CNN reports on Vietnamese girls trafficked into China to be rape-married.

The villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for human traffickers. Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged, then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. Young Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the gender ratio.

To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides.

Of course, “valuable commodity” doesn’t mean “to be respected and well treated”; it means “to be paid a high price for.” The money goes to the pimp, and the “bride” enters a life of slavery.

Nguyen was just 16 when a

Human Rights Watch did a big report in 2007 on Nicaragua’s total ban on abortions, including those to save the woman’s life, and its predictable results.

Nicaragua is one of only three countries in the world to maintain a blanket ban on abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.[1]Such blanket abortion bans are incompatible with international human rights obligations, including obligations on the rights to life, health, and non-discrimination. Their imposition can, and most often does, have serious effects on the lives and health of women and girls.

Nicaragua’s blanket ban on abortion was initially enacted in November 2006 and reaffirmed in September 2007, and includes a ban on previously-legal therapeutic abortions.[2]

Valerie Tarico has an extraordinary essay about what’s really behind the idea of “fetal personhood.”

The notion that life begins at conception is a variation on a very ancient cultural theme: penis worship.

I’m slow sometimes, but after years of writing about abortion rights it finally occurred to me that “life begins at conception” is one more version of a multi-millennial infatuation with the penis as symbol and proof that manliness is next to godliness.

Because it’s magic.

What creates the wonder of a new person? Forget about the maturation of germ cells, and the nine-month labor of a woman’s body, and painstaking parental nurture. It’s a sperm, a penile projectile shot forth by the ultimate organ of demi-divinity.

Men read hate-tweets sent to two women sports reporters.

[W]ith its #MoreThanMean campaign, the Just Not Sports podcast is trying to make people understand that online harassment is very real, and very harmful.

This powerful PSA video features male volunteers reading hateful tweets (which they didn’t write) that have been sent to two Chicago-area women sports personalities, Sarah Spain, a columnist and radio host with ESPN, and Julie DiCaro, an update anchor for WSCR-AM 670 The Score and writer at the Cauldron.

The women had seen all the tweets before, but the men — who thought they were being recruited for a much more light-hearted, Jimmy Kimmel-style “mean Tweets” segment — had no idea what was coming.

Do they … Read the rest

Alabama fanatics hope to get Alabama to emulate El Salvador in banning all abortions without exception, meaning even the ones that would save a woman’s life. Sorry, bitch, your life isn’t worth saving.

A co-sponsor of the bill, State Representative Jack W. Williams of Mobile, says the Personhood Amendment would allow Alabama voters to answer the question of whether or not life begins at conception through a referendum vote on the November ballot. If enacted as is, Williams says the bill will totally ban abortion at any time during pregnancy with no exceptions.

Ahem. Life is not the same thing as personhood.. The vast majority of life is not a person. No one disputes that fetuses are alive.

If the

Nick Cohen said yesterday “I told you so you fucking fools.” He did, yes. Today his article on identity politics appeared at Standpoint.

Everyone everywhere apologises to everyone else. Everyone demands the banning of everyone else. Societies where citizens bite their tongues and retract honestly-meant statements are neither particularly free nor particularly happy. And I don’t think our one will last.

Well racism can be honestly-meant, as can antisemitism. Some statements merit retraction. But I take Nick to mean that there’s a limit you fucking fools, and I agree with him there.

He points out the (absurd) absence of class in most identity check lists, and that an ex-miner with black lung disease is not obviously more privileged than say … Read the rest

And speaking of Bradford – let’s also speak of Liverpool. Suzanne Moore is one of many who wrote about the ugly class prejudice in the lies told about the Hillsborough disaster.

Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see. Those who died did not die because they were “animals” or drinking too much or behaving badly. They were unlawfully killed. Their families did not grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally incontinent or full of working-class mawkishness; they grieved because they lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances. Still, to read the details of how these people died

In the Independent, Ben Judah says that to understand Naz Shah and the things she said you have to understand Bradford.

Because Naz Shah, and everything she said, is normal politics in Bradford.

