So we’re not rid of the Duggars after all. They’re back, in the form of two of the daughters who show us what it’s like being raised as a breeding cow by fanatical Christians.

I spotted it while channel-surfing and watched a few minutes. (I can’t take them for very long – the hostage smiles freak me out.) It’s horrifying watching one very young woman, pregnant for the first time, talk to her slightly older sister who has already given birth, her “nervousness” about what childbirth is going to be like. It’s horrifying because we know she was raised to do exactly this, so it’s not a matter of a very young woman who is keen to have a baby for her own reasons and based on her own feelings, it’s a matter of her Christian Duty. It’s also horrifying because we know she’s expected to keep doing it as many times as she possibly can. It’s horrifying because the Duggars are Quiverfull.

The Washington Post reports on the “what about that Josh guy now, huh?” aspect.

Now, “Jill & Jessa: Counting On” was a fairly brutal emotional look into what his siblings have gone through since Josh’s “wrongdoings” went public, as they talked about feeling betrayed by their brother. In between updates about Jill’s missionary work and Jessa’s pregnancy, the special interviewed eight Duggar siblings, as producers asked them to describe the last four months. On-screen text helpfully popped up to remind viewers: “Several months ago, a police report was released containing allegations that, as a minor, Josh inappropriately touched five people.”

The Duggar kids all followed the same script in their responses: They couldn’t believe that (a) the police report was released and (b) the media was so interested in events that happened in Josh’s past so long ago. Jessa and Jill, who already sat for an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, described how (as two of Josh’s victims) they had already forgiven him and moved on.

“So the police report was released to the world. And I know that wasn’t right,” Jill, 24, said. “We had to work through it because as a victim, you’ve already worked through that — you’ve already dealt with it and you’ve already moved on. And you don’t want that rubbed in your face all the time and for everybody else to see.”

She said, on tv.

A Saudi millionaire has been acquitted of raping a teenage girl; he claimed he accidentally tripped and fell on her. Could happen to anyone, couldn’t it. So tragically easy to do.

Updating to add: this was in Southwark Crown Court, in London.

Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on an 18 year-old-girl who had slept on his sofa in his Maida Vale flat after a night out drinking.

The businessman had already had sex with the teenager’s 24-year-old friend, whom he already knew, in the bedroom and said his penis might have been poking out of his underwear when he fell on the teen.

The young woman said she had woken up in the early hours of the morning, with Mr Abdulaziz on top of her, forcing himself inside her.

But no: he was on top of her, but he wasn’t forcing himself inside her, it’s just that his penis was poking out of his underpants and it just happened to fall up inside her vagina. We all know how easily that can happen, right? We can all see the mechanics of it with no problem at all? A man trips and falls on top of a woman and whoops! there’s his penis accidentally fallen up her vagina. Half the people on earth are a result of how easy that is.

His semen and DNA was found inside the young woman, but he said it was possible he had semen on his hands from having sex with the 24-year-old earlier.

And his hands also accidentally fell up her when he fell on her. That too is so absurdly easy it’s amazing anyone ever brings a rape case at all.

Originally a comment by quixote on Guest post: The HPV vaccine saves lives.

Studies of how people process weapons-grade BS in the news show that once the nonsense is presented it soaks in. Any subsequent correction simply does not cancel out the initial BS in enough people.

That last is important. The feeling is always, “Oh, but that doesn’t apply to me.” Which can be true. But if it does apply to 60% or 40% or even 20% in the case of immunization BS, then we still have a problem.

Which has a deeply disturbing implication. Grimes is doing essential work trying to set the record straight. But the only real solution is to prevent total BS from being spouted in the first place. That means our current free speech model, where more speech is the solution for lies, does not work.

The evidence that it doesn’t is all around us by now. So we’re going to have to figure out how to filter total lies out of the media (including blogs?? Facebook??? Twitter????) without destroying free speech. And if we don’t figure it out, the whole point of free speech, which is enabling truth to be heard, will be lost.

The Goldsmiths Student Union has “concluded” its “investigation” of the ASH event where some men in the front row tried to disrupt Maryam’s talk. Here’s what they have to say about that:

We have now concluded our investigation into the events that took place at the ASH event on 20^th November. [That must be a typo for 30th November]

Goldsmiths SU will be taking the following actions:

(i)  We will arrange meetings with the Islamic and Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies individually and identify actions that will be taken by each society. This may be followed by disciplinary action against individual society members and/or a society.

