Monstrous.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, has been handed a new sentence that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, her lawyer said.

She was jailed in 2010 for spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security – charges she denied – and was released after serving half of her six-year term. The European parliament awarded her the Sakharov human rights prize.

38 years in prison and 148 lashes.… Read the rest

Jonathan Best on the attempted (and failed) no-platforming of Jenni Murray:

On March 1st, an open letter was published on Facebook demanding that Leeds Lit Fest and The Leeds Library cancel an event with BBC Woman’s Hour broadcaster Jenni Murray on the grounds that she is ‘an active transphobe’ and guilty of ‘hate speech’. The signatories included Trans Leeds, Non-Binary Leeds, Trans Pride and Yorkshire Mesmac (all of whom might be expected to sign such a letter) and five of Leeds’ arts and culture organisations: Live Art Bistro, Leeds Queer Film Festival, Aire Place Studios, Oxygen Films and the artist collective Queerology.

With four decades of experience as a BBC journalist, including more

Well now look at it from their point of view: how are people going to become The Elite if they never cheat? It’s the American way: get to the top via bribery and fraud.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities.

The Justice Department isn’t in the business of prosecuting scandals; it prosecutes crimes.

Do we soft-pedal the language when it’s the genteel kind of crime committed by people with money? Hmmm? I think it should be called a major college admission fraud or scheme or racket, as opposed … Read the rest

Moira Donegan has more details on Tucker Carlson’s chatty misogyny with his buddy the lovesponge guy.

In the recordings, Carlson says women are “like dogs”, claiming: “They’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” He insists that women find misogynist degradation pleasurable and makes sexual, antagonistic comments about women he does and does not like.

He calls Arianna Huffington “a pig”, Justice Elena Kagan “ugly” and “unattractive”, and Martha Stewart’s daughter, TV host Alexis Stewart, “cunty”. He says he “wants to fuck” Sarah Palin and called for the elimination of rape shield laws, provisions that make it illegal for defense attorneys in rape cases to bring up an accuser’s sexual history as a way to discredit

Kirsty Clarke in the Independent saying be more inncloosivv.

Sport is one of society’s most powerful tools for bringing people together and it should be open to everyone, including trans people.

Ok sorry to interrupt after just one sentence but I have to. Sport is open to trans people; that doesn’t mean sport should be open to letting male-bodied trans people compete against women. Everybody participate, yay, but that doesn’t mean throw out all the rules.

However, in recent days, sport has become a divisive issue around trans people’s right to participate.

No it hasn’t. That’s a stupid brainless lie. The objection is to letting male-bodied trans people compete against women.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen female

Something more cheerful by way of refreshment.

… Read the rest

This is Laurel Hubbard NZ. Who twenty years after retiring (at his prime) from weightlifting as a male came back as a trans woman athlete & lifted (age 40!!) just 30kg less!! This is what will happen to female sport if gender not sex is used to classify sport #fairplayforfemales pic.twitter.com/hNh2lG3Plx

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) March 11, 2019

Oh noes are we denying her right to exist?

No, actually, we’re denying a man’s “right” to compete against women who will thereby be unable to win anything ever.

The Guardian last April:

New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard went into the women’s +90kg finals at the Commonwealth Games as favourite, expected not only to win but also perhaps break records.

One of the Canadians on that Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed:

The Carleton community is shocked and devastated to learn of the death of Prof. Pius Adesanmi, who was among the 18 Canadians killed in today’s crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet at the Addis Ababa airport.

Global Affairs Canada has confirmed that Adesanmi is among the victims.

“Pius Adesanmi was a towering figure in African and post-colonial scholarship and his sudden loss is a tragedy,” said Benoit-Antoine Bacon, president and vice-chancellor. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and all those who knew and loved him, and with everyone who suffered loss in the tragic crash in Ethiopia.”

“The contributions of Pius Adesanmi to Carleton are immeasurable,” said

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on When did it begin?

