending regulations.

Because what could be more worth protecting from regulation than an “industry” that preys on poor people by charging sky-high interest rates on payday loans?

Wasserman Schultz is listed as a co-sponsor on the bill that would stall CFPB’s regulations and give states the opportunity to opt out of them.

Wasserman Schultz has plenty of support in this endeavor, much of it from Republicans, as The Huffington Post’s Zach Carter points out. But Wasserman Schultz, who has received over $30,000 from the payday loan industry, will lend legitimacy to the Democratic minority that supports the bill.

Sleazy sleazy sleazy.

The Women’s Liberation Group within the Edinburgh University Student Association is worried that there is going to be an event on human trafficking at the university. The group issued a statement.

Recently, it was brought to the Women’s Group attention that there is an event being organised within the university on Human Trafficking. The Women’s Group have a few concerns with the event.

Any conflation of human trafficking with sex work is incredibly harmful and damaging to both sides. We hope discussions on trafficking would not disproportionately focus on sex work, as from the statistics provided (an estimated 28 million are trafficked and 4.5 million are part of the sex trade) this would make up around 1/6 of trafficking. We would hope the conversation would address all forms of forced labour, including those such as domestic and manual labour.

But maybe that’s what the event is about – sex trafficking. Trafficking is not identical to forced labor, and there are different kinds of forced labor which can all be addressed separately. I don’t see it as particularly women-liberating to say don’t talk about sex trafficking, talk about all forced labor instead. A form of slavery that very disproportionately victimizes women ought to be a feminist concern, I should think. It’s odd to see feminists saying ALL forced labor matters.

However, we are concerned that the two speakers included in the event are from the same ideological wing and support an “end demand” model for prostitution through criminalisation. One of the speakers is from an organisation which equates child abuse and lap dancing as examples of violence against women. Their stance is: “All prostitution is exploitative of the person prostituted, regardless of the context, or whether that person is said to have consented to the prostitution.” This is directly at odds with EUSA policy to condemn anti sex work campaigns.

Because libertarian fun-feminism has eaten all their brains.

A statement by Inspire:

Inspire is shocked and disappointed that some British imams, Muslim groups and individuals in our country have expressed their support and paid tribute to Mumtaz Qadri following his execution* yesterday in Pakistan, by declaring him to be a “martyr” who defended the honour of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)

Mumtaz Qadri assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in January 2011 for his stance against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and his robust defence of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman who is currently on death row for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). 

Governor Taseer pointed out in November 2010 in an interview with CNN that the blasphemy law is not a religious law but a political tool implemented in 1979 when he stated: 

“The blasphemy law is not a God-made law. It’s a man-made law. It was made by General Ziaul Haq and the portion about giving a death sentence was put in by Nawaz Sharif. So it’s a law which gives an excuse to extremists and reactionaries to target weak people and minorities.” 

Also in 2010, during an interview with Newsline Governor Taseer made the following statement:

 “The thing I find disturbing is that if you examine the cases of the hundreds tried under this law, you have to ask how many of them are well-to-do? Why is it that only the poor and defenceless are targeted? How come over 50 per cent of them are Christians when they form less than 2 per cent of the country’s population. This points clearly to the fact that the law is misused to target minorities.” 

Such remarks angered Qadri enough to murder Governor Taseer in cold blood. Yet today in Pakistan thousands of supporters cheered and threw flowers at the casket of Mumtaz Qadri. Here in the UK since yesterday, a number of imams, Muslim groups and individuals have praised and defended Qadri’s act of murder.
 

We believe there is absolutely no justification – whether religious, moral or ethical – for supporting individuals like Qadri, least of all from an Islamic perspective. Qadri’s supporters have argued that he honoured the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by murdering Taseer when in fact Qadri and his supporters have tainted the name of the Prophet and dishonoured his teachings by murdering a man in cold blood who showed solidarity with minority communities, as did the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).  As Governor Taseer rightly pointed out: “Islam calls on us to protect minorities, the weak and the vulnerable.“ 

This Islamic position was recently re-emphasised at the historic Marrakesh Declaration which was attended by Muslim theologians from 120 countries in February 2016 and can be read here

We at Inspire believe that we must stand for equality, human rights and the rule of law. We also recognise we must challenge those who seek to bring our faith into disrepute by justifying violence and death in the Prophet’s name.

1st March 2016

*Inspire do not support the death penalty

William Brown at the Mancunion talks to Manchester University alumnus David Aaronovitch.

Toward the end Brown asks Aaronovitch about Murdoch’s influence on him as a Times writer.

“Over me? None whatsoever.

“The most important thing about where I work, is for me to be arguing with people. It’s pointless being at a paper arguing with people who already agree with you. If what you’re looking for is an echo chamber, then what you’ll do is work for a paper whose readers have views that already agree with yours. But what kind of challenge is that?”

