All entries by this author

Splaining

Sep 18th, 2016 9:54 am | By

Mischa Haider tells us how difficult it is being a trans woman with children. People look at her funny in the playground.

In these moments I am reminded how easily our worth as individuals, along with the bonds we form with our loved ones, can wither before the relentless gaze of society. That is the prison not only for transgender women and mothers but, I increasingly realize, for all women and mothers.

It’s interesting that she’s only now realizing that women are subject to social scrutiny and devaluation.

We inhabit a world in which we are seen as passive receptacles, defined by an oppressive normative gaze sharpened through millennia of misogynistic formulations long accepted as inarguable facts of nature.

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Get a job in the exciting field of prostitution

Sep 17th, 2016 4:11 pm | By

Sarah Dean at iNews:

School careers officers could suggest prostitution as a line of work for pupils, the Lib Dem conference has heard.

Dennis Parsons, the chairman of Cheltenham Liberal Democrats, floated the idea at a special session on sex work.

The Lib Dem said careers officers are not allowed to suggest prostitution, but added: “Why shouldn’t they?”

Good question. Why also shouldn’t they be allowed to suggest pupils could sell themselves into slavery? Careers officers could be urging pupils to sample the joys of working in garment factories in Bangladesh, or the leather industry in India, or cleaning sewers in Mogadishu, or sweeping the streets in North Korea. There are horrible dangerous jobs everywhere, so why shouldn’t school … Read the rest



Peel’s Principles of Law Enforcement

Sep 17th, 2016 3:32 pm | By

Something all Americans should be aware of, and aren’t. I wasn’t. Helen Dale pointed it out on Facebook, and we Americans had to confess ignorance. “Christ on a skateboard,” said Helen.

Sir Robert Peel ‘s Principles of Law Enforcement 1829

  1. The basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to the repression of crime and disorder by military force and severity of legal punishment.2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behaviour and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.3. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be
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Elizabeth Colson

Sep 17th, 2016 11:51 am | By

Via Neil Shubin, an obituary of anthropologist Elizabeth Colson from UC Berkeley:

Elizabeth Colson, a trailblazing professor emerita in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, died Aug. 3 at the age of 99 at her home in Zambia, Africa. Since the 1940s, she studied social change related to forced displacement, migration, development, kinship and political anthropology that carried implications far beyond the African continent.

She was watching birds from her verandah when she had a fatal stroke. That’s a good last thing to be doing, if you ask me.

“Truckloads of Zambians attended, tribal chiefs, university people, government people, Zambian(s) singing,” colleague Laura Nader, also a senior professor in anthropology at UC Berkeley, wrote in a remembrance of

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Every time he speaks

Sep 17th, 2016 11:10 am | By

A Trump classic from two years ago:

The lying cheating thieving bullying fraud calls other people losers and born fucked up.… Read the rest



The occupiers

Sep 17th, 2016 10:22 am | By

Maxine Bernstein reports on scenes from the Bundy trial:

FBI agents on Friday took the witness stand to reveal some of the hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts and private messages that defendants in the Oregon standoff trial made in late December and throughout the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Testimony focused on many of Ammon Bundy’s Facebook posts in late December and January, including his “Call for Action” in Burns on behalf of a pair of local ranchers poised to return to federal prison, and how his comments were interpreted.

Some people innocently thought that Bundy didn’t mean violent action, and urged him to make that clearer.

Some followers said they were confused about the

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Trump again hints Clinton should be shot

Sep 16th, 2016 5:34 pm | By

From the Guardian’s live coverage of the campaign:

Mere hours after he appeared to put one of the oldest criticisms of his presidential campaign to rest with the acknowledgment that President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters that his opponent’s Secret Service detail should disarm itself due to what he characterized as her opposition to the Second Amendment.

“Take their guns away,” Trump said of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. “Let’s see what happens to her.”

Speaking at a campaign rally in Miami, Florida, Trump criticized Clinton’s stance on gun-control issues, characterizing her stance as wanting to “abolish” the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the

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Is the “female brain” really so predictable?

Sep 16th, 2016 5:19 pm | By

Jemima Lewis is also not impressed by the Science Museum’s girl/boy brains exhibit.

According to the Science Museum’s interactive test of “brain sex”, I am – in common with others of the female persuasion – possessed of a “good visual memory”, but not so skilled at “seeing things in three dimensions” or “being able to imagine how things rotate”.

This verdict annoys me. What are they trying to say? That just because I happen to have a womb I must be terrible at parking? (I am terrible at parking.) Is the “female brain” really so predictable, so set in its ways, that it can be identified by an algorithm on the basis of just six questions?

Of course … Read the rest



A video scoreboard for the football stadium

Sep 16th, 2016 4:53 pm | By

A guy works at the University of New Hampshire library for 50 years, saves all his money, and leaves the University $4 million in his will. Great story, no? Yes, except for what the university elected to do with it.

The university dedicated $2.5 million to an expanded, centrally located career center, it said when it announced the gift two weeks ago. It put $100,000 toward the Dimond Library, where Morin worked, fulfilling the only specific spending request he attached to his donation. And with much of the remaining gift, the university wrote a controversial check.

It put $1 million toward a video scoreboard for its new $25 million football stadium.

Sigh.

Ok the university points out that … Read the rest



Pull the other one

Sep 16th, 2016 4:34 pm | By

Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that. Do.not.ever.do.that.

The Sun:

GUARDSMAN Chloe Allen has become the British Army’s first female frontline soldier — after being born a boy called Ben.

The 24-year-old joined up four years ago as a man, but changed her name officially last month.

Then that doesn’t count as the British Army’s first female frontline soldier. Just stop.

She will be the first woman allowed to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.

Chloe, from Cumbria, has now started hormone therapy.

