The American University in Kabul is being attacked, the BBC reports.

A large explosion has been heard and students barricaded inside rooms in the building say they can hear gunfire close by.

The emergency hospital says it has received five injured people from the scene so far.

Police have described it as a “complex attack” and have deployed special forces.

Some people have escaped, some are trapped inside.

Student Ahmad Mukhtar told the BBC that he was 100m (320ft) away from the university’s main entrance when he heard “six or 10” shots and a “huge” blast.

The explosion created so much light that it momentarily lit up the surrounding area, he said.

Then there were was more firing inside

The Atlantic has an extraordinarily ridiculous piece about trans men who have babies and breast feed them, and (this is the ridiculous part) the resulting need to stop talking about pregnancy and breast feeding as something that women do.

The writer is someone called Britni De La Cretaz, who calls herself Britni De La Cretaz, Writer on Facebook.

[Trevor] MacDonald began blogging about chestfeeding from his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and soon discovered a whole community of transmasculine people around the world in the same boat, looking for guidance. For trans men and transmasculine folks, putting a baby to their chest to suckle can lead to complicated feelings about their gender. Many lactation support services are available for “nursing

God damn it.

The Guardian:

A black British woman who was chosen to tweet from the @ireland account for a week has been subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, forcing her to take a break from Twitter.

Michelle Marie took over the account – which is curated by a different Twitter user in Ireland each week – on Monday. She introduced herself as a mother, blogger and plus-size model.

Originally from Oxford in England, she wrote she had settled in Ireland and “it has my heart”.

However, just hours after taking [she took] over the profile – which is followed by nearly 40,000 people – the abuse began.

And Twitter did nothing, as always. “Free speech” – unless … Read the rest

A much-needed video appeared yesterday, apparently via Alain de Botton and definitely via The School of Life – The Dick Pic. You may think sending dick pics nobody asked for is not a very thoughtful hobby, but have you thought about it deeply enough? The School of Life is here to help.

https://youtu.be/_1vIPRNhOP4

It’s pretty painful to watch, what with the pretentious narrator and all, but it’s an essay as well as a video, so we’re in luck.

The Dick Picture is one of the least well-regarded of contemporary genres. To many, the idea of a man sending an acquaintance a picture of his penis sounds the height of idiotic self-regard and arrogance. Who, after all, would be interested

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times on Facebook invited female attorneys to respond to their story on the ABA’s effort to get sexist remarks out of the courtroom. Many did. A sampling:

• I have been an attorney in Colorado for 17 years and in late December 2015, in an attorney’s fees hearing in federal court for a case we won in July 2015, the federal judge said, on the record, that my job in the trial (by the way I was the only female portion of my trial team and there were no females on the opposing trial team), “could have been done by a legal secretary” (Note I was second chair). In that 5-day federal jury

Originally a comment by ZugTheMegasaurus on All the while insisting we call them “feminist”.

The only thing that seemed to survive this push to destigmatize feminism is the word itself. People wanted so badly for “feminism” to not trigger this negative knee-jerk reaction, but they only succeeded by making it a toothless word that no one feels a need to react to.

It’s not that I don’t understand. I’m also irritated by people assuming all sorts of stupid shit about feminism and feminists. But I can also understand that feminism is, by its very nature, going to upset a lot of people. I can understand that it is not something that everyone is going to embrace, or even see … Read the rest

So it turns out that if you give people the opportunity to opt out of a religion they were “born” into, they take it.

Norway’s state chuch lost more than 15,000 followers in four days after launching an online registration system allowing people to opt in or out.

The Lutheran Church is the country’s largest, with nearly three-quarters of the population registered as members.

Nearly three-quarters of the population – in highly secular Norway. How could that statistic not be an artifact of churchy overcounting?

But officials revealed that many instead used the new process to do the opposite, with 10,854 people de-enrolling from the church in the 24 hours after the launch of the website on 15 August.

God hates women who get higher education.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbis have banned women from going to university, The Independent has learned.

The strict Satmar sect issued the decree, seen by The Independent, warning that university education for women is “dangerous”. Written in Yiddish, the decree warns: “It has lately become the new trend that girls and married women are pursuing degrees in special education. Some attend classes and others online. And so we’d like to let their parents know that it is against the Torah.

“We will be very strict about this. No girls attending our school are allowed to study and get a degree. It is dangerous. Girls who will not abide will be forced to leave our

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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