From Planned Parenthood Action on Facebook:
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
From Planned Parenthood Action on Facebook:
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Something I’ve noticed in passing before but noticed more slowly this time: referring to people as “hijabis”. It was in a Twitter exchange between Adele Wilde-Blavatsky and someone I don’t know.
Criticism of hijab is irrelevant: event was opposing harassment of hijabis not arguing that hijab is flawless
Adele Wilde-Blavatsk @lionfacedakini
but in promoting the event many equated the hijab with the hoodie and symbolically it appeared that way too
Nick Nipclose @NickNipclose
I’m not comparing murders, it could be sad that harassing a hijabi is worse than bothering a hoody clad kid1/2
It struck me more forcibly than it had before what a horrible way to refer to a person or set of people that is. … Read the rest
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Joint statement on legal note to Universities UK against their guidance condoning gender segregation
We are pleased to learn of the legal note submitted to Universities UK (UUK) yesterday in the name of Radha Bhatt, a student of Cambridge University, against their Guidance condoning gender segregation. Legal note can be found here [pdf].
We share Radha’s apprehensions that gender segregation reinforces
negative views specifically about women, undermines their right to
participate in public life on equal terms with men and
disproportionately impedes women from ethnic and religious minorities,
whose rights to education and gender equality are already imperilled.
Radha’s legal submission makes it unmistakably clear that despite
UUK’s protestations, the law could scarcely be more unequivocal on
gender segregation. The … Read the rest
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Aitzaz Hasan, 15, was with friends outside school when they spotted a man wearing a suicide vest.
Despite the pleas of his fellow students, he decided to confront and capture the bomber who then detonated his vest, his cousin told the BBC.
So that’s the end for Aitzaz Hasan, at age 15.
The incident took place on Monday in Ibrahimzai, a Shia-dominated region of Hangu, in north-western Pakistan. There were almost 2,000 students in attendance at the time of the attack, media reports say.
“My cousin sacrificed his life saving his school and hundreds of students and school fellows,” his cousin Mudassar Hassan Bangish told the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool.
I’m having trouble seeing the screen clearly enough to … Read the rest
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A jaw-dropper from York University in Toronto.
After refusing to honour a male student’s request to be separated from his female classmates for religious reasons, a York University professor has found himself at odds with administrators who assert he broke their “obligation to accommodate.”
Say WHAT???
There’s an obligation to accommodate a male student’s request to be “separated” from female students? Are you fucking kidding me?
Do these administrators not realize where this goes? It goes back to what we’ve been struggling to escape from for centuries. Men getting “separation” from women means women are imprisoned in seclusion, purdah, the harem, the kitchen. It is not something that should be “accommodated” in a university or anywhere else public. (Except a … Read the rest
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Via Leo Igwe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reAVJ9m3P2k… Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Pew did a survey on -
well this is how they titled the summary:
How people in Muslim countries prefer women to dress in public
Which is annoying, because there aren’t “Muslim countries.” Even the ones that have constitutions saying Islam is the official religion aren’t “Muslim countries”…
…but never mind, one knows what they mean.
Then again it’s annoying for another reason, which is that it sounds so bossy.
Never mind, never mind – what about the survey?
It’s depressing. Almost everyone in every country surveyed thinks women should have their heads bandages up to one degree or another. Lebanon did manage a whopping 49% who think no bandage at all is best, but even that is under half. … Read the rest
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Liberty is not happy about the Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill.
… Read the restThe Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill proposes to replace existing orders (such as ASBOs) with a new generation of injunctions which are easier to obtain, harder to comply with and have harsher penalties.
The Bill would also introduce unfair double punishment for the vulnerable, as social tenants and their families will face mandatory eviction for breaching a term of an injunction.
Other measures in the Bill include some restrictions on Schedule 7 stop and search powers which, while welcome, unfortunately come nowhere near addressing the dangerous breadth and intrusiveness of these powers.
The Bill also weakens key safeguards in our already heavily-criticised extradition system by removing
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Originally a comment by Dan Bye on He looked it up in a dictionary.
Those who think the law as written is potentially a danger to free speech are quite correct, and it’s also worth noting that it mirrors the law in relation to snail mail, originally dating to 1935, where case law has established (my source is the commentary in Halsbury’s Laws of England) that “The test of obscenity is objective and the character of the addressee is immaterial.”
In the wake of the Gay News Trial in the UK, the then editor of The Freethinker, the late great Bill McIlroy, was fined for sending copies of the poem through the post. He was hoping to trigger another … Read the rest
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Another Angry Voice points out some of the (to put it politely) mistakes in Michael Gove’s Daily Mail article about how marvelous the First World War was. (It was so marvelous it was even “iconic” – they called it The Great War you know, until the next big one came along and they realized it was just going to have to be numbers.)
… Read the restI’ll go through some of Gove’s absurd ramblings and highlight some of the many things that he’s got wrong.
“The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an
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From the Borowitz Report at the New Yorker - dateline Minnepolis:
The so-called polar vortex caused hundreds of injuries across the Midwest today, as people who said “so much for global warming” and similar comments were punched in the face.
Stay safe, people.
