The Times reports on that firing of an academic who showed an image of Mohammed in an art history class we talked about last month.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

Let me just interrupt here to say it’s an art history class and students shouldn’t be able to impose their religious taboos on all the students in the class. Their deeply held religious beliefs should be their problem, not everyone else’s. If they can’t tolerate images of … Read the rest

Allons enfants:

Parisians will be invited to vote on whether to allow electric scooter rental services to continue operating in the French capital as authorities weigh banning the controversial for-hire vehicles, the city’s mayor has said.

Do it. Those things are a nightmare. People zoom silently down the sidewalk [pavement] on them, risking the lives of all pedestrians.

The issue is “extremely divisive”, Anne Hidalgo told the weekend edition of Le Parisien newspaper, with critics saying riders show only cursory respect for the rules of the road.

Cursory meaning zero.

They often defy bans on riding on pavements, or park without consideration, while some abandon the scooters in parks or even toss them into the Seine river.

…

Let Women Speak part one:

Apparently the audio cuts out a lot, so be warned.

Part 2 is refusing to embed so here is Part 2.

H/t latsot… Read the rest

Interesting. It seems that if you’re in the military, reporting rape=having a “personality disorder” and getting discharged.

Hundreds of female members of the Armed Forces who accused their colleagues of rape were “misdiagnosed” with having a personality disorder, The Telegraph can reveal.

You can kind of see the logic, I guess. No one but a personality disordered person would accuse a colleague of rape. It’s such a…disordered thing to do.

The victims claimed that after they sought help for sexual assault from the military’s departments of community mental health (DCMH), they were “written off” with emotionally unstable personality disorder and subsequently medically discharged.

Very community mental health. I’m sure it did wonders for them.

Paula Edwards, the chief executive of

Originally a comment by latsot in Miscellany Room.

I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today. There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.

If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.

I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera … Read the rest

Oh yes about that guy with his dick out:

Victoria Centre statement over pictures of person exposing themselves in House of Fraser

Not themselves, just himself. He’s a guy.

A statement has been issued after photos of a person appearing to indecently expose themselves in a Nottingham designer shop caused rage on social media. The censored pictures have been widely shared on social media, depicting a person seemingly exposing their private parts in public.

What an abominable piece of writing. The photos were of a man apparently flashing in a Nottingham shop.

Users have identified the shop where the pictures were taken, which was in various locations across House of Fraser, in Nottingham’s Victoria Centre. The person seems to

Police seize Andrew Tate’s supplementary penises:

Several luxury cars have been seized from British-American influencer Andrew Tate’s property in Bucharest.

British-American for-profit misogynist, they mean.

After the arrests on 29 December, police said they had identified six people who were allegedly “sexually exploited” by what it called an “organised criminal group”.

Six people? Not six women? Were some of them men?

Police alleged the victims were “recruited” by the British citizens, who they said misrepresented their intention to enter into a relationship with the victims – which they called “the loverboy method”.

They were later forced to perform in pornographic content under threat of violence, a statement alleged.

That certainly sounds as if all six were women. Why not … Read the rest

Trans people in the bible! Jesus lifts up gender-queer people as model disciples!!

Also how fast can we talk let’s try to set a record… Read the rest

Is the long arm of the law finally reaching out to grab Trump by the shoulder?

Even as Donald Trump prepares to dial up his campaign to take back the White House, the former US president’s political and personal fate may already have been decided by the secret workings of a grand jury in Georgia.

The 23-member panel, convened to consider whether Trump and others committed crimes in trying to overturn his defeat in Georgia when it appeared the state might decide the outcome of the entire 2020 presidential election, was dissolved on Monday after submitting its conclusions and asking that they be made public.

…

In November, the day before Trump announced he was again running for the White

It’s like Nazi Germany. Just like. No difference.

I feel hunted. It is fascism. I understand how Jews must have felt in Germany in the Thirties.

— Davina Regina (@DavinaRegina68) January 13, 2023

No he doesn’t.

Exactly how I feel. And nobody’s doing anything.

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) January 13, 2023

There is no resemblance. None. Pretending there is is a disgusting form of narcissism. … Read the rest

That’s…………..what we’re saying.

My view is gender neutral awards should reserve 50% of nominations for women.