Today, according to Aaronovitch, you see a “silo mentality” all over the place—a refusal by many people to talk to others who don’t share the same political opinions as they do. Nowhere is this trend more apparent in than the student body. As a close friend of the feminist campaigner and writer, Julie Bindel, who was recently blocked from speaking by Manchester’s Students’ Union, David Aaronovitch turned his guns on the student movement.

“Why are students blocking people from speaking who they don’t like? Well it looks to me as if we’ve brought you up to be such a nice bunch really. You don’t sod off out of the house at 18 and not come back like our generation did. And you don’t think your parents are a bunch of shite, you actually quite like them.

“It’s a bit like the argument that we haven’t let our children play enough in the dirt because that actually effectively inoculates you against viruses. Have we been so incredibly protective, are you so precious, that whether or not you feel slightly bad at any one moment matters more than whether or not something is true?”

That might be a little unfair. I think the core idea is that some ideas can inspire persecution of relatively powerless people, and that therefore it’s better not to give those ideas publicity. I don’t think that idea is completely wrong – in fact I don’t see how it can be completely wrong, given what we know about Nazi Germany, the Balkans, Rwanda, Mississippi – you get the idea. But of course that idea can balloon out until it makes people afraid of almost all ideas, and there’s your silo mentality.

This tension plays out constantly. It’s all over that encounter between Sam Harris and my dear friend Maryam Namazie last week – Maryam thinks groups like Pegida and people like Douglas Murray are dangerous to refugees, Muslims, immigrants, but she also thinks the way to deal with that is to argue. Harris thinks Douglas Murray is “pre-stigmatized”…and Harris’s fans think Maryam deserves their verbal abuse. It’s complicated.

“Somebody coined the term ‘vindictive protectionism’,” he continues. “It’s where people claim to be active on behalf of other people who they think are being offended or denigrated. They use this as an opportunity to get pleasure from condemning someone else. The only time you can legitimately be very nasty to someone else is when you accuse them of being offensive or morally wrong. You can be really horrible [to] them, whilst pretending to be the virtuous one.”

And you can have a good time doing it.

Mentioning the recent case at Goldsmiths University where Iranian exile, feminist and ex-Muslim, Maryam Namazie, was shouted down by protestors from the university’s Islamic Society, Aaronovitch laughs at the absurdity of one protestor who cried out “safe-space, safe-space!” when confronted by Namazie.

“Look, the men were behaving very badly at the front of the show. But when they’re kicked out, the women protesters at the back start off trying to be really offensive. But actually, Maryam engages them in debate and suddenly there is something going on there which is outside everybody else’s control.

“There’s a dialogue going on. They are talking to an older woman who actually has been a victim of Islamic extremism. Free speech allows things to happen which you don’t expect.”

Especially when Maryam is around.

PEN on Iran’s renewed incitement to murder Salman Rushdie:

PEN International joins PEN America and English PEN in deploring the effort at intimidation mounted by 40 state-run media outlets in Iran that have announced a US$600,000 bounty put forward this week to augment Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 death fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie. The spectre of a new financial reward being added to this longstanding threat is a craven attempt to fan the flames of religious extremism and hatred.

‘PEN has supported Rushdie since the fatwa was first passed and writers around the world stand in solidarity with him. It’s highly disturbing to hear of this bounty offered by state-run media which should be rescinded immediately,’ said Jennifer Clement, President of PEN International.

‘The Iranian government should make it clear that they do not condone any violence directed against Rushdie, and undertake all necessary steps to guarantee his physical safety. Any Iranian citizen or organization against whom there is evidence of aiding or advocating Rushdie’s murder must be brought to justice.’

Rushdie, a former President of PEN America, a resident of the United States and a citizen of the United Kingdom, has lived for 27 years under a religious death warrant because of his novel The Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa led to the killing of a Japanese translator of the book, as well as other violent attacks.

In spite of the threat, Rushdie’s outspokenness and passionate defence of imperilled writers the world over stand as an inspiration, providing a daily reminder of what is at stake in safeguarding free thought.

True that last bit. Remember the boycott of Charlie Hebo’s PEN America award last year? Salman was right out in front on that.

Congratulations to Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy:

The first Oscar-winner in Pakistan’s history is back in the Hollywood limelight this weekend as Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s unflinching new documentary about “honor killings,” A Girl In The River: The Price Of Forgiveness, competes for an Academy Award.

The 37-year-old Chinoy’s previous film about acid-attack victims, Saving Face, won the top prize for a documentary short in 2012.

(UPDATE: Chinoy Won The Oscar. More Here.)

Bashir Ahmad Gwakh interviewed her via email.

RFE/RL: What does your documentary find? Tell us about the status of women going through domestic violence and families whose loved one was killed in ‘honor killings’?

