Amjad Khan at Sedaa suggests that the SPLC’s grotesque claims about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are rooted in an inadequate supply of racists at a time when the demand is higher than ever before.

Without the demand left-wing activists that organise themselves as anti-bigotry activists can’t justify their work and, more importantly, request for donations. Hence, the definition of bigotry needs to be stretched, new sources of bigotry need to be found and, eventually, critics of the regressive left find themselves being accused of bigotry.

I think the first three words should read “Without the supply” but we get the idea – there aren’t enough racists to keep anti-racism organizations busy and well funded. I don’t actually … Read the rest

By way of a shout-out to blasphemy and a fuck you to the SPLC – the new Jesus and Mo:

Patreon is here.

 … Read the rest

Samantha Bee on that whole thing where Catholic bishops tell women to die rather than get an abortion. It’s brilliant.

H/t Jen Phillips… Read the rest

Uh oh. Rachel Maddow could be in for some shunning.

New rule:

If you don’t have a vagina, you don’t get to make laws regulating them.

 … Read the rest

Glosswitch on the World Health Organisation’s new definition of infertility:

A woman’s desire to control her reproductive destiny will always be in direct opposition to patriarchy’s desire to exploit female bodies as a reproductive resource. The social institutions that develop to support the latter – such as marriage – may change, but the exploitation can remain in place.

To put it another way, marriage is not the only way to exploit female bodies as a reproductive resource. We live in modern times! We are liberated! Women can simply be rented now!

This is why all feminists – and indeed anyone serious about tackling patriarchy at the root – should be deeply concerned about the World Health Organisation’s new definition

The BBC reports on a pleasing interlude in the well-forested state of Maine:

A man in America has been arrested for obstructing traffic after crossing the road dressed as a tree.

Asher Woodworth, from the US state of Maine, covered himself in branches and walked really slowly across a street.

Ok so he slowed traffic a little, but he probably brightened up a lot of people’s day in the process.

Police in Portland arrested this tree for blocking traffic this afternoon. For real. @WCSH6 @WLBZ2 pic.twitter.com/molDocnKu7

— Kattey Ortiz (@katteynotkatie) October 24, 2016

You can see people grinning in the video – including one of the cops. Day brightened.

Frankly I hope it catches on. Beats scary clowns any day.… Read the rest

Obama is reminding the Republicans that he warned them.

On the stump, Obama now regularly links Trump’s candidacy, and the bind he’s created for down-ballot Republicans, to a greater theory about the way the right has practiced politics throughout his presidency.

“For years,” Obama said in Las Vegas, “Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.”

Obama went on:

[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along

Surprise surprise – Julian Assange and Donald Trump have things in common – and not just the predilection for sexual assault.

Julian Assange isn’t a Russia spy, but he is taking revenge on Hillary Clinton, and “if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions,” James Ball, who worked with WikiLeaks when it made its biggest splash, in 2010, writes at BuzzFeed News.

Anti-Clinton animus isn’t the only thing driving Assange in 2016, after four years of self-imposed exile in a tiny apartment in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Ball writes: Assange thinks himself “the equal of a world leader,” and the leak of Clinton

When beliefs about “gender” topple into full-on woo bullshit.

It’s a reply to a comment at the Huffington Post (which provides a link to the comment but not the reply, go figure):

Vanessa Sheridan ·

Director of Transgender Relations and Community Engagement at Center on Halsted

With respect, I would suggest that how the world relates to you has nothing to do with your femininity. Femininity comes from within, not from without. How others may or may not perceive you has nothing to do with your innate, invisible gender identity. That identity is self-determined (at least in an emotionally healthy person), and external forces are simply that: external and, for the most part, extraneous. Oh, it’s nice when other people