Had Britain a writer as dark and politically incorrect as Michel Houellebecq, the French author of the dystopian novel Submission, in which France converts to Islam, he would, without doubt, set his first novel in Bradford. This would be his dystopian plot.

Along comes a by-election. A dark and unknowable force with a Dickensian name – Mister Galloway – descends on the unsuspecting, segregated, depressed Northern town. Suddenly he is everywhere, the white Scotsman, and the large and miserable Muslim population apparently think that by

A horrifying observation by Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham:

6 people have been shot by toddlers since last Thursday.

Five of the six are dead.

 … Read the rest

Via Science Moms:

… Read the rest

Finally!!

41,000 Doctors to Join Lawsuit Against Catholic Hospital Over Denial of Care

It’s about fucking time.

Religious directives, written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, forbid doctors at Catholic facilities [to provide] birth control and [perform] common reproductive health procedures.

Even when that could mean the death of the woman. An incomplete miscarriage with its risk of deadly infection? Too bad, must wait until there is no fetal pulse. If the woman develops a raging infection before the pulse stops, that’s just too damn bad, according to the loathsome USCCB. Bishops have ordered hospitals and medical conglomerates not to perform abortions in such circumstances. Not requested, not begged, but ordered.

California’s largest medical association will join a 

How useful: a petition to universities to “Suspend Social Justice Courses” – !

Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist. Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.

Social justice has become a victim of its own good intentions and in the desperate attempt to make the world better for some it is creating a world better for none.  It has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.

To clarify,

The Independent tells us that the advertising watchdog is going to look into the sexism issue.

The UK’s advertising watchdog has launched an inquiry into the prevalence of negative gender stereotyping in ads. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced they are commissioning new research on the topic and invited members of the public and interested organisations to contact them to share their views on the issue in a bid to gauge public opinion.

In the US that would set off agonized protests about free speech. I have some qualms about the state schooling advertisers on sexism, but I also have massive objections to routinely insulting and belittling sexism in advertising. Competing qualms here.

A spokesperson for the ASA

So now Corbyn has suspended Ken Livingstone. The left is so brilliant at eating itself.

Jeremy Corbyn has denied Labour is in crisis after Ken Livingstone was suspended for comments made defending an MP accused of anti-Semitism.

The party leader said there were “grave concerns” about language used in a BBC interview by the former London mayor.

But he said: “There’s no crisis. Where there is any racism in the party… it will be rooted out.”

MP John Mann, who called Mr Livingstone a “Nazi apologist” in a public confrontation, has been reprimanded.

The Labour MP had been referring to comments Mr Livingstone made about Adolf Hitler.

Comments Livingstone made when he was defending Naz Shah on BBC Radio … Read the rest

So have some Georgia O’Keefe:

The Red List

The Whitney

The Whitney… Read the rest

A Michigan news outlet reports that a substitute teacher was fired a few days ago for uttering the word “vagina” in an art history class while talking about interpretations of Georgia O’Keefe paintings. (The vagina interpretation is pretty hard to miss.)

If you ask Allison Wint why she was fired from Harper Creek Middle School, she will tell you it’s because she uttered the word ‘vagina.’

“Yes, I did say that word however I was saying it in the context of art history; I wasn’t being vulgar,” she said.

Well you know when it’s a matter of being vulgar, “vagina” isn’t the word of choice. You’ve got cunt, twat, pussy, snatch, gash, minge, to name a few – vagina just … Read the rest

Naz Shah has been suspended by the Labour party pending an investigation. Earlier today Corbyn said he had accepted her apology, but it turned out that his acceptance wasn’t the only issue.

But later in the day, Labour announced that the Bradford West MP had been suspended, “by mutual agreement,” while claims against her were investigated by the compliance committee of Labour’s national executive committee.

The allegations centre around a 2014 Facebook post, in which Shah shared a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the US under the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict – Relocate Israel into United States”, with the comment: “Problem solved.”

And Buzzfeed said its article about the party’s drastic editing of Shah’s apology … Read the rest