(ii)  We will review our external speaker procedure and safe space policy in line with best practice from other institutions . 

(iii)  We will arrange a meeting with all our societies to brief them on the reviewed procedure, including our safe space policy.  No society will be able to proceed with an external speaker event unless this briefing has been attended.

(iv)  We will ensure that there is a comprehensive and compulsory annual training session for clubs and societies who wish to invite external speakers to events delivered as part of the training programme that takes place at the start of the year.

 

Equality, diversity and respect for others within the Goldsmiths community are core values at Goldsmiths SU and it’s important that all of our Societies and Sports Clubs adhere to these values.

The Times has reported on Maryam’s encounter with Goldsmiths ISOC.

Maryam Namazie, a feminist who fled the Iranian regime and campaigns against Islamic extremism, was speaking on “apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis” at Goldsmiths, University of London, when the talk was interrupted by protesters who switched off her projector and accused her of violating their “safe space”. The secularist, who said it was wrong for Bangladeshi bloggers to be hacked to death, or for Afghan women to be stoned, in the name of religion, said she was staggered when the Feminist and LGBTQ societies posted statements of solidarity with the Islamic Society, denouncing her as an Islamophobe.

She said: “I don’t expect any apology from Islamists – fascists don’t apologise — but I do expect it from those who feign to be defenders of women’s rights and gay rights. It’s a complete betrayal.”

Oh Goldsmiths feminist society. Oh Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ society. Repent. Apologize.

A sad story of identity and misunderstanding.

I’ve always known I was working class, even before I had the words to articulate it. Aged three, I used to call my dinner “tea”. My father, a high court judge, hated it but I kept on doing it all the same. I’ve no idea how I just knew the word “tea” was working class for “dinner”. I guess it’s something that was just in me.

Back in the 1980s no one ever discussed working-class children who’d been falsely assigned middle-class status at birth. It was as though we didn’t exist. Because of this I’d retreat into a fantasy world where I’d been swapped at birth and Den and Angie off Eastenders were my real mum and dad. I couldn’t talk to my parents about this. My mother, a bus conductor’s daughter and the youngest of six children, was always telling me how lucky I was with my holidays abroad and ballet lessons. I don’t think she meant to hurt me; it was just her identified-poor-at-birth privilege that made her such an evil bitch.

Mothers are all like that. Women old enough to be mothers, whether they are or not, are all like that. They get worse every year – exponentially worse. Scary bad.

There’s a word for people like me: überpoor (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; your ignorance just means you’re a privileged bigot). Basically, it describes the state of being poor while enduring the added oppression that comes with having money and a middle-class background. The queer poverty theorist J’amie Olivier came up with it in his brilliant work Whipping Chav. If you’ve not read it, please do. It explains so much about how poor people are not oppressed due to having no money but due to “poorphobia”: a widespread antipathy towards dog racing, Lambrini and the Waitrose Essentials range. Hardest hit by this are the überpoor: people who have been wrongly assigned middle- or upper-class status but are in fact poor. For centuries, such people have simply been invisible. No one has wanted to talk about us and our needs.

Thankfully, the release of Park Life in the mid-1990s came as something of a tipping point for überpoor people. Damon Albarn’s affected mockney accent finally proved to the world that yes, we did exist. To paraphrase Paris Lees on Conchita Wurst, Damon wasn’t middle-class or a millionaire pop star or any of these restrictive categories: he was just Damon, showing what it means to break through all the barriers! Obviously there was some opposition to such an image of liberation. Vile bigots such as Jarvis Cocker started releasing überpoorphobic anthems such as Common People, erasing our lived experience by claiming we merely thought “that poor is cool”. I always felt the NUS should have no-platformed Pulp due to that line about how we would “never understand how it means to live [our lives] with no meaning or control”.

You know who’s the worst that way? Socialists. Überpoor excluding radical socialists, aka ÜERs. ÜERs are always going on and on about literal poverty and class oppression and inequality, which excludes the überpoor who are already the most marginalized people ever.

My hope is that eventually, more and more assigned-poor-at-birth people are able to recognise how privileged they are, welcome us into their communities and hand over all their lager and pool tables. So many APAB prople think it’s enough just not to mind if I rent a flat above a shop, cut my hair and get a job, but this implies being überpoor isn’t in fact more valid and painful than simply being poor. It’s essential that these poor people put us first given that we bear the double burden of not just being überpoor but of having lots of money while being überpoor and hence being mis-classed (it never ceases to amaze me, by contrast, how welcoming the rich are to the überrich, allowing them to adopt plummy accents while continuing to do all the former’s domestic work).

