Julie Bindel and Rachel Jolley were on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking tonight talking about no-platforming and radical feminism – “not the fun kind that men love, pole dancing your way to liberation,” Julie said.
Their segment starts at 30 minutes.… Read the rest
… Read the restReporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders / RSF renamed the road of the Bangladeshi embassy in Paris to “RUE AVIJIT ROY” today, in honour of Avijit Roy, the first to be slain as part of a series of fatal attacks on outspoken secularists in Bangladesh this year, which still continues today.
Congratulations you “soldiers of Allah”, members of Ansarullah Bangla Team! Thanks to you, whenever people think of Bangladesh, they’ll be reminded of a brave people, voices of dissent who were so powerful, the only thing you could do to stop people from listening was to silence them forever. But alas, they speak on! They live on. Thanks to you, their voices
The Ansarullah Bangla Team has put out a new hitlist. Taslima’s name is at the top.
… Read the restThe group reportedly put up a list of 14 names of bloggers and writers on social media on Sunday, which includes several Bangladeshi writers who are now living abroad.
Taslima Nasreen has been living in the United States after threats to her life. She was moved to the US in May this year by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), which had said Nasreen was the ‘next target for murder by Al Qaeda-linked extremists’.
Apart from Nasreen, , other bloggers and writers on the terror hit list are Farjana Kabir Khan and Asif Mohiuddin who are currently in Germany, and Arifur Rahman and
About 1,000 Bangladeshi authors and teachers marched through the streets of the capital on Tuesday, asserting their right to free speech days after a suspected Islamist group attacked writers and publishers critical of religious militancy.
That’s so brave of them. On protests here you know the police may be taking pictures. There you know guys with machetes may be taking pictures.
… Read the restDespite the climate of fear caused by the attacks that follow the killings of four secularist bloggers this year, writers turned out in large numbers for the rally in Dhaka.
“No one is safe. First they killed bloggers. Now they are targeting publishers. Soon they will attack anyone who is progressive-minded,” said Khaledur Rahman, an
The Type III (or Type IV) ranking of glyphosate was long ignored by the anti-biotech opponents of Ht cotton as was the assessment by WHO and various Cancer societies that it was not likely a carcinogen. Suddenly with the new findings, the same groups are now demanding policy actions based on the findings of a source which they long implicitly discredited by ignoring it. Any credible evidence that does not support their firmly held beliefs does not exist in their universe. Nor did they indicate any awareness of the array of more toxic pesticides that were replaced by glyphosate or the resulting significant improvement in the Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ – “The EIQ impact assessment is based on the three … Read the rest
The concern over the Bt. Is a subset of the obsession, some might legitimately call it hysteria over the safety of transgenic using recombinant DNA (rDNA) to produce agricultural crops, particularly food plants generally called genetically modified or GMOs. It is easier to scare people than educate them. Need a new term for some forms of ignorance that is less pejorative. In the vast array of human knowledge, the best any one of us can do is to master small portion of it. In another words, all of us are uninformed or ignorant or at best minimally informed about all the rest of knowledge. True ignorance is when an individual or group has an absolutely unshakeable conviction on a subject … Read the rest
What is in a name? Plenty! The mere hint or even question suggesting that a pesticide might have any medicinal value would strike many as being ludicrous while to many others if not most others, it is beyond belief and therefore there is no need to continue reading. PESTICIDES ARE POISON! They are inherently evil and any attempt to define them in any other way makes one a member of a corporate cabal or a servant of them. For those brave souls still reading, let us begin with a few definitions or concepts – oversimplified but not incorrect.
Poison – disrupts a vital function or functions in a living organism or organisms that could lead to death but not necessarily … Read the rest
Nora Caplan-Bricker at Slate reports:
Men and women are equal—and so are the architectures of our brains, according to a new study by neuroscientist Lise Eliot of the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. According to a write-up in Wired, the study was aimed at evaluating the theory that the hippocampus is larger in women than in men; since the hippocampus is the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, this has been proposed as an explanation for all those feelings ladies tend to have. Eliot and her team analyzed 6,000 MRI scans and found “no significant difference in hippocampal size between men and women.”
This isn’t the first study that has shown no … Read the rest
I’ve written before about Leslee Udwin’s interviews with the men who raped Jyoti Singh and pulled her intestines out on that Delhi bus in 2012. But here’s another sample, from NPR:
They play a clip from Udwin’s film, then the interviewer asks Udwin about it:
… Read the restUNIDENTIFIED MAN: A lady are more precious than a gem, than a diamond. It is up to you how you want to keep that diamond in your hand. If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out. You can’t stop.
MARTIN: So what is he saying?
UDWIN: Well, essentially, he is giving expression to patriarchy. He is saying that men hold this diamond – this precious gem of
Again with this. This time at Feminist Philosophers, in a post about two posts discussing Germaine Greer.
There’s a lot wrong with it, but this one claim is especially infuriating (as well as all too familiar):
… Read the rest‘But I don’t get why gender identity is such a big deal’ – Sometimes, lurking in the background of these kind of criticisms of trans feminism is the suggesti[on] that we probably shouldn’t make such a fuss over gender identity. For [those] who have a relatively limited sense of or feelings toward their own gender identity, it can sometimes be hard to understand why some people think it’s so important. (Insert obligatory grumbling about ‘identity politics gone mad’.) As trans people have argued,
I hate to use the Daily Mail as a source, but every now and then I do. This story on Saturday reports that an organization called Gendered Intelligence runs workshops in a few primary schools in the UK. Very few – the Mail says “up to 20” schools a year get the workshops. Well 20 is a tiny number. Minuscule. The issue I have isn’t with the quantity but with the content.
