Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

Would they deplore any awards made in their memory?

Apr 28th, 2015 4:52 pm | By

Alex Massie takes on the Six Soft-heads with the kind of gritted disdain they deserve.

I wonder if these people also think the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses also had it coming? I wonder if they think there would be something unseemly about awarding Salman Rushdie – and all those involved in publishing his novel – awards for their courageous defence of liberty? People died and many others risked assassination to bring The Satanic Verses into print. Perhaps, however, there is a feeling that this was a noble enterprise because it was somehow a more literary enterprise? (Except, of course, plenty of people failed the Rushdie test too.)

And I wonder if these novelists would be appalled if they

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DNA can enter by accident

Apr 28th, 2015 4:25 pm | By

The Malay Mail Online went to a talk by Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia. HTM explained about rape.

Women are required to prove rape under Islamic criminal law, Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia (HTM) said today as the hardline Islamist group claimed that most sexual assault cases involve false accusations.

HTM also told a seminar on hudud that Islam does not accept DNA evidence and that one of the ways of proving rape instead is by obtaining either two male witnesses, or one male and two female witnesses.

Because as we all know it takes two women to be as much value as one man.

“The danger is that if the woman wants to betray other people, she commits adultery with a man,

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De qui se moquait le journal satirique Charlie Hebdo?

Apr 28th, 2015 3:59 pm | By

Le Monde, February 24 – No, Charlie Hebdo is not obsessed with Islam.

What does it make fun of?

De qui se moquait le journal satirique Charlie Hebdo, avant que deux terroristes islamistes assassinent cinq caricaturistes et six autres personnes présentes à la conférence de rédaction du 7 janvier ? Est-il vrai que ce journal faisait preuve d’une « obsession » à l’encontre des musulmans, comme cela a pu être dit à la suite des attentats, notamment dans une tribune du Monde du 15 janvier 2015, à laquelle ont contribué plusieurs chercheurs ?

What did the satirical mag Charlie Hebdo make fun of before two Islamist terrorists assassinated five cartoonists and six other people at an editorial conference January 7th?

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Get a room

Apr 28th, 2015 3:26 pm | By

Oh isn’t that sweet – Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are in love. Truly madly deeply.

Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif on Sunday said the love and affection for the Saudi leadership and people could not be explained in words.

Pakistan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) are tied in unbreakable bonds of religion and brotherhood and both the countries are standing shoulder to shoulder with each other.

Speaking at a function held in honour of Imam-e-Kaaba Shaikh Khalid al Ghamidi at Chief Minister’s House, he remarked that even if the world goes topsy-turvy, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could not be separated from one another.

They will wrap their legs around each other and hold on for dear life … Read the rest

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Or the poster for your movie is, like, a kitchen

Apr 28th, 2015 12:16 pm | By

Amy Schumer’s hit video Last Fuckable Day.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPpsI8mWKmgRead the rest

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She couldn’t imagine being in the audience when they have a standing ovation for Charlie Hebdo

Apr 28th, 2015 11:54 am | By

The Guardian on Rushdie on the Soft-headed Six.

[Francine] Prose told the Associated Press that while she was in favour of “freedom of speech without limitations” and “deplored” the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the award signified “admiration and respect” for its work and “I couldn’t imagine being in the audience when they have a standing ovation for Charlie Hebdo”.

She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Andrew Solomon, president of PEN, told the Guardian that aside from brief exchanges with Carey and writer Deborah Eisenberg, no one had indicated they would not attend the gala over the award before the six letters.

Solomon said that PEN distinguished between the right of free speech and much of what Charlie Hebdo

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No running for girls

Apr 28th, 2015 11:28 am | By

A heart-rending item in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago, about girls at an Islamic school being banned from running.

Girls at Al-Taqwa College have been banned from running at sporting events because the principal believes it may cause them to lose their virginity, former teachers claim.

The schools regulator, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority, is investigating the allegations, which have been referred to the state and federal education ministers.

In a letter sent to the education ministers this week, a former teacher said female students were being discriminated against at the Truganina school.

“The principal holds beliefs that if females run excessively, they may ‘lose their virginity’,” the letter said.

“The principal believes that there

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Spin in the Dawkins Circle

Apr 28th, 2015 10:56 am | By

What was that about Dawkins’s never having “proclaimed himself as any kind of atheist ‘leader'”?

What about this then – what about Join the Dawkins Circle?