Chinoy: The film really brings to reality the kind of patriarchal and conservative mindset that women are up against. I went to speak to Saba’s father after he was arrested and he had so much hatred in him. He was still adamant that Saba was in the wrong and he felt justified trying to kill his own daughter. He felt it was his duty as a father and husband to protect his family from the “dishonor” that Saba brought upon them by falling in love and getting married. The interaction that I had with him spoke volumes about the kinds of choices we women have in the world and how our lives are impacted by the decisions taken by others.

The very fact that women are currently unable to make their own policy decisions in certain parts of the country is an alarming reality, and pushes us further away from being the owners of our own stories and fighters for our own rights.

Ever year, hundreds of women are killed in the name of honor; and although honor killings are prevalent in Pakistan, they are considered a taboo subject by many. There is a perception that somehow these murders fall under the purview of the family and that they shouldn’t be questioned or challenged. To me, they have always been premeditated, cold-blooded murders justified under the guise of culture or religion.

Families don’t get to murder family members. Not cool. Family isn’t a permission slip to murder all the uppity females.

RFE/RL: How do you feel about your documentary being nominated for an Academy Award? What’s your next project?

Chinoy: I am proud to be representing Pakistan on such a prestigious platform — that [it is also] for the second time. I am grateful that the SOC Films production was able to share the untold story of A Girl In The River: The Price Of Forgiveness with a global audience. Since the start of my career, I have always endeavored to share the stories of those who cannot do so themselves. To be acknowledged for this work is always very humbling, and on such a giant platform like the Oscars makes it surreal.

But for me personally, it will be an even bigger win if we, as a nation, take this opportunity to acknowledge that we have a problem and pass the Anti-Honor Killings Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2014. It is time we change the law and stand up for the victims of this heinous crime.

(Editor’s note: The bill was passed by the provincial legislature on February 25.)

Congratulations x a million.

Shabnam Nadiya remembers Avijit Roy and a freer Bangladesh.

On February 15, 2016, at the annual book fair held in Dhaka, police handcuffed Shamsuzzoha Manik, the 73-year-old publisher of the small press Ba-Dwip Prakashan, and shut down their book stall.

They seized six books. Their target was a translation anthology called Islam Bitarka (The Islam Debate), published in 2013, but they also grabbed five others: Aryans and the Indus Civilization; Jihad: Forced Conversions, Imperialism, and Slavery’s Legacy; Islam’s Role in Social Development; Women’s Place in Islam; and Islam and Women, in case they were “insulting to Islam”.

Alongside Manik, two of his associates were arrested under Section 57(2) of the infamous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act.

Bangla Academy director Shamsuzzaman Khan said this was all good, as did Zafar Iqbal, a popular science-fiction writer, who went on to tell everyone to be cautious when writing.

Last February I emailed Avijit Roy, science writer and founder of Mukto Mona, a web forum for South Asian rationalists. Although we had been close friends since college, it had been months since we had talked. But I thought of him as soon as I read about Rodela Publishers.

Rodela’s offices had been vandalised after the Hefazat-e-Islam organisation issued threats over the translation of Iranian writer Ali Dashti’s 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Muhammad.

The next day, although the publisher had apologised and pulled the book from distribution, Bangla Academy closed Rodela’s stall at the 2015 Boi-Mela.

Avijit responded immediately. He and Bonya, his wife and co-activist, were visiting Dhaka after many years. He noted how frustrating the Rodela business was and that Dhaka felt more stifling.

Two days later he was murdered.

In the months that followed, there was a killing spree. Ananta Bijoy Das, Washiqur Rahman, Niloy Neel – all bloggers, all murdered. Coordinated, separate attacks targeted Avijit’s publishers: Faisal Abedin Deepan’s throat was slit open; Ahmedur Rashid Tutul (alongside two other writer/activists visiting him) was wounded.

Bangla Academy offered no official commemoration for any of these writers or publishers – not even for Avijit, who died on their doorstep – during Boi-Mela.

Khan, at his pre-fair press conference, acknowledged the attacks, though: he advised people to not publish anything inflammatory.

Dissent, provocation, hurtful religious sentiment, call it what you will: here lies a truth uncomfortable for institutions such as Bangla Academy (not to mention the state) – the Bangladeshi literary canon contains many works that, examined through the static and narrow lens of strict religion, will be found offensive.

If you allow religious fanatics to have a veto, very little will survive.

This, today, in a couple of hours (minus ten minutes), at the Oxford Union:

Prof Tariq Ramadan & Maryam Namazie

• Event name: Prof Tariq Ramadan & Maryam Namazie
• Start date: 29/02/2016 20:00
• End date: // :
• Duration: N/A

Description

Head to Head : Islam in Europe Today

Listed in a 2008 report called ‘Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech With Europe’s Muslim Communities’, Namazie has had multiple lectures no-platformed and disrupted.  She is spokesperson for the Council of ex-Muslims and for Iranian Solidarity.  Her writing specialists in challenging cultural relativism and political Islam

Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in Oxford, Tariq Ramadan has held positions in Universities across the world;  he is also persona non grata in at least six countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt for his challenges to undemocratic regimes

Namazie and Ramadan Will be debating some of the biggest challenges facing Islam today

 I wish I were nearby enough to go.

