The Goldsmiths Student Union has “concluded” its “investigation” of the ASH event where some men in the front row tried to disrupt Maryam’s talk. Here’s what they have to say about that:

We have now concluded our investigation into the events that took place at the ASH event on 20^th November. [That must be a typo for 30th November]

Goldsmiths SU will be taking the following actions:

(i)  We will arrange meetings with the Islamic and Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies individually and identify actions that will be taken by each society. This may be followed by disciplinary action against individual society members and/or a society.

(ii)  We will review our external speaker procedure and safe space policy in

The Times has reported on Maryam’s encounter with Goldsmiths ISOC.

Maryam Namazie, a feminist who fled the Iranian regime and campaigns against Islamic extremism, was speaking on “apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis” at Goldsmiths, University of London, when the talk was interrupted by protesters who switched off her projector and accused her of violating their “safe space”. The secularist, who said it was wrong for Bangladeshi bloggers to be hacked to death, or for Afghan women to be stoned, in the name of religion, said she was staggered when the Feminist and LGBTQ societies posted statements of solidarity with the Islamic Society, denouncing her as an Islamophobe.

She said: “I don’t expect any apology from

A sad story of identity and misunderstanding.

I’ve always known I was working class, even before I had the words to articulate it. Aged three, I used to call my dinner “tea”. My father, a high court judge, hated it but I kept on doing it all the same. I’ve no idea how I just knew the word “tea” was working class for “dinner”. I guess it’s something that was just in me.

Back in the 1980s no one ever discussed working-class children who’d been falsely assigned middle-class status at birth. It was as though we didn’t exist. Because of this I’d retreat into a fantasy world where I’d been swapped at birth and Den and Angie off Eastenders

A small news item from Williamsburg, Kentucky.

A homeless shelter in Williamsburg will no longer accept women as a way to stop people from having sex.

Allow me to do an editorial tweak of that sentence: In an effort to prevent people from having sex on the premises, a homeless shelter in Williamsburg will now turn away homeless women.

The director at Emergency Christian Ministries said people are having sex at the shelter and they cannot accept that.

“It seems like these last days it’s getting worse … the ungodly type,” Director Billy Woodward said.

About 10 to 12 women were asked to leave the shelter over the past two weeks.

Of course. Using a similar line of reasoning, … Read the rest

How they do it in Canada.

Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne greeted Syrian refugees at the airport in Toronto.

The family— the father is a blacksmith and the mother a sales clerk — was the first through processing in the wee hours of Friday morning after the government aircraft landed following a long flight from Beirut.

The family fled Syria, spent eight months in Lebanon and now they came to Canada because here, Madeleine will have many opportunities, the family said.

“We suffered a lot,” Jamkossian said. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”

Trudeau and Wynne were on hand to welcome the first two families from the plane that brought

Some cities in Israel have cut Jennifer Lawrence out of posters advertising the movie she stars in, because, you know, women are hoooooors unless they’re hidden away like dirty laundry.

Most Israeli cities have been treated to the standard poster of the final “Hunger Games” installment, featuring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen posing with her bow and arrow. But in the ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, as well as in Israel’s capital city Jerusalem – where several neighborhoods are heavily religious – residents instead received a censored version of the poster, featuring only an image of the fiery crown.

Extremely religious versions of Judaism consider the female image to be licentious, and ultra-Orthodox newspapers, catalogues and advertisements routinely edit out

Meghan Murphy explains some things about feminism.

When I started blogging, back in 2010, I was, admittedly, naive about the deep divides that exist between liberal and radical feminists. I still struggle with how to name those divides properly. I refer to those who refuse to make obvious connections between various forms of violence against women and who work to decontexualize our collective subordination as “liberal feminists,” “sex-positive feminists,” or “third-wave feminists,” never wholly sure of the most accurate label.

I realize this is because what I actually believe is that, if you can’t (or won’t) connect the dots between prostitution, pornography, rape culture, sexual harassment, objectification, femicide, colonization, domestic abuse and, more generally, female subordination, you are not

The British Humanist Association announces its new president:

Writer, broadcaster, and comedian Shappi Khorsandi will succeed physicist Jim Al-Khalili as the President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), it has been announced. The twelfth President in the BHA’s history, and the fourth woman to take the role, Shappi will begin her three-year term as President in January 2016.

Born to non-religious parents in Iran, Shappi and her family fled to Britain in her youth after her father, the poet Hadi Khorsandi, was targeted for assassination by Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime after writing a satirical piece about the Islamic Revolution. Growing up in England, Shappi’s childhood was marked by recurrent fears of her father being assassinated, and the family spent time

From Feminist Quotes:

Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper, Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

 … Read the rest

There’s this guy Taki Theodoracopulos who passes for a journalist of some sort, or at least a commentator. He’s very rightwing and very rude, but he also seems to consider himself an adult. He once had a column at the Spectator.

