He was also charged with assaulting two boys by caning them after they allegedly reported being sexually assaulted by another priest.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Striking miners charged with murder of colleagues shot by police
State prosecutors charged the miners under the apartheid-era “common purpose”
doctrine. -
A little outing
Five men allegedly shaved off the hair and eyebrows of a young woman and paraded her in the streets of a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province, police officials said Tuesday.
The incident occurred yesterday in Layyah district, 350 km from Lahore, after the married woman was accused of having “illicit” relations with a man.
According to an FIR registered by police, Parveen Bibi, 25, the wife of Sabir Husain, had a quarrel with her sisters-in-law.
Yesterday, her brothers-in-law Muhammad Pervaiz and Muhammad Zafar and three other men shaved off her hair and eyebrows. They then blackened her face and paraded her through the streets of their village.Five men bullying one woman. How picturesque.
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Jacob Jordaens
Here’s the source painting, by the way.
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/jacob-jordaens/pieta
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Anybody who resorts to tactics of desperation like this
A blast from the past at the Richard Dawkins Foundation (of which Paula Kirby is the UK head), December 15, 2006.
The following is an email sent by William A. Dembski to Richard Dawkins along with other prominent Darwinists, particularly those who defended Darwinism during the Dover Trial.
There’s a Christmas present for you at my website.
– a flash animation that features each of you prominently (some of you are probably aware of it already). We’re still planning a few enhancements, including getting Eric Rothschild in there and having Judge Jones do the actual voiceovers himself (right now it’s me speeded up though it’s his actual words). In return for the judge doing himself, we’ll drop some of the less flattering sound effects. We would have included Prof. Padian, but the images of him on the internet weren’t of sufficient quality (I’m copying Prof. Padian — if you send me a hi res jpg of yourself, I’m sure we can work you in — you were after all the expert witness at the trial).
Best wishes, Bill Dembski
How festive. What a pleasant friendly winter solstice joke.
Or was it. The recipient didn’t think so.
Reponse from Richard Dawkins:
Anybody who resorts to tactics of desperation like this has to be a real loser. Dembski is a loser, and it now looks as though he KNOWS it. My guess is that he will try to take it down when he realizes how foolish it makes him look. Josh, can we can keep a copy, after he tries to remove it from his own website?
Hmm.
Update: Here it is, on the original site, where Dembski found it. Apparently it had farts, but the hosts came over all adult and removed that aspect. What’s left is totally adult and clever.
H/t Gerry.
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Priest tells Catholic newspaper children are seducers
The priest has a PhD in psychology from Columbia University and hosts a television talk show on the Eternal Word Television Network.
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Peanuts thrown at black camerawoman at RNC
The two white people said “this is what we feed animals.” They were quickly expelled from the convention. The camerawoman said it could happen anywhere.
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Hilarity
Gosh. Paula Kirby made a funny on Twitter.
Paula Kirby
@PaulaSKirbyLadies and gentlemen, may I request a moment of silence in honour of CrucifixionPlus (Restored). pic.twitter.com/17wLZhof
That’s kind of startling. As I said before, when she called me a Feminazi and Femistasi and part of the Sisterhood of the Oppressed, I liked her a lot when I met her at QED. She was friendly to me, and I thought we’d had a good rapport – or to put it another way, I thought the liking was reasonably mutual. Clearly it wasn’t.
Fine; nobody has to like anybody. On the other hand, calling people totalitarians and Nazis and Stasi (when they’re not)? And circulating sneery caricatures? That’s…well it’s not very adult, for a start. And it’s nasty.
I’ve said this before too, but I’ll say this again too. I’m supposed to be such a monster, but I don’t do shit like that.
Mind you, the restored Jesus still makes me laugh; it makes me laugh every time.
But Paula Kirby? No. I don’t find her funny.
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Next spring in DC
Oh hai, registration is open for Women in Secularism 2.
That means I finally get to tell you that Katha Pollitt will be there! Yes, Katha Pollitt. Booya.
Also Vyckie Garrison! Also Soraya Chemaly, also Teresa MacBain, also Amanda Marcotte, to name just a few.
This is going to be great.
