On the one hand: in general, welcoming immigrants is a good thing, and welcoming refugees and asylum speakers is a moral imperative. On the other hand: there are genuine reasons to think it’s not possible to welcome all immigrants who would like to immigrate.

For one of those reasons, we have what seems to have happened in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. I emphasize “seems” because accounts differ.

The New York Times yesterday:

As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, some 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds

Chris Clarke points out that we don’t really even need a lot of deep background on the armed men occupying Malheur Wildlife Refuge. What they’re doing is stark enough on its own.

Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and in this case the group’s action says it all. They seized land that belongs to you, and now you can’t go there. And they say they’re just getting started.

I suppose this would be more obvious if they had seized the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or Yellowstone, but it wouldn’t be fundamentally different. It’s public land, and they’ve grabbed it, and now we can’t go there. I once knew a dedicated birder who spent two weeks there, his entire … Read the rest

Oh hey, look at this – a news story from Egypt in October 2006.

CAIRO: As Egyptians began their Eid Al-Fitr holidays last week, rumors of a wave of alleged sexual harassment tainted the joy of what is usually a family-oriented festive occasion.

The wave of harassment, manifested by public groping and touching of women accompanied by pushing and shoving and even pulling at headscarves and shirts, has stirred dismay among outspoken young women and men across some popular blogs.

Across these web spaces, which provide a free forum of expression for many, bloggers posted and shared pictures of incidents in which crowds of men harassed women.

In one picture, taken in the downtown area and posted on Misr

Seen on Facebook today:

Being lumped in with women by being called “female-bodied” is insulting to me. So, maybe if you dont want to insult people on your wall then you should heed the words of trans people.

Yeah, really – how gross to be lumped in with those disgusting people, women. What an insult.

Also how dare you say “female-bodied”? There is no such thing. Forget all that business about how sex=bodies and gender=everything else – that’s out of date. A person whose gender identity is male has a male body because that person is male, so obviously HIS body is male. Apologize or be evicted from everything.… Read the rest

The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court found Florida’s unique system of imposing a death sentence unconstitutional on Tuesday, saying it gives power to judges that is rightfully reserved for juries.

The decision united the court’s liberals and most of its conservatives, who voted 8 to 1 against the system employed by a state that’s among the leaders in imposing capital punishment. Florida has nearly 400 inmates on death row.

400! That’s downright Saudi.

It seems likely that the ruling will have limited impact outside of Florida, because no other state has exactly the same procedure. Alabama, another state with a higher-than-average history of imposing the death penalty, allows a judge to overrule a jury’s findings about whether the

The BBC yesterday on the Cologne attacks on women:

The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were “almost exclusively” from a migration background, mainly North African and Arab, an official report says.

…

Addressing state MPs on Monday, [North Rhine-Westphalia state’s interior minister Ralf] Jaeger criticised police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.

His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said.

These groups were predominately made up of North African

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