What links them

Dec 23rd, 2015 10:22 am | By

Kenan Malik in the New York Times compares and contrasts Donald Trump and Maryam Namazie.

What links them is that there are many people in Britain who do not wish to let one or the other speak.

Mr. Trump’s recent call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” caused outrage across the world. More than half a million Britons signed a petition to Parliament demanding that he be barred from Britain, a demand that has been backed by senior political figures.

The furor over Ms. Namazie’s views has caused fewer ripples, but is no less significant. Ms. Namazie is a founding member of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, an organization that campaigns on behalf of those facing hostility for renouncing their Islamic faith, or “apostasy.”

But, Kenan points out, there are people fatuous enough to think and say that Maryam is “Islamophobic” and thus in the same category as Donald Trump.

All this reveals the odd relationship that many on the left have with Islam. They view all Muslims as helpless victims, and regard any criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry. A columnist for The Guardian, David Shariatmadari, called the attempt at Warwick to muzzle Ms. Namazie “reasonable” because “we don’t want to have any part in the further stigmatisation of Islam.” Some academics disdainfully dismiss liberal Muslim critics of Islam as “native informants” — defined by one academic as “insiders” who “air the dirty laundry of Muslim communities.”

So what’s left? If Exes are “Islamophobic” and liberals are “native informants” – what’s left?

Uncritical endorsement of reactionary Islamists, that’s what.

Just as Mr. Trump seems unable to distinguish between Muslims and terrorists, do many on the left seem unable to distinguish between criticism of Islam and bigotry against Muslims. And just as Mr. Trump views Muslims as an undifferentiated lump, all potential terrorists, those on the left also often view Muslims as a homogeneous community speaking with a single voice. Both ignore progressive Muslim voices as not being truly of that community, while celebrating the most conservative voices as authentic.

I once interviewed Naser Khader, a secular Muslim and a Danish member of Parliament. He recalled a conversation with Toger Seidenfaden, then editor of the left-wing newspaper Politiken, about the “Muhammad cartoons” that had caused global controversy in 2005 when published in another Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten.

Mr. Seidenfaden claimed that “the cartoons insulted all Muslims.” “I am not insulted,” Mr. Khader responded. “But you’re not a real Muslim” came the reply. To be a real Muslim is, from such a perspective, to find the cartoons offensive. Anyone who isn’t offended is, by definition, not a real Muslim.

And yet people who think that way call Maryam Islamophobic.



Doo wah doo wah

Dec 23rd, 2015 9:53 am | By

And speaking of reform and “the community,” there’s a busy Twitter hashtag #DuaAgainstMaajidNawaz. Yesterday it was full of disgusting requests that Allah kill Maajid in degrading painful ways, but then the liberals took it over and now it’s full of jokes. I made a few myself.

But as so often, it’s interesting to note that passionate religion doesn’t seem to inspire people to be kinder, but rather the opposite.

Simon ‏@wingedbullsimon 27 minutes ago
May your earbuds always be tangled. #DuaAgainstMaajidNawaz

Embedded image permalink



From within the community

Dec 23rd, 2015 9:22 am | By

It’s Jesus and Mo day, i.e. the day a new J & M appears.

reform

So that means people like Maajid Nawaz and Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah and Tehmina Kazi and Sarah Khan are totally outsiders, right? Of course.

Volume 7, Wrong Again, God Boy, with a foreword by ME, is out now.

The Patreon.



How does it get worse?

Dec 22nd, 2015 5:06 pm | By

It gets more degrading every day.

Trump, last night:

“Even her race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama,” the GOP frontrunner told a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I don’t know who would be worse, I don’t know. How does it get worse? But she was gonna beat — she was favored to win — and she got schlonged. She lost.”

See what he did there? She got penised. The weak worthless pathetic woman got penised, because she’s so weak and pathetic and vagina.

I don’t like the way we do things here. It’s bad.

 



SpaceX landing

Dec 22nd, 2015 4:31 pm | By

See everybody scream and jump and scream.



The Harvard placemats

Dec 22nd, 2015 4:20 pm | By

Had you heard of the Harvard placemats? I hadn’t heard of them until just now.

The Washington Post reported:

It was just a matter of time before the campus debates over free speech and racial injustice took on a festive tone.