Konul Khalilova of the BBC Azeri service tells us How Muslim Azerbaijan had satire years before Charlie Hebdo.

More than 100 years before militant Islamist gunmen murdered journalists at France’s satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, another magazine very similar in style was playing an important role among the Muslim populations of both the Russian and Persian empires.

Azerbaijani weekly magazine Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary for its time, bravely ridiculing clerics and criticising the political elite as well as the Russian Tsar and the Shah of Persia.

Founded in 1906, it pulled no punches in tackling geopolitical events and also promoted women’s rights and Westernisation.

I look forward to the accusations of Premature Islamophobia.

The editor-in-chief of the magazine was Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (known as Mirza Jalil), a famous Azerbaijani writer, who was also a well-known novelist.

In his book, The Dead, the main protagonist is a drunken atheist, treated as a madman for telling the truth about his backward society, where girls as young as nine are forced to marry 50-year-old men.

Nine? Not eight, not ten, but nine? Anything special about nine?

Of course; Aishah bint Abû Bakr was nine when Mohammed first raped her.

Molla Nasreddin addressed uneducated Azerbaijanis, unlike other publications of the time, which were heavily influenced by Anatolian Turkish, Russian or Persian.

The texts were in simple language and the cartoons were easy to understand, often targeting clerics, which the magazine’s writers saw as the enemies of education and a secular society.

The birth of a boy compared to the birth of a girl:

The magazine campaigned for women’s rights and played an important part in women in Azerbaijan being granted the right to vote in 1919, at around the same time as women in the UK and US.

Sifting through old copies of the magazine in Azerbaijan’s National Library, it becomes clear how daring the writers and illustrators of Molla Nasreddin were.

In a 1929 edition, a cartoon was published of the Prophet Mohammad, although without depicting his face.

By this time Azerbaijan was a Soviet state and publication was taking place in the capital, Baku. Nevertheless, the majority of the population were still conservative Muslims.

The cartoon features a dialogue between Jesus and Muhammad and shows people drinking at Christmas.

Hey, an early Jesus and Mo!

It didn’t last though. In the ’30s the Stalinists tried to tell it what to do, and that was the end of it.

Meanwhile David Cameron is boasting about selling arms to Saudi Torturer Arabia.

The Saudi government has bought £3 billion of UK aircraft, arms and other defence products in 2015.

…

He announced his planned defence of BAE’s international trade: “I’m going to be spending a lot of the next four months talking about this issue but I promise I will not be taking my eye off the ball, making sure the brilliant things you make here at BAE Systems are available and sold all over the world.

…

On Wednesday, an Amnesty report said the UK is setting a “dangerous precedent” to the rest of the world by continuing to supply arms to questionable regimes such as Saudi Arabia”.

The report criticised the Government’s continuing arms exports to Saudi Arabia in the face of claims that the country may be responsible for atrocities in Yemen.

Not to mention its own citizens, and foreign workers.

A government spokesperson told the Independent:”This is an issue we take very seriously and we regularly raise human rights concerns with the Saudi government at the highest level.”

And then we all have a good laugh and get back to business.

Our beloved ally, Saudi Arabia.

A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in hundreds of social media posts.

The report carried in Al-Watan says the 28-year-old man admitted to being an atheist and refused to repent, saying that what he wrote reflected his own beliefs and that he had the right to express them. The report did not name the man.

It added that ‘religious police’ in charge of monitoring social networks found more than 600 tweets denying the existence of God, ridiculing the Quranic verses, accusing all prophets of lies and saying their teaching fuelled hostilities. The court also fined him 20,000 riyals – or, just short of £4,000.

600 or 6000 or 6 trillion, who cares? God doesn’t exist, the Quran is full of malevolent bullshit, of course “prophets” told lies. Saying all that and more shouldn’t be a crime anywhere.

In 2014 the oil-rich kingdom, under the late Saudi King Abdullah, introduced a series of new laws which defined atheists as terrorists, according to a report released from Human Rights Watch.

In a string of royal decrees and an overarching new piece of legislation to deal with terrorism generally, King Abdullah attempted to clamp down on all forms of political dissent and protests that could “harm public order”.

If you clamp down on anything that could harm “public order” then you’re left with a morgue. You can still sell oil, I suppose, but what’s the point? What are you going to do with money when you live in a morgue?

I wrote my column for the Freethinker about a couple of ethicists who recommend “compromising” over FGM.

