NBC News reports:

The popular South by Southwest festival said it was cancelling two panel discussions about harassment and the online gaming community due to threats of violence.

The decision prompted some big digital media companies, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media to withdraw from the festival — known as SXSW — in protest.

The festival — known as SXSW — said it had hoped that hosting the two panels “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games” would lead to a “valuable exchange of ideas.”

However, it said SXSW had received “numerous threats of on-site violence” related to the programs in the week since the March 2016 SXSW Interactive event panels were announced.

Terrible awful horrifying news from Ensaf Haidar:

I was informed by an informed source, that the Saudi authorities have given the green light to the resumption of Raif Badawi’s flogging. The informed source also said that the flogging will resume soon but will be administered inside the prison.

It is worth mentioning that the same source had warned me of Raif’s pending flogging at the beginning of January 2015 and his warning was confirmed, as Raif was flogged on 9th January.

While I do not understand this decision especially as Raif’s case is still being reviewed by the supreme court according to a senior source in the Saudi Ministry of Justice and according to the statement of UK Foreign

There’s a sub-conversation about “double standards” in the comments on A matter of simple semantics. That’s a conversation that’s basically going on all the time, with just about anyone who has moral or political views on things. The putative double standard boils down to: You think Question X is settled, while you think Question Y is not. You think there is room for discussion on Y but not on X. You think anyone who denies or disputes X is reprehensible, while you don’t think that of people who deny or dispute Y.

Well, yes. I do think some Question Xs are settled, or should be treated as settled.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example. That’s a … Read the rest

Glosswitch has thoughts on Germaine Greer and the hatred of old women.

She starts with bodies, and how vieux jeu it has become to take them seriously.

Once upon a time, people thought that there were bodies that gestated new life and bodies that did not. That there was a way in which you could tell – not always accurately, but generally so – which did which. This led to people being given different names on account of which of the two categories their bodies appeared to fall into, categories not based on any complex chemical or neurological detail, but just on the question “does your body look like the kind of body that can get pregnant or doesn’t

Massive earthquake in Afghanistan.

More than 200 people have died, mostly in Pakistan, after a magnitude-7.5 earthquake hit north-eastern Afghanistan.

Tremors from the quake were also felt in northern India and Tajikistan.

At least 12 of the victims were Afghan schoolgirls killed in a crush as they tried to get out of their building.

Facebook has a Safety Check where you can look for your friends. I see from mine that Gulalai Ismail, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, Lauryn Oates, and Emmanuel Enoch are safe.

Buildings in the Tajik capital Dushanbe were damaged by the tremors.

Local media report that a staircase at a school in Tajikistan’s Yavan district collapsed, injuring 14 children.

There are also reports of injuries in

Jonathan Sacks is all wrong part 2.

He goes on from his wrong assertion that religion can provide meaning to say that religion (being so good at providing meaning) has returned.

The religion that has returned is not the gentle, quietist and ecumenical form that we in the West have increasingly come to expect. Instead it is religion at its most adversarial and aggressive. It is the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world. It is the face of what I call “altruistic evil” in our time: evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.

Well isn’t that just like him. It’s not remotely altruistic; that’s entirely the wrong word. Altruism is concern for others; … Read the rest

The student newspaper of New York University Shanghai did an interview with Catherine MacKinnon last March (scroll way down).

Have your views ever changed over the years? Have you ever had to uphold a viewpoint that you do not necessarily believe in for the purposes of achieving some form of legal reform?

CM: My views have certainly developed. They develop every day, with everybody I talk to, everything I hear and everything I see. I don’t know of something I thought in the past that I don’t agree with today…

Certain things that I have had an inkling about have grown over time, for example, concerning transgender people. I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or

A forthright response to the no-platforming and demonization of Germaine Greer:

I made the mistake of checking my FB. Which is all “ooh that evil Germaine Greer!”

There’s a whole fucking thread where men are telling each other how terrible at being feminists women are. Seriously what is this shit?

I’ve seen that thread! Or one just like it – the chances are there are many of them. It takes more than one Facebook thread for men to tell each other how terrible at being feminists women are – and to complain about how ugly and old and ugly feminist women like Greer are. The one I saw was at Pink News, and it’s foul.

I disagree with

An interesting talk at Oxford Skeptics in the Pub next month by Professor Gina Rippon.

There is a long history of debate about biological sex differences and their part in determining gender roles, with the ‘biology is destiny’ mantra being used to legitimise imbalances in these roles. The tradition is continuing, with new brain imaging techniques being hailed as sources of evidence of the ‘essential’ differences between men and women, and the concept of ‘hardwiring’ sneaking into popular parlance as a brain-based explanation for all kinds of gender gaps.

But the field is littered with many problems. Some are the product of ill-informed popular science writing ( neurotrash) based on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what brain imaging can tell

A friend pointed out this set of tips by Katie Dupere on how to be a good ally to trans people.

It’s irritating stuff, of course, but it very quickly goes from merely irritating to reversing everything we’ve learned about the hierarchical system that is “gender” over the past few decades.

For the merely irritating –

For those in socially disempowered positions, being able to define how you’re spoken about can be really powerful, Stryker says. But in addressing language that can be non-inclusive, it is important to move toward a goal of education — not alienation.

“It’s about creating a space so you can go deeper into the issue, rather than trying to police speech in a way

What’s wrong with Ireland:

When Helen Linehan found out in 2004 that there was something fatally wrong with the 11-week-old foetus she was carrying, she was advised to have an immediate termination, because doctors knew there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth.

The foetus had a condition known as acrania, which meant that its skull had not closed over the brain. Although it probably would have survived inside the womb, it would not have lived once it was born, and doctors were clear that termination was the only option. Accompanied by her husband, Graham – writer of the television comedy series Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd – she

But there’s a counter-petition.

There is a petition to Cardiff to cancel Germaine Greer’s talk. I find it abhorrent that I must make a counterpetition so a second wave feminist isn’t silenced by those who could just as easily not go to the lecture yet instead have decided to try and no platform her, to silence her. They’ve given no evidence in the petition either, just slurs.

This reactionary tactic of calling a woman a ‘transphobe’ is no different than calling someone a ‘commie’ in 1960’s America during the cold war. It’s a slur that contains no analysis, just an emotional response that is primarily used against women who talk about women’s biological realities, not gender identities.

Greer centers

God I hate finding myself agreeing with Brendan O’Neill…and not just for political reasons, but because he’s so transparently and irritatingly a Self-conscious Preening Contrarian. But it can’t be helped: for once Preening Contrarian has a point.

If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the liberation of womankind — Germaine Greer — was denounced by a swarm of Stepford Students as ‘transphobic’, someone who should make all right-minded people feel ‘sick

But don’t worry – Huffington Post UK has a post by another Cardiff student who explains why it’s such a good idea to cancel Germaine Greer’s lecture.

So, notable second-wave feminist writer and scholar Germaine Greer is transphobic (more specifically transmisogynistic).

That’s the first sentence. It made me want very badly to stop reading. Why? That stupid “second-wave” shit. That label makes it sound as if Germaine Greer simply stopped thinking around 1975, and morphed into a statue that can be wheeled out to say 1975 things but nothing else.

Also, of course, the “transphobic (more specifically transmisogynistic)” part, which I have learned to be deeply suspicious of.

But maybe the student, Payton Quinn, goes on to make a case?… Read the rest