At Harvard, this has arrived in the form of a “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice,” an initiative from the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which was met with a recoil and an apology from two Harvard College deans this week.

These placemats, distributed in undergraduate dining halls, offered a script for answering questions about some of the more controversial topics of the year, from “Islamaphobia [sic]/Refugees” to “Black murders in the street.”

A script. Who wants a script? Can’t people create their own scripts? Especially when they’re talking to friends and family?

For example, in response to the question under “Yale/Student activism” — “Why are Black students complaining? Shouldn’t they be happy to be in college?” — students are instructed to tell their relatives:

When I hear students expressing their experiences of racism on campus I don’t hear complaining. Instead I hear young people uplifting a situation that I may not experience. If non-Black students get the privilege of that safe environment, I believe that same privilege should be given to all students.

Are students so helpless and hapless and feeble now that they need the Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to write scripts for them? Can’t they figure out what to say all by themselves? Based on the thoughts in their own head, which will have been shaped by other conversations and reading and reflection?

Also, do they need such bad scripts? “Uplifting a situation”? That’s not what “uplift” means.

A note at the bottom of the page states that the guidelines were adapted from the “Showing Up for Racial Justice Holiday Placemat” created by a national community organizing network of the same name which “moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.”

Well that’s a whole different thing. It makes sense coming from a community organizing network; you know where you are with that. But coming from an office of the university and distributed at dining halls? Not so much.

Harvard Placemats Harvard Republican Club Facebook



Atheist Woman of the Year Oscars

Dec 22nd, 2015 3:18 pm | By

Well now look at that, Godless Utopia is doing a Woman Atheist of the Year poll with four categories (with four nominees in each category). It’s a Twitter-based poll, i.e. you vote by clicking a box on the relevant tweet.

One is for comedian; I of course voted for Kate Smurthwaite. There’s also actress and blogger (I voted for Maryam). The fourth is author; I voted for Taslima. But here’s the shocker: somehow I’m one of the nominees in that one. I won’t win of course but feel free to vote for me anyway! (But really you should vote for Taslima.)

(Voting has already started.)



Impure

Dec 22nd, 2015 11:51 am | By

Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.

Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.

“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.

There are no kitchens, because bleeding women aren’t allowed to cook. A thick sheet on the ground is the only bed; during the day it’s folded to serve as a chair. The huts are isolated, so forest animals pay visits; there are reports of women dying from snakebites.

The practice of banishing women and girls is most prevalent among the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups. The Gonds are the largest indigenous group in central India and hail from the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.

Girls miss school while they are in the huts. An estimated 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating. “Many times a menstruating girl is unable to take her exams because of this practice. It means that few girls from this region study beyond matriculation [high school],” says Barsagade.

They have to stay there for five days.

There are two gaokors in Sitatola, home to about 20 families. Although there have been incidents of harassment, women are generally left alone because they are considered impure while they have their periods. There have been moves to improve the conditions of the gaokors, but not to end the practice.

It’s very important not to rape a woman when she’s impure. Keep that for when she’s not bleeding.



God will provide

Dec 22nd, 2015 11:16 am | By

From the New Statesman in August 2005: Donal MacIntyre reports some of the truth about “Mother” Teresa.

dormitory held about 30 beds rammed in so close that there was hardly a breath of air between the bare metal frames. Apart from shrines and salutations to “Our Great Mother”, the white walls were bare. The torch swept across the faces of children sleeping, screaming, laughing and sobbing, finally resting on the hunched figure of a boy in a white vest. Distressed, he rocked back and forth, his ankle tethered to his cot like a goat in a farmyard. This was the Daya Dan orphanage for children aged six months to 12 years, one of Mother Teresa’s flagship homes in Kolkata. It was 7.30 in the evening, and outside the monsoon rains fell unremittingly.

Earlier in the day, young international volunteers had giggled as one told how a young boy had peed on her while strapped to a bed. I had already been told of an older disturbed woman tied to a tree at another Missionaries of Charity home. At the orphanage, few of the volunteers batted an eyelid at disabled children being tied up. They were too intoxicated with the myth of Mother Teresa and drunk on their own philanthropy to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading.