Stop stop stop that.

The caption reads:

Chloe makes history as the first female in­fantry soldier since the Army began in 1660

No Chloe does not. Stop doing that.… Read the rest



He stepped on a lot of people

Sep 16th, 2016 4:16 pm | By

CNN on some of the small companies Donald Trump cheated.

“It was like we won the lottery,” Beth Rosser remembers. Her dad, Forest Jenkins, had just secured a $200,000 contract to work at the biggest prize in Atlantic City: Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal.

His company installed toilet partitions — not exactly glamorous, but important nonetheless. It was 1988, and a six-figure contract was huge.

They were all excited…but the check never arrived.

“We weren’t this big company,” remembers Rosser, who now runs the company with her brother, Steven. “We didn’t have tons of money in an account somewhere to cover things.”

Jenkins says his dad, who built the company from nothing, nearly lost everything.

The Taj Mahal, the most

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Trump is not a normal candidate

Sep 16th, 2016 3:39 pm | By

Dan Rather on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s disdain, mockery, and antagonism of the press, whose freedoms are enshrined in the Bill of Rights and whose presence has provided ballast to our democracy since its inception, raises very serious questions about his fitness for the presidency of the United States.

For a long while, these thoughts have been coursing through my veins with concern and disbelief, and yet my abiding loyalty to the notion of fair, accurate and unbiased journalism held me in check from saying it out loud – much as I suspect it has muzzled the true feelings of many of my colleagues. But we must remember that Donald Trump knows this and cynically plays the press corps’ deep

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The fraternity

Sep 16th, 2016 11:44 am | By

The largest police union has endorsed the fascist misogynist lying thieving cheating bully Trump.

The Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump for president on Friday, praising the Republican nominee’s “real commitment to law enforcement.”

Trump met with the 33,000-member police union in early August and its endorsement bolsters his claim that he is the “law and order candidate.”

Oh really? What about all the stealing and lying and cheating? What about the fraud?

Clinton has made reforming the criminal justice system a centerpiece of her campaign, highlighting it during a particularly violent July week in which a pair of unarmed black men were killed by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana, leading to nationwide protests. At one such

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A final insult

Sep 16th, 2016 11:29 am | By

A woman in Italy killed herself after a terrible year of revenge porn and social media shaming.

Tiziana Cantone, 31, was found dead at her aunt’s home in Mugnano, close to Naples in the country’s south, on Tuesday. Her funeral procession was televised as commentators grappled with the tragic outcome of her torment.

Cantone’s death came a year after she sent a sex video of herself to some friends including an ex-boyfriend .

The video was subsequently posted on the web and viewed almost a million times. The phrase “You’re filming? Bravo”, spoken to her lover in the video, became a derisive joke online and was printed on T-shirts, smartphone cases and other items.

She quit her job, she … Read the rest



The rights of abusive men

Sep 16th, 2016 11:11 am | By

Sandra Laville at the Guardian reports:

The government must carry out a full review of family courts to stop them being used by violent men to perpetuate abuse against their partners and children, MPs have said.

They called on the justice secretary, Liz Truss, to act swiftly to tackle deep-seated cultural attitudes among family court judges which put the rights of abusive men over the safety of women and children.

MPs were debating research by Women’s Aid which revealed that between 2005 and 2015, 19 children in 12 families were killed by violent fathers who had been allowed to see them through formal and informal child contact arrangements.

Women who leave their husbands to escape violence and coercive control … Read the rest



Statement by Sri Lanka’s Muslim Personal Law Reforms Action Group

Sep 16th, 2016 10:37 am | By

A statement released by the Muslim Personal Law (MPL) Reforms Action Group in Sri Lanka consisting of individual human rights advocates, lawyers, and women, as well as community and women’s rights groups:

 

In 2014, a 14-year old Muslim girl in Eastern province was given in marriage and her schooling was stopped as a result. After a few months of marriage she applied for fasah divorce (initiated by wife) due to severe sexual torture by her husband. The Quazi instead of dealing with the case in a sensitive and appropriate manner chose to interrogate her for over two hours asking her specific details about the sexual violence. This in turn caused the girl serious psychological trauma that she attempted suicide

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Men were on the main floor

Sep 15th, 2016 5:32 pm | By

I envy Canada Trudeau, but I also think he shouldn’t be endorsing gender-segregated mosques by paying them visits.

Trudeau was at the mosque Monday to mark Eid al-Adha, considered the holiest of feast days for the world’s Muslims. Three female MPs accompanied Trudeau during his brief remarks, though they had to arrive by a side door and stand with their heads covered. They did not address the mosque.

Worshippers at the mosque are separated by gender. Men were on the main floor where Trudeau spoke. Women and girls were in a balcony or in other parts of the mosque. [Asra] Nomani said that recent surveys indicate about two of every three mosques separate men from women, but that is

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Meeting

Sep 15th, 2016 4:04 pm | By

Afghan Atheists posted a very pointed, and poignant, photo, with the caption “When the present meets its past.”

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Getting around

Sep 15th, 2016 12:54 pm | By

Frivolous interlude:

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Silver heart charm and glittery sock

Sep 15th, 2016 12:30 pm | By

It’s everywhere. It’s in shoes – kids’ shoes. (“Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream?”) Francesca Cambridge Mallen, chief campaigner for Let Clothes Be Clothes, went shopping for school shoes with her daughter age 8.

Three shoes are available in her size: two pairs are slip-ons which with a knowing look from Grandma we dismiss immediately. After all, these are what Clarks describe as “sophisticated style” which makes me wonder how they could have missed the fact they are selling to kids, not office staff. When my daughter plunges over in a tangle of shoes and playground, I’ll be sure to console her with how classy she looked doing it.

The third pair are the most common style in the

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