Guest post by iknklast.

I have just recently come back from an annual play festival that I’ve attended several times before. I have always enjoyed this festival; it gives me a chance to interact with other playwrights, to attend workshops, and to see new plays that are in the process of development. The coordinators choose the plays from a large pool of submitted work. This year, there were 680 plays submitted, and only 30 were selected. These plays are then given a reading by trained actors, chosen and directed by a trained director, to allow them to hear their works and engage in a conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the work. Although this is not in one of … Read the rest

In news from the UN –

A woman in Ireland who was forced to choose between carrying her foetus to term, knowing it would not survive, or seeking an abortion abroad was subjected to discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as a result of Ireland’s legal prohibition of abortion, United Nations experts have found.

The independent experts, from the Geneva-based Human Rights Committee, issued their findings after considering a complaint by the woman, AM, who was told in November 2011 when she was in the 21st week of pregnancy that her foetus had congenital defects, which meant it would die in the womb or shortly after birth.

This meant she had to choose “between continuing her non-viable pregnancy or

The CBC also has advice about how to do a healthy Ramadan. It too fails to make it clear that going without water is not just unpleasant, it’s unsafe.

Ala’a Eideh, a PhD student in nutrition at the University of Manitoba, mainly recommends consuming anything that will not aggravate thirst throughout the day.

“The main things that should be avoided are spices, caffeine and sodium to prevent thirst to prevent fluid loss from the body,” she said.

But of course that day is 17 hours long, or longer (this is Canada we’re talking about). There’s no way to prevent thirst over 17+ hours with no water or any other liquid. Thirst=dehydration. This isn’t an issue of mere discomfort, it’s … Read the rest

Ramadan is certainly happening at the worst possible time this year, maximizing the number of hours people feel religiously required to go without water. That’s unhealthy at best and dangerous at worst – especially dangerous for people who do physical work in the heat.

The Independent takes a wrongheaded approach:

As the world’s one billion-plus Muslims gear up to fast over the next month during Ramadan – one of the five pillars of Islam – there is some concern this year may be particularly challenging with followers required to go without any food and water for some 17 hours a day as a test of personal strength and communication with Allah.

However, if done right – and if Muslims

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Now he faces of lifetime of struggling for decent work.

Reading the references to Turner “struggling for decent work” and saying “Goodbye to becoming an orthopedic surgeon” reminds me of something else that really irks me: the sense of entitlement to a “good job,” i.e. well-paying, white-collar, high-status.

If I may quote a different judge, Caddyshack’s Judge Smails, “the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” Smails, of course, was being an asshole snob to the working-class caddie Danny Noonan, in response to Danny’s concern about not being able to afford college without the caddie scholarship that Smails controlled.

But the world does need “ditchdiggers” — well, maybe not literally ditchdiggers, but people who do … Read the rest

Another religious mouthpiece tells us that religion must be taken more seriously, by law, and that it must be forced on everyone whether they like it or not.

The BBC should be legally required to treat religion on a par with politics, sport or drama, the Archbishop of Canterbury is to say.

I thought it already did treat it that way, but if it doesn’t, so what? I can think of a lot of reasons the BBC might prefer to keep its distance from religion, and I don’t see why it should be legally required to take it as seriously as politics.

A recent Government White Paper includes calls for the BBC to be required to reflect the

The Guardian publishes samples of the many many letters urging Judge Persky not to sentence Brock Turner to prison.

The father’s letter, however, is just one of dozens of testimonials that Turner’s supporters sent to Persky – letters that the judge said he seriously considered in his decision to allow the former swimmer to avoid the minimum prison time of two years prescribed by law.

The Guardian has obtained copies of all the letters Persky received – statements that defend Turner’s actions, blame the victim for being assaulted, and decry the consequences the swimmer has faced while ignoring the suffering of the 23-year-old woman. The letters, along with Turner’s own statement, provide a window into a culture that critics

Media Matters has a depressing report on the way cable news in the US talks about abortion.

A Media Matters study of 14 months of evening cable news programs found that discussions of abortion were weighted toward anti-choice speakers, which resulted in widespread misinformation on the topic. Of the three networks, Fox News aired the largest number of inaccurate statements about the most prevalent abortion-related myths, and MSNBC was the most accurate.

…

Media Matters analyzed the following four abortion-related misinformation claims:

1) Government funds given to Planned Parenthood through Medicaid are illegally used to pay for abortions;

2) Birth control acts as an abortifacient;

3) Planned Parenthood “harvests” or “sells” or is “profiting” from fetal tissue; and

4)

An extract from Kat Banyard’s new book Pimp State:

The steady creep of “sex work” into 21st-century vernacular is neither incidental nor accidental. The term didn’t just pop up and go viral. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), an organisation that openly campaigns for brothel-keeping and pimping to be recognised as legitimate jobs, credits itself as largely responsible for “sex work” replacing “prostitution” as the go-to terminology for institutions such as the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“More than mere political correctness,” the NSWP proudly states, “this shift in language had the important effect of moving global understandings of sex work toward a labour framework.”

Oh yeah? … Read the rest

There’s a new way of being shitty: the [[[echoes]]] symbol.

Updating to say: those brackets should all be parentheses, as should all the brackets below, including in the quoted passages. Pretend you see three curved vertical lines facing right plus three curved vertical lines facing left.

In the early days of the social web, putting someone’s name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it’s something far more sinister.

Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, [[[Fleishman]]] — to identify and target Jews for harassment on blogs and major social media sites like Twitter. As one white supremacist tweeted,

Jen Gunter asks a very pertinent question about Brock Turner’s father that I wish I’d thought to ask myself.

And as for Brock Turner’s father who feels that his son doesn’t deserve jail for one 20 minute period of bad behavior (or an “action” as he called it) in a life of otherwise “good,” I guess I’d say if your son were unconscious behind a dumpster and an otherwise “good man” were caught raping your son would you think the injuries not serious and what punishment do you think that man would deserve?

And how deeply would you mourn for that man’s lost ability to enjoy a good ribeye steak?… Read the rest

Oh fuck.

ISIS on Thursday executed 19 Yezidi girls by burning them to death, activists and eyewitnesses reported.

The victims, who had been taken by ISIS terrorists as sex slaves, were placed in iron cages in central Mosul and burned to death in front of hundreds of people.

“They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants,” local media activist Abdullah al-Malla said.

“The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching. Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment,” an eyewitness said in Mosul.

We’re a mistake. Human beings are a mistake. We must be, or we wouldn’t be capable of that kind of thing. All that brain power, … Read the rest

From the “this must be parody” file, Yale students launch a petition telling the English department to stop requiring English majors to read Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

The prestigious Connecticut university requires its English majors to spend two semesters studying a selection of authors it labels the “major English poets”: “Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne in the fall; John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and TS Eliot or another modern poet in the spring”.

Now, if I were in charge of that course I might swap Spenser for someone else – like, maybe push Milton back into the first semester and add Keats to the second. I can see quibbling over which “canonical” poets … Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Not blaming her directly.

Another thing about the DUI – it is very possible, and in fact happens every day all over the driving world, that people who drive drunk may get safely home without hurting anyone (this doesn’t make it OK, mind you). A person who rapes drunk cannot, by definition, get safely home without hurting someone, because in rape there is always another person involved. Yet society is harder on someone who is driving drunk who has not hit a tree, a car, or a person, but who has just weaved in and out and can’t walk a straight line, than on a young man who uses his drunkenness as an … Read the rest