Or maybe just too Catholic, too indoctrinated, too unthinking, too convinced that piety=goodness to see that such treatment of children was inhumane and degrading. Irish industrial “schools” were run by people like that.

Volunteers (from Italy, Sweden, the United States and the UK) did their best to cradle and wash the children who had soiled themselves. But there were no nappies, and only cold water. Soap and disinfectant were in short supply. Workers washed down beds with dirty water and dirty cloths. Food was prepared on the floor in the corridor. A senior member of staff mixed medicine with her hands. Some did their best to give love and affection – at least some of the time. But, for the most part, the care the children received was inept, unprofessional and, in some cases, rough and dangerous. “They seem to be warehousing people rather than caring for them,” commented the former operations director of Mencap Martin Gallagher, after viewing our undercover footage.

Much of that was because “Mother” Teresa refused to spend money on the people she claimed to be caring for, instead giving it to the church (and spending it on herself when she was ill).

Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. The order has stopped reusing needles, but the poor care remains pervasive. One nurse told me of a case earlier this year where staff knew a patient had typhoid but made no effort to protect volunteers or other patients. “The sense was that God will provide and if the worst happens – it is God’s will.”

“God will provide” but the 50 million dollars sits in the bank account.

Nearly eight years after her death, Mother Teresa is fast on the way to sainthood. The great aura of myth that surrounds her is built on her great deeds helping the poor and the destitute of Kolkata, birthplace of her order, the Missionaries of Charity. Rarely has one individual so convinced public opinion of the holiness of her cause. Her reward is accelerated canonisation.

But her homes are a disgrace to so-called Christian care and, indeed, civilised values of any kind. I witnessed barbaric treatment of the most vulnerable.

But she’ll be a “saint” all the same.



Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us

Dec 21st, 2015 1:34 pm | By

Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa say thanks but no thanks to the whole “wearing ‘hijab’ in solidarity” thing – not for the familiar and irritating reason that it’s “appropriation” but for the much better reason that it’s sexist shit.

Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah, the women smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The media obligingly reported this interfaith gesture.

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful joke and reminder of the well-financed effort by conservatives to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting unsuspecting well-intentioned do-gooders, while promoting the headscarf for women as a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars,” the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. We reject this interpretation. We are not too sexy for our hair.

It’s been grating on me for ages, the way the media and would-be progressives beam approval on the headscarf for women, as if it stood purely for mutual love and respect and not at all for the subordination of women.

This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf,” furthering a sexist interpretation of Islam that women and girls must “protect” their “honor” by covering their hair. Hijab literally means, “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.

I did not know that. I’ve been calling it hijab all this time. Damn.

Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shia sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have experienced bullying to cover our hair from men and boys – and women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” for example, telling jokes about “hijabis” in skinny jeans actually being “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”

To us, the headscarf is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and, thus, we must cover ourselves. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.

And treats her like so much garbage if she doesn’t cover up.

Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf for women, duping well-intentioned “interfaith” supporters, is promulgated by efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shia proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day,” the TV station arguing “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Yikes. Bad move, University of Calgary.

In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”

Also, the notion that “the woman is awrah” presupposes that the only people who count as people are men. The woman is forbidden to men, and therefore she’s just plain forbidden, because only men count. Since only men count, the way to deal with these forbidden women is to imprison them. Problem solved…as long as you assume women don’t count as people.

The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”

Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.

These things always disturb me. They just send the message that Muslim women and girls are expected to wear the damn curtains.

As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.

In the name of “interfaith,” well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity,” pushing a platform to put a headscarf on every woman.

Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.

I do!



Stuck on the belief that truth will save you

Dec 21st, 2015 12:07 pm | By

Alice Dreger has, with effort, learned to accept that historians are always too late with advice; people don’t listen until after it’s all over.

A group of transgender activists has achieved a major victory—the shutting down of the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Even better from their point of view, they got the head of it, psychologist Ken Zucker, fired.

The activists didn’t like Zucker because he never did subscribe to the “true transgender” model of identity, wherein you simply accept what any child (no matter how young) says about his or her gender. The transgender activists who called for his ouster insisted that Zucker was doing “reparative therapy,” trying to talk children out of being transgender when they “really” were.

