Aug 22nd, 2016 5:36 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Edinburgh SA is in the news again.
EUSA’s controversial LGBT+ officer Ada Wells is in hot water once again, after tweeting: “I sure hope more police die today”.
Ada, whose Twitter account has been private after a variety of controversies saw them in the public eye, followed the tweet with the hashtag #acab – an anti-police acronym standing for ‘all coppers are bastards’.
Ada said it again a week later.
Ada, whose full title is EUSA’s LGBT+ Liberation Group Convenor, has previously been extremely outspoken on LGBT+ matters. Ada, who is trans and prefers to be called ‘they’, labelled women with vaginas as ‘cuntscum’, a remark that shocked members of the LGBT+ community in Edinburgh, the very people Ada
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Aug 22nd, 2016 4:28 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Meghan Murphy is amused by people who insist that Kim Kardashian really is a feminist even though she says she isn’t.
At this point, it’s basically illegal for celebrities not to call themselves feminist, even if they really hate feminism, so naturally dozens of hot takes were published over the past week explaining that actually Kim, you are feminist even if you say you aren’t and even if you think the idea of “women’s liberation” is totally ick.
Through said hot takes I’ve deduced that Kim understands why people might assume she is a feminist, writing, “I work hard, I make my own money, I’m comfortable and confident in my own skin, and I encourage women to be open
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Aug 22nd, 2016 3:59 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Well at least it’s clear that Anjem Choudary was in no sense a joke. The Daily Express reports that Scotland Yard wanted to arrest him for years but MI5 said no.
Counter terror officers believed they had enough evidence to build a case against the radical Islamic State sympathiser but were reportedly blocked from doing so because he was a vital part of MI5’s ongoing investigation.
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Serious questions were raised as to why Choudary was allowed to continue spreading his Islamist poison across Britain for more than 20 years, but now a counter terror source has said MI5 were responsible.
Following his conviction of inviting support for ISIS it emerged Choudary was involved in at least 15 terror
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Tags: Anjem Choudary
Aug 22nd, 2016 9:54 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Another one. Deutsche Welle reports:
Turkish President Erdogan has said the suicide bomber who attacked a wedding party in southeastern Turkey was a child as young as 12 years old. More than 50 people were killed in the blast – Turkey’s deadliest this year.
Nearly half of the victims were children too.
The explosion happened among people who were dancing at the wedding party.
The BBC:
One woman lost four children in the attack, the Haberturk newspaper reported. Emine Arhan told the title “if it wasn’t for my only surviving child, I would have killed myself”.
Another victim was a nine-year-old girl who had stayed on at the party to see the bride after her parents had left,
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Aug 21st, 2016 5:32 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Amanda Hess at Slate on Elizabeth Smart three years ago:
When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.
“I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence,” Smart told the panel. “And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to
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Aug 21st, 2016 3:33 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
How We Shun Now:
A public post about the naked Trump statue and whether it’s a good idea or not drew some comments.
There’s been an argument raging for years about what level of verbal anger or aggression or hostility or contempt is acceptable in internet discussions. There’s a lot of disagreement.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that calling people garbage is not acceptable. Calling people garbage over and over and over and over again is really not acceptable.… Read the rest
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30 comments
Aug 21st, 2016 2:52 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
As a companion piece to the one about lesbian taco shells and queer consensual hot dog rolls:
Stop appropriating “Daddy”.
It’s like striking gold without even leaving the desk.
Take Daddy out of your straight vanilla discourse.
“Daddy” has deep fucking roots in places you have no fucking clue about.
And
and
and
Justin Bieber will never be “Daddy AF”. Get off Instagram.
Ain’t it great to live at this moment?
… Read the rest
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15 comments
Aug 20th, 2016 6:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Lauren Evans at Jezebel looks down at Elizabeth Smart from an immense height in order to sneer at her for pointing out that her kidnapper-rapist’s consumption of porn made her living hell even worse.
Elizabeth Smart’s abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002 will go down in history as the realization of every American’s darkest nightmare. Now, at age 28, a healthy and happy Smart recalls the locus of at least some of her misery: Her captor’s obsession with porn.
The above video was posted on Friday by the anti-porn group Fight the New Drug. Whether porn is systematically destroying the moral fabric of America is a conversation for a different day, but one thing is certain: Hearing
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Aug 20th, 2016 5:54 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Seth on The almost pathological suspicion.