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Law in a theocracy
Apparently in Pakistan, if you’re a lawyer and you think a case might not go your way, the thing to do is to muse aloud about people who got murdered in similar circumstances if you know what I mean wink wink nudge nudge. At least if you see yourself as a lawyer for Team God.
A lawyer representing the man who accused a Pakistani Christian girl of blasphemy has claimed that if she is not convicted, Muslims could “take the law into their own hands”.
Rao Abdur Raheem, who appeared in court for the first time at a bail hearing on Tuesday, cited the example of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who last year gunned down a senior politician who had called for the reform of the much-abused blasphemy law.
Because a girl of 11, with possible learning difficulties, may or may not have thrown out or burned or carried in a garbage bag a few pages from the Koran or a guidebook on reading the Koran – if she doesn’t get convicted, never mind the evidence or the age or the who cares about a few pages from a mass-produced book anyway growthefuckup, then let’s hope somebody murders her.
Really? Really, Rao Abdur Raheem? The case is so good? The “crime” is so horrendous? That you want her convicted (and executed, I take it?) or else murdered?
What a profoundly horrible person you must be. I hope you get over it.
The girl, Rimsha Masih, whose family says she is 11, was arrested earlier this month and charged with desecrating the Qur’an after a neighbour, Malik Hammad, claimed that he saw her with burnt pages of the holy text in a bag she was carrying.
Her family had hoped that she would be granted bail on Thursday after a medical report this week found that she was a minor – thus eligible for bail – and has learning difficulties. But those hopes were dashed when Raheem challenged the report in court and the hearing was postponed.
According to Raheem, the medical report on Masih was illegal, as it followed the orders of a civil servant and not the court, and went beyond its remit of determining her age. He accused the government of supporting her and manipulating court proceedings.
Speaking outside the Islamabad court after the hearing, Raheem said: “There are many Mumtaz Qadris in this country … This (medical) report has been managed by the state, state agencies and the accused.”
Later, sitting in his office beneath a large poster of Qadri, Raheem told the Guardian: “If the court is not allowed to do its work, because the state is helping the accused, then the public has no other option except to take the law into their own hands.”
Sometimes it’s actively unpleasant living in a world with so much obsessive stupid malice in it.
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Lawyer for blasphemy-accuser offers threats
A lawyer representing the man who accused a Pakistani Christian girl of blasphemy has claimed that if she is not convicted, she could be murdered.
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They’re not a separate issue
One nice thing.
There’s a transcript of a hangout PZ did with Rebecca and Jen and Brownian and Louis. (I’m not sure I know Louis.)
Louis is apparently in the UK, and he said a thing I liked.
So I see the vitriol, I see the vehemence of it. And I can understand Brownian’s point, of the, fuck you assholes [Unintelligible] misogynist skeptics. I can see it, because, you know, it’s so apparent to me as an outsider from that angle.
But when I’ve been to Skeptics in the Pub in the UK, or when I’ve been to skeptic events in the UK, or when I’ve dealt with, I don’t know, the Simon Singhs or these sorts of people over here, it’s all so obvious that. . . you know. . . Anita Anand, Simon’s partner, or any of these wonderful people whose names I can now not remember. Tessa Kendall for example. Who are fantastic skeptics and fantastic atheists and fantastic advocates for Enlightenment values and thought.
There was never a question. . . that these people that didn’t have willies were somehow our equals or betters. It was never an issue. So I’m coming from an incredibly privileged background, where it was never questioned. Or at least in my limited view, it was never questioned.
That’s the feeling I got when I was there. (Although that’s partly because I naturally didn’t experience everything. I now know of one guy who was there from the fuck you assholes [Unintelligible] misogynist skeptics contingent.)
And to see some of the abhorrent stuff that’s been chucked out across the intertubes recently, and not so recently, is shocking to me. But that just makes me want to redouble my efforts.
That, you know. . . the Enlightenment values for which skeptics and atheists claim to stand are the Enlightenment values from which feminists have built feminism. It’s – they’re not a separate issue. So I don’t really feel like ceding ground to the misogynists. I don’t really feel like ceding ground to the homophobes and the racists, and the privileged white dudes who think that, you know, being skeptical of Nessie is somehow good, good enough. It just isn’t! You know, I think it all comes from the same wellspring. It all comes from that same Enlightenment value.