I don’t doubt that these particular transgender adults look back and see that, from very early on, they had been assigned a gender that didn’t make sense for them. The mistake they make is then to assume that every child who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment should simply be “affirmed” by parents and clinicians in their “new” gender.

It’s the other minds problem, as always. You can’t ever know that other people are thinking exactly what you thought in what you take to be the same situation. You just can’t. It’s all guesswork and extrapolation, and it’s inherently fallible.

This is an unbelievably simplistic understanding of what’s going on with these children. Yes, some of them will grow up to be transgender; Zucker and others have documented that, over and over again. But if history is a guide, the majority will not. Trying to make sure they all get the best care they need is the goal of clinics like Zucker’s, as well as the clinics run by other good folks at the children’s hospitals of UCLA, Northwestern, Seattle, and on and on.

Why not just go ahead and transition everyone who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment? Because physical transition is a big deal. On the other hand starting early with kids who won’t later regret it is much better than waiting. There are reasons both ways. That’s why it’s important to get it right.

For many years, there was pretty heavy medical gatekeeping around sex reassignment. This had some to do with homophobia, heterosexism, and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being sued if a patient later regretted transitioning). Today, the pendulum has swung really hard in the other direction. It is now much, much easier for children, adolescents, and adults who signal that they are transgender to gain access to social gender changes, hormone therapies, and sex changing surgeries. This has a lot to do with political rejection of homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia and so on, and some to do with defensive medicine (fear of being attacked as anti-transgender).

In other words, it’s still pretty damned political. Whereas before, some people who would have benefitted from transition were denied it, today some people who might benefit from alternative clinical help (alternative to transition) are effectively denied that help and are instead being “treated” with transition.

Dreger links to people who have later changed their minds about transitioning.

There are more and more of these, and they are typically not written by people who are anti-transgender by any means. They are written by people who realize transition isn’t what they needed after all. They are written by people who urge caution.

Many people today are afraid to urge caution, because when you do, you get labeled anti-trans, and sometimes coopted by genuinely anti-trans people. But some people are willing to talk in private or to speak pseudonymously. So, earlier this year for WIRED magazine, I interviewed a thirty-something woman I called Jess. She had been a gender nonconforming female child and was skeptical about sending children too quickly down the road of transition.

Today, in the clinics presumably the transgender activists want, a gender nonconforming, gender-questioning child like Jess would simply be transitioned over and sent out into the world. But Jess told me that, today, “I’m very happy having the body I have, with just some changes in how I express it.” She identifies as a genderqueer gay person with a female body (the body type she was born with), and works on LGBT rights issues professionally. She’s not anti-trans.

Not a bad outcome, is it?

The transgender activists who demanded and ultimately achieved the shut-down of Zucker’s CAMH clinic said that Zucker’s approach was full of stigma. That’s because he didn’t simply “gender affirm” every child that came by. He worked with them to figure out what they needed psychologically. For some, that was transition. For others, it was coming to see that you could be gender nonconforming without changing your sex, or dealing with depression or bi-polar disorder, or dealing with the mental health needs of parents who were not well enough to really care for their children as their children deserved. It was a pretty idiosyncratic approach, designed to help each individual child be the most healthy in the long run, no matter which label she or he came to inhabit. Again, for some children, that meant transition (becoming “T”), and for those children, Zucker arranged puberty-blocking hormones and then hormonal and surgical transition.

The trouble is, Zucker didn’t do the community education and outreach that was needed.

I so wish Zucker had done the “community education” that this review called for. Now it is too late. For years, I and others advised Zucker to be far more proactive in terms of the politics in which he was caught—to reach out to the public to directly engage them in conversation about the methods and reasoning of his clinic’s approach, the same approach used in many top clinics around the world. As late as this summer, I gave him a lot of the advice I also recently gave to the International Society for Intelligence Research about how to work to protect yourself in politically difficult fields (see video).

But Ken seemed to believe that he didn’t need to deal with the activists coming after him. He disregarded my repeated advice. As a consequence, what has happened to him reminds me very much of what happened to Napoleon Chagnon, as recounted in chapters five and six of Galileo’s Middle Finger. It’s the Galilean personality, stuck on the belief that truth will save you. Wrong. The Church of True Gender doesn’t give a crap what science shows.

