Sometimes it just collapses into total absurdity and all one can do is laugh.

Like this ad for takeout fried chicken in Australia for example:

Yes but what does she think of the fried chicken?

Anyway the ad was posted to Twitter and Twitter did what Twitter does do.

The ad was immediately criticized as everything from simply inappropriate to downright misogynistic. One critic even wrote that the ad had “set women back 50 years” according to Australian news site News.com.au.

Possibly a slight exaggeration, given everything else that’s going on, but whatever.

The fried chicken people apologized and deleted the tweet.

“We are very sorry for our earlier tweet on H&S – we didn’t mean to offend and

A religious group organizes a campaign against [religious?] extremism, and the invited Muslim groups don’t attend.

Ahmadi Muslims in Scotland have launched an anti-extremism campaign following the death of the Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, despite the failure of other prominent Muslims to attend the event.

Representatives of the Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland were invited to attend the launch alongside other faith groups, but the Guardian understands that both sent their apologies at the last minute.

…

The event’s organiser Ahmed Owusu-Konadu said: “We are undertaking this campaign as part of our stand on the rejection of all forms of extremism and as a message of solidarity with all who have been its victims, including

Zahira Patel notes that ten years after the murder of Banaz Mahmod honor killings haven’t gone away.

Working in the legal sector has also brought to light for me just how difficult it has become for victims of domestic violence to secure legal aid since the changes introduced by LASPO (The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012), which came into effect in 2013. As a result of these changes, a third of domestic violence victims are unable to provide the required evidence to secure legal aid, according to a Parliamentary watchdog report. Further, in 2014, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) released a damning report which concluded that “only 8 out of 43 forces respond well to

Joshua Hammer at the Wall Street Journal tells us about a guy in Timbuktu who did a lot to keep the city’s libraries, books and manuscripts out of the hands of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The story begins in April 2012, when [Abdel Kader] Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city. He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.

He has quite … Read the rest

The University of Washington (which is up the road from me) Q Center has a glossary of terms.

A note about these definitions: Each of these definitions has been carefully researched
and closely analyzed from theoretical and practical perspectives for cultural sensitivity,
common usage, and general appropriateness.

There’s something odd here. Look.

Gay – 1. Term used in some cultural settings to represent males who are
attracted to males in a romantic, erotic and/or emotional sense. Not all men who
engage in “homosexual behavior” identify as gay, and as such this label should
be used with caution.

Lesbian – Term used to describe female-identified people attracted romantically,
erotically, and/or emotionally to other female-identified people.

Notice a certain…asymmetry?… Read the rest

More on Sheikh Hasina’s view of the freelance murders of atheists in Bangladesh, which is basically “go right ahead, we approve.”

In a recent exchange with the ruling awami league supporters and active leaders, Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina has brazenly supported the machete wielding killers of Bangladesh atheist bloggers who have already hacked to death at least seven atheist bloggers and publishers of free thinking writers. Many of the bloggers had been hacked to death in open daylight on the streets of Dhaka the capital while the police had been reluctant or incompetent to arrest anyone responsible. The wording of the premier who has been the chief executive of the government since the questionable one party election in earlier

Deborah Cameron wrote about default male today, in the wake of Green Party Women’s “non-men.”

The idea behind substituting ‘non-men’ for ‘women’ was to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people. It will be news to nobody that this is a contentious issue in contemporary feminist politics. But whatever position you take on the issue itself, ‘non-men’ remains problematic from a linguistic point of view. It cannot easily be made to function as an inclusive, feminist or non-sexist term, because it repeats the most basic and ubiquitous of all sexist linguistic gestures: treating men as the default human beings while relegating women to what the radical feminist linguist Julia Penelope dubbed ‘negative semantic space’. ‘Non-men’ defines a subordinated

Jessica Valenti is the woman who gets the most blocked comments at the Guardian’s Comment is Free.

When the Guardian examined the 1.4 million comments that have been blocked by moderators since 1999, they found that eight of the 10 writers receiving the most blocked comments were women, and topping the list was … well, me. Sure, there’s a small part of me that’s proud – I’m No 1! – but the bigger truth is that I’m mostly just exhausted.

I’m tired of laughing it off and rolling my eyes. Because while misspelled threats or entreaties for me to get back in the kitchen are certainly easy to mock, the disdain with which they’re employed is not very funny.

For

In case the absurdity of Germany’s charging a comedian with insulting Erdogan isn’t enough for one day, we can turn our attention to Kuwait:

A prominent female academic and human rights activist in Kuwait has been charged with blasphemy.

Sheikha al-Jassem was summoned to the public prosecutor’s office after legal complaints were filed against her over a recent interview she gave on TV.

She asserted that the constitution of Kuwait should be above the Quran and Islamic law in governing the country.

So, you can’t win, can you – not if you think a government should be secular when you live in a theocracy. You can’t say that in a theocracy, because the theocracy defines it as “blasphemy,” and … Read the rest

An item that Vanina shared with me on Facebook, via comments on a Sarah Palin article. It has so many layers of meaning…

… Read the rest

Apparently Erdoğan gets to tell Merkel to prosecute German citizens for making jokes about Erdoğan. Philip Oltermann in the Guardian:

Angela Merkel has been criticised by members of her cabinet after acceding to a request from Ankara to prosecute a comedian who read out an offensive poem about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The German chancellor insisted her government’s decision did not amount to a verdict on whether Jan Böhmermann was guilty or not, but should be understood as a reaffirmation of the judiciary’s independence.

Oh please. The issue is whether such a thing should be prosecuted in the first place, not whether the comedian is “guilty” or not.

“In a constitutional democracy, weighing up personal rights against

I was going to visit the Secular Policy “Institute” just the once, but of course I was underestimating the scope of their absurdity when I thought that. I find I can’t not point out their projects.

One of the categories on their website, between About Us and Coalition, is Projects. Within that category you get Active, Past, and Proposed, along with Submit a.

So we look at Active Projects.

Active Projects

Our project program is brand new. We will have active projects soon. Meanwhile, look at our proposed projects!

The end. That’s all there is on the page.

Next we look at Past Projects. (Hey it’s the next item on the drop-down menu. We can’t just jump … Read the rest

Hard to read without grinding one’s teeth in rage: women in San Salvador spent years in prison for having miscarriages.

The case of Guadalupe Vásquez, who was imprisoned for more than seven years after losing the baby she conceived when she was raped at the age of 17, is to be examined by a panel of experts in the first People’s Tribunal to focus on El Salvador’s draconian anti-abortion law.

Vásquez, who was sentenced to 30 years for murder in 2008, was pardoned and freed last year after the supreme court ruled her conviction was unsafe. Her case is one of three that will come under renewed scrutiny this weekend following a dogged campaign by reproductive rights campaigners and