William Brown at the Mancunion talks to Manchester University alumnus David Aaronovitch.

Toward the end Brown asks Aaronovitch about Murdoch’s influence on him as a Times writer.

“Over me? None whatsoever.

“The most important thing about where I work, is for me to be arguing with people. It’s pointless being at a paper arguing with people who already agree with you. If what you’re looking for is an echo chamber, then what you’ll do is work for a paper whose readers have views that already agree with yours. But what kind of challenge is that?”

Today, according to Aaronovitch, you see a “silo mentality” all over the place—a refusal by many people to talk to others who don’t share

PEN on Iran’s renewed incitement to murder Salman Rushdie:

PEN International joins PEN America and English PEN in deploring the effort at intimidation mounted by 40 state-run media outlets in Iran that have announced a US$600,000 bounty put forward this week to augment Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 death fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie. The spectre of a new financial reward being added to this longstanding threat is a craven attempt to fan the flames of religious extremism and hatred.

‘PEN has supported Rushdie since the fatwa was first passed and writers around the world stand in solidarity with him. It’s highly disturbing to hear of this bounty offered by state-run media which should be rescinded immediately,’ said

Congratulations to Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy:

The first Oscar-winner in Pakistan’s history is back in the Hollywood limelight this weekend as Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s unflinching new documentary about “honor killings,” A Girl In The River: The Price Of Forgiveness, competes for an Academy Award.

The 37-year-old Chinoy’s previous film about acid-attack victims, Saving Face, won the top prize for a documentary short in 2012.

(UPDATE: Chinoy Won The Oscar. More Here.)

Bashir Ahmad Gwakh interviewed her via email.

RFE/RL: What does your documentary find? Tell us about the status of women going through domestic violence and families whose loved one was killed in ‘honor killings’?

Chinoy: The film really brings to reality the kind of patriarchal and conservative mindset

Shabnam Nadiya remembers Avijit Roy and a freer Bangladesh.

On February 15, 2016, at the annual book fair held in Dhaka, police handcuffed Shamsuzzoha Manik, the 73-year-old publisher of the small press Ba-Dwip Prakashan, and shut down their book stall.

They seized six books. Their target was a translation anthology called Islam Bitarka (The Islam Debate), published in 2013, but they also grabbed five others: Aryans and the Indus Civilization; Jihad: Forced Conversions, Imperialism, and Slavery’s Legacy; Islam’s Role in Social Development; Women’s Place in Islam; and Islam and Women, in case they were “insulting to Islam”.

Alongside Manik, two of his associates were arrested under Section 57(2) of the infamous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act.

Bangla Academy … Read the rest

This, today, in a couple of hours (minus ten minutes), at the Oxford Union:

Prof Tariq Ramadan & Maryam Namazie

• Event name: Prof Tariq Ramadan & Maryam Namazie
• Start date: 29/02/2016 20:00
• End date: // :
• Duration: N/A

Description

Head to Head : Islam in Europe Today

Listed in a 2008 report called ‘Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech With Europe’s Muslim Communities’, Namazie has had multiple lectures no-platformed and disrupted.  She is spokesperson for the Council of ex-Muslims and for Iranian Solidarity.  Her writing specialists in challenging cultural relativism and political Islam

Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in Oxford, Tariq Ramadan has held positions in Universities across the world;  he is also persona non grata in at least

Konul Khalilova of the BBC Azeri service tells us How Muslim Azerbaijan had satire years before Charlie Hebdo.

More than 100 years before militant Islamist gunmen murdered journalists at France’s satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, another magazine very similar in style was playing an important role among the Muslim populations of both the Russian and Persian empires.

Azerbaijani weekly magazine Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary for its time, bravely ridiculing clerics and criticising the political elite as well as the Russian Tsar and the Shah of Persia.

Founded in 1906, it pulled no punches in tackling geopolitical events and also promoted women’s rights and Westernisation.

I look forward to the accusations of Premature Islamophobia.

The editor-in-chief of the magazine was Jalil

Meanwhile David Cameron is boasting about selling arms to Saudi Torturer Arabia.

The Saudi government has bought £3 billion of UK aircraft, arms and other defence products in 2015.

…

He announced his planned defence of BAE’s international trade: “I’m going to be spending a lot of the next four months talking about this issue but I promise I will not be taking my eye off the ball, making sure the brilliant things you make here at BAE Systems are available and sold all over the world.

…

On Wednesday, an Amnesty report said the UK is setting a “dangerous precedent” to the rest of the world by continuing to supply arms to questionable regimes such as Saudi Arabia”.

Our beloved ally, Saudi Arabia.

A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in hundreds of social media posts.

The report carried in Al-Watan says the 28-year-old man admitted to being an atheist and refused to repent, saying that what he wrote reflected his own beliefs and that he had the right to express them. The report did not name the man.

It added that ‘religious police’ in charge of monitoring social networks found more than 600 tweets denying the existence of God, ridiculing the Quranic verses, accusing all prophets of lies and saying their teaching fuelled hostilities. The court also fined him 20,000 riyals –

I wrote my column for the Freethinker about a couple of ethicists who recommend “compromising” over FGM.

