An editorial in the Dhaka Tribune:

Asked about the murder of Jagannath University Masters student Nazimuddin Samad, the home minister told BBC Bangla: “We need to see whether he used to write objectionable things on blogs.”

No, no, no.

It is almost impossible to quantify how wrong-headed and self-defeating this approach is.

The point is not what Nazim may or may not have written. The point is that he has been slaughtered in public in cold blood.

It’s stomach-turning that a high government official apparently thinks writing “objectionable things” on blogs is a valid reason to murder the writer.

The minister’s unwise and ill-judged comment, by implying the victim may in some way have been responsible for his fate,

Soraya Chemaly wrote a public Facebook post linking to a news story from Seattle about a woman murdered and cut into pieces and left in a recycling bin. Some of you don’t do Facebook and I wouldn’t want you to miss what Soraya said.

I don’t have time to write about this at the moment, but this awful story is the perfect example of how complicit media are in refusing to face misogyny in our own culture. If this crime had happened in India it would be plastered all over front [pages] as an example of deep cultural misogyny and persistent patriarchy. In the case of the brutal Delhi rape several years ago an analysis of the NYT and the

Let’s have a bit of comic relief – let’s drop in on the “Secular Policy Institute” again. I’d forgotten about them…I think I’d vaguely assumed they’d gone to ground after that embarrassing thing where they announced a fancy expensive conference in DC that then apparently never took place. But no, they’re still there and still engaged in empty boasting. Look at the page where they attempt to recruit interns.

Say what? Any organization in the world? Just like that? How would that work exactly? How would interning for a self-styled “institute” that doesn’t actually do anything other than brag about itself provide “the insider shortcut” to your dream job? At [your pick of] any organization in the world?

Well … Read the rest

Vice has a new documentary about the war on women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Huffington Post has details:

In a new documentary for Vice, filmmaker correspondent Isobel Yeung shines a light on the ongoing human rights abuses Afghan women endure on a daily basis, despite domestic and foreign promises to improve their quality of life. 

In a hidden shelter discreetly operating to support women fleeing violence, Yeung spoke to a pair of 17- and 18-year-old women who are sisters-in-law and had escaped an abusive family.

“[My husband] would beat me as if he wanted to break my arms and knees,” explained the younger girl, who said she had attempted suicide by poison at least twice since getting married at

Speaking of the agonies of female puberty – Glosswitch has an astonishing post on the subject titled The right way for women to disappear.

I am not at home in the body I have. I’ve never got over the desire to tell people, the first time I meet them, that this isn’t the real me. The real me is thin, breastless, narrow-hipped. This version of me is a poor compromise, a pathetic accommodation. I look like a woman but actually I identify as a human being.

I relate to that. I don’t experience it as sharply as Glossy does, but it fits nevertheless.

Womanhood, I had decided, was not for me. I sought to roll back puberty and remain stuck

CST (which I had to look hard to discover stands for Community Security Trust) on anti-Semitism and Dilly Hussain.

Antisemitism comes in lots of different guises. It can be blatant, subtle or hidden. It can invent new antisemitic charges, or rely on a reservoir of old antisemitic language and images. Or, sometimes, it just swaps the word “Zionist” for “Jew”, in the naïve hope that doing so will change an antisemitic statement into a political one.

This is what appears to have happened in an online campaign against Tell MAMA, an organisation that works to combat anti-Muslim hatred. CST’s relationship with Tell MAMA is no secret. We advised its Director, Fiyaz Mughal, before and after he set it up

Big news from Loch Ness:

A 30ft (9m) model of the Loch Ness Monster built in 1969 for a Sherlock Holmes movie has been found almost 50 years after it sank in the loch.

The beast was created for the Billy Wilder-directed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, starring Sir Robert Stephens and Sir Christopher Lee.

It has been seen for the first time in images captured by an underwater robot.

Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine said the shape, measurements and location pointed to the object being the prop.

Ok. But then look at one of the images the underwater robot captured:

Kongsberg Maritime

How do they know that’s not the monster?

The robot, operated by Norwegian company Kongsberg

I hadn’t heard of Shugs & Fats before but now I have, and they sound amazing.

Growing up, comics Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz never dreamed that they would one day co-star in a sketch-comedy series about two women in Brooklyn.

“Being onstage was something that I could’ve never imagined,” Manzoor, who grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim community in London, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “The only time I thought I was going to be onstage was as a bride; that’s how Pakistani women were on stages.”

But now, in the Web series Shugs & Fats, Manzoor and Vaz (who grew up in India) play immigrant roommates whom they describe as “walking the line between hipsters and hijabis.” Manzoor

The BBC on witch hunts in India, and a woman who campaigns against them.

Witch hunts have been reported from Assam, one of India’s most ethnically diverse states, for decades now.

Last year, the home ministry informed the parliament that at least 77 people – mostly women – were killed and 60 others injured in “witch hunting incidents” in Assam since 2010. Last year, in a particularly grisly incident, a feted athlete was branded a witch, tied up and severely beaten. (More than 2,000 ‘witchcraft murders’ have taken place in India since 2000)

Women are often branded witches to help relatives and neighbours grab their land and property, to settle personal grudges, or for denying sexual favours.

