My internet connection will be fixed Monday (it’s an actual physical problem with the physical infrastructure, not my technical incompetence), so posting will probably still be light until then.

Meanwhile here’s something to read by the excellent Sarah Ditum.

Boys grow up by getting bigger, stronger, louder. The things that a male child is encouraged to be good at are, by and large, things esteemed in the male adolescent too. But for girls, adolescence is a time of loss. Becoming a woman means giving things up, explains Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus, and taking up new and feminine occupations: “In particular, [girls] abandon physical play: instead of using their bodies to do things, they

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

If you want evidence of the contempt of Conservative punditry for the working-class whites who vote for them, look no further than the National Review:

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America…

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory

Strangely enough, the full text of Ordinary Men is available online, in more than one place. Here’s one. I wonder if it’s some sort of public interest thing.

Here’s a bit from where it started getting really hard to continue (but it all was, and it’s cumulative):

When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an 
equal number of policemen came forward and, face to face, were 
paired off with their victims. Led by Kammer, the policemen 
and Jews marched down the forest path. They turned off into the 
woods at a point indicated by Captain Wohlauf, who busied 
himself throughout the day selecting the execution sites. Kam- 
mer then ordered the Jews to lie down in 

I’ve been reading Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, and as an offshoot from that this morning I read some of chapter 7 of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. I would have read more but I had to stop because I couldn’t take it. I’d forgotten how horrible it is reading it.

It’s about a police battalion, made up of middle-aged men because all the younger men were in the military, who were assigned to kill all the Jews except the able-bodied men (who were sent to a work camp) in a Polish village by walking them into the woods, making them lie down, and shooting them.

It’s horrific, and at the same time it’s instructive. I plan to … Read the rest

Metro UK on yet another incident of gender segregation connected with a university:

An Islamic society at a top university has come under fire after segregating men and women at a gala dinner by using a large screen running through the middle of the group.

The Muslim society at the London School of Economics sat guests on either male-only or female-only tables at the dinner on Sunday night with a 7ft screen between the two groups.

In case the women all got pregnant from seeing the men.

They also had to use different phone lines to order tickets. Because…what? I have no idea. It can’t be something Mo said, since there were no damn phones then.

he sold out event,

So who is Merrick Garland?

Let’s consult the Beltway establishment first, which is to say the Washington Post:

President Obama on Wednesday nominated Merrick Garland to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, calculating that choosing the highly regarded jurist who has served presidents from both parties will ultimately force Senate Republicans to drop plans to block his nomination.

Garland, the 63-year-old chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a moderate, does not fit neatly into a category that is likely to mobilize Democratic voters in an election year. He is the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, not a “first” in the way an Asian American or black female nominee would

Originally a comment by Freemage on Reporter arrested at Trump rally for filming while brown.

Ariel

March 14, 2016 at 1:53 pm

I’m watching this from far away, although, I must say, I’m more and more interested in the upcoming American election.

Recently I’ve gone so far as to read an article in our press titled “The most complicated electoral system in the world”, explaining the details of the American voting system. The experience was traumatic. I’m still shaking. And it is all *your fault*!

Anyway, I’m not particularly surprised that the police got nervous intervening during clashes in which some police officers were hurt. Yeah, I know – attacks against the journalists are always newsworthy, but still. When

Sorry about lack of activity here, I’m having dire connection problems and may be some time.

But fortunately I live only 3 blocks from a library, so I can connect here except for Fridays. Then the question becomes how long I can bear to stay, what with diseased people coughing wetly one day and the next day twitchy teenagers thrashing and squirming opposite me while staring maniacally in my direction and writing with a pencil held by all the fingers, which is the oddest and clumsiest way of holding a pencil I’ve ever seen. At the moment however it’s very tranquil, with reasonable people sitting quietly typing or reading. So I should be able to accomplish as much as … Read the rest

At Fitnah, Maryam talks to Marieme Helie Lucas about gender segregation:

Maryam Namazie: Universities UK’s guidance first said (though it has now been withdrawn as a result of pressure) if women are not made to sit at the back of the room but are segregated alongside men, since none are disadvantaged, then there is no discrimination. Your views?

Marieme Helie Lucas: Whether at the back or on the side, the old argument is always that this is done to protect women – for their own good, of course, and by doing so to restrict their freedom of movement. By the same logic, some twenty years ago, Bangladesh suddenly restricted women from leaving the country as there was a lot of

Huffington Post reports:

CBS News reporter Sopan Deb was arrested Friday night while covering protests surrounding Donald Trump’s canceled rally in Chicago.

Deb, who has covered the Republican presidential front-runner‘s candidacy since last summer, was filming video of a man whose face was bloody and lying on the ground near police at the time of his arrest, according to a “CBS This Morning” report Saturday.

