Photos of that gender segregated mosque:

That’s the gymnasium all right.

The boys have a better place to go.

… Read the rest

Danielle Muscato has a public post on Facebook saying a thing that I strongly agree with (and wrote a Free Inquiry column saying a few issues back):

Rant mode engaged:

I’m sick of hearing people say, “No one is pro-abortion. Pro-choice is not pro-abortion.”

Bullshit. I’m pro-abortion. Anytime, for any reason, on demand, no questions asked, no waiting period, no parental consent, no spousal consent, tax-funded abortions, and please take as many free condoms on your way out as you’d like. And I make no apology for this. Your body, your choice.

Copious heated “oh no you didn’t” ensued – nearly all of it from men. Lots of impassioned concern for the other person involved, and the fact that abortion … Read the rest

Asra Nomani and Ify Okoye start with setting the scene:

This past weekend, dozens of girls and boys as young as about 8 years old ran up the stairwell to the main entrance of the musallah, or main prayer hall, of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama visits Wednesday in his first presidential visit to a U.S. mosque. As the children rounded the corner, a stern mosque Sunday school teacher stood before them, shouting, “Girls, inside the gym! Boys in the musallah.”

The girls, shrouded in headscarves that, in some cases, draped half their bodies, slipped into a stark gymnasium and found seats on bare red carpet pieces laid out in a corner. They

This just makes me sick – Business Insider reports on the way US Secretary of State John Kerry has been sucking up to Saudi Arabia.

Despite a flurry of international criticism regarding Saudi Arabia’s mass execution, the US government has been exceptionally muted in its response. After the executions, the State Department reported that it had “expressed [its] concerns” about the legal process in Saudi Arabia and raised those concerns at “high levels of the Saudi government”.

Emerging from meetings with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, Secretary Kerry declared the discussion to be “one of the most constructive conversations that we have had in a time.” Speaking to embassy staff in Riyadh, he stated, “We have as

Tiny got in the watering hole and can’t get out. The bank is just a little too steep and a little too slippery. The elephants try to help by screaming and bellowing, but it doesn’t quite work. One craps copiously in Tiny’s general direction, but that doesn’t do it either. Pulling doesn’t do it…but maybe pushing? Worth a try.

… Read the rest

Uh.

Randy Milholland ‏@choochoobear 5 hours ago
So MRAs are planning a meet up in a Chicago park & invited a guy who proposed rape be legalized in public places https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160202/rogers-park/pro-rape-mens-rights-group-plans-saturday-rally-rogers-park …

Once your organization actively bands with a guy who wants rape legalized, the argument of “we don’t hate women” is harder to make.

I’m curious if there will be any MRAs who actually stop, look at this, and say, “No, that’s not someone I want to be associated with.”

And got my first angry MRA.

“He’s not an MRA, do your goddamn research” – I never said he was. I said he was going to be at a gathering of MRAs & he’s pro rape.

So, yes –

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