There was a re-run of a Jon Stewart interview on Fresh Air yesterday. He said something that made me think “oh yes, I have that too.”

DAVIES: You grew up in, I guess, Lawrenceville, N.J.

STEWART: That is correct.

Ok that’s weird because I grew up very near there myself – in and near Princeton, N.J. My cousins went to Lawrenceville the school.

But that’s not it.

DAVIES: Were you a class clown? Did you have the sort of persona that made fun of everybody in a kind of playful and endearing way?

STEWART: (Laughter). Yes, I was very playful and endearing.

DAVIES: That was you.

STEWART: Yeah. People always say, you know, when did you realize you were

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Salman Rushdie talked to L’Express the other day; the Guardian shares some highlights in translation.

Salman Rushdie believes that if The Satanic Verses had been published today, the members of the literary elite who rounded on Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the French satirical magazine winning a PEN prize for courage would not have defended him.

I think he’s quite right. Things have moved on since the fatwa, and not in a good way. The very awfulness of theocratic Islamism (that’s a tautology, but people get confused about what Islamism is) has helped to make it harder to resist theocratic Islamism. The thinking goes: Islamists do terrible things, and that makes people be horrible to Muslims in general, … Read the rest

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Aw shucks, as so often happens, once you look it up it’s not quite as fatuous as it looked.

Stonemill explains:

Thank you to all of our customers who have provided feedback on the recently launched Men’s and Women’s Wellbeing breads. We’ve had many positive comments about these new breads, but have also had some customers express concern about the gender-specific labelling.

As background, our intention when creating the Wellbeing breads was to support the unique and different nutrient needs of men and women. We worked under the guidance of a registered dietitian to identify the specific nutrients men and women require on a daily basis and what they may fall short on. For example, Health Canada indicates that

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No, no, no, no…this can’t be real…

Sarah Nyberg ‏@srhbutts 21 hours ago
that tragic feeling when you’re at the grocery store but they’re all out of your gender’s bread

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Wow. A new low every day.

Marian Melby’s blog. Post by HJ Hornbeck.

I’m currently away, with only a scattered internet connection.

If you’re looking for M.A. Melby, you have the wrong extension. Please hang up and try again.

If you’re a blogger in the middle of a meltdown over accusations of transphobia, I spotted that post of yours thanks to a commenter. Nice troll, but I’m not biting.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t approved your comment or made one myself, technical reasons are conspiring to prevent it. About all I can do from here is write or edit blog posts, and only then when I catch a spare moment and/or build up sufficient outrage.

For all

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StevoR left us some treats in the Withdrawing Room:

Rosetta and Philae awesomeness :

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Science_on_the_surface_of_a_comet

Stick with that first photo – its an animation with some pretty impressive reality in it.

Plus :

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-31/philae-lander-photo-shows-there-is-more-to-comets-than-soft-dust/6662378

Also a good radio segment on Pluto, Kepler 452b ad more here as well :

http://www.abc.net.au/science/audio/2015/07/29/4282396.htm#.Vbr7rjD0D8U.facebook

Hope these are interesting & informative for folks here.

Thanks!… Read the rest

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Guest post by Bruce Everett

CN: Talk of spousal murder. And Nazis.
…
You know what I’d do if I were compulsively obsessed to fine-parse the ideas and beliefs of a certain group of people in order to find them guilty-by-association? I’d start looking for links to the works of Louis Althusser – because while the work of Althusser may have been picked up and expanded upon by some feminists, the guy strangled his wife to death. (And let’s not forget debate over his supposed turn towards neo-conservatism in his later years).

Then I’d start looking for links to Heidegger… because, well… Godwin’s Law. The work of Heidegger, and its derivatives (i.e. a lot of Left Bank philosophy) do turn … Read the rest

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This is a comment that I deleted, by someone using the nym “Leum” who won’t be commenting here again.

I find it quite staggering.

And this time this stuff is coming from supposed allies. Progressives. People of the left.

This is what the people whipping up the hatred of me are fomenting:

Leum @58

Do you think Ophelia is not physically safe for a trans woman to be around?

Full disclosure: I am a cis male. I have the same reservations as Ophelia about a “yes” answer. I have spent some time in the company of a trans woman and felt no desire to attack her, physically or emotionally.

Since I’m a) not a trans woman and b) have

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Oh god what an unbearable story. Be warned: this is an unbearable story.

A young woman has spoken of her “living hell” as her abusive ex-husband was jailed for life with a minimum of 28 years for shooting her mother as an act of revenge.

Tariq Rana, 31, travelled from his home in Wolverhampton to Pakistan intent on tracking down relatives of his 28-year-old wife Ayesha Riaz, who split up with him a year after their arranged marriage.

