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.

Here’s a shining example of the kind of thing that is sundering so many friendships and alliances: Aaron Kappel on why women and feminists are so horrible.

The piece starts with an unpleasant fantasy about peeling off a strip of skin, unpleasant enough that I skipped over most of it.

The fluidity of gender is complicated; it is messy and it is beautiful. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I cannot say with any real sense of authenticity or certainty that I know who or what I am–not fully. I lived as a cis heterosexual man for the first 22 years of my life. I then lived as a cis homosexual man for another decade. Today I am something

In Oklahoma City:

A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of 18 of the 36 counts he faced, including four counts of first-degree rape, related to accusations that he victimized 13 women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.

Daniel Holtzclaw, 29, sobbed as the verdict was read aloud. He could spend the rest of his life in prison based on the jury’s recommendations, which include a 30-year sentence on each of the first-degree rape counts. Among the other charges he was convicted of were forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery and second-degree rape.

…

The allegations against Holtzclaw brought new attention to the problem of sexual misconduct committed by law enforcement officers, something police chiefs

Hooray for tolerance and acceptance and general friendliness, right? Including for parents who don’t vaccinate their children, including when you are a parent with children in the same school, right?

It’s right according to the principal of Brunswick North West Primary in Melbourne, Trevor Bowen. Slate quotes from his message to parents:

We expect all community members to act respectfully and with tolerance when interacting with other parents and carers who may have a differing opinion to their own. This includes an opposing understanding about child immunisation.

People from both sides of the discussion have expressed their thoughts in terms of the wellbeing and ongoing health of the children they care so much for. This is most admirable. I

The Independent has a heartwarming story about a little girl in Toronto.

A Canadian transgender father left behind a wife and seven children to begin a new life as a six-year-old girl.

Stefonknee (pronounced ‘Stephanie’) Wolschtt, 46, had been married for 23 years when she realised she was transgender.

She’s now living with an adoptive family, and says she does not “want to be an adult right now”.

She realized she was transgender and six years old? How? How does an adult age 46 realize she is six years old? What’s that like? What does it mean? How does it work? Six year old girls, for instance, don’t have seven children, so doesn’t having seven children interfere with realizing … Read the rest

Via IKWRO on Twitter, those dedicated campaigners:

… Read the rest

The press release on the One Law For All event today:

On Thursday 10 December 2015, Southall Black Sisters (SBS), One Law for All, Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), Centre for Secular Space and British Muslims for Secular Democracy will attend 10 Downing Street to hand deliver a letter signed by nearly 400 individuals and organisations urging David Cameron to hold an inquiry into the discriminatory nature of Sharia ‘courts’ and other religious arbitration forums.

These women’s and human rights organisations also led successful campaigns preventing public authorities such as the governing body of UK Universities (UUK) and the Law Society from incorporating aspects of Sharia laws into their public policies. With regards the question of parallel legal … Read the rest

I guess Donald Trump is to the Right what George Galloway is to the Left. Galloway considers himself on the Left in some sense, but I (along with of course many others), despite being on the Left, consider him a terrible person. So it apparently is with Peter Suderman, a senior editor at Reason magazine, when it comes to Trump. His article is elegantly titled Donald Trump Is a Bad Person.

His declaration yesterday that he would close the United States to all Muslim immigrants, including tourists and Muslim American citizens abroad trying to return home, confirmed both his fascistic tendencies and his undisguised bigotry, and made something else clear in the process: that he is simply a bad

Mother Jones reports on a brilliant plan for next weekend:

Gun rights activists in Texas are planning to stage a mock mass shooting at the University of Texas this weekend in protest of both gun-free zones and President Barack Obama’s continued calls for tougher gun control legislation.

According to the website Statesman, gun rights supporters will begin the day by marching through Austin with loaded weapons and conclude their walk with a “theatrical performance.”

A spokesman for the two participating gun rights groups, Come and Take It Texas and DontComply.com, told the site the event will involve using fake blood and bullhorns to mimic gunshot noises.

By way of persuading the people of Austin and perhaps the Texas … Read the rest

There’s a new Fellowship for young writers in Australia.

The Kat Muscat Fellowship

Express Media is honoured to announce the inaugural Kat Muscat Fellowship to support and develop female-identifying young writers and editors from around Australia.

The annual Kat Muscat Fellowship offers professional development up to the value of $3,000 for an editorial project or work of writing by a young person. The Fellowship aims to continue Kat’s legacy and further develop the future of defiant and empathic young Australian women.

Kat Muscat was a brilliant young mind of the Australian writing community, whose formidable talent was demonstrated through her incisive writing and perceptive editing. Kat was an integral part of Express Media for many years, before becoming Editor of

The linguist Deborah Cameron dissects the damaging allure of neuroscience for non-scientists who write books about female and male brains.

For every scientist doing her best to communicate the complexity of contemporary brain research, there are a hundred non-scientists—self-help gurus, life-coaches, marketing consultants—churning out what has been labelled ‘neurobollocks’, a species of discourse that purports to be scientific, but is actually, in the words of one article on the subject, ‘self-help books dressed up in a lab coat’.

You can picture them on the shelves at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, in the Men Are From Mars section.

The language connection explains why over the years I have felt obliged to read such classics of neurosexism as Why Men

And now for something completely different from Saudi Arabia – the Independent reporting that they did indeed lie about the numbers of people who were killed in the crush at Mina during the hajj. Only a little – only by a factor of 3.

A stampede during the hajj in Saudi Arabia killed three times the number of people acknowledged by the Kingdom, according to the Associated Press.

A new count reveals at least 2,411 people died during the crush at Mina on 24 September, despite the official Saudi toll of 769 deaths not changing since 26 September.

That’s only 1642 people not reported. That’s only Saudi officialdom treating the pointless deaths of ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED FORTY TWO … Read the rest

A note from Maryam:

Delivered letter today to 10 Downing Street calling for end to parallel legal systems with one law for all, southall black sisters, Iranian Kurdish women’s rights organisation, centre for secular space and British Muslims for secular democracy.

 … Read the rest