For me, it was recognising the pattern of Cluster B abuse from when it happened in my favourite Asperger’s/autism forum, although I didn’t have a name for it until fellow commenters, here and on Facebook, joined the dots for themselves with regard to transactivism, and so educated me.

**********

It even happened the same way (Cluster B behaviour seems to go by the book):

Firstly:

Someone points out how unfair it is to expect every member to have a full, official diagnosis of Asperger’s [dysphoria]. They request that self-identifying should be enough.

• Reason 1: Official diagnosis is expensive; and difficult and convoluted to obtain.

• Reason 2: A … Read the rest

Sarah Sanders gives her first press briefing since the invention of Post-it notes.

The first White House briefing in six weeks has begun as Sarah Sanders returns to podium in the White House briefing room with Russ Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That’s ok, they’re busy, it’s not as if they have any obligation to keep the populace informed about what they’re doing to us.

Sanders says that Democrats should denounce Ilhan Omar’s anti-semitic comments in the same that Republicans denounced Steve King’s comments in support of white supremacy. President Donald Trump has yet to denounce King though.

Good people on both sides, both sides.

The national emergency was Trump’s patriotic duty.… Read the rest

Surprise surprise, one of Fox News’s more famous talking heads is contemptuous of women. Who could ever have guessed that?

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, many years ago, would regularly call in and chat with the host of the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show. The idea, as it is with any shock-jock program, was to stir up a buzz by discussing some controversial topics.

Carlson didn’t disappoint.

One of those topics, according to the Media Matters website, focused on Warren Jeffs, who was on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list for his role in arranging illegal marriages between adults and underage girls.

Carlson said criminal charges against Jeffs were “bullshit” because “arranging a marriage between a

Originally a comment by latsot on Overt rather than clandestine.

Breaking things can be useful, if by breaking them you are able to reassemble them in a new way that improves them

In theory, yes. In practice it hardly ever happens, with even the best will in the world.

It certainly doesn’t happen much in the software business even though we have whole swathes of theory about how to do it in software design and development practice, much of it very good.

It works like this:

1. The boss says “build me a system, don’t worry about the budget, we can sort that out later, just bring me a design”.

2. The boss sees the design, her eyes pop … Read the rest

Pliny’s T shirt for International Women’s Day:

… Read the rest

If you’re looking for an adventure, I wouldn’t advise looking for it in Saudi Arabia, at least not if you’re a woman. (Or a dissident man.)

At first, Saudi Arabia was an adventure for Bethany Vierra.

An American from Washington State, she taught at a women’s university, started a company, married a Saudi businessman and gave birth to a curly-haired daughter, Zaina.

And couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, right? And had to wear an abaya any time she left home, right? Not all that adventurey.

But since the marriage went sour and she sought a divorce, she has been trapped. Because of the kingdom’s so-called guardianship laws, which give men great power over women, she is unable to

People say (and apparently think) the most ridiculous things about “rights.”

Case in point:

pic.twitter.com/c7Jk1fnD5f

— Deborah Callahan (@deborahmacnz) March 9, 2019

I don’t agree with the t-shirt but I understand how someone could be driven to wear it. I wouldn’t wear it, but it’s her right to express herself. Just like it’s your right to disagree.

— Deborah Callahan (@deborahmacnz) March 10, 2019

There’s no such thing as a “right” to express oneself by carrying banners or wearing T shirts that say “KILL THE ___”.

There may be a legal right in some jurisdictions to do that, but it’s thin ice. But more to the point, legal rights aren’t the only kind, and it’s pretty clear the tweeter was … Read the rest

Jonathan Chait looks at the question of why our minds boggle so stubbornly when we’re presented with the truth about Trump’s captivity to Russia.

The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.

The flaw lies in the assumption about what constitutes “normal.” In this case, the baseline should not be previous American elections, but other foreign elections in which

Jeezus, Beeb, work on your headlines.

Oh well in that case maybe we care.

They must have thought again (or someone yelled at them), because if you click on the headline you get the story with a less narcissistic version…but the first one still appears in Top Stories.

Go back to headline school.… Read the rest