There’s much discussion on social media of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Kavita Shah Arora and Allan J Jacobs that urges ‘compromise’ on the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Just cut off a little bit of girls’ genitals, as opposed to shaving everything off and sewing the hole closed.

By the same token we could throw just a little bit of acid in women’s faces, and throw just a few stones at women accused of sex outside marriage, and rape just a few altar boys when no one is looking.

Read on.

At the Bristol Festival of Ideas next month –

The End of Free Speech?

With Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Maryam Namazie and Sian Norris

Sat 19 March 2016
18:00-19:30

Watershed
Price: £9/£8

An interesting point made by Les Green at Semper Viridis:

Of course gender is not fixed at birth. Simone de Beauvoir was right that no one is born a woman. Possibly, no one is even born female. Sex is cluster-concept, a bundle of attributes, some of which do not develop until puberty or later. And gender is another cluster-concept.  Gender is constituted by norms and values that are conventionally considered appropriate for people of a given sex. Gender is a lot more vague than sex, and a lot more historically and geographically variable.

But gender has another interesting feature.  It is path dependent.  To be a woman is for the pertinent norms and values to apply a result of a certain life history. Being a woman is not only ‘socially constructed’, as they say, it is also constructed by the path from one’s past to one’s present.   In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways.   That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who used to have one and then cut it off.

And those things, and many others, are important; they make a difference; they shape how one experiences being a girl and then a woman. They’re not nothing.

More on path dependence, by Stephen E. Margolis and S. J. Liebowitz.

Path dependence is a term that has come into common use in both economics and law. In all instances that path dependence is asserted, the assertion amounts to some version of “history matters.” Path dependence can mean just that: Where we are today is a result of what has happened in the past.

Being a woman is path dependent because it’s a result of years of being a girl. Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl. We are what our pasts make us.

That’s one reason, probably the main reason, I don’t think people can just become something radically different by uttering the words (except in cases where uttering the words does the work – “I am abandoning my religion” for example). That’s why I refused to answer that stupid “yes or no” question the way I was ordered to. That’s why I made the distinction between the ontological and the political meaning of the words, which some people found so very over-intellectual and shameful of me.

History does matter.

Guest post by Anonymous

I have an angle on people throwing around threats of violence, and directing menacing fantasies at people online; an angle on the way people excuse, enable, and dismiss such violent ideations; an angle on the virtue-signalling, and other pathological responses you get in communities addressing these issues.

To begin with, for the sake of context, I’m going to have to get a few things out in the open, although my default state with regards to autobiographical writing is basically this; I don’t like it.

The fuzzy, cuddly, intended-as-supportive bromides that some people issue in response to the kinds of detail I’m about to give don’t really do it for me either. I’ll probably read the comments, without participating in discussion. Please don’t take this as an opportunity to tell me how sorry you are.

I won’t be disclosing my name any time soon. A few people reading this may be able to tell who I am and I’d appreciate if they didn’t identify me. The possibility of anything even remotely close to a Dr Phil experience is just too cloying to embrace, and this is hardly the kind of writing I’d like to be known for anyway.

Needless to say, with violence mentioned in the title, people may find the following unsettling. Now, I’ll try to be brief with the personal stuff.

Violent autobiography in brief

When I was a child of about five-to-six years old, my mother would threaten to kill herself, before driving off, leaving a crying pre-school brother in my care. This particular behavior returned around a decade later, with my mother then threatening another, younger, pre-school brother with auto-vehicular murder-suicide. For a brief few years in the interim, my mother became physically violent, on a number of occasions going as far as biting my next-youngest brother, all up until the point we grew large enough to protect ourselves. At that point, after the loss of physical violence as an option, the gas-lighting began, wherein we’d be told we were the ones victimizing her.

I did what I could to protect my brothers, but I wasn’t perfect, the system was largely unavailable, and willfully or not, our community was blind regarding this kind of thing. Or at least, that’s what I believed, and going by other people’s experiences, I was probably right.

While a minor, I was punched in the face by my father. Oddly enough, even after accounting for Masculine Bullshit, I still can’t see this as a particularly great transgression. Perhaps this is because I’m confident my then-warm-but-largely-absent-and-entirely-parentally-incompetent father actually loved me, or maybe it’s just because it’s lower on my list of things to give a shit about.

In the same year as the final punch to the face, a young fellow attempted to cut my throat with a hunting knife, thankfully failing. We both survived, but I did what I had to do to prevent him from cutting me. This was not pleasant. I can still recall the physical sensation of my injuring the guy, and could relate it graphically if I chose. I’ll spare you the experience. Being drug related, Young Fellow pretended, upon reaching hospital, to have fallen down the stairs outside his home, thereby sparing me an awkward conversation with parents and police I didn’t trust. This, incidentally, wasn’t the first attempt on my life I had to deal with.

