Another high up Catholic dude explains that women are really irritating, so irritating that sometimes men are forced to beat the shit out of them.

Braulio Rodriguez, who is the Archbishop of Toledo, spoke to his congregation about relationships at a sermon held in Toledo Cathedral on 27 December, and his comments were later written up in the Our Father parish bulletin.

He criticised ‘false marriages’ and ‘quickie divorces’, and said that the root cause of domestic violence was a woman’s ‘disobedience’ to her husband.

Oh yes? So if I go to Spain and make my way to Toledo and track down the archbishop and tell him to do something, I can hit him with a baseball bat when … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Carlos Cabanita on If you say “I’m not Charlie,” you are not a liberal.

I agree. How come Western liberals love their liberties so much, conquered through centuries of bloody wars and revolutions (and we aren’t halfway through, I think), but for the oppressed people of the rest of the world they show the middle finger?

Stay with your mullahs, accept your theocratic dictators, hide under your burkas and leave us alone! As long as you let us play our world chess and get cheap oil to finish poisoning the planet, it’s all right for us.

This position is imperialist, the same as that other one that demonizes Islam as an unhistorical evil power that … Read the rest

Hmm.

A new publication, in Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies.

Intimacies of Rock

Ethnographic Considerations of Posthuman Performativity in Canada’s Rocky Mountains

Here’s the Abstract:

This essay engages feminist science studies and theories of performativity to inject with dynamism familiar figurations of static being. Through the modalities of ethnographic writing, memory, and embodied experience, I enact a lively engagement with Canada’s Rocky Mountains. By shifting the way we understand this unique, constitutive feature of the Canadian West, I suggest an approach to ethics that expands categories of agency, disaggregating it from realms of human exceptionalism. Through the analytic of performativity, I attend to the dynamic and agentive capacity/ies of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen—nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert

Bad news from Pakistan:

Pakistani officials said at least 14 people have been killed in a bomb attack outside a polio vaccination center in the southwestern city of Quetta on Wednesday. The attack appeared to target police, and came before vaccination teams were due to launch a three-day immunization campaign.

Nobody has stood up to say “we did it!” yet, but al-Qaeda is suspected.

Militants have claimed that polio vaccination programs are a front for espionage or used to sterilize Muslims.

Islamic clerics have told their followers that the West conspires against Muslims, and that they use a substance found in the polio vaccination to sterilize Muslim men.

The clerics also point to the case of a Pakistani doctor

Sarah Ditum at the New Statesman:

Daria Pionko was supposed to be safe. Or safer, anyway. That, at least, was part of the thinking behind the “managed prostitution area” established in the Holbeck area of Leeds in June 2014 and officially announced the following October. It was also a tidying-up exercise, in response to locals’ concerns about living alongside street prostitution. By suspending the laws on kerb-crawling and soliciting between seven at night and seven in the morning in one non-residential part of town, Leeds City Council hoped to draw all the city’s outdoor prostitution to one unobtrusive place.

Alongside this effective decriminalisation, a Sex Work Liaison officer was appointed to work with women in prostitution, who are often

I saw a ridiculous item on Facebook yesterday, comparing Obama urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children with Hitler urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children.

Our friend Stewart found and translated an item from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 21 March 1938.

A new weapons law.

Berlin, 21 March. In the latest edition of the Reich law gazette a new weapons law is announced which was recently decided upon by the Reich government and which replaces the defensive weapons law of 1928, as well as a series of weapons directives from the emergency period.

The new law is the result of an examination of the weapons law in order to see which relaxations could be made

Nick Cohen tears into the pope and the pro-theocracy left.

The only respectful way to mark the first anniversary of the Paris killings is to honour the memory of the dead by fighting for the Enlightenment values they lived by and died for. Whether we can is moot. Anglo-Saxon societies have enjoyed the privilege of Enlightenment freedoms for so long our defences have fallen into disrepair. We fool ourselves into thinking we are in a post-Enlightenment world. The old battles appear dead and gone, even though all around us murderous fanatics remind us that they intend to fight the war all over again.

It’s like vaccinations all over again, isn’t it – we’re so used to our freedoms that … Read the rest

Think about corsets for instance. Yes, corsets.

We all know they were hella uncomfortable, and bad for the internal organs – but I’m not sure I had realized they were also bad for mental functioning.

Elizabeth McGovern, one of the Downton Abbey crew, spent a lot of time wearing them, and she says they are. It makes sense, of course – obviously you can’t breathe properly in them, and obviously breathing properly is important for mental functioning – but I don’t think I’d made the connection until I saw her say it on some dopy PBS special about How Fabulous is Downton Abbey the other day.

Elizabeth McGovern is talking about restrictive underwear. Or more precisely – since we

Oh good god – this exists on Twitter – #JeSuisNero. Nero is the loathsome professional misogynist Milo Yiannopoulos. Why are imbeciles saying they are Nero aka Milo Yiannopoulos? Because Twitter removed his verification check, as punishment for being a loathsome professional misogynist and harasser.

He lost his verification check on Twitter, so people are comparing him to Charlie Hebdo.

I want to vomit.… Read the rest

Travis Longcore takes on the attack on science at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, saying he stands with Linda Sue Beck.

Linda Sue Beck. It is at her desk that Ammon Bundy, leader of the group of armed anti-government religious fanatics occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, has set up shop. As a federal biologist, like my father was for decades, she works to steward the resources that are held in common trust for all Americans. My stomach turned as the report came through the radio today — approaching a week into the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — and I heard the descriptions of the Bundys picking through her belongings and ridiculing her work.

“She’s not here working

The New York Times takes a squint at the “give all the land to us” movement behind the Bundy putsch.

Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government’s.

Is it indeed? How? According to whom or what? On what terms? With what mechanism for dealing with conflicts? If it’s “their” land it’s presumably “my” land too so what if I want to protect it from development and “they” want to develop it?

How did it get to be anyone’s property in the … Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg took the baby to the doctor.

Doctor’s visit — time for vaccines!

See what he did there?

The Washington Post reports on the reactions:

The nearly 70,000 comments on Zuckerberg’s post run the gamut of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments. On the one hand, users have pointed out, scientists credit vaccines with eliminating formerly widespread diseases such as smallpox, and severe allergic reactions to vaccinations are rare.

Yet, many Americans, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, doubt the medical efficacy of vaccines and have pointed to their potential dangers. During a September 2015 GOP debate, Trump recounted that the 2-year-old child of one of his employees “got a tremendous fever” and “now is autistic” after

New York to LA

https://youtu.be/9G4jnaznUoQ… Read the rest