Irony stretched to the breaking point – a Facebook rant (sorry, I instantly forgot who posted it so can’t link) about how pathetically unelectable the Dems are, because all the people who spoke last night – Cory Booker, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren among others – never struggled a day in their lives, so how can they possibly lure voters away from Trump?

What universe is this? Trump is the one who inherited millions. Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren grew up working class. Cory Booker’s parents were IBM executives, but I don’t think we should be assuming that even comfortably middle class black kids grow up with zero struggle, especially compared to rich white kids.

People seem to confuse Trump’s incredible … Read the rest

The BBC reports fallout from its own reporting on the “hyena” in Malawi who cheerfully admitted that he’s HIV-positive.

An HIV-positive Malawian man, who says he is paid to have sex with children as part of initiation rites, has been arrested on the president’s orders.

Eric Aniva, a sex worker known in Malawi as a “hyena”, was the subject of a BBC feature last week.

He told the BBC that did not mention his HIV status to those who hire him.

President Peter Mutharika said the police should investigate and charge him over the cases of defilement he had seemingly confessed to.

“Defilement” is a horrible choice of word. He apparently confessed to potential infection.

“While we must promote positive

When choosy-choice libertarian “feminism” meets Porn Culture Today – and the result is hipster bullshit.

Can a feminist have rape fantasies?

According to feminist pornography producer Pandora Blake, who runs the fetish porn site Dreams of Spanking and frequently portrays fantasies of “non-consent”, the answer is a no-brainer. “Absolutely.”

The general consensus in the feminist porn movement is that no fantasy, no matter how anti-feminist the subject matter appears to be, is off limits. To tell a woman what she is and is not allowed to be turned on by is just about as anti-feminist as it gets.

No, it really isn’t. We know the advertisers and marketers and porn producers want you to think that, but if we think … Read the rest

Erdoğan is zeroing in on the journalists now.

One journalist, who was on vacation, had his home raided in the early morning by the police. Others were called in to their bosses’ offices last week and fired, with little explanation. Dozens of reporters have had their press credentials revoked.

A pro-government newspaper, meanwhile, published a list of names and photographs of journalists suspected of treachery.

The witch-hunt environment that has enveloped Turkey in the wake of a failed military coup extended to the media on Monday, as the government issued warrants for the detention of dozens of journalists.

Erdoğan never has liked to see journalists just doing journalism, without any helpful guidance from him.

Many dozens of journalists have

A 28-year-old woman from Bradford dies suddenly while visiting relatives in Pakistan.

Police are investigating the death of a British woman in Pakistan after her husband claimed she was the victim of an “honour” killing for marrying a man from outside the family allegedly against her parents’ wishes.

Samia Shahid, a beauty therapist from Bradford, died on Wednesday while visiting relatives in Pandori village near Mangla Dam in northern Punjab, the Foreign Office confirmed.

Shahid’s local MP, Naz Shah, has demanded that authorities in Pakistan exhume her body and commission an independent autopsy.

Her husband was told she’d had a heart attack. Someone else told the Guardian it was asthma.

Her husband said he feared she had been killed

Glosswitch ponders the way purity politics on the left ends up meaning misogyny just doesn’t matter enough to do anything.

Misogyny may be deplored in theory, but when you look at actual women, they are never good enough to merit protection. Men are. Men always are. There’s not a man on earth who doesn’t benefit from the unpaid labour of women, but that is only natural. As Andrea Dworkin put it, “God is the right, nature is the left.” There’s always a moral reason for hating women. Ruth Smeeth worked for an evil corporation, as have I. Screw us. While men’s humanity is not in question, women only get one humanity token and we blew it.

Today’s left wing

That’s not all Theresa Kachindamoto is working on. She’s also working on making it possible for girls to stay in school instead of getting married.

Theresa Kachindamoto, the senior chief in the Dedza District of Central Malawi, wields power over close to 900,000 people… and she’s not afraid to use her authority to help the women and girlsin her district. In the past three years, she has annulled more than 850 child marriages, sent hundreds of young women back to school to continue their education, and made strides to abolish cleansing rituals that require girls as young as seven to go to sexual initiation camps. With more than half of Malawi’s girls married before the age of

An “interesting” custom in Malawi:

In some remote southern regions of Malawi, it’s traditional for girls to be made to have sex with a paid sex worker known as a “hyena” once they reach puberty. The act is not seen by village elders as rape, but as a form of ritual “cleansing”. However, as Ed Butler reports, it has the potential to be the opposite of cleansing – a way of spreading disease.

Well, you know, how it’s seen by “the village elders” isn’t really the issue, since it’s not the village elders who are being fucked against their will. Note that the girls are made to “have sex with” this guy – in other words they’re raped. The … Read the rest

IS says it did it – sent the suicide bombers who killed 80 people in Kabul and wounded another 230.

The IS-linked Amaq news agency said two fighters “detonated explosive belts at a gathering of Shia” in Kabul.

The attack in Deh Mazang square targeted thousands from the Shia Hazara minority who were protesting over a new power line, saying its route bypasses provinces where many of them live.

…

An Afghan intelligence source told the BBC that an IS commander named Abo Ali had sent three jihadists from the Achen district of Nangarhar province to carry out the Kabul attack.

Only one of them successfully exploded his belt, so the death and injury toll could have been much higher.… Read the rest

A letter to the New York Times yesterday:

To the Editor:

As Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s mother, I am writing to object to any mention of his name and death in Benghazi, Libya, by Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party.

I know for certain that Chris would not have wanted his name or memory used in that connection. I hope that there will be an immediate and permanent stop to this opportunistic and cynical use by the campaign.

MARY F. COMMANDAY

Will Trump heed this request?

Any bets?… Read the rest

… Read the rest

I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life – the translation of La Force de l’Age, the second volume of her memoirs – last night and arrived at a sentence that I found supremely hilarious.

It’s November, and she and Sartre are sitting on the terrace of a café in Le Havre, as one does, “complaining at length about the monotony of our future existence.” That’s not it though. This is it:

If I drank a little too much one evening I was liable to burst into floods of tears, and my old hankering after the Absolute would be aroused again.

You’re welcome.… Read the rest

Tom Slater at spiked utters the familiar mindless platitudes about what he calls “free speech” when he’s actually talking about unchecked bullying and abuse.

For all of our 15 years, spiked has championed freedom of speech – with no ifs or buts. For us, it’s an indivisible liberty, a freedom that crumbles once you caveat or qualify it. More profoundly, it’s the foundation stone of politics, progress and solidarity. It is through having the freedom to speak our minds that we create the space to experiment with new, transformative ideas, and decide, collectively, what is important. That’s why the insidious creep of censorship – from hate-speech laws to Twittermobs – so troubles us. Each and every act of censorship chips