… Read the restIn one class, Year Six boys at Hotspur Primary in Newcastle are asked to describe the ‘girlish’ things they like to do, while the girls say what ‘boyish’ pursuits they enjoy.
Gendered Intelligence’s founder Jay Stewart, who is giving the class, asks the pupils if they think ‘life
Just fucking unbelievable. The Jack the Ripper “museum” was promoting the opportunity to take selfies with “Jack” and the facsimile corpse of one of the murdered mutilated women. Selfies with the corpse of a slashed woman. What is wrong with everyone?
The museum was promising Halloween selfies with models of his victims and the founder of the museum, who was dressed as Jack the Ripper.
“Dressed as Jack the Ripper” doesn’t mean anything, because no one knows who the murderer was. “Perp the mutilator” would be a better name for him. (Yes, I doubt the perp was a woman.)
… Read the restOn their website, they posted: “How about a picture with Jack in Mitre Square together with the body of Catherine
I find it hard to believe this isn’t satire, but people tell me it’s not. Ok then – meet The five young revolutionary feminists you need to listen to.
… Read the rest“Just because you lop off your dick doesn’t make you a fucking woman”
This is just one regressive comment recently shit out by Germaine Greer – Australian second-wave “feminist”, writer and author of The Female Eunuch.
Her shitty statements have incited a rally of essays rightfully calling out her attempt to pitch transgender women as imposters, claiming they don’t “look like, sound like or behave like women.”
Essentially, her violent comments attempt to erase, undermine and deny the identity of transgender people, many of whom fall victim
Take heed:
A poster with the message:
ATTENTION
BETA MALES
SUPPORTING
#heforshe:
Despite what you may have been told, your sudden newfound support of feminism will do absolutely nothing to get you laid. Indeed, feminism has a long, bloody history of despising feminist men. They find them sexless, unarousing, and boring. BUT THEY WON’T TELL YOU THAT. They want your help, not YOU.
I love the “long, bloody history” part. It’s bloody to say no to sex?… Read the rest
AQ in India says it did it. Big surprise there.
The claim of responsibility by the division, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was made in statements posted on Twitter on Saturday. One of them said the two men were “worse than the writers of such books, as they helped propagate these books and paid the blasphemers handsome amounts of money for writing them.” A second statement, titled “Who’s Next,” describes categories of people as “our next targets.” The list includes writers, poets, intellectuals, newspaper or magazine editors, reporters and actors.
It always does. That’s always who’s on the list – the people who influence thought and ideas.
… Read the restAs “hit lists” of secular writers circulate on the Internet, many
Well this is hilarious.
A friend pointed out a comment on a thread at Pharyngula discussing feminism.
… Read the restIt’s one thing to criticize an artist for racism or transphobia. It’s quite another for who knows how many people to create over 3 dozen blogs and use social media to target an individual without social, economic, or political power. That’s disproportionate to any offense she caused. This isn’t a case of thousands of people taking to Twitter to mock and excoriate someone like Pharmabro Martin Shrkeli. He is a public figure in a position of power with a lot of privilege and a distinct lack of empathy who’s actions could impact a great many people. Zamii is nothing like him. She doesn’t
The comments on that post by Glosswitch are gold.
Like this one by Glosswitch:
… Read the restYou’re not listening. I’m saying I don’t identify with my assigned gender but this is not the same as identifying with another gender. Why is that so hard to understand? I’d have thought it was pretty fucking obvious. I have been forced into a gender I don’t identify with. So have most women who get dismissed as cis. It doesn’t mean we’re not women. If you’re fine with the cis definition – if you identify with the construct of inferiority bestowed on you at birth – then guess what? You’re really privileged, despite what you might feel about how you look. So as a privileged
In a post from April 2014, Glosswitch says most women hate their bodies. I think that’s probably putting it too strongly…but Glosswitch likes the hyperbolic vein, and I do too, so I read her point as being that this self-hatred gets underestimated. (On the other hand, where would marketing be without it?)
… Read the restWhen women like me shrink away, no one finds it strange. When we have our thighs sucked off, our breasts inflated, our cunts trimmed, we might find it an oddity – just about – but it will be positioned as personal choice. We don’t think of it as oppression. It is privilege and narcissism that makes us do it, a silly desire to be just like the
Kate Smurthwaite at the Jack the Ripper “museum” protest today:
Maryam gave her talk at Warwick on Wednesday. The Student Rights blog reports:
Namazie’s visit to Warwick first gained media attention last month when the Student Union attempted to bar her from speaking on campus.
Thanks to a vocal campaign by Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists (WASH), which saw widespread media coverage, the ban was overturned.
The president of WASH, Benjamin Davids, welcomed a packed lecture hall to the event on Wednesday, before Namazie spoke about the need to challenge Islamist groups – stressing that too often these movements are wrongly conflated with Islam and Muslims.
I have friends in and around Coventry. They were probably there.
… Read the restStudent Rights also spoke to Davids, who said that:
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