In tribal

The Guardian took a look at comments on the Guardian, and found what we all knew.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of

This looks like a delayed April Fools joke but apparently isn’t. Neil Lyndon at the Telegraph is aggrieved that some people think prostitutes aren’t the guilty party when it comes to the sex trade.

This unusual approach to criminal responsibility – reversing legal tendencies that have developed for decades in the West to protect the customer – will be the obvious, logical outcome of France’s latest regulations governing prostitution.

Interesting point: he thinks the sex trade should be a matter of consumer protection rather than worker protection. So I guess if a punter finds a prostitute insufficiently hot when naked, he can file a consumer complaint?

What is obvious, however, is the clear prejudice towards heterosexual men which underpins the

A friend posted that 1997 David Foster Wallace piece on Updike on Facebook, and what a gem it is.

[N]o U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.

That is what eventually put me off Updike – the fact that he was always writing about himself. And the fact that he didn’t seem to realize that women existed, except as things for having sex with.

His friends, especially his women friends, did not like Updike, at all.

[I]t’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for

From the Telegraph:

A stack of leaflets calling for the killing of a sect of Muslims have been found at south London mosque, it was reported today.

The flyers, uncovered in Stockwell Green mosque, are said to have labelled Ahmadi Muslims apostates, claiming they deserved to die if they refuse to convert to mainstream Islam.

They call for those who refuse to convert to mainstream Islam within three days to face a death penalty.

Which random guys are apparently willing to carry out on a voluntary basis. A return ticket from Bradford to Glasgow and the job’s done.

Ahmadis are known for their non-violence and interfaith concerns. But the sect is banned by the constitution of  Pakistan from referring

The Beeb reports another manifestation of religious zeal:

An Australian prisoner who supports the so-called Islamic State has allegedly used a knife to carve a slogan on to his cellmate’s head.

Reports said the Islamic State mantra “e4e”, standing for “an eye for an eye”, was carved into the man’s head.

An inquiry will examine how the high-risk attacker, 18, came to be housed with his 40-year-old cellmate.

The guy with the carved-up head was a minimum security prisoner; the carver was maximum security.

The 40-year-old man was admitted to Port Macquarie Base Hospital in a critical condition, but was now stable, a hospital spokesperson told the BBC.

Police have charged Hraichie with causing grievous bodily harm with intent

Oh hey, I think I see where the “discussion” that led to the shunning of Surly Amy took place. I’d assumed it was on The Orbit, and there was no way I was going to look for it there, but it seems to have happened on The Orbit’s Facebook wall, where it’s a doddle to read posts by visitors.

So unless there’s another parallel discussion on The Orbit, this is where the Aggrieved ordered the Orbit to shun Amy and The Orbit said okay.

It’s a public post, by the way.

Emily Titon‎ to The Orbit
March 30 at 11:29pm ·

I would love to support the Orbit, because some of my most favorite bloggers are on it. But I

Meghan Murphy on Australia’s first abolitionist conference, and the harassment that greeted it.

A campaign headed up by Vixen, a pro-prostitution advocacy group in Australia, attempted to shut down Australia’s first abolitionist conference (which doubles as the Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade book launch), but failed.

Over the past week, the #RMIT2016 hashtag was overrun by prostitution fans and anti-feminists who claimed that, somehow, hosting voices of survivors and feminists who opposed the sex industry equated to “silencing” and “hate.” Vixen encouraged supporters to harass RMIT University, via Twitter and email, into shutting down the conference, though University representatives refused to comment publicly (because, why?). Feminists were called “cunts” by online protesters and one young

Remember last summer when things got all sharp and spiky at Freethought blogs so I left there and came back here? After that everything calmed down at FTB and went back to collegial harmony and love.

Hahaha no it didn’t. That’s why we saw the debut of The Orbit on March 15, a new blog formed from a bunch of former FTB ones and some new ones.

It took only three weeks. Three weeks! Even I, who know their way with dissenters so intimately, thought it would take way longer than that. Only three weeks before the first schism: an update to their fundraiser on April 6:

We Made a Mistake, and We Apologize

When The Orbit launched,

First there’s the headline. You just have to laugh.

John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel

Say what? Revives it? Since when is it moribund?

Then there’s the author: Steven Kurutz. So men think there aren’t enough male-centric sex novels around. Ok…

Then there’s the article.

There was a time when the great American male novelists took delight in writing about sex…Sex was freedom, sex was adventure, sex was a good time, sex was pain, sex was life. Masturbation, threesomes, pedophilia, extramarital flings, one-night romps: It was all up for grabs, and how they grabbed it.

Good old “it.” No need to ask an it how it feels about any of this. Also, what is pedophilia doing in there? … Read the rest

Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Tanveer Ahmed and life for Ahmadis in the UK and elsewhere.

She begins with a slice of life:

Some of Samia Sultan’s neighbours don’t greet her any more, and sometimes it’s hard for her to understand why. Sultan, a dentist, lives in Glasgow, in an area of the city that is – like most Muslim populations in the UK – majority Sunni. But Sultan isn’t Sunni: she is Ahmadi. And that is the source of the problem.

“My neighbours were fine, but when they came to know I was Ahmadi, their attitude changed,” Sultan explains. It is a bright morning in Glasgow, but the boredom of the school holidays is beginning to bite, and