Down with the ÜERs.

A small news item from Williamsburg, Kentucky.

A homeless shelter in Williamsburg will no longer accept women as a way to stop people from having sex.

Allow me to do an editorial tweak of that sentence: In an effort to prevent people from having sex on the premises, a homeless shelter in Williamsburg will now turn away homeless women.

The director at Emergency Christian Ministries said people are having sex at the shelter and they cannot accept that.

“It seems like these last days it’s getting worse … the ungodly type,” Director Billy Woodward said.

About 10 to 12 women were asked to leave the shelter over the past two weeks.

Of course. Using a similar line of reasoning, Tim Hunt told a group of women scientists that women should be in separate labs. Using a similar line of reasoning, some states force women to wear concealing tents whenever they go outside. Using a similar line of reasoning, some Islamist student groups try to impose gender segregated seating at their events. The reasoning is that men are the people, and women are the devilish distraction, so of course it’s women who have to be shut out, including shut out of actual shelter when they’re homeless.

Woodward said in some cases, they will not accept children either.

“Right now, no because of the female factor,” Woodward said.

However, Woodward added he would accept a male child if his father and he were homeless.

Because men and boys are people, who have needs. Women and girls are not people, and don’t have needs.

Also if somebody has to be turned away from the only homeless shelter in town, it totally makes sense that it should be men, since men are so much more vulnerable to rape and violence than women are.

Woodward said he made his decision based on the Bible. He said what was happening at the shelter was sinful.

He told us he is not saying women are the cause of the “sex problem.”

“It takes two to do that,” he said. “We are not biased or prejudice whatsoever.”

He says he’s not saying women are the cause of the sinful shelter-sex, but he’s turning them away from shelter anyway. So all he’s saying is that women don’t matter.

I’ll refrain from muttering about mangers and inns.

How they do it in Canada.

Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne greeted Syrian refugees at the airport in Toronto.

The family— the father is a blacksmith and the mother a sales clerk — was the first through processing in the wee hours of Friday morning after the government aircraft landed following a long flight from Beirut.

The family fled Syria, spent eight months in Lebanon and now they came to Canada because here, Madeleine will have many opportunities, the family said.

“We suffered a lot,” Jamkossian said. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”

Trudeau and Wynne were on hand to welcome the first two families from the plane that brought 163 Syrian refugees to Canada. They were joined by the ministers of immigration, health and defence, as well as local mayors and opposition immigration critics.

Some cities in Israel have cut Jennifer Lawrence out of posters advertising the movie she stars in, because, you know, women are hoooooors unless they’re hidden away like dirty laundry.

Most Israeli cities have been treated to the standard poster of the final “Hunger Games” installment, featuring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen posing with her bow and arrow. But in the ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, as well as in Israel’s capital city Jerusalem – where several neighborhoods are heavily religious – residents instead received a censored version of the poster, featuring only an image of the fiery crown.

Extremely religious versions of Judaism consider the female image to be licentious, and ultra-Orthodox newspapers, catalogues and advertisements routinely edit out photographs of females entirely. City posters in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem featuring images of women have been often been vandalized, and Bnei Brak specifically, the city municipality bans public images that could be deemed offensive to its religious population.

Because women are hoors. You can look at men all you want, but women – no no no, because they’re hoors. We hates’em, precious.

H/t Seth

Meghan Murphy explains some things about feminism.

When I started blogging, back in 2010, I was, admittedly, naive about the deep divides that exist between liberal and radical feminists. I still struggle with how to name those divides properly. I refer to those who refuse to make obvious connections between various forms of violence against women and who work to decontexualize our collective subordination as “liberal feminists,” “sex-positive feminists,” or “third-wave feminists,” never wholly sure of the most accurate label.

I realize this is because what I actually believe is that, if you can’t (or won’t) connect the dots between prostitution, pornography, rape culture, sexual harassment, objectification, femicide, colonization, domestic abuse and, more generally, female subordination, you are not a part of this movement — the feminist one. In other words, it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, it’s that you’re not doing it at all.

Feminism is a real thing. It means something. It is a particular analysis. It is not whatever any individual says it is or wants it to be. It is not “inclusive.” It is not everything nor should it be — if feminism is everything then it is nothing. It is not about framing misogyny as empowerment because it makes us feel better. It is a movement. It is political. It is what we call the woman-led fight to end patriarchy and male violence against women.