But people don’t listen to historians until it’s too late.



Beaten like slaves, treated like merchandise

Dec 21st, 2015 11:25 am | By

Jonah Cohen and Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe tell us what “justice” looks like for foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.

They start with the Sri Lankan woman whose sentence of beheading for having sex outside her marriage has been sent back for review.

But the public still doesn’t know her name, for whom she was working, what she testified in court, or who bore witness against her. Not her family, not even her “betrayed” husband, knows that she stands to be executed.

Why won’t her name be released? Officials involved with the case claim she doesn’t want her family to know how far she’s fallen, that she’d feel humiliated. But it’s hard to believe that the same court that would stone a woman to death would also protect her from the sting of social scandal. It’s just as likely that the housemaid’s name is being concealed to stifle media attention, as well as to imply her shame and guilt over a sexual crime for which her male judges might kill her.

Yeah Saudi officials are so concerned with their victims’ feelings of humiliation. Please.

If she does survive and make it home, she will be another in a string of horror stories.

“Now I have become a prostitute. I have come back home a prostitute,” says the woman in this video as she recounts the horror of her experience as a maid in Saudi Arabia. “The house I was working in threw me out on to the road. When I got into a taxi on the road, the driver took me to a brothel. I had to work as a prostitute for two months.”

Another woman says that she was tasked with looking after 14 children. “When I couldn’t manage, instead of taking me back to my agency, they sold me to another agency. And at that agency they hit me until I started bleeding from my skull.”

Beaten like slaves, treated like merchandise, these women are among the fortunate ones. Other young Sri Lankan housemaids, working for two dollars a day, never return home.

Human Rights Watch reports on this subject too.

You might have heard about the young woman who was beheaded in Saudi Arabia in 2013. But you probably haven’t heard of the underage housemaid whose corpse was just returned earlier this month to her parents in Sri Lanka.

She hanged herself in the spring. Or so it is claimed by Saudi authorities. Her parents are skeptical. “I have doubts that someone who was supposed to come home in May would kill herself like this,” her father says. “She called us and said she was coming in May.”

And these aren’t aberrations.

Namini Wijedasa, a Sri Lankan journalist, recently reported that “the tales of misery are too numerous to ignore.”

Few, if any, of these migrant workers receive the protection of domestic employment laws. Visiting workers in Saudi Arabia must obtain permission from their employers to exit legally from the kingdom. If that is not slave labor, what is?

It’s almost as if more religion doesn’t make people good.



The rapper told ‘The Breakfast Club’

Dec 20th, 2015 4:58 pm | By

I tried to find some evidence to rebut (or not) something I claimed.

Ed Cara on Twitter said in response to my link to the first collection of misogynist comments about Germaine Greer:

Those are all certainly vile, but I absolutely do think there’d be vile racist comments over quotes from a famous AA speaker

So I looked around, and found a rapper who obliged. Pink News reported last September:

Waka Flocka Flame made a series of transphobic comments on a New York radio station on Friday.

The rapper told ‘The Breakfast Club’ that Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was an: “Affront to God.”

He went on to accuse “transgenders” of “marketing evil, man.”

Flame continued to wax lyrical about the danger of non-traditional family units, accusing men and women of forgetting their gender roles as “husbands and wives”.

“Women are afraid to be a wife and young males is afraid to be men.” he said.

“It’s like, it’s not cool, they’re not marketing that. They don’t market families and husbands and wives no more.

“They marketing young girls, you know what I’m saying?” he said, as it became increasingly clear that few around him did.

“Transgenders — they’re marketing evil, man,” he said, before accusing the trans community of doing the “devil’s work” and as a test that society needed to “outbeat [sic]”.

“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after he did.

“That’s how I just feel. You rebuking God, man.

“God didn’t put them feelings in you, man, that’s the Devil playing tricks on your mind,” he added.

“That’s a test from God. If you can’t outbeat [sic] that one task and you believe that, then you’re going to believe everything else.”

However, Mr Flame didn’t reserve his hate fuelled philosophising for trans people alone – he also criticised the African American community, insisting that they need “get over slavery”.

So I found the Pink News Facebook post of the story. Ed was at least partly right – the comments are certainly abusive. On the other hand they’re not explicitly racist the way so many of the comments about Greer were misogynist – and there are only 34, compared to her 223.

