Paul Krugman on the impact of money on character.

Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

Especially in a place like the US, where getting rich is seen as evidence if not downright proof of merit.

Modern America is a society in which a growing share of income and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, and these people have

Ensaf Haidar says Raif’s health is deteriorating.

Ensaf Haidar, who was granted asylum in Canada with the couple’s three children, said on Thursday that she hoped her husband would end a hunger strike he had initiated more than 20 days ago to protest against his transfer to a different prison in Saudi Arabia.

A member of Amnesty International in Canada and a spokeswoman for the Canadian government both said they were unable to confirm the hunger strike.

…

“I am very worried about him,” Ms Haidar said on Thursday. “His health, both physical and mental, is very poor.”

She said she last spoke with her husband two weeks ago, and had been kept informed of Mr Badawi’s condition by

Gosh, really?

The Rationaliser ‏@TheRationaliser 8 hours ago
@RichardDawkins Out of curiosity, do you think your gender/colour/class has given you privilege in your life?

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 8 hours ago
@TheRationaliser I don’t know, but my first class education probably has.

Really? He doesn’t know? At all?

I get that the word “privilege” gets thrown around too much, and has become both stale and belligerent, but none of that means that there is nothing to it at all. How can Dawkins simply not know if his being male and white and upper middle class has given him any privilege?

How, for instance, does he think he came by his first class education? The very label – first class – acknowledges … Read the rest

TIME magazine lists some people and institutions that have cut ties with Bill Cosby.

Spelman College. In July, the historically black women’s college discontinued its endowed professorship with Cosby, who donated $20 million in 1988. The school had suspended the program in 2014 before terminating it completely.

CAA. The comedian’s talent agency, which had represented him since 2012, dropped him in late 2014.

New York University. In September, university officials removed“William H. Cosby” from the title of its Future Filmmakers Workshop.

NBC ditched a sitcom. A cable network dropped Cosby Show reruns.

Drexel University. The Philadelphia school revoked Cosby’s honorary degree in November.

The University of Pittsburgh. “Based on a unanimous recommendation from the University Committee for honorary degree

His special barbecue sauce.

… Read the rest

A popular tweet:

Shari VanderWerf ‏@shariv67 11 hours ago
Excuse me, sir. Do you have a minute to talk about global warming?

Cosby has been to court for his arraignment.

Judge Elizabeth McHugh ordered him to surrender his passport and to avoid contact with Ms. Constand.

Judge McHugh concluded the proceeding after about 15 minutes by saying, “Good luck to you, sir.” He replied, “Thank you.” He will remain free on bail of $1 million.

Mr. Cosby then headed to the Cheltenham Township Police Department to be fingerprinted and to have a photographs taken. A small gathering of people outside shouted, “You’re a monster” and “Shame on you” as he walked into the station. He said nothing.

I’m wondering if this will play out the way the OJ Simpson case did. The other day at the local branch library I happened … Read the rest

Maajid Nawaz expands on his thoughts about “wear hijab day.”

Simply wearing a headscarf on World Hijab Day falls terribly short of our moral responsibility. It is, after all, being called World Hijab Day. So, it is not only Western Muslim women who must be considered here, but the millions of Muslim women who live under theocracies around the world, for whom World Hijab Day is enforced every single day, and for the rest of their lives.

That’s why I would never in a million years wear any form of hijab.

Did these non-Muslim women—indulging their Orientalist fetish by covering their heads—not stop to consider for one moment that their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and under Taliban or

Monday I mentioned a BBC photo of a heartbreakingly huge pile of full bin-bags outside a bookshop in Hebden Bridge. Today I read in the Guardian:

Authors including Jon Ronson and Ian Rankin have joined efforts to help a bookshop badly hit by the floods that have swept the north of England. The Book Case in the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge was one of the businesses in the town wrecked when the town was hit by the severe rain battering the region.

Sam Missingham, head of events at publisher HarperCollins, and Yorkshire-based husband-and-wife author team Bob and Carol Bridgestock, who write crime fiction as RC Bridgestock, have been lobbying authors to provide signed copies of

Deborah Cameron talks about some Words of the Year.

If this blog could ban a word in 2016, that word would be ‘banter’. Banter cropped up in the news several times during 2015, and on each occasion it revealed itself, once again, as a term whose main function is to normalize misogyny. Of course it’s true that getting rid of the word wouldn’t eliminate the thing itself. But it might make it harder for people to pretend that sexist verbal abuse is just a bit of harmless fun, in a totally different category from the racist or homophobic equivalent.

One traditional place for the ‘harmless banter’ argument to surface is in discussions of the shit that gets said to

Larry Wilmore on Cosby last July, after the New York Times published that deposition in which Cosby admitted drugging women in order to fuck them. (In other words, as Wilmore emphatically points out, to rape them.)

… Read the rest

Because it made me laugh my insides out.

… Read the rest

Taslima mentioned this on Twitter, so I looked it up. International Business Times reports:

Indian Army personnel allegedly gang-raped a 14-year-old girl Monday in a moving train in the eastern state of Jharkhand, according to local reports. Police in Jharkhand reportedly detained one of the men and said the other two would be arrested soon.

The girl ran away from her home Sunday and was travelling alone on a train bound for the town of Amritsar, in the northwestern state of Punjab. Her family alerted police of her disappearance, who informed railway authorities.

The Times of India reported officials spotted her boarding a train car reserved for troops.

Railway police rescued the girl, who later said in a

Originally a comment by Samantha Vimes on For no reason at all.

There are some uninformed people speaking up this time.

Listen, guys: there’s this thing you might have heard of called “socialization”. It’s where people form opinions, values, and behaviors based on what the people who came before them and live around them think, do or say. It’s the reason why so many people have a low opinion of women. It’s not that women are, in general, so bad at life that we deserve to be mocked and scorned. It’s that when you were boys, the men around you taught you to deride women. She’s angry? Must be that time of the month; it cannot be thought that … Read the rest

Pull up your chairs for a lesson in Spoilers and Social Justice. Shut up, this is important.

First of all – is it hypocritical to want spoiler alerts while thinking trigger warnings are out of hand or silly or both? Yes, yes it is. Thank you for asking that question. The answer is yes.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get down to the real politics.

Spoiler warnings are an intersectional social justice and accessibility issue. For example, I am rarely able to experience media right away. I don’t get to see movies when they come out because I work a lot of hours, I’m a student, and I’m usually totally broke. Spoilers are a

Feel a need for the Third Man theme music? Of course you do.

https://youtu.be/r8jN1treRKQ… Read the rest