More on Sheikh Hasina’s view of the freelance murders of atheists in Bangladesh, which is basically “go right ahead, we approve.”

In a recent exchange with the ruling awami league supporters and active leaders, Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina has brazenly supported the machete wielding killers of Bangladesh atheist bloggers who have already hacked to death at least seven atheist bloggers and publishers of free thinking writers. Many of the bloggers had been hacked to death in open daylight on the streets of Dhaka the capital while the police had been reluctant or incompetent to arrest anyone responsible. The wording of the premier who has been the chief executive of the government since the questionable one party election in earlier

Deborah Cameron wrote about default male today, in the wake of Green Party Women’s “non-men.”

The idea behind substituting ‘non-men’ for ‘women’ was to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people. It will be news to nobody that this is a contentious issue in contemporary feminist politics. But whatever position you take on the issue itself, ‘non-men’ remains problematic from a linguistic point of view. It cannot easily be made to function as an inclusive, feminist or non-sexist term, because it repeats the most basic and ubiquitous of all sexist linguistic gestures: treating men as the default human beings while relegating women to what the radical feminist linguist Julia Penelope dubbed ‘negative semantic space’. ‘Non-men’ defines a subordinated

Jessica Valenti is the woman who gets the most blocked comments at the Guardian’s Comment is Free.

When the Guardian examined the 1.4 million comments that have been blocked by moderators since 1999, they found that eight of the 10 writers receiving the most blocked comments were women, and topping the list was … well, me. Sure, there’s a small part of me that’s proud – I’m No 1! – but the bigger truth is that I’m mostly just exhausted.

I’m tired of laughing it off and rolling my eyes. Because while misspelled threats or entreaties for me to get back in the kitchen are certainly easy to mock, the disdain with which they’re employed is not very funny.

For

In case the absurdity of Germany’s charging a comedian with insulting Erdogan isn’t enough for one day, we can turn our attention to Kuwait:

A prominent female academic and human rights activist in Kuwait has been charged with blasphemy.

Sheikha al-Jassem was summoned to the public prosecutor’s office after legal complaints were filed against her over a recent interview she gave on TV.

She asserted that the constitution of Kuwait should be above the Quran and Islamic law in governing the country.

So, you can’t win, can you – not if you think a government should be secular when you live in a theocracy. You can’t say that in a theocracy, because the theocracy defines it as “blasphemy,” and … Read the rest

An item that Vanina shared with me on Facebook, via comments on a Sarah Palin article. It has so many layers of meaning…

… Read the rest

Apparently Erdoğan gets to tell Merkel to prosecute German citizens for making jokes about Erdoğan. Philip Oltermann in the Guardian:

Angela Merkel has been criticised by members of her cabinet after acceding to a request from Ankara to prosecute a comedian who read out an offensive poem about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The German chancellor insisted her government’s decision did not amount to a verdict on whether Jan Böhmermann was guilty or not, but should be understood as a reaffirmation of the judiciary’s independence.

Oh please. The issue is whether such a thing should be prosecuted in the first place, not whether the comedian is “guilty” or not.

“In a constitutional democracy, weighing up personal rights against

I was going to visit the Secular Policy “Institute” just the once, but of course I was underestimating the scope of their absurdity when I thought that. I find I can’t not point out their projects.

One of the categories on their website, between About Us and Coalition, is Projects. Within that category you get Active, Past, and Proposed, along with Submit a.

So we look at Active Projects.

Active Projects

Our project program is brand new. We will have active projects soon. Meanwhile, look at our proposed projects!

The end. That’s all there is on the page.

Next we look at Past Projects. (Hey it’s the next item on the drop-down menu. We can’t just jump … Read the rest

Hard to read without grinding one’s teeth in rage: women in San Salvador spent years in prison for having miscarriages.