But plenty of them are implicitly racist. Like the second one for instance:

Gideon John Kramer Waka flaka wtf all theses idiots with the brain the apsize of an ant who brag about fucking bitches selling drugs and people are so fucking stupid they pay these idiots attention rap takes no talent what so ever these idiots call themself artists and then say stupid things like this moron its sad to see how many people actually even listion to anything these idiots say

And others:

Pete Smith Looks like a trans human.

Scott Sherman I’m not a fan of ignorant, bigoted talentless twats holding themselves out like theyre a role model and spewing their hate in interviews

There’s a rather cryptic one…

Donny Ball WAKA your baby girl is waiting for you.

The misogyny sneaks in even when the sinner isn’t a woman.

But anyway: my claim is at least partly rebutted.



The view from Compton

Dec 20th, 2015 12:45 pm | By

Whooooooo – Phil Plait alerts us to an amazing NASA photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This incredible photo was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been mapping the Moon since it achieved orbit in 2009. Its cameras are usually pointed straight down (what’s called nadir viewing), but sometimes the whole spacecraft is rotated to point them toward the horizon, or even up into space, to measure the Moon’s incredibly thin atmosphere (called an exosphere, which, c’mon, is an extremely cool word) or to take calibration measurements.

In this case, on Oct. 12, 2015, when it took the images used to make this image, LRO was over the large crater Compton, which is just over the visible edge on the farside of the Moon. LRO was 134 km above the Moon’s surface, so it could peek over the horizon and see the Earth.

Earthrise



Model arguments

Dec 20th, 2015 12:25 pm | By

I was going to leave it there, but then I clicked on the “more comments” button and there are so many that are so horrific I’m going to add a few more. Pink News on Facebook flagging up its own story on something Germaine Greer said about trans women.

Scott Sherman Cocker spaniel? I never thought she was as pretty as a dog, nor as kind are loyal. Will somebody please tell this irrelevant cunt to shut up

Hellen Back Lets have Mz Greer put to sleep shall we.

Lucinda Ferguson miserable cow , getting paid for being miserable and stupid

Nicholas Marshall
to be fair.. she does look like a dog… woof woof

Kevin Oliver I’ve said it before. She was worth listening to 50 years ago. Now she has nothing to say and spends far too much time saying it. She’s little more than a geriatric Katie Hopkins.

Christina Engela …she could call herself a ‘bitch’. She should.

Darren Lee Layton Hurry up and die you wretched waste of oxygen and space.

Huw Williams you could also call yourself an ugly cunt who talks shite

Dave Edwards
What a foul, bitter old hag!!!!!

Don Joiner She will say anything about anything as long as she sees her name in the press Tired worn out old HAG

Mikey Mcmahon Sure you can… and I can call you a sad old cunt, but only I’d be right!

And more of the same, and then it devolves into mostly one-word blurts – bitch! hag! cunt!

Because these guys are all so very progressive.



“She looks like a flea ridden old bitch anyway!”

Dec 20th, 2015 11:33 am | By

One thing about the peculiar, fraught, often venomous politics of trans activism – sometimes it just looks like nothing but a “progressive” excuse for vomiting out torrents of misogynist abuse just like the horribly familiar trolls who haunt our blog comments and Twitter feeds.

An example: a public Facebook post by Pink News yesterday linking to a Pink News story on Germaine Greer:

She compared trans women to claiming you’re a dog.

Germaine Greer on trans women: I could call myself a Cocker Spaniel
Feminist author Germaine Greer has continued to defend her anti-trans…

There are 223 comments as of this moment. Many of them are indistinguishable from bog-standard misogynist abuse.

Mikey Mcmahon I’d be happy to treat her like one in any case. The sick old dog needs putting down.

Steven Powell If Germaine Greer thinks that having a fully functioning vagina is what defines a woman, she is absolutely not a feminist.

Donn Spanninga Steenkist But Bitch, you can claim you are a cocker spaniel but you will never ever feel like one….though I DO think you are a dog….

Dave Basora May want to rethink that. Dogs are mans best friend. Is she?

Donn Spanninga Steenkist True!! Ok….errrmmm…. I think she’s a cunt!! That better??