“Deb continued to roll as police kept watch,” the CBS report noted. “Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.”

A police officer placed his boot on Deb’s neck to keep him in place on the ground, according to the account he provided his network.

Illinois State Police

IS is nostalgic for the way women were treated like shit in the prophet’s day.

Locked inside a room where the only furniture was a bed, the 16-year-old learned to fear the sunset, because nightfall started the countdown to her next rape.

During the year she was held by the Islamic State, she spent her days dreading the smell of the ISIS fighter’s breath, the disgusting sounds he made and the pain he inflicted on her body. More than anything, she was tormented by the thought she might become pregnant with her rapist’s child.

But no problem, because he made her take birth control pills. When she was sold to another man, the pills went with her.

According to an

Shaheen Hashmat won a True Honour award from IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, last week.

LONDON, March 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At 12 years old, Shaheen Hashmat left her family home in Scotland to escape the threat of forced marriage to a stranger in Pakistan. At 13, she attempted suicide.

Hashmat, who now campaigns against forced marriage and “honour based” violence, says Britain urgently needs better mental health services for girls and women escaping these situations.

“There needs to be far more training about the increased risk of suicide and the impact of family estrangement,” said Hashmat, who won the True Honour 2016 award on Thursday for her bravery in standing up to honour abuse.

Helen Griffiths at Human Rights Watch says hashtag solidarity with women and girls is nice, but what’s needed is action.

Last weekend, I attended a Women of the World event in Cambridge, England, where experts from several sectors discussed what exactly is preventing girls from getting into and staying in school. They agreed that numerous factors play a role, including early marriage, pregnancy, disabilities, lack of accommodation for menstrual hygiene, cultural beliefs, and traditional caregiver roles.

These barriers are not new.

And what do they all rest on? The material reality of being female – of being the sex that gets pregnant, that bears the children, that lactates. (The disabilities part is the exception – either … Read the rest

I’ve always hated snowmobiles – at least, I have since encountering one racing all over a Seattle park after a heavy snow one day back around 1980. I know they have their uses, though, as long as the people using them aren’t mean bastards. But one snowmobiler is a very mean bastard.

One dog has been killed and multiple dogs have been injured by a snowmobiler in what appears to be an intentional attack on competitors in the Iditarod Race in Alaska.

Iditarod veteran Aliy Zirkle was the first to report an attack.

A snowmachiner had “repeatedly attempted to harm her and her team,” the Iditarod Trail Committee says, and one of Zirkle’s dogs had received a non-life-threatening injury.

More on the mess in South Sudan, from the UN.

11 March 2016 – A new United Nations report on the human rights situation in South Sudan published today describes a multitude of horrendous violations in “searing detail,” in particular by Government forces, including cases of civilians burned alive or cut to pieces and a teenage girl being raped by ten soldiers.

Although all parties to the conflict have committed patterns of serious and systematic violence against civilians since fighting broke out in December 2013, the report says State actors bore the greatest responsibility during 2015, given the weakening of opposition forces.

The scale of sexual violence is particularly shocking, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human

South Sudan doesn’t have the money to pay its armed militias, so it lets them extract payment in kind, such as raping women for example.

South Sudan lets fighters rape women as payment, the UN rights office said Friday, describing the country as “one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world.”

“The assessment team received information that the armed militias… who carry out attacks together with the SPLA (South Sudanese army) commit violations under an agreement of ‘do what you can and take what you can,'” the rights office said in a new report.

“Most of the youth therefore also raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment,”

Pink News reports on a gay UKIP candidate who tweeted that all feminists he’s spoken to on Twitter are “man hating cunts.” (What’s that we’re always being told about how in the UK “cunt” NEVER means a woman? Never never never ever you stupid Yank?)

Alex Nierora is the party’s candidate for Ealing and Hillingdon on the Greater London Assembly, ahead of the election on May 5.

The candidate – who is vocal within the party’s LGBT group despite previously opposing equal marriage – has spoken out to defend himself after he was caught referring to feminists as “c**ts”.

In the since-deleted tweet, sent in December, he claimed: “all feminists I have spoken to on here [Twitter] are man hating

The Times reports:

CHICAGO — Donald J. Trumpabruptly canceled a large rally here on Friday night as scuffles and shouting matches erupted on the arena floor between large groups of his supporters and protesters angered by his campaign.

Cable news networks broadcast live scenes of chaos inside the arena that showed people on both sides screaming at, punching and shoving each other.

So that sounds healthy.

The protests at Mr. Trump’s rallies have increased and so has the pushback surrounding them. One protester in North Carolina this week was sucker-punched by a rally attendee. Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has insisted he does not condone the violence but that in the “good