Also in the same year, I was tortured to see if I could keep secrets. Think hot glass, punching, and so forth. The year after, an acquaintance from the same circle of violent folk murdered one of my father’s pot-smoking buddies, and put another into hospital with severe brain damage owing to shrapnel wounds. Further down the track, another guy from the same crowd, one who started out soft, even likable if pathetic, went bad, abused small animals, and eventually wound up murdered, a screwdriver to the neck being the method of his offing.

The guy who I fell in with this company to help in the first place (on account of my being asked by his parents), is currently serving his nth prison sentence for violent crime. He’s a diagnosed psychopath. He once tried gouging out my eyes when I was fourteen. I’m a little less naive about psychopaths these days.

This is probably enough information for people to get a feel for the necessary details of where I’m coming from, loosely speaking. There’s more, but really, it’d be gratuitous.

Urges and fallacies

This urge some people have, to compete with or dismiss other people’s suffering, is something I think I can sympathize with, even if ultimately it’s an urge worthy of resistance and rejection. Even in the best of possible worlds, we have only so much stage time, with enough suffering to report as to be able to use all the limelight several times over. As frustrating as this is, we don’t even live in the best of possible worlds; people can be altogether too selfish at times. Narcissists, opportunists and even full blown predators reside within the many of the very structures purposed for dealing with all this suffering.

I’ve caught myself on a few occasions before I’ve actually become dismissive, when people have talked about being creeped out by skeezy guys. Most of us, in atheist-skeptic-humanist-whatever circles over the past few years, have seen more than a few instances of online death and rape threats, and abuse hurled at feminists, being dismissed out of hand by people often in relative positions of power.

Sure, being creeped on in an elevator at 4am, or told by a Twitter misogynist that he’s going to rape you, isn’t the same as having a hot, incandescent lamp globe drawn briefly over your junk – but why compare such things in the first place? What is the purpose of a given comparison?

There are two concepts some people need to better familiarize themselves with in these debates. The first is the fallacy of relative privation, and the other is opportunity cost.

The fallacy of relative privation is where because something worse exists, it is argued or assumed that a given concern automatically isn’t worthy of consideration.

“Computer broken down before its warranty? So what! Think of The Starving Kids in Africa!”

“Stubbed your toe? What about conflict diamonds you whining piss-baby?”

Something’s always worse somewhere in the world, so you ought not complain about what’s right in front of you.

The fallacy falls on its face though, because it assumes right out of the box that addressing the “lesser” concern necessarily detracts from addressing the “greater”. It’s a line of reasoning that doesn’t entertain the possibility that two concerns may not be in competition for resources, or that the effect of addressing the “lesser” may actually help address the “greater”, even when the causes for both concerns are similar or even possibly the very same thing.

In a sense, the fallacy of relative privation can be seen as a misapplication of the concept of opportunity cost – the other concept I want more people to appreciate.

Opportunity costs occur when resources are restricted in such a way as to not be able to be spent on an entire array of options. For example, if you have ten dollars and you walk into a shop where there are only two items, A and B, each costing ten dollars, then the opportunity cost of purchasing A, is not being able to purchase B, and vice versa.

Constraints on resources in real world ethical quandaries however, are rarely as clear-cut as this, and often there’s just plain guesswork involved. Moreover, resources can be bottle-necked, and spending can attract diminishing returns. If increased resource allocation to a given concern won’t improve outcomes, then no matter how serious the concern you have resources that can be either accumulated or re-allocated. Spending on a relief effort that is maxed-out or bottle-necked only accrues opportunity cost at the expense of other causes.

At other times, concerns that your values tell you to address are practically beyond your limits – when you simply cannot allocate resources to a given cause. There’s no opportunity cost if there’s no opportunity.

My point here, is that rebukes against domestic Western social justice concerns on the basis of alleged lack of perspective, aren’t always well-founded, or rational, at best being innocent mistakes, but too often being motivated by malice. Even when such dismissive rubbish is motivated by real, personal suffering, it’s still wrong. A degree of restraint in this respect may not always be possible, but should be aspired to, even by people who have been wronged, if they hope to cooperate ethically and effectively in social justice projects. This can be hard if you’ve suffered, I know.

It’s when this goes wrong, though, and people are motivated by urges to enable and indulge the abusiveness of some people, even when these people happen to be oppressed, that I really get shirty.

Menace and character

I’ve noticed over the years, a number of instances of Ophelia and company ending up on the receiving end of menacing fantasies. In 2008, Marxist pseud Louis Proyect ideated wildly about what would happen to the folks at Butterflies and Wheels once the revolution came, rhetorically praying that “God protect the souls of those who fed at the trough of the big corporations and the intelligence agencies since an aroused people will have properly earned the right to extract justice.” If you were wondering what puts Ophelia in the frame for such retributive justice, it’s the pro-science position of Butterflies and Wheels, Proyect being credulous towards the prospect of it attracting “…funding from Huntington and other such animal torturers”.