August Phoenix The old bitch must be really craving publicity to come out with such inane comments.
Problem is she was out of touch by the 80s and can’t handle that
Go back home and raise kangaroos, they might want to listen to you.
Of more concern is the bbc getting more and more anti lgbt. Ought to be made a pay as you go channel. Then it might have to face reality instead of its pathetic line up of programmes.

Jodie Martin She’d be closer if she called herself a c**t! You can convert to Judaism and it would take more than a fur coat to trans into a dog. Is she out of her fucking mind?

Donn Spanninga Steenkist It’s menopause lol!!

Christiaan De Wet Cocker spaniel = bitch? Lol, that seems to be what i want to call someone that is so closed minded.

Nicky Hann Shes just an old ignorant women, where lgbt in her decades were prosecuted and not talked about.

Michael Bonham Carter Ignore her. Just as we all do. A pointless women that has only ever lived in world that all goes on in her own head.

Gabby Nowten she could call herself a cocker spaniel but she would be better off calling herself what everyone else does

Matthew Thatcher Well she is a dog and a c*nt but who cares, at one point thought she was a drag queen !!!

Nico De Bruin Freud would have something to say. COCKer Spaniel? A touch of penis envy perhaps?

Sissi NorthQueen This hideous b***h would pale and cry in front of some incredibly beautiful and xxtimes more feminine than herself transwomen and I like the “political” statement of men who want to quit the ranks of their “look-at-my-dick” peers…

Owain Pritchard Well. She would be welcome to call herself a Cocker Spaniel. After all, she looks like a flea ridden old bitch anyway!

That’s just from the first 50.

Imagine Jesse Jackson said what Greer said. Do you suppose people would post flamingly racist comments on Pink News’s wall in response? I don’t know the answer, because it’s a hypothetical, but I sure as hell doubt it. I don’t recall seeing any racist attacks on Bill Cosby as the news started to come out – and you’d think actual rape would be quite a lot more serious and anger-inducing than having the wrong opinion on trans women is.

But somehow loathing of women becomes instantly respectable if she has the wrong opinion on trans women.

I wonder why that is…



Undeclared links

Dec 20th, 2015 10:37 am | By

In the Times today – behind a paywall as always, but the free first two paragraphs are of interest all the same.

Britain’s biggest Islamic organisation and its largest Muslim student group have undeclared links to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist network that has at times incited violence and terror, a government report claimed yesterday.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body of more than 500 Islamic organisations, claims to be non-sectarian, but Brotherhood supporters are said to have “played an important role in establishing and then running” it, according to the review.

Wait, the MCB claims to be non-sectarian? What sense does that make? It’s sectarian right in the name. The issue isn’t sectarian / non-sectarian but theocratic / secular, or tolerant / intolerant, or liberal / illiberal. It’s whether or not you respect human rights. It’s whether or not you think your religion has the right to demand and enforce universal obedience.

It’s also whether or not you exclude women in the name of your organization.

 



A principle virtually no one contests

Dec 19th, 2015 3:58 pm | By

Speaking of Al Jazeera…last January it had some issues with Charlie Hebdo. National Review saw the emails.

As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their own by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide e-mail.

Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was “really an attack on ‘free speech,’” discuss whether “I Am Charlie” is an “alienating slogan,” caution viewers against “making this a free speech aka ‘European Values’ under attack binary [sic],” and portray the attack as “a clash of extremist fringes.” “Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr wrote. “Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response — however illegitimate — is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.”

Excuse me? A principle virtually no one contests? If virtually no one contests it, what were all those dead bodies then? If virtually no one contests it, why did the Kouachi brothers murder 12 people at Charlie Hebdo? If virtually no one contests it, why do so many people get in such a rage of opposition to it? What a cowardly, blaming, contemptuous, horrible thing to say. The whole point is that a great many people absolutely do contest it, and a great many of them contest it with violence. They contest it by murdering people. Those guys with machetes in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who draw up lists of people to be killed in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who threaten to kill my dear friend Taslima? They contest it. That guy who shot up the conference in Copenhagen, killing a Danish film director, and then later killed a guard outside a synagogue? He contested it. I could go on. People do contest it and they use force, they use murder, to make their contesting stick. So yes, actually, the people at Charlie Hebdo were bravely defiant.

