Michael Eisen is pissed off at Berkeley, his university.

On Friday, Azeen Ghorayshi posted a story about Geoffrey Marcy, a high-profile professor in UC Berkeley’s astronomy department. It reported on a a complaint filed by four women to Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) that alleged that Marcy “repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.”

Unusually for this type of investigation, the results of which are usually kept secret, Ghorayshi’s reporting revealed that OPHD found Marcy guilty of these charges, leading to his issuing a public apology in which he, in all too typical PR driven apology speak, acknowledges doing things that “unintentionally” was “a source of distress

So there are people who actually think it’s a serious mark against Julie Bindel that she said in an interview last month:

I mean, I would actually put [men] all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans.

Oh come on. Really? That’s obviously not a serious statement.

Let’s look at it in context. The interview is with radfem collective, so she’s talking to fellow radical feminists – not “radical feminists”as in the hostile stereotype, but radical feminists as in feminists who think we need to get to the root of things. They asked her:

will heterosexuality survive women’s liberation?

And she replied:

It won’t, not unless men

So Ariana Huffington and the Huffington Post empire are promoting Islamism via their new website, from what the Independent says:

The refusal of Western news organisations to involve Islamist voices in the debate on the future of the Middle East is acting as a recruitment driver for Isis and al-Qaeda, one of the region’s leading media figures has claimed. The accusation that global news groups are “pushing people to become extremists” was made last week to The IoS by Wadah Khanfar, the former managing director of the Al Jazeera network.

Mr Khanfar is Arianna Huffington’s partner in the new Huffpost Arabi website, which has been embroiled in controversy since it launched eight weeks ago. Critics have denounced the site

… Read the rest

One National Review – 4chan laughingstock of the week is a “language awareness campaign” at Western University in London, Ontario. It’s a Facebook campaign, the kind with people posing next to sound bites, which frankly makes the whole idea look sillier than it has to. Not all its points are obviously absurd, but they look solemn and self-important in that format, so it’s no wonder that National Review and 4chan are pointing and laughing.

Some of its points are silly though.

Like this one:

I don’t say “White washed” because it presumes “Whiteness” as tied to a certain set of behaviors.

No, it doesn’t, any more than washing white shirts to get them clean does.

Or this one… Read the rest

A post at A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

At Leaders Vision Preparatory School in Ndalat, Kenya, one student stands out from the rest — 90-year-old Priscilla Sitienei! The nonagenarian, who attends school alongside six of her great-great-grandchildren, is believed to be the oldest primary school student in the world. Although she never had an opportunity to learn to read and write as a child, Sitienei now hopes that her example will inspire the children of her community to understand just how valuable education is.

Affectionately known as Gogo, which means “grandmother” in the local Kalenjin language, Sitienei has been a midwife for 65 years and she even delivered several of her 10 to 14-year-old classmates. When she first applied

Obama went to Roseburg, Oregon yesterday to meet with some of the people mourning the victims of the shooting there.

President Obama, visiting a city Friday where emotions are still raw from last week’s shooting massacre, was alternately berated by hundreds of demonstrators and warmly embraced by many survivors of the victims.

The president met privately for about an hour with about 40 people, including survivors of at least three of the nine dead, and made only a short public statement afterward. Many in the community have said they were angered by his pro-gun-control remarks hours after the shooting at Umpqua Community College.

Imagine the students and teacher killed at Umpqua Community College had been blown up by a bomb … Read the rest

Why does this sound so familiar…?

Azeen Ghorayshi at BuzzFeed reports:

One of the world’s leading astronomers has become embroiled in an increasingly public controversy over sexual harassment.

After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.

As a result of the findings, the women were informed, Marcy has been given “clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,” which he must follow or risk “sanctions that could include suspension or

Originally a comment by Holms on “White Feminism”

I’m noticing a trend here. Apparently, it’s bad when activists campaigning against [X] social ill to fail to consider the intersection of [X] with [being black in America], i.e. it’s bad for a [feminist] to fail to consider [black feminism in America]. The fact that [X] is being fought in another nation doesn’t seem to change this; it all needs to consider the social climate in America.

I first noticed this years ago when an Australian KFC ad was running. As you may or may not know, Australia is a major cricketing nation, and as Americans probably don’t know, cricket is very international. The teams that have what is called ‘test status’ … Read the rest

Penny White has a shout-out to those pesky second-wave feminists everyone hates so much.

Second wave feminists fought to make marital rape a crime and won. They fought for tougher domestic violence laws and for state funding for shelters where women could go to escape violent partners. They fought for the passing of rape shield laws, which protect rape victims from the cruelest form of slut-shaming: being cross-examined on the witness stand about their sexual histories. They fought to define and enforce sexual harassment laws, which gave women the tools to fight harassment at work and in school. Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program; Title X,

If Allah is merciful…why are foreign servants treated so horribly in Saudi Arabia? Why doesn’t Allah’s mercy make all Saudis kind and compassionate?

An Indian servant was trying to leave her employer’s house, so the employer allegedly cut off her arm.

India’s foreign ministry has complained to the Saudi Arabian authorities following an alleged “brutal” attack on a 58-year-old Indian woman in Riyadh.

Kasturi Munirathinam’s right arm was chopped off, allegedly by her employer, when she tried to escape from their house last week, reports say.

Ms Munirathinam was working as a domestic help. She is recovering in hospital.

She’s not recovering her arm though. That’s gone.

The family of Ms Munirathinam in the southern Indian city of Chennai

Rosamund Urwin in The Evening Standard:

On Wednesday night, Suffragette opened the BFI London Film Festival. Along with the film’s stars, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, Sisters Uncut campaigners had their moment on the red carpet. They let off green-and-purple smoke bombs and staged a lie-in, protesting about government cuts to domestic violence services.

…

But while the feminist fire is burning bright, the flames are sometimes scorching other feminists. The Suffragette cast was understandably supportive of Sisters Uncut (“Marvellous” was Bonham Carter’s verdict: “That is exactly what the suffragettes were about”) but the protesters were less enamoured about the film. Writing for Independent Voices yesterday, Sarah Kwei, a member of Sisters Uncut, said she felt

A 2008 study also found the double standard about anger in women as opposed to men.

The abstract:

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women’s emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., “she is an angry person,” “she

A study confirms what everybody already knew: women can’t win.

Angry men are strong and forceful, while angry women are often dismissed as overly emotional. That double standard has been alleged for years now, with plenty of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

A newly published study featuring a mock jury not only supports that assertion: It takes it a step further, suggesting women’s anger may actually be counterproductive. It finds that, while men who express anger are more likely to influence their peers, the opposite is true for women.

Well that’s annoying.

Oh dear, I just made it worse.

“Our results lend scientific support to a frequent claim voiced by women, sometimes dismissed as paranoia,” conclude psychologists Jessica

Katie Bamber of Liberty notes the relationship between universal human rights and women’s rights, via Suffragette.

It’s been said countless times, but it bears ceaseless repeating, that we owe so much to those brave women. Many of them, names long forgotten, were working-class foot soldiers – like Maud – who suffered social exclusion, destitution, lost their incomes and their families, for the cause. Others, most famously Emily Wilding Davison, paid the ultimate price.

Forget all that, the important thing is to attack them for not being 21st century anti-racism campaigners.

A century on, we’re still far from true parity. Gender injustice remains the most entrenched on our planet. Even here in the UK, it’s so embedded in our day-to-day