You won’t see Proyect, or anyone else perhaps male enough, getting too much in the way of obstacles in far left circles for such violent ideating in the name of the revolution.

Repeated menacing ideations from misogynists in the years following ElevatorGate, not that infrequently depicting violence against their targets, have done little to attract censure by atheist organizations, celebrities and public intellectuals, even when such celebrities and public intellectuals are under no illusions about the textbook arguments concerning free speech, incitement and intimidation. There have been notable exceptions, and there has even been mainstream media attention, but on the whole, institutional comprehension and will on the matter seems rather piss-weak.

The noise of the more recent “clusterfuck” of 2015, wherein amongst other abuse, hyperbole describing the pegging of dead ferrets and an injunction to “fuck off so hard that you unbirth your own grandparents…” was posted in a semi-notorious Facebook post re-dedicated to “Lady Benson”, saw pretty much zero objection to such behavior from people who’d previously positioned themselves in opposition to online abuse, who were also in social proximity to the event. Indeed, it was argued, despite the already – and still at the time of writing - public nature of the post, that Ophelia’s drawing attention to this was the true act of harassment, and with-it wannabe leftists swallowed this hook, line and sinker.

We’ve seen the resurgence of the fallacy of relative privation; forget your concerns, cis-women, you’re arguing with people more oppressed than you. It’s Dear Muslima all over again, albeit without the prior appearance of solidarity in response. That Ophelia may have unintentionally mis-gendered someone, and failed to be rude to Cathy Brennan, whatever you make of these transgressions, isn’t mitigating because that’s not how relative privation works. Correcting a mis-gendering, if need be, isn’t contingent on permitting menace against the person doing the mis-gendering; there’s no opportunity cost involved between allowing correction and barring vengeance.

People aren’t permitting this menacing because of some ethical up-shot, they’re simply permitting it because they’re permissive. Either these people don’t care, never cared, or they’re just incompetent.

It’s this apathy that bugs me the most. I thought it was clear we needed space within atheism-Humanism-etc that was inclusive of people who’ve had to put up with a past of shitty, even traumatic treatment.

I don’t expect people to like Ophelia, I don’t expect trans-women to automatically agree with gender skepticism, and I certainly don’t expect them to like being mis-gendered. What I do have a hard time swallowing, though, is the notion that trans people, as well as anyone else in need of a welcoming space, are going to feel safe and/or welcome in a community capable of enabling abusive ideating about ferret fucking and retroactive unbirthing. (And don’t get me started on the ageism or the feeble levels of opposition amongst this lot to the “cotton ceiling” ideations – Jesus McFuck that shit’s a whole other story).

Sure, some people are going to feel right at home amidst this SlymePit-esque culture. I’m not discounting that. But folks with broken pasts or histories of oppression, having healthy experiences in this climate? Please.

With the benefit of decades to do so, I’ve more or less recovered from incidents such as having my scrotum singed by homicidal drug dealers, but Christ, I can’t bear to be around this other crap. I don’t know if this means I’m a bit frail, or if this community is just that sick.

So Lands End – it’s a clothing company, I think – had a feature on Gloria Steinem in its spring catalogue, and then…it said it was very sorry, and it scrubbed all mention of her from its website. As one does.

“We understand that some of our customers were offended by the inclusion of an interview in a recent catalog with Gloria Steinem on her quest for women’s equality,” the company said in a statement. “We thought it was a good idea and we heard from our customers that, for different reasons, it wasn’t. For that, we sincerely apologize.”

Because…? Women are not equal, but are stupid lazy weak deceitful sluts? Yes, pretty much. Here’s one such:

“This family will not buy one single thing from Lands End ever again unless this drive highlighted by Gloria Steinem is fully retracted. You’ve had great customer service for book bags for us in the past … never again!!! Lauding Gloria Steinem is beyond what I can understand from a company that ‘appears’ to celebrate family.” (Posted to the company’s Facebook page.)

Because “celebrating family” means disparaging women and keeping them down.

But the people who celebrate anti-family stuff like treating women and girls as just as complicated and important as men and boys – those people did their own shouting at Lands End.

“Well, now that you’ve pulled it, I won’t be placing my order,” another (former?) customer wrote on the company Facebook page, echoing hundreds of other angry comments. “I don’t intend to teach my children that anyone should do business with a company that is ashamed to even talk about feminism. You see equal rights as a divisive issue? Thanks for letting me know not to give you my money.”

Hostility to feminism is a deal-breaker around here, too. Just fuck right off with that.

At the New Statesman, Glosswitch takes a look at paid surrogacy and finds it wanting.