I was talking about that yesterday, in disagreeing with Aaron Kappel’s piece. Feminism isn’t so “inclusive” that it’s about men, not even “nonbinary” or “genderqueer” men. It’s about women, just as anti-racism movements are not (and should not be) about white people.

Murphy found herself shut out of journalism when she started, because she’s not the right kind of feminist.

The sites that were dominating the conversation around feminism and the women who worked for these sites were not, in fact, “helping other women” — they were helping their friends, friends who held the same political ideology, who thought prostitution was fun and cool, who didn’t dare question the party line, who could afford to hang about in New York City on their parent’s dime, shmoozing with those who held the reigns to the tightly-knit New York media cabal. They were heavily invested in attacks on the second wave and in promoting a marketable version of “feminism” that supported capitalism, boobs, and boners.

If that’s the feminism of the future, y’all are screwed.

At first I thought it was all in my head, but it wasn’t. I’d been blackballed. My words had broken the unspoken rule all young female journalists and writers were to follow: keep it light, keep it sexy, don’t dare to move beyond the Twitter mantras that passed for “feminism” these days. If you want to write about “whorephobia” and “slut-shaming,”great. Even better if you can write about how radical Slutwalk is and point to all the “agency” of your white, rich “sex worker” friends. But to say anything else was to bite the hands that feed you. Liberal feminists and sex industry advocates had become one in the same and the media reflected that.

It makes sense, I suppose. Sex industry advocacy is obviously more likely to be profitable than its opposite is. Journalism doesn’t pay for itself you know.

There are millions more who are far less privileged than I and so it amuses me (in a rather ragey way) to see young, middle class, American women blathering on about “privilege” and “marginalized voices” on Twitter within the safety and comfort of their family money, Ivy League educations, fancy internships, and gifted property. It’s no mere coincidence that these women and men are the same ones who write articles for Playboy and Jezebel about how empowering “sex work” is and call anyone who disagrees a variety of names that all amount to anti-feminist cliches about “prudes” and “man-haters.” (We hear you — you love dick. That’s not a politic. That’s something insecure 19-year-olds say because they want to be cool.)

So we have an in-crowd that consists mostly of privileged, American, liberal women, based in New York, who have turned cronyism into “feminism,” rejected women who question the patriarchal and capitalist status quo, and have turned words like “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “privilege” into media careers.

If that’s true, it explains a lot.

It’s no accident that the actual feminist movement (not the Playboy Feminism, as I coined it recently in New Statesman, increasingly shoved down our throats) is under attack, erased and misrepresented by the liberal and even leftist media. It’s no accident that our work — women’s work, the work of the movement — is carefully removed from discourse by women already on the inside or women who are desperately trying to get in. It’s no coincidence that women who speak out against male violence are no-platformed, attacked, vilified, slandered, and have their employment threatened.

The new erasure is the same as the old, but this time they’re calling it “feminism.” A kind of “feminism” that is not only detached from the global feminist movement, but that actively works against it. That supports “diversity” but not a diversity of ideas. A kind of feminism that attacks radical women, only to turn around and sell books that regurgitate the arguments we were making all along (but minus the credit). A genius Con if there ever was one.

I really don’t like the kind of feminism that attacks radical women. Radical women are what’s needed.

The British Humanist Association announces its new president:

Writer, broadcaster, and comedian Shappi Khorsandi will succeed physicist Jim Al-Khalili as the President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), it has been announced. The twelfth President in the BHA’s history, and the fourth woman to take the role, Shappi will begin her three-year term as President in January 2016.

Born to non-religious parents in Iran, Shappi and her family fled to Britain in her youth after her father, the poet Hadi Khorsandi, was targeted for assassination by Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime after writing a satirical piece about the Islamic Revolution. Growing up in England, Shappi’s childhood was marked by recurrent fears of her father being assassinated, and the family spent time under police protection. Sharing her father’s talent for humour, she began a successful career in stand-up comedy after graduating from Winchester with a degree in drama, and has made numerous appearances on TV and radio comedy shows, including Live at the Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Have I Got News for You and QI.

A humanist all her adult life, Shappi was most recently one of several contributors to Michael Rosen and Annemarie Young’s new children’s book What is Humanism?, a project that is in keeping with her personal priority of having humanism better understood by young people in particular.