His denunciation of Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed didn’t sit well with some Al Jazeera English employees.

Hours later, U.S.-based correspondent Tom Ackerman sent an email quoting a paragraph from a January 7 blog post by Ross Douthat. The New York Times’ Douthat (film critic for National Review) argued that cartoons like the ones that drove the radical Islamists to murder must be published “because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”

I hate having to agree with Ross Douthat, but these things happen.

H/t Lady Mondegreen



Carbon fibre as a prosthetic form of masculinity

Dec 19th, 2015 11:58 am | By

Lots of people are passing this around, and I think the original spark for the passing around may have been Dawkins, but all the same, I’m going to pass it around too, because it is just that whatever it is.

Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Abstract.

This article examines material economies of carbon fibre as a prosthetic form of masculinity. The paper advances three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fibre can be a site in which disability is overcome, an act of overcoming that is affected through masculinized technology. Secondly, carbon fibre can be a homosocial surface; that is, carbon fibre becomes both a surface extension of the self and a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface that facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies. Carbon fibre surfaces are material extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fibre surfaces are vectors of the cultural economies of masculine competition. Thirdly, the article gives an account of Oscar Pistorius as an example of the masculinization of carbon fibre, and the associated binding of a psychic attitude of misogyny and power to a form of violent and competitive masculine subjectivity. The paper unpacks the affects, economies and surfaces of “carbon fibre masculinity” and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fibre, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability.

Let’s see…

One, what does it mean to say “carbon fibre can be a site”? Why call it a “site”? I know it’s theory jargon, but why use it? Carbon fiber is a material. What is added by calling it a “site”? Other than obfuscation?

Two, why call it “masculinized technology”? No doubt this is explained in the paper, but it’s taken to be self-evident enough to work in the abstract, and I wonder why.

Third, how can carbon fiber be “a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships”? That obviously will be a big part of the article, but on its face it looks desperately arbitrary. Women can make use of carbon fiber prostheses too, surely?

Then of course I wonder how carbon fiber can be a surface that “facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies.”

The rest – well I can see the drift. Oscar Pistorius may have felt less of a man because of his missing leg. I would guess that most people feel less of a human if they lack a major limb, but whatever – maybe Pistorius felt it especially acutely. But the special carbon fiber aspect…?

Oh well. I prefer clarity to deliberate obfuscation. So it goes.



Article? What article?

Dec 19th, 2015 10:51 am | By

Cora Currier reports apparent censorship by Al Jazeera.

The corporate headquarters of Al Jazeera appears to have blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record from viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is funded by the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend to offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.

The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor and lawyer Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the U.S. government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The article ran on December 3, and is still available in the United States, but people attempting to view the link in other countries were given an error or “not found” page. (For international readers, we’ve reprinted the full text of the article here.)

Al Jazeera said in a statement that it’s “investigating what the source of the problem may be.”

Last week, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz quoted a director of Al Jazeera apologizing for the article and saying that it would be removed. Another news story, from a Bahraini website, shows a tweet from Al Jazeera America’s account with the article’s headline. That tweet appears to have been deleted. A spokesperson for Al Jazeera America would not comment on the tweet or on the discrepancy between the parent company’s statement to The Intercept and the comments in Okaz.

There’s nothing unusual about Sethi’s article, and he says Al Jazeera America commissioned it from him.

A few days after publication, Sethi’s Twitter feed was flooded with attacks from pro-Saudi accounts. David Johnson, senior opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, retweeted many of the attacks. (He declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

Scuzzy. It all looks very scuzzy.

While Al Jazeera’s international coverage has been praised — particularly in the years after the 9/11 attacks — this is not the first time that the network has appeared to cater to the interests of Qatar and its Gulf allies. (Disclosure: prior to joining The Intercept, I wrote an article for Al Jazeera America as a freelancer.)

It has been criticized for lack of coverage of protests against the government of Bahrain, for example, and in 2012, several journalists complained that they had to edit coverage of Syria to feature the emir of Qatar’s position. In 2013, staffers in Egypt resigned in protest of the network’s bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood after the military deposed the president, Mohamed Morsi.

But staffers at Al Jazeera America say this kind of blocking is new.