Women represent a majority of the music industry workforce, so the Academy making the nominations should also be weighted to be at least 50% women, too. https://t.co/7JrDha1S8f

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) January 13, 2023

That’s the whole point. Gender-neutral awards=women being forgotten. That’s why there have to be awards specifically for women. If the Oscars didn’t have a Best Actress category women would have vastly fewer awards, because most movies have few women and those few women have few lines.

But

Non-binary people, like Emma Corrin and Sam Smith, exist. They're never going to accept being in a men or women's category.

So you

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Telegraph can reveal.

Why go to all the trouble of removing care of trans children from the Tavistock only to get training from Mermaids? Why not find people who aren’t captive to a deranged ideology?

The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the regulator, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) starting this month.

It’s under investigation, but in the meantime – “Keep doing what you’ve been doing!”

Mermaids’ influence on

A genius comments on Joan Smith’s The Brits go gender-neutral and women disappear:

This is the real paradox of late stage feminism, by insisting that women can be equal to men in everything and anything they have forced women to compete in spaces and venues where Nature has given men genetic advantages – hence women are pushed down the hierarchy.

Yes indeed, women are genetically inferior to men in the writing novels departments, which is why we’ve never heard of Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or Mary McCarthy or Margaret Drabble or Margaret Atwood.… Read the rest

Let’s drop the sex categories for the awards, they said! Let’s make the awards gender-neutral, they said! It will be awesome, they said!

Who could possibly have predicted that would happen? The top category in a major music award goes ‘gender-neutral’ — and this year’s nominees are all men. The Brit Awards scrapped the best male and best female categories last year, ignoring warnings that the decision would lead to the exclusion of women. Five male artists, including Stormzy and Harry Styles, are in the running in 2023, with not a woman — or a gender-neutral person — in sight.

Welllllllllll but then obviously that’s because women aren’t as good, isn’t it? Not at all because women just get … Read the rest

How to suppress the vote:

When [Ohio] Gov. Mike DeWine last week signed what’s been called the nation’s strictest voter ID law, it raised fears that it would disenfranchise large numbers of voters in poor communities where people are less likely to meet the new requirements.

Why? Because strict ID is not wealth-neutral.

Those fears seem to be supported by a September report that estimates 1 million Ohioans have suspended licenses because of debts from things such as a lack of insurance, unpaid fines, and court costs. That’s in a state with 8 million registered voters.

The analysis, by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, said the suspensions by far fall most heavily on impoverished urban communities of

This just in –

Today, the Trump Organization has been sentenced for committing years of tax fraud and must pay $1.6 million, the maximum penalty.
 @ManhattanDA and I will always work to ensure any individual or organization that cheats New Yorkers is brought to justice.

— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) January 13, 2023

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sastra on Damn reaper, the post that reported the bad news that Harriet Hall had died suddenly.

This is very sad news indeed.

I was her official First Fan. I’d somehow come across several of her early essays (including iirc the “Tooth Fairy Science” one) and thought they were wonderful. James Randi’s second The Amazing Meeting was held that year in Vegas and he’d put up the names of all the attendees on a board in the lobby. I was thrilled to see “Harriet Hall” listed and spent the convention looking at the women’s name tags. No luck. Near the end of TAM we went to see Penn & Teller and afterwards a bunch … Read the rest

It’s been pouring rain all day and still is raining, though not quite so hard – but all the same there’s someone with a snarling backpack blower out there, the one who generally takes an hour or more to shift every leaf on the large property across the alley. I hate the sound noise of blowers even more than I hate the noise of mowers, weedeaters, hedgeclippers, edgers, and all the rest of the box of tricks.

I’m not the only one who hates the damn things.

It’s almost impossible to enjoy a quiet moment in many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods without hearing leaf blowers. The engines alternate between bone-shaking rumbles and high-pitched whines that assault our ears.

It’s a … Read the rest

Another “progressive” man trashing women via the Karen trope.

imagine if suburban white women had twitter during the peak years of the AIDS epidemic

— Ben Miller (@benwritesthings) January 12, 2023

… Read the rest

Oh damn, bad news.

This is Kirk Hall, Harriet’s husband.

I know Harriet’s work was followed and admired by many of you. It is with great sadness that I must tell you my beloved wife passed away quietly and unexpectedly in her sleep last night.

Please take care.

— Harriet A. Hall, MD (@HHSkepDoc) January 12, 2023

… Read the rest