Reason Circle: $1,000 to $2,499 annually (or $85/month)

  • Invitation to Dawkins Circle member-only event with RDFRS personalities
  • Member-only discount for all purchases in the richarddawkins.net store

Science Circle: $2,500 to $4,999 annually (or $210/month)

All the benefits listed above, plus:

  • One ticket to an invitation-only Dawkins Circle event with Richard

Darwin Circle: $5,000 to $9,999 annually (or $420/month)

All the benefits listed above, plus:

  • Two tickets to an invitation-only Dawkins Circle event with Richard

For as little as one thousand dollars a year, you can attend a Dawkins Circle member-only event … Read the rest

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Francine Prose again compares Charlie Hebdo to neo-Nazis

Apr 28th, 2015 10:21 am | By

Francine Prose expanded on her thoughts in the CBC interview, in a piece for Comment is Free. Her expanded thoughts make my skin crawl.

When I learned that PEN had decided to award the Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, I was dismayed. I had agreed to serve as a literary table host and I wondered what I would do when the crowd around me rose to its feet to applaud an award being given – in my name – to what I felt was an inappropriate recipient.

She still doesn’t understand what Charlie is. She thinks it’s a right-wing racist rag.

Let me emphasize how strongly I believe in the ideals of PEN; for two

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Never say never

Apr 28th, 2015 9:13 am | By

Speaking of thought leaders…I was looking for something and happened on this article by Jerry Coyne in The New Republic last October. It’s a riposte to an article by John Gray, also in TNR, trashing Richard Dawkins. I can easily believe Gray’s is a crap article, because John Gray seems to specialize in crap articles. But I read the first paragraph of Coyne’s article, and found a claim that I think is absurd.

It’s not a good time to be Richard Dawkins, for he alone, like the scapegoat of Leviticus, must bear the brunt of everyone’s hatred of atheism. (Sam Harris sometimes serves as a backup goat.) Even though Dawkins has never proclaimed himself as any kind of

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The Cosmic Institute of Disruption

Apr 28th, 2015 8:46 am | By

Geoff Nunberg told us yesterday on Fresh Air about the fad for the word “disruption,” which I didn’t know was a fad. It reminds me of the fad-word in literary “theory” some years ago, “transgressive.” Same basic idea, innit – we’re new, we’re happenin’, we’re Rebels.

HBO’s Silicon Valley is back, with its pitch-perfect renderings of the culture and language of the tech world — like at the opening of the “Disrupt” startup competition run by the Tech Crunch website at the end of last season. “We’re making the world a better place through scalable fault-tolerant distributed databases” — the show’s writers didn’t have to exercise their imagination much to come up with those little arias of geeky self-puffery, or

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Sabeen was always a woman made of different stuff

Apr 27th, 2015 6:30 pm | By

Kamila Shamsie writes about her lifelong friend Sabeen Mahmud.

“Be careful,” I said to my childhood friend Sabeen Mahmud when I saw her in London in 2013, soon after she’d received a death threat – neither the first nor last. “Someone has to fight them,” she replied.

Sabeen was always a woman made of different stuff, thanks in large measure to the two great influences of her life: her mother, Mahnaz (shot twice during the attack), from whom she inherited her socialist tendencies, and her friend and mentor Zaheer Kidvai (Zak) who introduced her to the idea of counterculture, via everything from Abbie Hoffman to revolutionary Urdu poets. While most of us at our elite school in Karachi

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Guest post: We have a long way to go to raze the house that slavery built

Apr 27th, 2015 6:18 pm | By

Originally a comment by freedmenspatrol on Very much a part of many white Southerners’ identity.

For quite some time, white Southerners actually refused to observe the national Memorial Day. In various places they also didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July. Not so many wave the flag or the other totems as have done in past generations, but plenty of white Americans still do. It’s worked deep into how the culture operates, inside and outside the South. The Second Klan controlled Indiana and Oregon for a while. White Northerners could be absolutely vicious even when they had slavery around for contrast, passing laws excluding black Americans from even living in entire states and demanding those present leave.

It’s what we … Read the rest

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“The narrative of white Europeans being killed by Muslim extremists”

Apr 27th, 2015 4:40 pm | By

The CBC talked to Francine Prose about her hostility to Charlie Hebdo today.

Prose tells As It Happens host Carol Off that despite her objections, she supports the magazine’s right to free speech.

“Free speech is indivisible. If you believe in free speech you believe in any sort of free speech — that you can say anything you want. And that’s absolutely what I believe in and I would include in that everything Charlie Hebdo has done.”

