Now here’s a movie I want to see. Judging by the trailer it’s all about the Hollywood Ten (specifically Dalton Trumbo) and HUAC and the blacklist. That’s a fascinating subject. If you want to read up on it, Eric Bentley has an excellent collection of extracts from HUAC hearings, Thirty Years of Treason.

One of Dalton Trumbo’s lines from the trailer:

Many questions can be answered ‘yes or no’ only by a moron or a slave.

Some background:

After the Second World War, as tensions began to simmer between both the United States and Soviet Union and the Hollywood studios and unions like the Screen Writers Guild, the House Committee on Un-American Activities turned its eyes towards the

Is the claim that sex should always be consensual compatible with the claim that sex work is just a job like any other job? A blogger asks.

One could write a book on the contradictions inherent in the pro-prostitution stance – Janice Raymond did just that – but there may be no single greater inconsistency than the dual love liberals have for both paid sex and the notion of “enthusiastic consent.”

Most jobs don’t build in claims about the need for consent, because that’s the nature of jobs. Jobs are about being paid to do something someone else wants done.

Sexual encounters should be given the go-ahead with more than just a nod of agreement or shrug of the

Courtesy of Josh Spokes, Saunders and French read an interview that a Hungarian newspaper did with Madonna, which involved multiple levels of translation. Have paper towels at your side.

… Read the rest

I want to draw attention to something Pieter B said in a comment, because the situation he describes is so…frustrating, pervasive, infuriating…

I used to have a photo studio, and since I’m in Los Angeles I did a lot of shoots with actors and models. One day a stuntwoman who was trying to move into acting came to me with her portfolio, and said an agent who’d been interested in representing her had looked at her photos and asked “Don’t you have any where you look like a girl?”

She was a trained athlete, and in all her photos she was tall and proud and looked physically capable. Personally, I find that quite attractive, but then I’m not

I’ve been thinking about identity politics, aka privilege, aka intersectionality. Not really aka but they’re all talking about much the same thing – kinds of people who are treated badly in some way because they belong to that “kind”…aka because they have that identity.

I have mixed thoughts about it, as I do on so many things. (This isn’t allowed, I can’t help noticing. You’re not allowed to see what The Enemy is getting at, you have to spit at it and stamp on it, instead. The ensuing conversation tends to be rather thin and drab for my taste.) I get why identity politics can get tedious, and indeed grating. But – the fact remains that people are treated badly … Read the rest

A not very blesséd event.

An 11-year-old girl, who according to authorities was raped by her stepfather, gave birth to a healthy baby girl Thursday morning in Asunción, Paraguay.

That’s because Paraguay prevented her from having an abortion. Paraguay forced her to carry a baby to term at age 11 and to have major abdominal surgery to deliver it.

If that baby has the bad luck to be raped in ten years and to get pregnant via the rape…she too will be forced to carry the child to term, unless Paraguay changes the law.

The pregnancy was discovered in late April when the mother took her daughter to the hospital after the girl complained of abdominal pain.

The mother

Ever noticed these?

Usually when I notice them I notice the stupid skirt, and I grumble stupidly that that’s not me so why yadda yadda…

…but if I’m stuck wherever it is for a longer than usual time, I move on to the shoulders.

Look at the shoulders.

Consider the message.

… Read the rest

I’ve found a great new source of hilarity – the visitor posts on Target’s Facebook page.

Like this response to the frenzied protesters:

Elena Christensen‎ Target 19 mins ·

Alright opposition, let’s get one thing straight. Removing gendered labeling does not mean those things are now only for people who do not conform to the traditional gender binary. Most things in Target stores are not gendered. Do you only buy a television if it’s a “girl” television? Will you only use earplugs if they’re the “girl” earplugs (although these are actually a thing)? Are you constantly suffering from headaches because the Advil is ungendered (OH THE HUMANITY!)? And if you can’t sort out for yourself what the

Chris Clarke reports a fairly striking bit of mission-reversal at the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

A federal judge has spiked a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to issue 30-year-long permits to industry that would allow companies to kill bald and golden eagles.

Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court in San Jose ruled Monday that USFWS acted illegally when it approved the permits without analyzing the policy’s likely environmental impact as required by federal law. Koh ordered the agency to conduct a full environmental assessment of the policy. The permits, which would have allowed accidental “take” of bald and golden eagles at wind power sites and other industrial facilities, were created after wind power companies objected

Asif Mohiuddin has won the Anna Politkovskaya Award for Journalism.

The 30-year-old Bangladeshi blogger, who left the country following militant attack and imprisonment for his writing, will be handed over the award at an International Festival in Ferrara, Italy in October this year.

German newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung and Italian newspaper Ferrara Italia reported on his latest achievement.

The report in Ferrara quoted Asif as saying: “I did not expect to win the award, is a recognition that makes me proud and makes me do my job more and more professional.”

Richly deserved.

 … Read the rest

Der Spiegel reports that decriminalization hasn’t made everything great for sex workers.

Alina ran away from poverty and abuse in Romania when she was 22.

Through a friend’s new boyfriend, she heard about the possibilities available in Germany. She learned that a prostitute could easily earn €900 ($1,170) a month there.

Alina began thinking about the idea. Anything seemed better than Sânandrei. “I thought I’d have my own room, a bathroom and not too many customers,” she says.

So she went to Berlin, to a brothel near the airport elegantly called Airport Muschis (“Airport Pussies”).

The brothel specialized in flat-rate sex. For €100 ($129), a customer could have sex for as long and as often as he wanted.

It all

Last week Jesus and Mo talked to the barmaid about freedom of speech.

That kind of reminds me of what was going on last week at the blog network I used to belong to. I’m sure it’s totally a coincidence though. Totally.

The J&M Patreon.… Read the rest

I have an email from the Human Rights Campaign. They tell a story about a gay man in Nebraska who was passive-aggressively fired from his part-time job at a wine store after his boyfriend came to visit. They want more stories to share.

Stories like Luke’s remind me why we cannot stop fighting.

They are the backbone of HRC’s mission. They are the reason that we are relentlessly advocating to pass comprehensive non-discrimination legislation. And they are also how we change hearts and minds, and inspire others to become advocates for equality.

If you have faced discrimination based on your sexual orientation or gender identity, or if you know someone who has, we want to know about it. Please take

Callimachi’s Times article goes on to describe the way IS has developed a whole theology around its enslavement and marketing of Yazidi women and girls.

The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.

A thriving slave trade, selling enslaved girls and women for permanent rape.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run

Prepare for extreme disgust as you begin to read this article by Rukmini Callimachi in the NY Times.

QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious

From an interview with Cordelia Fine by Anna Lena Phillips in American Scientist around 2010.

What first motivated me to write the book was an experience I had as a parent, rather than as an academic. I read a book which claimed that hardwired sex differences mean that boys and girls should be parented and taught differently. I found this really interesting—but when I looked at the actual studies being used as evidence, I was shocked by the extent to which the neuroscientific findings were being misrepresented. So my initial motivation was simply to alert people to the fact that old-fashioned stereotypes are being dressed up in neuroscientific finery, and to remind people not to be so enthralled with brain

Update: The story is from 2011. I blogged it then.

The BBC reports an incredibly depressing situation in the UK.

Britain’s madrassas have faced more than 400 allegations of physical abuse in the past three years, a BBC investigation has discovered.
But only a tiny number have led to successful prosecutions.

The revelation has led to calls for formal regulation of the schools, attended by more than 250,000 Muslim children every day for Koran lessons.

That’s a lot of children. And – every day? That’s a lot of time, too. And the “lessons” are just memorization of the Koran in Arabic – they’re about the most futile time-wasting kind of “lessons” it’s possible to have.

And on top of that … Read the rest

Let’s consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a moment.

Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness as objects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims,

You’d better believe it.

… Read the rest