Announcing Shappi’s appointment, BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson said, ‘It’s a great pleasure to welcome Shappi to the Presidency of the British Humanist Association. Our President must be able not just to communicate humanism clearly but to connect on an emotional level with those many people in Britain who have humanist beliefs but don’t know the word exists to describe them. As such a warm and accomplished broadcaster, not to mention an intimate commentator on the human experience in her standup and elsewhere, Shappi certainly has that ability in spades.’

Brilliant. I hadn’t heard of her before, and she sounds terrific. I think humor is a massively important part of humanism.

H/t Maureen

From Feminist Quotes:

Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper, Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

There’s this guy Taki Theodoracopulos who passes for a journalist of some sort, or at least a commentator. He’s very rightwing and very rude, but he also seems to consider himself an adult. He once had a column at the Spectator.

He has a website he calls Taki’s Magazine, and there he has a pile of childish abuse.

TIME magazine has selected German Chancellor and part-time nude model Angela Merkel as its “Person of the Year,” because to call her “Man of the Year” would be sexist, even though she looks like a man.

…

The magazine’s glowing profile of the dumpy, toadstool-like alleged woman with the Moe Howard haircut…

So because she’s opened her legs spread-eagle to at least a million Middle Eastern “migrants” by the end of this year, TIME has designated her a hero rather than a traitor.

And in Chicago, tiny-fingered part-time Jewish ballerina Mayor Rahm Emanuel…

It should be obvious why British feminist Julie Bindel is a lesbian—because she looks like a sullen warthog and no self-respecting heterosexual man would touch her with a ten-foot dildo.

Any time you feel a bit fed-up or futile, just pause to remember that you’re not Taki Theodoracopulos.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown went to an LGBT summit the other day and wrote it up for Reason.

During a lunch break at The Atlantic LGBT summit Thursday, attendees were invited to watch an informal panel discussion on transgender civil rights. Panelists included several transgender activists, as well as several non-trans panelists included for their expertise on legal issues (such as Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Chai Feldblum) or proximity to the conversation (such as an Atlantic staff writer who covers social justice). This, it turns out, was problematic.

Erasing marginalized people from discourse about their own communities has long been a problem, of course. But the fact remains that, at the moment, there are no trans EEOC commissioners. There is no trans executive of the American Civil Liberties Union D.C., or on the White House outreach team. Considering that this was not a panel on the trans experience per se but a dialogue on legal barriers to equality, the inclusion of cisgender people who work directly on these issues hardly seems a mystery or a microaggression.

Commissioner Feldblum and moderator Steve Clemons pushed back slightly, defending the inclusion of non-trans panelists on these grounds. No good. Before long, those who thought having cis people on the panel was OK were branded complicit in the fact that trans people are often the targets of physical violence. Once again, nods and murmurs of approval from the audience.

Were they told they have blood on their hands?

here’s some other conventional wisdom gleaned from the summit:

• Being “safe” means not just freedom from actual or threatened physical violence but also avoiding offensive or hurtful language.
• Gender identity is established in early childhood (“between three and six years old,” according to Hattaway Communications research associate Nicholle Manners); for parents, helping children transition to their preferred gender identity at a young age is the only humane position.
• Laws that are redundant or practically unenforceable are still worthwhile for their “symbolic” power. (Says Scott Shackford: “I remember when people defended anti-sodomy laws as symbolic.”)
• Anything short of unconditional affirmation of minority-activist goals is a form of “erasure.” The correct response when talking about politics and policy is to assess who has the most potent victim-profile and then defer to them. By assessing people on things like race, gender expression, and sexuality rather than the content of their ideas, we are showing them proper respect.

The urge to police people’s language at the summit was also strong—comically so, at times. During one Q&A session, an aggrieved audience member suggested panelists watch their use of the word “states” when referring to American land, as it was exclusionary to those who live in U.S. territories.

And it was impossible not to notice a contradictory impulse in so many of those gathered. At the same time as people praised the non-binary “gender spectrum,” they reinforced old tropes about masculinity and femininity, and the centrality of biology to both. One speaker said he knew his daughter was trans from a young age because Nicole—assigned male at birth, like her twin brother—liked to dress in pink and avoided boy toys. Another speaker described a man as being “in touch with his feminine side” because “he cries a lot.” (Nothing regressive and gender-stereotypical to see here!)

That’s one I still haven’t seen any sensible explanation or reconciliation of. I don’t think I’ve even seen any acknowledgement that it is contradictory. I still want to know – why is non-binary seen as on a continuum with trans when in fact it’s the opposite?