But she says that doesn’t mean Charlie Hebdo deserves the award.

No, it doesn’t; she’s right about that much. They are two separate things.

“We defend the right of neo-nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois but that doesn’t mean we give them an

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Very much a part of many white Southerners’ identity

Apr 27th, 2015 4:03 pm | By

There’s such a thing as Confederate Memorial Day. I did not know that. It’s today in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Woohoo. Is there also a Hooray for Slavery Day? A Glorify Racism Day? A Steal Other People’s Labor Day?

Alabama closes its government offices today in observance of Confederate Memorial Day, along with Mississippi and Georgia. On May 10, South Carolina government offices will close in observance of the state holiday.

Of the 11 Southern states that made up the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, few agreed on what date was best for remembrance once the war officially ended in 1865.

I suggest the 32d of December, myself.

State officials still mark Confederate Memorial Day on their

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Satire is, by definition, disrespectful

Apr 27th, 2015 2:23 pm | By

Suzanne Nossel’s reply to Deborah Eisenberg, also in Glenn Greenwald’s collection, is very elucidating.

We believe that honoring Charlie Hebdo affords us an opportunity to inflect global opinion on an issue of longstanding concern to PEN and to free expression advocates worldwide, including many in the Muslim world: namely, efforts to devalue, ban, or punish acts deemed to constitute the defamation of religion. Such assaults come both from governments and from vigilantes, and they are not acceptable in either context.

That pulls a little against some of the other things she says, which are on the “speech all speech no matter what the content” side. This is saying that it’s not just a matter of all speech no matter … Read the rest

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Guest post: The Mancunian Way

Apr 27th, 2015 12:52 pm | By

Guest post by Al Lee.

The long and fascinating history of Manchester is punctuated by moments of important scientific, technological and industrial advance, as well as radical socialist thought and revolutionary action. Engels wrote about the “grim future of capitalism and the industrial age” when viewing the dark slums and working class conditions in the city. But without those bleak and hard days of the textile-driven, inchoate Industrial Revolution, we would not have the vibrant and independent city that we know today. The grim, mill-strewn, industrial landscapes of the city’s environs were depicted by L. S. Lowry and later mirrored in the sparse, hard-edged music of Manchester band Joy Division, and the Northern sardonic wit and desolate ordinariness of the … Read the rest

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Say no to the assassin’s veto

Apr 27th, 2015 12:09 pm | By

From PEN: Rejecting the Assassin’s Veto.

The “assassin’s veto” over speech has become a global phenomenon in recent years and, even more vividly, in recent months, when we’ve seen killings not just in Paris but also in Copenhagen and Bangladesh. Reflecting the intensification of violent intolerance for speech considered offensive by some, former PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie has commented that while he would write The Satanic Verses again today, he does not believe that he would survive the reprisals in this era.

Charlie Hebdo has positioned itself in the firing line of this battle, refusing to accept the curtailment of lawful speech by those who meet it with violence. It is undoubtedly true that in addition to

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Joyce Carol Oates joins the pissing contest

Apr 27th, 2015 11:57 am | By

Joyce Carol Oates is another useful idiot. That doesn’t perturb me as much as for instance Prose, because I have never liked Oates’s writing, to put it mildly.

The useful idiocy:

Deborah Solomon ‏@deborahsolo 16 hours ago
Thank you, @PENAmerican, for honoring #CharlieHebdo & not bowing to the pressures of literary correctness. http://nyti.ms/1GmLLYe

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates 4 hours ago
@deborahsolo @PENamerican It is a very delicate issue to honor “freedom of expression” without seeming to endorse seeming “hate speech.”

I wonder what the scare quotes are for. If Oates doesn’t think it is hate speech, then what is she talking about?

Joyce Carol Oates‏@JoyceCarolOates
@deborahsolo @PENamerican Have you actually seen these “satirical” images? If they were of

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Deborah Eisenberg gets Charlie Hebdo all wrong

Apr 27th, 2015 10:41 am | By

Glenn Greenwald is collecting

the key documents giving rise to the controversy that has erupted inside PEN America over the award the group is bestowing on Charlie Hebdo.

He starts with an email from Deborah Eisenberg to PEN’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel on March 26.

What a wonderful thing to give an award to some person or institution that courageously exemplifies freedom of expression – and how entirely in keeping with the objectives of PEN. But as a member, up until now anyhow, of PEN, I would like to express myself freely on PEN’s decision to confer the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

It is clear and inarguable that the

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