The meteorology professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, issued a safety warning to residents of the states hammered by the historic low temperatures: “If you are living within the range of the polar vortex and you have something idiotic to say about climate change, do not leave your house.”
Say it to the mirror, or the dog.… Read the rest
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Libby Anne wonders if Vision Forum is collapsing altogether.
… Read the restThere has been no public announcement, but the Vision Forum Ministries site now includes only the resignation statements and the Vision Forum Inc. site is no longer selling anything, or even listing any products. This suggests to me that Vision Forum has collapsed entirely, and that the corporate wing is disappearing in addition to the ministry wing.
If this complete collapse is the case, as it appears, this is an extremely positive change. Vision Forum has been probably THE pillar of the Christian Patriarchy movement for the past decade, and is now gone. This is not to say that Christian Patriarchy is gone. It is not. There are still organizations like
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Conor Friedersdorf gets what the problem is with the kind of harassment women are subject to online, although he didn’t at first. He didn’t until he guest-blogged for Megan McArdle.
… Read the restMy stint running her page while she vacationed included the keys to the blog’s inbox. Even as someone who’d previously blogged about immigration in California’s Inland Empire, fielding insults and aggressive invective as vile as any I could imagine, I was shocked by a subset of her blog’s correspondence. To this day, I don’t know if I was experiencing a typical or atypical week. Perhaps in the abstract, there isn’t any threat more extreme than the death threats I’d received and brushed off as unserious. But I read emails and
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The Daily Mail did a long piece on Twitter harassment of women last August. I generally avoid the Mail, but this article is worth it.
Some of those involved in the recent tirade against Miss Criado-Perez , two female MPs, and other high-profile women, are exposed today following our investigation into this dark sub-culture.
They are indeed; names, pictures, cities, jobs, the works.
… Read the restOn Monday, less than 24 hours after Miss Criado-Perez was targeted by Johnny@beware0088, she received another message: ‘Back to the kitchen, you t***.’ In subsequent tweets from the same ‘troll’, she was called a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute.’
He also made a revolting remark about her anatomy. And there was more. ‘Go and tell all your followers
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Madeleine Teahan (that seems like a peculiarly Proustian or edible sort of name) muses in a post at the Catholic Herald (yes, that would be the well-known, even “iconic”, religion of the same name) about gender equality and toys for girls versus boys. She wants everyone to realize that men have problems too, because sadly that fact has entirely disappeared in all the noise about princess dolls.
… Read the restIs there anything really wrong with encouraging our sons to play with cars and our daughters to play with Barbie? There is a strange paradox with modern-day champions of diversity: it is that they are determined to propagate the idea that we are all exactly the same. Accepting common differences between the sexes
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We are pleased to learn of the legal note submitted to Universities UK (UUK) yesterday in the name of Radha Bhatt, a student of Cambridge University, against their Guidance condoning gender segregation.
We share Radha’s apprehensions that gender segregation reinforces negative views specifically about women, undermines their right to participate in public life on equal terms with men and disproportionately impedes women from ethnic and religious minorities, whose rights to education and gender equality are already imperilled.
Signs assigning different entrances for male and female students at Leicester University; (c) The Guardian
Radha’s legal submission makes … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
But then there’s the other way of reacting to threats and abuse on Twitter and elsewhere online – the way of dismissal and belittlement, the way of shrugging and laughing slightly and asking what’s the big deal.
Like someone calling herself (on Twitter) fleetstreetfox for instance. I’d never heard of her before but she used to be a columnist for the Mirror and she has over 60 thousand followers, so she’s not some tiny voice in the wilderness. What she says on the subject is horrible.
… Read the restfleetstreetfox @fleetstreetfox
I think if there were really vile tweets to me I’d report them only if it sounded like the person was going to attack someone else.
That they were getting so wound
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Two people – one woman and one man – have pled guilty to sending menacing messages to Caroline Criado-Perez.
… Read the restIsabella Sorley, 23, of Newcastle, and John Nimmo, 25, of South Shields, admitted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court sending the messages over a public communications network.
…
Alison Morgan, prosecuting, said Ms Criado-Perez had received abusive messages “of one type or another” from 86 Twitter accounts including those accounts attributed to both Nimmo and Sorley.
“Caroline Criado-Perez has suffered life-changing psychological effects from the abuse which she received on Twitter,” she told the court.
“In particular, the menacing nature of the tweets sent by both defendants caused her significant fear that they would find her and carry out their threats.”
The court
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Short walk but it’s 30° below zero Centigrade.
Yikes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqajj8DvqvU… Read the rest
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Via Taslima on Twitter, a news story on violence against Hindus after the elections in Bangladesh.
… Read the restHundreds of Hindu families who fled their homes following post-poll violence in different districts on Sunday are scared to return as the administration could not ensure their security.
As soon as the voting ended on Sunday afternoon, BNP and Jamaat-Shibir men looted, vandalised and burned Hindu houses in Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Bogra, Lalmonirhat, Rajshahi, Chittagong and Jessore.
The raids remind many of the atrocities by the Pakistani occupation forces and their collaborators in 1971.
“We left our house in 1971 as the Pakistan army and razakars set fire to our village. And we are passing through the same ordeal in 2014,” lamented
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)