Check out today’s marvelous Google doodle, stashed on YouTube –

… Read the rest

Very good news: elections yesterday in Bihar, India, were a resounding rejection of Modi and the BJP.

Prime MinisterNarendra Modi of India suffered a severe political setback on Sunday when the voters of Bihar, the country’s third most populous state, overwhelmingly rejected his party in state assembly elections.

Mr. Modi, who had eagerly cast the Bihar elections as a referendum on his first 17 months as India’s leader, acknowledged defeat shortly after noon.

Recriminations were swift within his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Some party leaders questioned whether Mr. Modi had erred in the closing weeks of the Bihar campaign by elevating hard-right appeals to Hindu nationalism over his more unifying message of “vikas,” or development, for all

I also like the Starbucks red cup.

I like red, I like shades of red. It’s a nice cup.

Apparently there’s a pretend-controversy about the cup as a new front in the war on Christmas.

Ok so have this one then.

Jamilah Lemieux

Problem solved.… Read the rest

I can’t help loving it that Ben Carson has a painting of himself with his buddy Jesus.

Not just with Jesus, either, but with Jesus dropping a matey hand on his shoulder, and with the other hand telling the world, “Behold, here is my beloved Ben Carson, in whom I am well pleased.”

Although…are they really sure that is Jesus? It’s not Ben Carson’s trainer? I’m not sure why Jesus would be wearing a snowy-white bathrobe, or sporting a ’70s goatee.

But no, I’m just being blasphemous, I’m sure that’s the authentic Jesus, after a vigorous session on the elliptical.… Read the rest

The wife of one of the men injured in the Dhaka attack October 31st lives in Montreal. Nick Logan at Global News reported her story a few days ago. It includes gut-wrenching photos of him in the hospital.

Monika Mistry said her husband, Tareq Rahim, was hacked multiple times in the head, hands and torso and was shot in the stomach. His condition has improved but he remains in critical condition, with a bullet still inside his body. Mistry’s afraid he could be attacked again.

Rahim, she said, was meeting with writer friends Saturday afternoon in the office of Shuddhashar publishing house, in capital city Dhaka, when a purported group of Islamist extremists stormed in and began hacking

Speaking of menstruation…

The UCLA student newspaper The Daily Bruin ran an opinion piece by Zoey Freedman arguing that necessary menstrual products should be covered by health insurance.

The editors attached a stipulation at the beginning:

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies.

Yes, it’s such a shocking generalization to refer to people who menstruate as women.… Read the rest

Facebook thinks women are ooky. Kate Ng in the Independent:

A feminist blogger has been censored by Facebook for blogging about periods and the history of menstrual products.

Alaura Weaver, also known as ‘Bad-ass Motherblogger’, started an ongoing series of blog posts detailing the history of menstrual hygiene.

I took a look. It’s interesting. Well worth a read, and not worth censoring.

She tried to boost one of her posts on Facebook, and they said no, you can’t, not allowed.

According to Facebook, the post violated their Ad Guidelines, which state: “Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products.”

When she … Read the rest

More from Maryam:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie Nov 7
Banner of women protesting stoning of Rakhshana #Afghanistan:
“End reach of merchants of religion from our country”

More photos:

There are more at the link.

… Read the rest

Via Maryam on Twitter:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie Nov 7
Mothers against execution in Iran
Long Live.

An editorial from the Daily Times in Pakistan:

Pakistani society’s deep rooted acceptance of despicable misogynistic behaviour once again came to light recently when a mixed gender group of students at Karachi University (KU) who were playing a casual game of cricket together within the bounds of the university were assaulted for doing so by the activists of the notoriously thuggish fundamentalist Islami Jamiat-e-Talba (IJT), the student wing of the Jamat-e-Islami. The IJT and its members are a menace across the universities of the country, and they have defaced and perverted these supposed places of learning and critical reflection into fearful places of demagoguery and reactionary backwardness.

Imagine if Mormons or Baptists were doing that on university campuses in … Read the rest

John Knight, LGBT Project Director at the Illinois ACLU, posts about a suburban Chicago school district that refuses to let a trans girl use the girls’ locker room, instead making her use a separate room.

My clients started meeting with the District more than two years ago to explain why their daughter should be treated as a girl at school in all ways, including when using the locker room. As the District has no policy guiding the treatment of transgender students, the parents had to initiate the discussion regarding how the school would treat their daughter in accordance with her gender. They provided medical information regarding her diagnosis with gender dysphoria and her transition to living fully as a girl,

The Guardian reports on A New Study that finds that children from godbothering families are less altruistic than children from non-godbothering families.

Academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.

They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.

“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.

I can’t say that that surprises me. I don’t think religion necessarily makes people less altruistic, or that atheism necessarily does … Read the rest

There was a big rally in Madrid today to protest violence against women.

The rally, organised by feminist groups, was attended by representatives of all the main political parties.

Activists dressed in black [lay] on the ground to remember hundreds of women murdered over the years in what they described as “macho terrorism”.

They said laws against domestic abuse should be extended to include all violence against women.

Isn’t violence against women kind of last century? Kind of second wave? Kind of over?

A survey carried out by the European Union last year estimated that 13 million woman in Europe experienced physical violence in 2013.

But statistics and surveys suggest the problem is less prevalent in Spain than other

The NSS reports that Turkey is working on treating violence against women more gently, kindly, compassionately – to the perps, that is, not to the women.

Proposals by the Turkish Ministry of Justice to treat sexual harassment and violence against women less severely have drawn widespread condemnation from campaigners.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) is “deeply concerned” by the draft proposal and has warned that if passed the plans will allow perpetrators of crimes normally punishable by five years’ imprisonment “to engage in negotiations with prosecutors to reduce their sentence to one year, postpone their sentence, do community service or pay money to avoid jail time.”

They note that the proposal “covers a number of crimes that

I’m going through the past three years of Jesus and Mo, so I thought you’d enjoy this one:

Ontological bomb-shelter – that’s so exactly right. You can’t see it or talk to it, you can’t get messages from it, you can’t register complaints with it – it’s beyond your reach. Permanently…Except after you’re dead, they say, but then that’s very easy to say, isn’t it – you’re not going to be able to show them wrong. It’s the perfect con, and most people fall for it.

The Patreon is here.… Read the rest

So this is where we are.

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4

TERFs are commiting acts of genocide against trans women under the UN’s definition of genocide. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf …

Shivoa Birch ‏@Shivoa Nov 4
Imagine writing a piece telling queer/trans* youth to remember elders & saying “yes, call me a Terf or a Swerf” #ToneDeaf #TransGenocide

Morgan M Page ‏@morganmpage Nov 4
The entire anti-trans radical feminist agenda has always been upfront that their purpose is genocide. We need to start calling it that.

Genocide.

And they accuse other people of inciting hatred.

Reason (the libertarian website) agrees with the libertarian feminists, of course. Elizabeth Nolan Brown says the usual things:

In a recent interview with Time magazine, feminist icon Gloria Steinem—currently promoting a new travel memoir—says that the biggest threat to reproductive rights today is “patriarchy… the very definition (of which) is that men control women’s bodies in order to control reproduction.”

The way johns do, for instance. But Brown isn’t having any of that, thanks.

It’s a nice sentiment—but alas, Steinem’s concept of human rights and bodily integrity only applies to certain people. Steinem has been an outspoken proponent against sex workers’ right to bodily integrity.

Over the summer, Steinem was one of a group of Hollywood celebrities and