For years, feminists have fought against the idea that there’s something inherent in girlhood or womanhood that explains most of the gendered preferences and traits foisted on us. Now this viewpoint gets a pass, as long as it’s espoused by the LGBTIQ community rather than the usual old patriarchy.

Not from me it doesn’t.

I’ve just learned that all the museums have made paintings and books of paintings available to all of us to download for $0.00. The Rijksmuseum for instance.

So have that street in Delft.

Robert Jensen on sex, gender and patriarchy, from June 2014.

Today’s existing sex-role differentiation is the product of a patriarchal society based on male dominance. In that system, males are socialized into patriarchal masculinity to become men, and females are socialized into patriarchal femininity to become women.

In patriarchy, sex-role differentiation supports male power and helps make the system’s domination/subordination dynamic seem natural and normal. Moral, intellectual, and emotional traits are assigned differentially to each sex, creating what we today typically call gender roles. This patriarchal system of control—which is complex, adapting to changing conditions and to resistance—is designed to justify and perpetuate male dominance.

I’m not sure “designed” is the right word there, since it’s not really designed at all in the ordinary understanding of the word. “Functions to” maybe?

The gender roles in patriarchy are rigid, repressive, and reactionary. These roles constrain the healthy flourishing of both males and females, but females experience by far the most significant psychological and physical injuries from the system.

In patriarchy, gender is a category that functions to establish and reinforce inequality.

Ah look, he said “functions to” himself. Better.

Anyway – yes, and that’s why the claims that gender is a precious essence or an inner feeling or an identity are so dubious.

In contemporary culture, “radical” is often used dismissively as a synonym for “crazy” or “extreme.” In this context, it describes an analysis that seeks to understand, address, and eventually eliminate the root causes of inequality.

Radical feminism opposes patriarchy and male dominance. Radical feminism, which challenges the naturalizing of the process by which patriarchal societies turn male/female into man/woman, rejects patriarchy’s rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender roles.

And now that whole project is being relentlessly and steadily demonized by people who want to embrace gender roles instead of rejecting them.

It’s sad.

The latest Jesus and Mo:

How do people of the book think they know the book is actually “God’s word”? How do they manage to be so confident about it? That’s one of the things I can never figure out about that kind of religious belief. It’s so trivially easy to pretend something is “God’s word”…so why do people so readily believe it of just one book out of the millions of books there are? Why do they think the goddy authorship is established and doubt-proof?

I don’t know. That’s one of the infinite number of things I don’t know.

The latest collection of Jesus and Mo strips, with a foreword by ME.

The Patreon.

The Alberta government has had the audacity to pass farm safety legislation. We can’t have that.

Alberta’s premier and some NDP MLAs have been targeted with violent threats over their controversial new farm safety legislation.

Rachel Notley’s government saw Bill 6 pass in the legislature on Thursday; it will become law on Jan. 1, 2016.

Someone on Twitter took screenshots of the threats.

Someone’s gotta man up and kill her…

…put a pitchfork through notley’s neck?

We honestly need to start killing off politicians.

Maybe we need to go back to the old west and just shoot her already.

Because farming should be dangerous, right?

It’s not just Oklahoma cops, it’s not just US cops. Via teslalivia in a comment: Tammy Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Police officers with histories of sexually exploiting vulnerable victims of crime were given responsibility for family violence and sexual offences investigations, a damning anti-corruption report has found.

The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry into predatory behaviour by Victoria Police found officers preyed on vulnerable victims of crime, particularly victims of family violence, and misused the power and trust placed in them.

The small minority of officers, the report stated, misused their authority to “devastating effect” by commencing or attempting to commence an intimate personal or sexual relationship with victims of crime.

Priests and cops. They get their victims handed to them on a platter.

The report, released on Wednesday, found family violence victims were the most common victims of predatory police officers in its examination of 142 allegations of predatory behaviour by Victoria Police over the past decade.

It examined complaints ranging from sexually inappropriate comments or relationships, through to stalking and assault.

…

Another case IBAC examined concerned a male officer who allegedly sexually assaulted a female victim of family violence whom he had met on-duty.

A number of female police officers came forward during the internal investigation to state they too had been subjected to sexual harassment and assault by the officer.

Some had reported the conduct to their superiors, but no action was taken.

The investigation identified the officer also frequently misused the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database to access personal details of women he met on-duty to pursue for sexual relationships.

Some were vulnerable women with mental health issues or family violence victims.

The more vulnerable the better, right?