I was born and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from a family of toilet cleaners and garbage workers and petty, unsuccessful business. Like Vance, I was cursed with insight into the hopelessness of my circumstance, and blessed with both the appetite and the extreme good fortune to claw my way out of the deep well of poverty and ignorance into which I’d been born. I’ve not read Vance’s book, but I’ve read reviews of it, and it seems he’s missed the three Rs of Southern poverty, without which nothing peculiar to Southern behaviour can be adequately explained. These are, in my order of estimation, revanchism, … Read the rest
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11 comments
Aug 20th, 2016 4:57 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Someone who uncritically swallows the claim that J D Vance explains why the white working class loves Trump, apparently without noticing its extreme thinness: Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, who interviews Vance.
RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.
J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles
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Tags: Trump
Aug 20th, 2016 4:23 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Salt Lake Tribune:
Pornography made her captor more violent, Elizabeth Smart said in a video posted online Friday.
Produced by the anti-porn advocacy group Fight the New Drug, the 5-minute video delves into how Smart’s convicted kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, would “just sit and look” at various “hard-core” porn magazines.
“I can’t say that he would not have gone out and kidnapped me had he not looked at pornography,” Smart says in the video. “All I know is that pornography made my living hell worse.”
Smart was held captive for nine months in the Utah mountains after Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, pulled the then-14-year-old Salt Lake City girl from her bed at knifepoint in June
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Aug 20th, 2016 3:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Fareed Zakaria is also somewhat baffled by J D Vance’s explanations for why impoverished white working class people love Trump. He’s not as baffled as I am, and he’s more polite about it, but he sees some holes in the argument.
The other, larger gap in Vance’s book is race. He speaks about the causes of the anxiety and pain of the white working class, but he describes the causes almost entirely in economic terms. Their jobs have disappeared, their wages have stagnated, their lives have become more unstable. But there is surely something else at work here — the sense that people who look and sound very different are rising up. Surveys, polls and other research confirm that
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Tags: Trump
Aug 20th, 2016 12:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A judge has referred Joe Arpaio for prosecution,
finding that they ignored and misrepresented to subordinates court orders designed to keep the sheriff’s office from racially profiling Latinos.
Federal prosecutors get to decide whether or not to pursue the case. Here’s hoping.
In his decision, Judge Snow removed several of Sheriff Arpaio’s powers, including his ability to oversee internal affairs investigations. The judge had already found that Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies had mishandled and manipulated such investigations, in part to obscure wrongdoing or neglect by deputies.
The lawsuit has already cost taxpayers more than $50 million in legal fees and contributed to Arizona’s reputation for bias against immigrants.
Gov. Doug Ducey has worked to redefine the state’s relationship
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Tags: Trump
Aug 20th, 2016 11:17 am |
By Ophelia Benson
As I’ve mentioned, because I’ve always avoided taking any notice of Donald Trump, I’ve missed much about his sleazy career. I just read up on one item from 1989, recalled by Matt Ford in The Atlantic a few months ago. I felt rising nausea as I read.
It was an otherwise unremarkable event when Donald Trump received the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association, a union of police and correctional officers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, on December 10. As he addressed the crowd in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Trump restated his support for police officers and for the death penalty for those who kill them. Then he articulated a new proposal to demonstrate that support.
One of
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Tags: Trump is evil
Aug 19th, 2016 2:32 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
When I saw this yesterday I thought it was satire – I assumed it was satire, I took it for granted it was satire. I had a good laugh and shared it on Facebook, thinking it was satire. Then I learned that it’s not satire – they mean it.
The title is We Messed Up. What follows is a hyperbolic, endless confession of wrong-doing over…a movie review and a lesbian taco shell.
And it’s not satire.
Yesterday we published a review of Seth Rogen’s new animated film, Sausage Party. After we received feedback about it from our Trans Editor Mey Rude, the members of the QTPOC Speakeasy and Facebook commenters, we decided to un-publish the piece. Here’s how
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Aug 19th, 2016 1:57 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
This one is just frivolous, but it’s so peculiar I can’t resist it.
The CBC reports:
A Washington state couple preoccupied with reliving the Victorian era — from their icebox to their undergarments — were asked to change out of their traditional costumes or leave Butchart Gardens near Victoria.
I remember reading about that couple; I thought maybe I’d blogged about them but if so I can’t find it. They do their “Victorian” thing all the time…except of course that they don’t, because for instance they blog about it, and Victorians didn’t have “blogs.” But apart from the internet and similar minor details, they pretend to be living in the 19th century full-time.
The Port Townsend couple booked tickets
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Aug 19th, 2016 1:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I wrote about witch camps (via the BBC) in <i>Does God Hate Women?</i> This Facebook post thus makes me both happy and sad.
“I am so happy because I will see my sister every day now and I won’t have to wait on her visits here.”
This is Azara. After 21 years in the witch camp she is going home today. The purification process of the priest is complete and she is now a free woman.
21 years.
Azara is now going home to Wulensi to spend the remainder of her days living in peace with her sister.
It really is a happy day.
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