He has a website he calls Taki’s Magazine, and there he has a pile of childish abuse.

TIME magazine has selected German Chancellor and part-time nude model Angela Merkel as its “Person of the Year,” because to call her “Man of the Year” would be sexist, even though she looks like a man.

…

The magazine’s glowing profile of the dumpy, toadstool-like alleged woman with the Moe Howard haircut…

So because she’s opened her legs spread-eagle to

Elizabeth Nolan Brown went to an LGBT summit the other day and wrote it up for Reason.

During a lunch break at The Atlantic LGBT summit Thursday, attendees were invited to watch an informal panel discussion on transgender civil rights. Panelists included several transgender activists, as well as several non-trans panelists included for their expertise on legal issues (such as Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Chai Feldblum) or proximity to the conversation (such as an Atlantic staff writer who covers social justice). This, it turns out, was problematic.

Erasing marginalized people from discourse about their own communities has long been a problem, of course. But the fact remains that, at the moment, there are no trans EEOC commissioners. There is

I’ve just learned that all the museums have made paintings and books of paintings available to all of us to download for $0.00. The Rijksmuseum for instance.

So have that street in Delft.

 … Read the rest

Robert Jensen on sex, gender and patriarchy, from June 2014.

Today’s existing sex-role differentiation is the product of a patriarchal society based on male dominance. In that system, males are socialized into patriarchal masculinity to become men, and females are socialized into patriarchal femininity to become women.

In patriarchy, sex-role differentiation supports male power and helps make the system’s domination/subordination dynamic seem natural and normal. Moral, intellectual, and emotional traits are assigned differentially to each sex, creating what we today typically call gender roles. This patriarchal system of control—which is complex, adapting to changing conditions and to resistance—is designed to justify and perpetuate male dominance.

I’m not sure “designed” is the right word there, since it’s not really designed … Read the rest

The latest Jesus and Mo:

How do people of the book think they know the book is actually “God’s word”? How do they manage to be so confident about it? That’s one of the things I can never figure out about that kind of religious belief. It’s so trivially easy to pretend something is “God’s word”…so why do people so readily believe it of just one book out of the millions of books there are? Why do they think the goddy authorship is established and doubt-proof?

I don’t know. That’s one of the infinite number of things I don’t know.

The latest collection of Jesus and Mo strips, with a foreword by ME.

The Patreon.… Read the rest

The Alberta government has had the audacity to pass farm safety legislation. We can’t have that.

Alberta’s premier and some NDP MLAs have been targeted with violent threats over their controversial new farm safety legislation.

Rachel Notley’s government saw Bill 6 pass in the legislature on Thursday; it will become law on Jan. 1, 2016.

Someone on Twitter took screenshots of the threats.

Someone’s gotta man up and kill her…

…put a pitchfork through notley’s neck?

We honestly need to start killing off politicians.

Maybe we need to go back to the old west and just shoot her already.

Because farming should be dangerous, right?… Read the rest

It’s not just Oklahoma cops, it’s not just US cops. Via teslalivia in a comment: Tammy Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Police officers with histories of sexually exploiting vulnerable victims of crime were given responsibility for family violence and sexual offences investigations, a damning anti-corruption report has found.

The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry into predatory behaviour by Victoria Police found officers preyed on vulnerable victims of crime, particularly victims of family violence, and misused the power and trust placed in them.

The small minority of officers, the report stated, misused their authority to “devastating effect” by commencing or attempting to commence an intimate personal or sexual relationship with victims of crime.

Priests and cops. They get … Read the rest

A new cartoon from Assigned Male:

Sophie Labelle

I’m not transitioning because”I want to become a girl” ; I’m transitioning because I AM a girl.

Same for boys and non-binary folks. heart emoticon

Then what does “I’m transitioning” mean?… Read the rest

The birth of another theocracy.

The Gambia has been declared an Islamic republic by President Yahya Jammeh who said he wanted to further distance the west African state from its colonial past.

The tiny, formerly secular country – named after the river from which British ships are said to have fired cannonballs to fix its borders – joins the ranks of other officially Islamic republics such as Iran and Afghanistan.

And Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – such lovely, rights-respecting states, all of them.

“In line with the country’s religious identity and values I proclaim Gambia as an Islamic state,” said Jammeh on state television. “As Muslims are the majority in the country, Gambia cannot afford to continue the colonial

Meanwhile, it’s perfectly all right to make little kids feel excluded and weird because they’re not from godbothering families.

Valentine Doyle (6) sits at the back of her class for 30 minutes every day and “draws”, while her classmates are taught religion.

“She feels left out, different, excluded,” says her father, Devin. “She says she wants to ‘do the God thing’ now because the other kids are doing it. They were doing the sign of the cross and some of them told her she should do it too. So she wants to.”

The parents had been living in France, where the state schools don’t teach religion.

“Vallie went to school in France. There you just go to the local school.