Yes yes yes and yes.
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So that she will mend her ways
Małgorzata has sent me another gem – a lecture on tv by an Egyptian cleric explaining why men have to beat up women.
Abd Al-Rahman Mansour: Islam instructs a man to beat his wife as a last resort before divorce, so that she will mend her ways, treat him with kindness and respect, and know that her husband has a higher status than her.
That’s usefully blunt. We know where we are. We’re among stupid unreflective people who have not managed to figure out that stronger does not equal better or higher, and that the mere fact that person X is able to beat up person Y does not mean that person X is better than person Y. It’s the morality of street thugs. What do you do if you’re a street thug? You look for people you can take, as opposed to people who can take you. That’s not morality, it’s just engineering.
When ‘Aisha thought ill of the Prophet Muhammad, believing that he did not treat her the same as his other wives, and that when he left her room, he would go to another wife, she followed him and spied on him. ‘Aisha said that when the Prophet found out about this, “He gave me a shove that was painful.”
This was done in order to discipline her, not because the Prophet enjoyed beating or inflicting bodily harm. The Prophet did this in order to discipline this woman.
“Discipline” nothing. He did it to make her knuckle under and let him fuck around the house as much as he liked. She wasn’t as keen on polygamy as he was, so he punched her to force her to do what he wanted.
A good woman, even if beaten by her husband, puts her hand in his and says: “I will not rest until you are pleased with me.” This is how the Prophet Muhammad taught his women to be.
Well of course he did, because it make things so pleasant for him. It’s been making things pleasant for Muslim men ever since.
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Police the borders
The Everyday Sexism Project keeps track of that very thing. If you follow it on Twitter you see a lot of items that people send in. One today was the children’s magazine rack at Tesco.
Picture by
@sconesgone -
Both parties have respect
Fabulous. The Republicans are having New York’s archbishop Timothy Dolan saying a goodbye prayer at their convention, so now the Democrats are having him too, so that everyone will know that both parties suck up to the Catholic church because hey, votes.
The fact that Dolan will be speaking at both conventions, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, shows the measure of respect both parties have for “ou[r] new cardinal.”
Yes exactly, and why the hell should they do that?
Mind you, the rest of what Bloomberg said sounded a tad perfunctory, or even contemptuous.
“It’s very flattering, I think, to him,” Bloomberg said. “He’s a very good speaker, and I’m sure he’ll give a very nice invocation, blessing or whatever he chooses to call it.”
Mmmmmmf.
But seriously. Timothy Dolan is the guy who pitched a huge fit at the New York Times for reporting on priestly child rape because other people do it too. He’s not someone both parties should respect. He’s a moral imbecile.
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Gujarat riots: BJP former minister convicted
Former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani of the BJP is among 32 people convicted in one of the worst incidents of mob violence, in Naroda Patiya.
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Enabling them
Aron Ra said his piece in Amy’s series.
Remember that we’re not talking about religizombies either; we’re talking about plainly prejudiced people who consistently identify as, associate with, and participate in the freethinking community –both virtually and personally. Yes or no, are these the sort of people you want to have seen as representative of your position? Or typical of it? Or welcome in it? Because when you minimize the threat they impose, you are enabling them.
If you’re tired of hearing what’s-her-name complain about this all the time, why not solve the problem? Could it help to pretend that isn’t a problem? Or not enough of one to warrant your attention? Should you become part of the problem yourself? Do you think a bit of name-calling would be an appropriate response? If you not only permit it –by ignoring it- but actually contribute to it at all, then you’re aiding and defending those trolls –which is much worse than feeding them. If you’re well-known in this movement, you’ll be seen as a spokesman for despicable behavior. I have seen it happen.
Because when you minimize the threat they impose, you are enabling them. Yes you are.
There was a time when one could get away with telling really offensive jokes, or expressing deep-seated hatred against any other demographic, and it would be nervously tolerated. Why is it not that way anymore? Because the pockets of humanity who permit that are dwindling. That means progressive people are having a positive impact, and there is just no defensible alternate position on this matter.
So be a progressive people and have a positive impact. Dwindle the pockets of humanity who permit the expression of deep-seated hatred against women. Because why not?