She starts with a recent newspaper story about the lack of human kidneys for sale in the UK and the horror that people in more distant, poorer countries who agree to sell you a kidney can change their minds.

A lawyer specialising in cases such as these confirmed that this was a problem:

“The UK has a long way to go in catching up with other nations, some of which have even built dedicated hostels to prevent donors – or living incubators, as we call them – from departing in possession of body parts which are reserved for those with more money.”

There was no such newspaper story.

Wealthy people in this country are not permitted to harvest the bodies of poor people elsewhere. While a shortage of organ donors is a recognised problem, it is widely understood that the exploitation of extreme wealth inequalities is not the solution.

We cannot allow ourselves to reach a point where certain people, born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, have the same status as the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Unless we are talking about international surrogacy. While no one may be publicly complaining of the difficulties of purchasing organs from abroad, the Guardian recently published a highly sympathetic piece on “childless UK couples forced abroad to find surrogates”.

I read that piece, and was revolted by it, and wanted to post about it, but didn’t have the strength.

The piece focused on two barriers to finding surrogates: the cost (“attempts to keep costs down have seen the creation of ‘hybrids’, where an egg is fertilised in one country, often where the commissioning parents reside, and then implanted in a woman in a developing country”) and the risk of a surrogate changing her mind (celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi, whose own child was born to a surrogate in the US, claims it is “definitely time the laws were adjusted to allow people to sign legally binding contracts here”).

No. No, no, no, no, it’s not.

Remember the Baby M case? I disagreed with most of the feminists I was aware of at the time (it was long before blogs and Facebook) in thinking that Mary Beth White had every right to change her mind.

Throughout the piece, the difficulties are portrayed almost entirely from the perspective of those wanting easier access to rentable wombs. That surrogates are people too, not property on an unstable market, would be an easy thing to miss.

We shouldn’t miss it, though. There is something horrendously dystopian about the growing acceptability of trans-national surrogacy, involving an industry which places poor women of colour in closely monitored residences and treats them as potting soil for the planting and growing of children for wealthier, usually white clients.

I didn’t know the women were put in closely monitored residences. That’s hideous.

While radical feminists have long been critical of the practice, mainstream liberal feminism, which claims to be more aware of intersections of race, class and gender, has remained surprisingly silent on the topic. This is the most literal example we have of women being treated as walking wombs, yet it appears that it would be bad manners to point it out.

It’s liberal feminism for a reason – liberal not as in universalist or rights-respecting but as in libertarian. Those women choose to sign binding contracts and be put in closely monitored residences. They have agency. How dare you not respect their agency?

Liberal feminism has painted itself into a corner from which it is very hard to launch a coherent critique of surrogacy. Two effective but dangerously simplistic slogans, “work is work” and “my body, my choice”, make it almost impossible to claim that what is happening is wrong.

A woman can, it is suggested, rent out any part of herself. To question this would be a denial of her agency. The logical conclusion of such a line of thought is that nothing that is mutually agreed and paid for can be deemed abusive or exploitative, regardless of the gendered, class-based and/or racial conditions under which the agreement is made (which seems to me the antithesis of an intersectional approach).

Even worse, we seem to have reached a situation whereby the more physically or sexually intrusive gendered work is, the more it is seen as anti-establishment and therefore beyond criticism. Thus one woman employing another to clean her house is seen as more abusive than a man employing a woman to gestate, bear and relinquish a child. I can see how we got here but it does not look much like feminism to me.

Glosswitch is brilliant.

What a clusterfuck.

‘Girls in tech’ competition won by boy

EDF Energy has been criticised after a 13-year-old-boy won a competition that was part of a campaign to attract teenage girls to the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths.

…

EDF said that while its Pretty Curious programme is still aimed at girls, the UK competition was later opened up to all 11 to 16-year-olds.

“Pretty Curious” as the name for a program aimed at girls – see what they did there?

Siiiiiiiiigh

They paused just long enough to insult female people by implying their appearance is what matters about them, and then opened the competition to everyone.

“Congratulations to the winner – but I’d love to hear from EDF how the winning solution meets their stated aim for the competition,” said computer scientist Dr Sue Black OBE.

“It is taking me a bit of time to work out how this result will change girls’ perceptions of Stem.”

It might repel them even more?

Suw Charman-Anderson, who founded the annual celebration of women in Stem, Ada Lovelace Day, told the BBC she had had reservations about the Pretty Curious campaign from the beginning.

“EDF Energy chose to link appearance and interest in Stem through the title of their campaign, despite many people pointing out that it was demeaning to girls,” she said.

“Rather than challenging stereotypes, the focus on girls’ looks rather than their intelligence reinforces them.

“EDF Energy have failed to understand both the nature of the problem [of women in Stem] and the negative impacts that their publicity stunt may well have on girls who took part with genuine enthusiasm and excitement.”

Oh well, they’re only girls.