The case of Guadalupe Vásquez, who was imprisoned for more than seven years after losing the baby she conceived when she was raped at the age of 17, is to be examined by a panel of experts in the first People’s Tribunal to focus on El Salvador’s draconian anti-abortion law.

Vásquez, who was sentenced to 30 years for murder in 2008, was pardoned and freed last year after the supreme court ruled her conviction was unsafe. Her case is one of three that will come under renewed scrutiny this weekend following a dogged campaign by reproductive rights campaigners and

An editorial in the Dhaka Tribune:

Asked about the murder of Jagannath University Masters student Nazimuddin Samad, the home minister told BBC Bangla: “We need to see whether he used to write objectionable things on blogs.”

No, no, no.

It is almost impossible to quantify how wrong-headed and self-defeating this approach is.

The point is not what Nazim may or may not have written. The point is that he has been slaughtered in public in cold blood.

It’s stomach-turning that a high government official apparently thinks writing “objectionable things” on blogs is a valid reason to murder the writer.

The minister’s unwise and ill-judged comment, by implying the victim may in some way have been responsible for his fate,

Soraya Chemaly wrote a public Facebook post linking to a news story from Seattle about a woman murdered and cut into pieces and left in a recycling bin. Some of you don’t do Facebook and I wouldn’t want you to miss what Soraya said.

I don’t have time to write about this at the moment, but this awful story is the perfect example of how complicit media are in refusing to face misogyny in our own culture. If this crime had happened in India it would be plastered all over front [pages] as an example of deep cultural misogyny and persistent patriarchy. In the case of the brutal Delhi rape several years ago an analysis of the NYT and the

Let’s have a bit of comic relief – let’s drop in on the “Secular Policy Institute” again. I’d forgotten about them…I think I’d vaguely assumed they’d gone to ground after that embarrassing thing where they announced a fancy expensive conference in DC that then apparently never took place. But no, they’re still there and still engaged in empty boasting. Look at the page where they attempt to recruit interns.

Say what? Any organization in the world? Just like that? How would that work exactly? How would interning for a self-styled “institute” that doesn’t actually do anything other than brag about itself provide “the insider shortcut” to your dream job? At [your pick of] any organization in the world?

Well … Read the rest

Vice has a new documentary about the war on women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Huffington Post has details:

In a new documentary for Vice, filmmaker correspondent Isobel Yeung shines a light on the ongoing human rights abuses Afghan women endure on a daily basis, despite domestic and foreign promises to improve their quality of life. 

In a hidden shelter discreetly operating to support women fleeing violence, Yeung spoke to a pair of 17- and 18-year-old women who are sisters-in-law and had escaped an abusive family.

“[My husband] would beat me as if he wanted to break my arms and knees,” explained the younger girl, who said she had attempted suicide by poison at least twice since getting married at

Speaking of the agonies of female puberty – Glosswitch has an astonishing post on the subject titled The right way for women to disappear.

I am not at home in the body I have. I’ve never got over the desire to tell people, the first time I meet them, that this isn’t the real me. The real me is thin, breastless, narrow-hipped. This version of me is a poor compromise, a pathetic accommodation. I look like a woman but actually I identify as a human being.

I relate to that. I don’t experience it as sharply as Glossy does, but it fits nevertheless.

Womanhood, I had decided, was not for me. I sought to roll back puberty and remain stuck

CST (which I had to look hard to discover stands for Community Security Trust) on anti-Semitism and Dilly Hussain.

Antisemitism comes in lots of different guises. It can be blatant, subtle or hidden. It can invent new antisemitic charges, or rely on a reservoir of old antisemitic language and images. Or, sometimes, it just swaps the word “Zionist” for “Jew”, in the naïve hope that doing so will change an antisemitic statement into a political one.

This is what appears to have happened in an online campaign against Tell MAMA, an organisation that works to combat anti-Muslim hatred. CST’s relationship with Tell MAMA is no secret. We advised its Director, Fiyaz Mughal, before and after he set it up