All entries by this author

Another great Anglo delicacy

Apr 20th, 2016 11:41 am | By

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



The revolution

Apr 20th, 2016 11:15 am | By

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

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Like most other games he plays

Apr 19th, 2016 3:00 pm | By

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

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Hot and spicy

Apr 19th, 2016 11:56 am | By

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

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Both sent their apologies at the last minute

Apr 19th, 2016 10:32 am | By

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

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No hurry

Apr 18th, 2016 5:51 pm | By

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

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If they hadn’t acted

Apr 18th, 2016 3:07 pm | By

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



Carefully researched and closely analyzed

Apr 18th, 2016 2:52 pm | By

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



Dismissed

Apr 18th, 2016 11:28 am | By

Green Party Women has been answering questions on that terrible post today, and answering them so cluelessly it’s clear they haven’t understood a word anyone said.

Their reply to Magdalen Berns for instance.

Magdalen Berns As a lesbian, I am particularly offended by the implicit homophobia and misogyny underlying your baseless assertion that womanhood is somehow a gender; it’s as if you believe female people somehow choose to be subjected to sex-based oppression and that you’re saying women who don’t present themselves in a stereotypically “feminine” way are not “actual women”, but “non-males”. I hope the Scottish Greens don’t win a single seat in the Holyrood elections this May as a direct result of your disgraceful disregard for the humanity

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We used to call them feminists

Apr 18th, 2016 9:42 am | By

Glosswitch again says what needs saying.

She starts with a discussion, via the also wonderful Janet Radcliffe Richards, of “feminine” and “masculine” as part of

a system that places women and men under very different social pressures, the primary aim of which is “to ensure that women should be in the power and service of men”.

It’s not about inherent qualities, it’s about subordination. That’s basic feminism.

Fast-forward 36 years and it seems we’ve forgotten the basics.  It’s not that we no longer use gender to extract resources and labour from one class of people for the benefit of another. Men still own the vast majority of the world’s material resources. Women still struggle for safety, visibility, education, reproductive

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‘Non-binary’ is not an alternative identity to ‘woman’

Apr 17th, 2016 4:10 pm | By

Continuing our suddenly regular feature, Comments On Bonkers Green Party Women Posts on Facebook, I give you some comments from the post that explains to us slow women that the group for women has to include non-binary genders and other gender identities, including those that say they are not women and resent being called women.

  • As a lesbian, I am particularly offended by the implicit homophobia and misogyny underlying your baseless assertion that womanhood is somehow a gender; it’s as if you believe female people somehow choose to be subjected to sex-based oppression and that you’re saying women who don’t present themselves in a stereotypically “feminine” way are not “actual women”, but “non-males”. I hope the Scottish Greens don’t win
Read the rest


Green Party Women explain

Apr 17th, 2016 2:39 pm | By

Green Party Women on Facebook:

A recent issue, taken out of context of its intent, has arisen and caused quite a stir. As a result, the committee of Green Party Women would like to reassure our sisters that we by no means intend to erase women’s identities by forcing members to define [in] relation to men. “Non-male” and “women” are not synonymous.

However, Green Party Women are happy with uses of the term “non-male” as an umbrella term when gender balance practices are conducted. This umbrella term groups together all who face gendered oppression; women, transgender women and individuals of non-binary or no genders. We all deserve to be recognised and included.

For too long, marginalised women have been

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Sheikh Hasina to the killers: have fun

Apr 17th, 2016 11:03 am | By

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

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Seen but unnoticed

Apr 16th, 2016 4:12 pm | By

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

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Get a grip and stop promoting the erasure of women as policy

Apr 16th, 2016 11:54 am | By

More comments on the Green Party Women post

  • I’m so encouraged by the political intelligence in this thread. 🍾A tiny number of people subscribe to this women erasing nonsense. If the Greens don’t want to become a political irrelevance they’d do well to remember that simple fact.
  • I’m a floating left-wing voter – I’m nowhere near 100% happy with WEP, Labour, Lib Dem or Greens, but my vote has to go somewhere. Well done for ensuring it won’t be here.
  • Women are not “non-men” – this is Handmaid’s Tale stuff. Get a grip and stop promoting the erasure of women as policy – if you’re bothered about keeping and attracting voters, that is.
  • Are Green Party Women happy with the
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Out in the bitter cold

Apr 16th, 2016 10:30 am | By

Green Party Women did a public post on April 4:

Green Party Women, as a whole, are happy with terms such as ‘non-men’ to be used to describe women, including transgender women, and non-binary people as a collective term. This is to avoid further marginalising certain groups of women, particularly those who have been excluded from women’s movements for far too long.

That’s incoherent. Women are women. People who aren’t women aren’t women. It’s incoherent (or so self-evident as to be meaningless) to say people who aren’t women are being excluded from women’s movements. Non-binary people say they are neither women nor men. It’s not women (or men) who exclude them, they exclude themselves.

Be that as it may … Read the rest



One is not born but rather becomes a non man

Apr 16th, 2016 9:58 am | By

The Greens again. “Non-men” again. The Independent:

Feminists including leading activist Caroline Criado-Perez have attacked an invitation to “non-men” by the young women’s arm of the Green Party.

“Women/non-men who are Young Greens can find and join our Facebook group ‘Young Greens Women’”, they tweeted on 26March.

But on Friday Ms Criado-Perez, who led the campaign to keep a woman on English banknotes and co-founded feminist media website The Women’s Room, called the tweet “the most anti-woman anti-feminist ignorant bullshit I have seen in some time”.

“Women are not “non-men”, she tweeted, urging the Greens to “sort your shit out”. “You do not include people by establishing men as default human,” she added.

Ms Criado-Perez later took to

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Top of the heap

Apr 15th, 2016 5:57 pm | By

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

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Sheikha al-Jassem’s turn

Apr 15th, 2016 2:56 pm | By

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



If

Apr 15th, 2016 11:35 am | By

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

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