So for that he killed her mother. For a wound to his precious ego, he killed the mother of the woman who didn’t like being married to him. I like my ego as much as the next person, but I … Read the rest

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Nimisha Jaiswal points out that witches are not a form of cosplay in India.

Last week, a mob of 200 people in the Indian state of Assam dragged a 65-year-old woman out of her house, stripped her and beheaded her with a machete. They did so because a self-proclaimed “goddess,” who asked them to gather at a local temple, proclaimed that the woman was a witch and would bring bad luck and illness to the village.

People hate old women.

In a country teeming with IT graduates and higher-education institutes, such attacks are sadly and strangely common. Ninety people in Assam, a majority of them of them women, lost their lives in the last six years because they

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I can’t figure out what I think about this. I just go on a parade of “on the other hands” that never end up at a settled opinion. I do that a lot. I’m not very good at resolving ambivalence. That’s a problem when you have to make a decision – when you’re a judge, for instance – but I don’t think it’s entirely bad when you’re just thinking. It’s not always terrible to see merit on both (or several) sides of an issue. One of the things that annoys me most about the current campaign to expel me from the Community of Good People is the fervent loathing of ambivalence.

The “this” is the prosecution and conviction of Oskar … Read the rest

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Glosswitch says sex education should include teaching boys not to be sexist. That seems reasonable.

I am a mother of sons and the thought of them growing up within a culture of rampant male sexual entitlement terrifies me. Right now they are six and seven – still innocent, still able to see their female peers as fellow humans – but as adolescence approaches, I fear that a deluge of misogyny will engulf them as they encounter the adult world and so-called “normal” attitudes to sex.

I am very much in favour of them being granted access to as much accurate, open-minded sex education as possible. Nonetheless, I doubt such teaching will ever be effective as long as we are in

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At Slate, a piece titled Why I’m Still a Butch Lesbian.

Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart says she first started wearing what she calls “men’s clothing” a few years ago.

(Me, I would just call them clothes. I wear jeans – black ones when I need to clean up – and T shirts or turtlenecks, sweatshirts or sweaters. I don’t think of them as men’s clothes. Then again I don’t wear neckties – I guess I do think of them as men’s clothes. Why? Well…uh…I guess because I don’t wear them. Is this a little bit circular?)

VVU felt as if she’d been wearing an uncomfortable, ill-fitting costume her whole life, until she started wearing “men’s clothing.”

As I adjusted to

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Originally a comment by TGuerrant on Fresh quality content.

As timgueguen said (and despite the common elements in our nyms we are not the same person), the Duggars have a real estate business that Jim Bob took over from his mother, and they’ve parlayed it into a portfolio of income-generating commercial real estate, including a cell tower.

Jim Bob also ran a used car lot and a towing business – a good pairing. A used car lot arranges high-interest loans for buyers with lousy credit (profitable), the cash down payment made before the car’s driven off the lot usually covers the dealer’s costs, any payments the buyer makes are profit, and if a buyer fails to make the payments, … Read the rest

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What Salty Current said on Alex Gabriel’s “smoke / fire” post from last month, a post which was kicked back to life a few days ago by the odious “sonofrojblake,” whom I finally banned from commenting here because he’s so odious.

This is the whole comment, because it’s good.

Alex:

@Salty Current (#59): Including trans women in your definition of women doesn’t require you to ‘accept unproblematically a gender binary with whatever associated qualities anyone might attach to it’.

If you’ve been experiencing the oppressive aspects of the category “woman” and its associated beliefs for your entire life, writing for years prior questioning and challenging the category and its definitions, and (in Ophelia’s case) feeling very ambivalent about what … Read the rest

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Jesus and Mo explain about blasphemy.

You can support J and M via Patreon.… Read the rest

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The Duggars are asking for money.

On the conservative clan’s official YouTube page, Duggar Studios, the family asks for supporters to contribute funds so the kids can create “fresh quality content” on their video site.

“Every contribution is helpful, big or small,” they claim.

…

However, the videos, featuring the children playing basketball and going to the dentist, don’t seem to require much of a budget.

Also, clips are only uploaded to the account once every few months.

The former reality stars have a history of money grubbing.

MORE: Josh Duggar’s Bizarre Sex Abuse Recovery Program Revealed

Daughter Jill, 23, and husband Deryck Dillard, 26, recently faced criticism when they asked fans for financial donations for their first

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Another good comment by John Horstman on how we think about gender, this time on Heina’s post distancing herself from me.

The fact that cis women are women is not disputed by anyone, not trans women nor non-binary trans folk nor men nor trans men. Even on the very fringes of radical non-cis thought, spaces where I often find myself, I’ve yet to see anyone questioning the legitimacy of cis women’s status as women. On the other hand, some people, including some women, think that trans women’s status as women is up for debate.

This is simply incorrect. There is a massive amount of scholarship questioning the validity of gendering organizational schemata at all, for cis, trans, genderqueer,

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