A story a couple of years ago reporting on research that suggests elephants comfort each other.

Credit: Elise Gilchrist Copyright: Think Elephants International, Inc. CC BY SA

Asian elephants reassure other distressed elephants by touching them and “talking” to them, which suggests they are capable of empathy and reassurance, according to new research.

 …

The researchers found that when “an elephant would show distress, the other elephants would adopt that same state — and we call that “emotional contagion” — which is something you typically see in an empathic reaction,” Plotnik said.

Then, the elephants would move toward each other, touch each other’s faces and genitals, and put their trunks in each other’s mouths and chirp, he

A friend sent me the link to a post by a Man on a blog called “Fix the Family” – a post about reasons “to NOT send your daughter to college.” “You” here of course assumes you are a Man. Only men get to send anyone anywhere, and only men get to keep people away from anywhere.

(I look at the top and see home, about, videos, blog, man room…)

(There’s no woman room. Don’t be silly.)

The logo is a guy talking.

Probably the most controversial and rejected position we have at Fix the Family is that parents should not send their daughters to college.  It is even more vehemently opposed than the submission of wives to their husbands. 

I knew this yesterday, but didn’t feel like posting about it.

One of my quondam elephant friends, Chai, was found dead Saturday morning. It breaks my damn heart. I was working at the zoo (Woodland Park in Seattle) when she arrived there in 1980. I went to take a look the day she arrived. She was a year old. A couple of years later I became one of her keepers. She was a wonderful elephant.

 … Read the rest

Raw Story has more on Roosh V’s plans to promote rape as a good thing. It turns out it’s supposed to be a global event, like those protests against wars or slavery or similar. Of course this Roosh guy is doing the opposite of protesting bad shit, so that’s a twist on the story.

The spokesperson for a U.S.-based anti-woman group who advocates for “legal” rape has organized worldwide meet-up events in 43 different countries on Saturday.

On a website advertising the “Return of the Kings” event, self-styled “pick up artist” Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh has encouraged his misogynist supporters to “come out of the shadows and not have to hide behind a computer screen for fear of retaliation,” The

Nina Liss-Schultz at Mother Jones:

Amid the rapid spread of the mysterious Zika virus throughout Latin America and the growing evidence that it may lead to birth defects, governments in the region have made an unusual request: that women should hold off on having children for as many as two years. The unprecedented directives from heads of state and government officials have shocked many public health and medical experts. They say the prohibition of pregnancy could have untold effects on the birthrate in Latin America, and that managing and terminating a pregnancy is often not an option for many women in the region, where contraceptive access is limited and abortion laws are some of the strictest in the world.

Dear god.

From the Scottish paper The National:

CONTROVERSIAL American pick-up artist and rape advocate Roosh V has organised meetings in Edinburgh and Glasgow for next Saturday.

Only heterosexual men will be allowed to attend the meetings, and any women attempting to come along will be filmed with footage sent to his worldwide “anti-feminist” network who will then “exact furious retribution”.

It would be interesting to see a Venn diagram of that network and people who follow Dawkins on Twitter.

At 8pm next Saturday supporters of the militant misogynist will turn up at Glasgow’s George Square and Edinburgh’s Grassmarket to meet other men before heading to another, secret location.

It’s part of an international meet-up taking place in 40

You know what I wish? I wish Dawkins would just change direction. I wish he would buckle down and find out who all those progressive feminist universalist Muslim and ex-Muslim women are and promote them. That’s what. I wish he would stop using his massive Twitter voice to attack and bully individual women he takes a dislike to, and individual Muslim schoolboys he takes a dislike to, and instead use it to tell his million fans about people he likes. Stop the bashing, and start promoting instead.

He could do that. It wouldn’t hurt him. It would be fun, and he could feel he was accomplishing something. He would be accomplishing something. He’d be putting his fame to good … Read the rest

Guest post by Magdalen Berns.

Since I wrote about my experience of being excluded from Edinburgh University Student Association (EUSA) Women’s Liberation, LGBT Liberation, and LGBT Society Facebook groups, I can now confirm that I have also been banned from the NUS Scotland Women’s Campaign Facebook group which represents around 0.2% of roughly 100,000 female Scottish higher education students. My latest thought crime was having the temerity to post a discussion between Chris Hedges, Lee Lakeman and Alice Lee and quoting the following remark from Alice Lee.

I think with neoliberalism it’s worse for women of colour, indigenous women, because now a sort of–they use an excuse of subjugating women and the exploitation of women of colour and indigenous women

Via Maryam: a lecturer at a Swedish university is being investigated for lecturing on John Stuart Mill. It’s in Swedish but there’s a translate button at the top, so one can get the gist. Rrr provided us with a translation:

Groundless investigations of teachers jeopardize academic freedom and reduce the working and learning environment within the university.

Adamson (the male lecturer, who was by the way previously fired from Malmö university for criticising the Swedish variety policy) claims the quotes about religion are untrue. “All I did was to point out that while religions may not necessarily be true, they can give a sense of cohesion that secular society can not offer.”

The school planned an extensive investigation by

Racist bullies went on a rampage in Stockholm last night.

Hundreds of masked men marched through Stockholm’s main train station on Friday evening, reportedly beating up refugees and anyone who didn’t appear to be ethnically Swedish.

Wearing all-black balaclavas and armbands, the men “gathered with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” Stockholm police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.

Attacking children – that’s a nice touch. Hundreds of men getting together to attack children; what courage.

Before the attacks, the mob handed out leaflets with the slogan “It is enough now!” which threatened to give “the North African street children who are roaming around” the “punishment they deserve”.

The leaflet refers to the death of social worker Alexandra Mezher, who