An ad for a cab company in India:

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

Vox breathlessly tells us that an American dictionary has added two new Socially Approved words.

Big news for LGBTQ folks: On Wednesday, Merriam-Webster announced that it added the words “cisgender” and “genderqueer” to its unabridged dictionary.

What do those words mean? Here are Merriam-Webster’s definitions:

• Cisgender: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.
• Genderqueer: of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female.

But what does “gender identity” mean?

I don’t call myself nonbinary or genderfluid or genderqueer, nor do I claim to be a trans man. On the other hand … Read the rest

Lionel Shriver experienced being female as an imposition as a child, in much the way I did and most or perhaps all women I know did.

But I was historically fortunate. By the time I entered university in 1974, a revolution was well under way. As I understood it, “women’s liberation” meant that the frilly cookie-cutter template of femininity had been chucked out. Being female was no longer defined in terms of skirts, high heels, and homemaking. Men and women were equal. Both sexes were just people. We had entered the post-gender world.

And then we turned around and went right back into Gender World, and to make it all the more excruciating, this time we did it in the … Read the rest

The International Business Times gives us an account of what it’s actually like to be a teenage girl stopped and abused by the new undercover police in Tehran:

In the video, the teenager said: “As two young students, today my friend and me have decided to go shopping for new shoes for school and we also decided to see the new line of school supplies. So we headed for the bazaar.

“As we approached bazaar, we saw two Fati-Commandoes. They were specifically waiting at the entrance of the bazaar. In order not to be noticed by them, we decided to go by the parking.

“In the meantime, we decided to conceal our hair that was sticking out of the headscarf

The BBC on priorities in Iran:

Outraged Iranians have taken to social media to condemn the decision to deploy 7,000 undercover police officers in Tehran to monitor the observance of the Islamic dress code.

7,000 spies to police something that should be nothing to do with the police in the first place – that’s some brilliant staff allocation. They should deploy another 7000 to monitor how people brush their teeth.

Tehran’s police chief announced on Monday that the role of the new unit is to:

• Report women for the improper wearing of the hijab (and to ensure a woman’s veil covers her in public as required)

• Report anyone who harasses women

• Report anyone who plays loud music in their

Maajid Nawaz on Malia Bouattia, newly elected president of the NUS.

The words below are not mine. But because of their gravity, it is important that you read them in full.

“The notion of resistance has been perhaps washed out of our understanding of how colonised people will obtain their physical emancipation…With mainstream, Zionist-led media outlets …resistance is presented as an act of terrorism.

“But instead of us remembering that this has always been the case throughout struggles against white supremacy, it’s become an accepted discourse among too many…

“Internalised Islamophobia has also enabled our obsession with convincing non-Muslims of our non-violent and peaceful nature, so we’re taking things a step further and dangerously condemning the resistance, branding groups

Elizabeth Warren:

Yesterday, Ted Cruz sent a campaign fundraising email whining about the “significant sacrifice” he’s made to run for President. He whined about facing constant attacks, nonexistent family time, his limited health and sleep, and having no personal time.

Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to pity him because trying to be the leader of the free world is hard?! I’ve got two words for you, Ted: Boo hoo.

Know whose health is limited? Workers with no paid leave who can’t stay at home when they fall ill or have to care for sick kids. Know whose sleep is limited? Working parents who do everything they can to save money but stay up at night worrying about how

Students at Paris’s Sciences-Po decided to throw a party for the hijab, but hardly anyone showed up.

The international campaign to get college students and non-Muslim women to wear Islamic veils as a demonstration of solidarity hit trouble at elite Paris university Sciences-Po when fewer than a dozen donned head and neck coverings on a “Hijab Day” that attracted more polemics than participants.

Liberal feminists and secularism defenders, alarmed at what they saw as another attempt to impose a highly conservative interpretation of Islam on secular educational institutions, condemned the protest as an “insult” to women who are forced to wear hijabs in Iran and parts of the Arab-Muslim world. The extreme right National Front, meanwhile, tried to exploit

The NUS has lit up the Twitters again.

The National Union of Students caused widespread outrage on Wednesday after students applauded motions not to commemorate the Holocaust, because doing so isn’t ‘inclusive’.

Inclusive of – ? Nazis? Hitler’s memory? People who hate Jews? People who love genocide?

The motion to remember the Holocaust did end up passing, but what is this idea that commemorating it isn’t inclusive? Are the applauding students worried about the feelings of people who like to see whole populations wiped out?

An amendment to a motion combating anti-Semitism on campuses argued that “education is vital”.

They said the NUS should organise campuses into creating events on Holocause Memorial Day.

Darta Kaleja, from Chester University,

Well it’s about time. Jackson is out, Tubman is in.

Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on Wednesday announced the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of American currency in a century, proposing to replace the slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, and to add women and civil rights leaders to the $5 and $10 notes.

Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical named after and based on the life of the first

Amnesty International has sent a letter to Obama urging him to put human rights on the table at his meeting with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh on April 21.

In particular, I urge you to address repression of freedom of expression and the abusive use of criminal justice systems in the name of security, and violations of international humanitarian law by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the Yemen conflict. In recent years, GCC leaders have aggressively stifled dissent, often under the pretext of ‘national security.’

Last year you told the New York Times that you believed the GCC’s greatest security threat stems from the dissatisfaction of their populations, including from a sense that there is

Finally, at last, a supermarket that has one of those “ethnic” aisles for the most neglected group of all.

The Sedano’s Supermarket chain has launched new ethnic food aisles in 25 of its Miami locations as part of a strategy to target the growing segment of White millennials moving to Miami’s urban core.

Products featured in the new “Anglo” aisles include almond milk, brussels sprouts, goji berries, kombucha, gluten-free crackers, and assortments of artisanal jams sold in mason jars.

The food of my people! Recognized!

Actually sprouts are the only ones of those things I eat, but ethnically speaking, that would be my aisle.

(Is it a sign that I’m a tedious pedant that I roll my eyes whenever I … Read the rest

This again.

A public post by Amanda Marcotte:

Helpful “socialist” sends me friendly messages to persuade me to vote Sanders. (And probably because he friended me.) Edited to add the‪#‎NotAllSandersVoters‬ caveat. Just not going to let these guys harass me in private, thinking no one will know what they did.

Charles W. Belser

How diod a stupid counter-revolutionary motherfucker like you get on my “friends” list? Don’t you EVER post anything on any of my pages again, you ignorant cunt.

A comment:

This is what I received from Charles W. Belser last Thu 8:48pm
“Go back to sucking Hillary’s cock, bitch and stay off my pages. What will you do when the revolutionaries come for you? Don’t

Oh no, look out, look out – a popular video game is making it so that players can’t choose the sex of their characters. You know what that means – sometimes a man gets stuck with a female character! Ewwwwww.

Rust is a popular first-person survival video game where you start out completely naked, left to a barren environment to build yourself tools, weapons, and a home as other players try to do the same — and potentially try to kill you and steal your stuff. It’s a tense game, one in which your friends can suddenly turn against you and basically ruin everything you worked for just for their own personal gain.

But it’s not the betrayal and

Sometimes it just collapses into total absurdity and all one can do is laugh.

Like this ad for takeout fried chicken in Australia for example:

Yes but what does she think of the fried chicken?

Anyway the ad was posted to Twitter and Twitter did what Twitter does do.

The ad was immediately criticized as everything from simply inappropriate to downright misogynistic. One critic even wrote that the ad had “set women back 50 years” according to Australian news site News.com.au.

Possibly a slight exaggeration, given everything else that’s going on, but whatever.

The fried chicken people apologized and deleted the tweet.

“We are very sorry for our earlier tweet on H&S – we didn’t mean to offend and

A religious group organizes a campaign against [religious?] extremism, and the invited Muslim groups don’t attend.

Ahmadi Muslims in Scotland have launched an anti-extremism campaign following the death of the Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, despite the failure of other prominent Muslims to attend the event.

Representatives of the Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland were invited to attend the launch alongside other faith groups, but the Guardian understands that both sent their apologies at the last minute.

…

The event’s organiser Ahmed Owusu-Konadu said: “We are undertaking this campaign as part of our stand on the rejection of all forms of extremism and as a message of solidarity with all who have been its victims, including

Zahira Patel notes that ten years after the murder of Banaz Mahmod honor killings haven’t gone away.

Working in the legal sector has also brought to light for me just how difficult it has become for victims of domestic violence to secure legal aid since the changes introduced by LASPO (The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012), which came into effect in 2013. As a result of these changes, a third of domestic violence victims are unable to provide the required evidence to secure legal aid, according to a Parliamentary watchdog report. Further, in 2014, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) released a damning report which concluded that “only 8 out of 43 forces respond well to

Joshua Hammer at the Wall Street Journal tells us about a guy in Timbuktu who did a lot to keep the city’s libraries, books and manuscripts out of the hands of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The story begins in April 2012, when [Abdel Kader] Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city. He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.

He has quite … Read the rest

The University of Washington (which is up the road from me) Q Center has a glossary of terms.

A note about these definitions: Each of these definitions has been carefully researched
and closely analyzed from theoretical and practical perspectives for cultural sensitivity,
common usage, and general appropriateness.

There’s something odd here. Look.

Gay – 1. Term used in some cultural settings to represent males who are
attracted to males in a romantic, erotic and/or emotional sense. Not all men who
engage in “homosexual behavior” identify as gay, and as such this label should
be used with caution.

Lesbian – Term used to describe female-identified people attracted romantically,
erotically, and/or emotionally to other female-identified people.

Notice a certain…asymmetry?… Read the rest