I didn’t realize Helen Ukpabio was in London, but she is, or at least was last week, according to the Independent.

“Lady Apostle” Helen Ukpabio, founder of the controversial Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, is believed to still be in the capital after addressing three gatherings last week.

The born-again Christian Pentecostal preacher claims to have been betrothed to Satan as a teenager before being rescued from a cult at the age of 17. She now specialises in liberating captives in “deliverance sessions” that critics claim are little more than crude exorcisms.

Among her advice to parents is the suggestion: “If a child under the age of two screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he

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… Read the rest

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The Guardian on Richard Hoggart:

As news of academic Richard Hoggart’s death emerged last week, there was a sense in obituaries and appreciations that the 95-year-old was a figure from the past, the relevance of whose work, most famously his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy, had waned over time.

My intellectual development continues to be defined by his writing, and all I can say to anyone who has yet to read his work is: do it now. We still need voices like his to articulate what is wrong, right now, with an official and media language that wilfully ignores the malign effects of class and poverty.

What, you mean we’re not all raking in the profits from real … Read the rest

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BenBaz Aziz did an interview for Atheist Alliance International with a transsexual woman in Saudi Arabia…which is not one of the best places to be a trans woman. BenBaz is hoping people will share it.

9- Tell us about the discrimination by the family.

Growing up in misogynistic society, surely my family will see females are inferior to males. The idea that I will “become” as they think a female, is not acceptable. They have no idea about the difference between gender and sex . So, they think I will “shift” to female,which is the inferior sex.  From this vision, you can imagine how they are misguided about the truth.

They consider me a “disgrace”, “shame”  and wanting to challenge

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I heard a discussion of a new movie, Calvary, on BBC Radio 4′s Saturday Review yesterday; it sounds pretty damn interesting.

The Irish Times has a review.

The predictably flawless Brendan Gleeson plays Father James Lavelle, a decent priest serving the needs of an absurdly colourful Sligo community, whose world is upended by an unexpected encounter in the confessional.

A troubled parishioner – unseen by us, but apparently known to our hero – explains that, having been abused by clerics as a child, he intends to exact revenge by killing James in one week’s time.

There is a terrible logic to his scheme. The annihilation of a guilty priest will provoke only so much rending of garments.

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Is this a parody? It certainly looks like one, but…it’s not clear that that’s what the Guardian intends.

Beware of cupcake fascism, it tells us. Oh come on, that has to be a parody.

The constellation of cultural tropes that most paradigmatically manifest in the form of the cupcake are associated in particular with infantilisation. Of course, looking back to a perfect past that never existed is nothing if not the pained howl of a child who never wanted to be forced to grow up, and the cupcake and its associates market themselves by catering to these never-​never-​land adults’ tastes. These products, which treat their audience as children, and more specifically the children of the middle classes – perfect

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Nick Cohen has a good piece on the grinding of the poor in the UK.

…for me, the best way of summing up the division between rich and poor, and high and low, is a contract stating that “hours of work will be advised by the visitor manager and will be dependent upon the requirements for retail assistants“. The staff had no security, the contract made clear. Their employers guaranteed them no minimum income. The bosses might leave them at home from one week to the next, while still insisting that the casual workers remained available to work for them and them alone.

Who’s that – some hotel chain? Asda? The local prison?

No, it’s Brenda, aka … Read the rest

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Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe is also annoyed about CAIR’S bullying of Honor Diaries.

‘HONOR DIARIES” might not be coming to a theater near you, at least not if CAIR gets its way. The award-winning documentary about “honor” violence against girls and women in much of the Muslim world was released last month in honor of International Women’s Day, and it didn’t take long for the Council on American Islamic Relations to slap its all-purpose “Islamophobic” label on it. The film has been shown in dozens of venues, but CAIR has raised enough of a stink to get screenings cancelled on several college campuses, including the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois.

He then talks about … Read the rest

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Ugh.

Remember that horrible piece by David Foster at Comment is Free saying it should be totally fine to ask a total stranger for sex? Well guess who shared it on Twitter.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins

“Adults of both genders [should be] comfortable both making and receiving straightforward sexual propositions.” http://bit.ly/1ndgmje 

Well if nothing else, that at least helps to explain Dear Muslima. Not that we didn’t know that was the reason for Dear Muslima, but that helpfully puts it on the record for people who were in denial. Richard was pissed off at Rebecca because he doesn’t want guys being told “don’t do that” – don’t corner women at 4 a.m. to ask them for sex. He doesn’t want … Read the rest

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Election officials in Miami-Dade County have thought of a fabulous new way to disenfanchise people: lock up the restrooms (toilets, WCs, washrooms) at polling places so that voters faced with long lines will give up and leave.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.

“I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county

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More from the shut-uppers at CAIR.

Writers and producers of “Honor Diaries” are standing by the film they made about abuses women face around the world, despite criticism it received from the U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), reported the Washington Examiner on Thursday.

CAIR called the film, which showcases nine Muslim women who speak about their experiences with honor practices such as forced marriage at young ages, denial of education and female genital mutilation, “islamophobic.”

It’s also forced marriageophobic, child marriageophobic, denial of educationophobic, and FGMophobic. So the fuck what? Shut up, CAIR. You’re not the boss of everything.

The controversy began after CAIR convinced officials at University of Michigan to cancel a screening of the

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Sometimes I can’t believe what I’m reading.

A Senate subcommittee in South Carolina is seeking to expand the state’s “Stand Your Ground” defense law to include protections for all children, including unborn ones, beginning from the moment of conception.

In other words a Senate subcommittee in South Carolina is seeking to legalize the murder of abortion providers.

Democratic State Senator Brad Hutto shared with The State his concern that any new law would be redundant, as it is already legal for a pregnant woman to respond with deadly force. He asked supporters of the measures — three are currently pending — to provide him with an example in which an unborn child’s life would be threatened when the mother’s isn’t.

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Via Political Loudmouth on Facebook.

… Read the rest

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In India, where politicians are out trying to make themselves popular, one guy said a surprising thing.

In a bizarre and grotesque statement, the state Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Abu Azmi said women who were raped should also be punished. The statement came after this reporter questioned Azmi about SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s comments on rape.

Yadav had, at a rally in UP, said that the death sentence, as punishment, for rape was too harsh. “Ladkon se aisi galtiyan ho jati hain, to iska matlab yeh to nahi ki unhe phaansi de di jaaye (Boys make mistakes, but this doesn’t mean you hang them),” he told the gathering. 

When this reporter asked for Azmi’s comments on his

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A local CAIR boffin wrote a gloating letter to the New York Times rejoicing at CAIR’S success at getting Brandeis to shit all over Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations welcomes Brandeis University’s cancellation of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist with a long record of vicious anti-Islam statements, some of which are quoted in your article.

It’s not “vicious” to criticize a religion, even harshly. Religions, like corporations, are not people, and do not have feelings to be viciously wounded.

We should all take note, however, that opposition to the honorary degree for Ms. Hirsi Ali did not come only from the Muslim community, but also from Jewish students and faculty members at Brandeis,

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I published an article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali at ur-Butterflies and Wheels way back in 2005, when she was still an MP in the Netherlands. It was a talk she gave at a UN conference in Geneva, one of three. I published all three. Here’s the background information I provided at the time:

A one-day conference was held at the United Nations in Geneva on April 18 2005, titled ‘Victims of Jihad: Human Rights Abuse in the Name of Islam’. The conference occurred during the last week of the 61st session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. On April 12, the Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution condemning the ‘defamation’ of religion. The resolution, titled ‘Combating Defamation

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