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

The Salt Lake Tribune:

Pornography made her captor more violent, Elizabeth Smart said in a video posted online Friday.

Produced by the anti-porn advocacy group Fight the New Drug, the 5-minute video delves into how Smart’s convicted kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, would “just sit and look” at various “hard-core” porn magazines.

“I can’t say that he would not have gone out and kidnapped me had he not looked at pornography,” Smart says in the video. “All I know is that pornography made my living hell worse.”

Smart was held captive for nine months in the Utah mountains after Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, pulled the then-14-year-old Salt Lake City girl from her bed at knifepoint in June

When I saw this yesterday I thought it was satire – I assumed it was satire, I took it for granted it was satire. I had a good laugh and shared it on Facebook, thinking it was satire. Then I learned that it’s not satire – they mean it.

The title is We Messed Up. What follows is a hyperbolic, endless confession of wrong-doing over…a movie review and a lesbian taco shell.

And it’s not satire.

Yesterday we published a review of Seth Rogen’s new animated film, Sausage Party. After we received feedback about it from our Trans Editor Mey Rude, the members of the QTPOC Speakeasy and Facebook commenters, we decided to un-publish the piece. Here’s how

This one is just frivolous, but it’s so peculiar I can’t resist it.

The CBC reports:

A Washington state couple preoccupied with reliving the Victorian era — from their icebox to their undergarments — were asked to change out of their traditional costumes or leave Butchart Gardens near Victoria.

I remember reading about that couple; I thought maybe I’d blogged about them but if so I can’t find it. They do their “Victorian” thing all the time…except of course that they don’t, because for instance they blog about it, and Victorians didn’t have “blogs.” But apart from the internet and similar minor details, they pretend to be living in the 19th century full-time.

The Port Townsend couple booked tickets

I wrote about witch camps (via the BBC) in <i>Does God Hate Women?</i> This Facebook post thus makes me both happy and sad.

“I am so happy because I will see my sister every day now and I won’t have to wait on her visits here.”

This is Azara. After 21 years in the witch camp she is going home today. The purification process of the priest is complete and she is now a free woman.

21 years.

Azara is now going home to Wulensi to spend the remainder of her days living in peace with her sister.

It really is a happy day.

Oh look – another medal ceremony with US participants:

The other day there was this one:

Gabby Douglas was given a lot of shit for not conforming to what the other four did.

The reaction to gold-medal winning US gymnast Gabby Douglas neglecting to place her hand on her heart during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at the medal ceremony does not strike me as a unifying moment. Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke spoke for a certain segment of the Olympic-watching public when he said on Wednesday, “The next time Gabby Douglas stands on a podium for the national anthem, she can forget the words, disagree with them, protest them. But here’s hoping she never