Ok. Abortion rights. Women. Feminism. Abortion rights as part of feminism. Opposition to abortion rights as part of misogyny and sexism. All that.

I think it’s a huge political mistake to talk about abortion rights in terms of “pregnant people” and “people who can get pregnant.” I think it’s a huge political mistake to drop women from the discussion in order to be inclusive to trans men (and gender fluid people and yadda yadda). The struggle over abortion rights is the way it is because of misogyny and sexism. It would be a very different struggle, if it existed at all, if women were and always had been considered equals. For that reason, it’s a massive mistake to talk about … Read the rest

The Ansarullah Bangla Team has published a list of bloggers and writers it wants to murder for refusing to grovel to Islam.

The targets in the list include nine bloggers based in the UK, seven in Germany, two in the US, one in Canada and one in Sweden. Some are Bangladeshi citizens living overseas. Others are dual nationals or citizens of the western nations.

The list was issued in a statement on the internet by the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a group that has been blamed for a series of murders of bloggers and activists in Bangladesh over the last 18 months. All those killed have been prominent critics of extremist religious doctrines, especially in Islam.

We know they’re not … Read the rest

Via United Humanists and Bernard Hurley.

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bernard Hurley on Your disease is their cash cow.

This is not industrial capitalism in the sense which Smith, Marx or Ricardo would have understood it, rather it is what Ricardo called “rent seeking.” The point is that the prices do not reflect the value of the product on a competitive free market but rather the “economic rent” you can levy in virtue of “owning” property, in this case so-called intellectual property. Ricardo warned that we may end up in a sort of neo-feudal society run by a few rentiers who own all the property, be it real estate, intellectual property or so-called financial assets. Just as the serf could only exist if he/she paid … Read the rest

Hahaha oh dear no it’s not nut-ella, it’s nu (noo but sharper) tella. I must have first encountered it in the UK because I’ve always pronounced it that way. Apparently Americans think the first three letters mean nut.

I didn’t know its history though.

Nutella® spread, in its earliest form, was created in the 1940s by Mr. Pietro Ferrero, a pastry maker and founder of the Ferrero company. At the time, there was very little chocolate because cocoa was in short supply due to World War II rationing.

So Mr. Ferrero used hazelnuts, which are plentiful in the Piedmont region of Italy (northwest), to extend the chocolate supply.

It was just to extend the chocolate. But it’s so delicious. … Read the rest

If you want to feel completely nauseated at capitalism in a matter of seconds, you could do worse than to read the New York Times article by Andrew Pollack on price gouging in life-saving drugs.

It starts with the jacking up of the toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 a table to $750, which is not an isolated example.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. Scott Spencer, general manager of Rodelis,

Who better to head an important panel on the UN Human Rights Council than that paragon of human rights, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

UN Watch, an independent campaigning NGO, revealed [Faisal bin Hassan] Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, was elected as chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council.

As head of a five-strong group of diplomats, the influential role would give Mr Trad the power to select applicants from around the world for scores of expert roles in countries where the UN has a mandate on human rights.

Such experts are often described as the “crown jewels” of the HRC, according to UN Watch, which has obtained official

Capitalism at its worst.

A former hedge fund manager turned pharmaceutical businessman has purchased the rights to a 62-year-old drug used for treating life-threatening parasitic infections and raised the price overnight from $13.50 per tablet to $750.

Next up: fire departments start charging $100,000 for every house fire they respond to.

Daraprim is used for treating toxoplasmosis — an opportunistic parasitic infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems in babies and for people with compromised immune systems like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients — that sold for slightly over $1 a tablet several years ago.  Prices have increased as the rights to the drug have been passed from one pharmaceutical company to the next, but nothing

Something Dawkins said reminded me of the Secular Policy Institute’s upcoming event, that I blogged about last June. It’s this fall, isn’t it, I thought – I wonder what events and speakers they’ve lined up, I thought. The program was rather thin when I blogged about it, you may remember, with only two people named, Laurence Krauss and Gregory Copley. It did have a day of events though, even though it was unclear who would be doing the talking:

9:00-10:30 am – Future of Earth’s Climate (Ballroom)
How will global warming affect life as we know it? Will climate interventions become commonplace mechanisms to save our planet?

10:30-10:45 am – Break

10:45-12:15 pm – Future of Violence and Terrorism

Oh honestly.

I saw this on Twitter but didn’t feel like doing another seen-on-Twitter post, so I’m grateful to the Evening Harold for doing a parody.

Eminent scientist turned huffy, proselytizing sideshow, Richard Dawkins, has had his motives for taking to Twitter to heap shit on a fourteen year old boy questioned, with many believing that he knew exactly what he was doing and that it was a pre-meditated attack carried out purely for attention.

“Assembling a Twitter rant is fine. Making it look like it was done as part of some great crusade for truth, and isn’t a famous 74 year old man picking on a boy is not fine. Which is true?” said the first villager we found

Nick Cohen has extensive and complicated experience of the purity-sniffing Left. He’s done with it.

The one prophesy I can make with certainty amid today’s chaos is that many on the left will head for the right. When they arrive, they will be greeted with bogus explanations for their ‘betrayal’.

Conservatives will talk as if there is a right-wing gene which, like male-pattern baldness, manifests itself with age. The US leftist-turned-neocon Irving Kristol set the pattern for the pattern-baldness theory of politics when he opined that a conservative is a liberal who has been ‘mugged by reality’. He did not understand that the effects of reality’s many muggings are never predictable, or that facts of life are not always,

Charlotte Proudman reports on the harassment she’s getting, and why she’s not apologizing.

Why all the fuss? Should women not be grateful that they’re being complimented on their looks by strangers, particularly by powerful, senior men? Let me be clear: the compliments I receive from friends or family, and those I choose to give, are a private matter. I do not welcome unsolicited remarks about my body from someone I don’t know and who, in a professional context, is in a position of authority over me. Sexist comments are part of the process that seals and cements women’s subordinate position to men in the workplace.

Yet many professional women believe that because of their relative disempowerment they simply have

Another dispatch from Alison Criado-Perez of MSF, from a search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean run jointly by @MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station and @MSF. She joined a few days ago.

The call has come in from the MRCC, the organisation in Rome that coordinates the rescues: we’re being directed to help two wooden boats with about 700 people on board. So it’s happening. Our adrenalin starts pumping. What are we going to find? What kind of a state will the refugees be in?

The MOAS crew – Igor, Antoine, Mimmo – lower the rescue boat (RHIB) into the water and set off with Simon, our Canadian doctor, to assess the situation. The rest of us, the small