A male political blogger objects, with the utmost politeness and restraint, to a “mouthy” female MP who expects protection after she gets threats.

‘Panic room’ is installed at office by mouthy Labour MP. Who’s paying?

I was just kidding about the politeness and restraint. He clearly thinks he’s being polite and restrained – he repeatedly says as much in the comments – but he’s delusional on that point. The scare quotes are not polite, “mouthy” is not polite, the question about who is paying is not polite.

It’s very hard to gauge the moral rights and wrongs of this situation.

Nobody should be put in fear for their life while carrying out a job that doesn’t carry that kind

Seriously, go to Google Images and type in “vulgarian” to see what happens. It’s quite hilarious.

If that’s too much trouble, just click here.

H/t Charles Sullivan… Read the rest

A story out of Pakistan:

A British teenager claimed she was forced at gunpoint in Pakistan to marry her cousin, who raped her everyday for three years.

Tasbassan Khan [not her real name] alleged she was 15 when her aunt told her she was going on a summer holiday to Pakistan. Khan’s father had murdered her mother when she was 12, leaving her and three brothers in the care of their aunt in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

Well that’s a jolly start to life.

Now 26, Khan told the Sunday Express, “I thought I was going to Pakistan on holiday. I was excited. Then two months passed and it was time to start the school year. I asked my

There are actual flat earthers – people who believe the earth really is flat, and the only reason we don’t all realize this is because of the Giant Conspiracy.

Flat Earthers have a wide range of convictions. Some come to the movement from a religious place, others from a scientific one. But most believe in one simple principle: that NASA and everyone involved in space exploration are liars and that there is a massive conspiracy to hide the fact that the Earth is flat.

That would have to be such a massive conspiracy.

We can’t all be astronomers or physicists, of course. (I know I certainly can’t.) But I know a thing we can do: we can look at … Read the rest

The AP reports:

The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.

“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.

She didn’t really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.

So that’s what you get for being an aid worker.

On July 11, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle in the capital, Juba, over opposition forces, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in South

… Read the rest

The Independent has found a horror in London: Haredi Jews are trying to fundraise a million quid to try to stop divorcing parents taking their children with them out of the reactionary religion. The money is to pay the legal bills.

The Independent has seen flyers for a fundraising event in the Stamford Hill area of London that call for the community to back the bid, saying: “Rescue The Children Convention: We now need one million pounds and therefore the community is requested to join in with a minimum sum of £500.”

The flyers were accompanied by a letter of support from a local rabbi stating they wish to fight cases involving 17 children: “To our great pain, and

The New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi was on Fresh Air the other day. One of the things they talked about was the sex slavery of Yazidi girls and women.

GROSS: So the ISIS men who raped these women and used them as sex slaves, they believed that the Quran gave them justification to do it as long as the women didn’t get pregnant?

CALLIMACHI: Yes, yes. The Quran has about more than a dozen references to the phrase those your right hand possesses. And what scholars of Islam have explained to me is that phrase means a slave. And that phrase comes up in sections that deal with what are the licit forms of sexual intercourse that a man

Sky News talks to Kate Smurthwaite about online abuse and harassment.

It would be nice if Sky News had not stuck the label “Thought Police” next to Kate’s name in the caption. It’s not “thought policing” to want to be free of abuse online.

https://youtu.be/ZME4L7FJ_qA… Read the rest

On Saturday Review yesterday they talked about a novel, The Summer That Melted Everything. One of the participants said it was quite good but there was a great deal too much of it, and added with much passion that Americans really need to learn to edit their novels and take out a lot. That resonated with me because I’m reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I found it at a Little Free Library the other day, and was surprised 1. that it was so heavy and 2. that there was a huge heavy Donna Tartt I’d never heard of before. Now, having googled it, I’m surprised all over again about 2, because there was a huge fuss about … Read the rest

Someone I don’t know commented on a Facebook thread about a New Yorker article that asks if God is transgender. The comment expresses a very familiar, conventional, and convenient religious idea, but it’s one that makes no sense, and is the source of endless horrors. It’s an idea that should be disputed more often than it is.

Is there no end to the arrogance of humanity? We are constantly making God on our own terms instead of His, which is really nothing more than deciding that we know best and really ought to be God.

There’s so much wrong with that claim. I could go on about it for hours. The most obvious item is that if we can’t use … Read the rest

The people of Manbij in Syria have been liberated from IS.

Ecstatic Syrian civilians have been shaving off their beards, burning their burqas, smoking and dancing in the streets after being freed from Isis.

The jubilant celebrations were seen in the Syrian city of Manbij on Friday, where militants have been driven out after months of fighting by US-backed rebel groups.

Families ran through rubble-strewn streets, past the ruins of buildings destroyed in air strikes, carrying their babies and belongings.

Men jubilantly had their beards cut off as women ripped off their veils and set them on fire in an act of rebellion after years living under Isis’ brutal interpretation of Sharia law.

https://twitter.com/todayinsyria/status/764397034979885056… Read the rest