There’s much discussion on social media of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Kavita Shah Arora and Allan J Jacobs that urges ‘compromise’ on the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Just cut off a little bit of girls’ genitals, as opposed to shaving everything off and sewing the hole closed.

By the same token we could throw just a little bit of acid in women’s faces, and throw just a few stones at women accused of sex outside marriage, and rape just a few altar boys when no one is looking.

Read on.… Read the rest

At the Bristol Festival of Ideas next month –

The End of Free Speech?

With Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Maryam Namazie and Sian Norris

Sat 19 March 2016
18:00-19:30 Watershed
Price: £9/£8

Are we facing a crisis in free speech? Are there limits on what we can talk about, campaign for, criticise and debate? Recent topics of discussion – ranging from the provision of safe spaces in educational institutions and work places, through ‘no-platforming’ policies to religious fundamentalism and the ideology behind the attacks in Paris and elsewhere – lead some to call for limits on freedom of speech and some areas of campaigning.

Four speakers – all

An interesting point made by Les Green at Semper Viridis:

Of course gender is not fixed at birth. Simone de Beauvoir was right that no one is born a woman. Possibly, no one is even born female. Sex is cluster-concept, a bundle of attributes, some of which do not develop until puberty or later. And gender is another cluster-concept.  Gender is constituted by norms and values that are conventionally considered appropriate for people of a given sex. Gender is a lot more vague than sex, and a lot more historically and geographically variable.

But gender has another interesting feature.  It is path dependent.  To be a woman is for the pertinent norms and values to apply a result

Guest post by Anonymous

I have an angle on people throwing around threats of violence, and directing menacing fantasies at people online; an angle on the way people excuse, enable, and dismiss such violent ideations; an angle on the virtue-signalling, and other pathological responses you get in communities addressing these issues.

To begin with, for the sake of context, I’m going to have to get a few things out in the open, although my default state with regards to autobiographical writing is basically this; I don’t like it.

The fuzzy, cuddly, intended-as-supportive bromides that some people issue in response to the kinds of detail I’m about to give don’t really do it for me either. I’ll probably read the comments, … Read the rest

So Lands End – it’s a clothing company, I think – had a feature on Gloria Steinem in its spring catalogue, and then…it said it was very sorry, and it scrubbed all mention of her from its website. As one does.

“We understand that some of our customers were offended by the inclusion of an interview in a recent catalog with Gloria Steinem on her quest for women’s equality,” the company said in a statement. “We thought it was a good idea and we heard from our customers that, for different reasons, it wasn’t. For that, we sincerely apologize.”

Because…? Women are not equal, but are stupid lazy weak deceitful sluts? Yes, pretty much. Here’s one such:

“This family

At the New Statesman, Glosswitch takes a look at paid surrogacy and finds it wanting.

She starts with a recent newspaper story about the lack of human kidneys for sale in the UK and the horror that people in more distant, poorer countries who agree to sell you a kidney can change their minds.

A lawyer specialising in cases such as these confirmed that this was a problem:

“The UK has a long way to go in catching up with other nations, some of which have even built dedicated hostels to prevent donors – or living incubators, as we call them – from departing in possession of body parts which are reserved for those with more money.”

There was … Read the rest

What a clusterfuck.

‘Girls in tech’ competition won by boy

EDF Energy has been criticised after a 13-year-old-boy won a competition that was part of a campaign to attract teenage girls to the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths.

…

EDF said that while its Pretty Curious programme is still aimed at girls, the UK competition was later opened up to all 11 to 16-year-olds.

“Pretty Curious” as the name for a program aimed at girls – see what they did there?

Siiiiiiiiigh

They paused just long enough to insult female people by implying their appearance is what matters about them, and then opened the competition to everyone.

“Congratulations to the winner – but I’d love to hear from

Eric Adriaans, the Executive Director of CFI Canada, wrote an open letter to the mayor and council of Ottawa about their “Celebrate Hijab” day.

To the Mayor and Council of the City of Ottawa

It has come to the attention of Centre For Inquiry Canada (CFIC) that the City of Ottawa is hosting a celebration of the hijab on February 25, 2016.  As an organization which represents views of the non-religious and secularists members of the community, CFIC – including our Ottawa Branch members – opposes this initiative.

Centre For Inquiry Canada (CFIC) supports and promotes the human right to freedom of religion which includes freedom from religion.  CFIC does not denigrate those who wish to express their personal

Tom Banse reports on KUOW:

Republican Congressmen from several Western states are running with a theme that emerged during the recent armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

A panel of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Thursday discussed two measures that would let states take over management of large swaths of federal land. The Subcommittee on Federal Lands heard Alaska GOP Congressman Don Young pitch his idea to let states buy national forest land from the federal government to increase timber production.

I saw this via Peter Walker on Facebook, who called them Bundy bills.

The Obama administration sent a deputy chief of the U.S. Forest Service to Thursday’s Congressional hearing to

It’s being reported that Scalia’s final hunting trip was with a secret group of secret elite special secret best hunter guys.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.

Hubertus – I’m not familiar with the name. I wonder what his sainthood was based on. Eating more venison than anyone else?

Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website