A random tweet spotted in a crowd.

…liberalism is about individual liberty & free speech, not about authoritarian rules to protect sensibilities.

Classical liberalism is, but then that’s why classical liberalism by itself isn’t enough.

Or to put it another way, one thing I find increasingly repellent about some classical liberals is this disdain for other people’s “sensibilities” – this assumption that “sensibilities” is all they are, and that they’re kind of a joke. The tweeter checks most of the privilege boxes – male, pale, Anglo, straight, educated – so isn’t subject to the kind of social contempt that people who check fewer boxes may be.

Individual liberty and free speech are good, and so is equality.… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More Richard Rothstein. NPR, Morning Edition, May 6.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Scenes of West Baltimore’s troubled neighborhoods do raise natural questions. One is why they seem heavily segregated generations after legal segregation ended.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Richard Rothstein studied that question. He’s with the Economic Policy Institute, and he says Baltimore neighborhoods reflect a national legacy of segregation. Generations ago, during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government started subsidizing a lot of housing. But they did it a certain way.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: The New Deal was a coalition of Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats were segregationist, and in many cases, the Northern Democrats compromised with them in order to get housing programs enacted.

Result: … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s a new audio message that IS says is from its beloved führer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whoever it is has a charmingly blunt message for those of us who decline to submit to Allah.

The speaker says: “There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State… joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are.”

He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There was an exceptionally good interview on Fresh Air yesterday with Richard Rothstein, explaining the way ghettoization in the US was an official government policy, along with the fact that it fully accounts for the massive wealth gap – as distinct from income gap – between blacks and whites. Whites were able to buy cheap decent housing in the 40s and 50s while blacks were not, so that became the equity that is now the wealth that while people have while black people have 5% of that wealth. 5%.

5%. That’s a lot of university educations not paid for, houses not bought, equity not built.

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another CBC reporter offers some thoughts on “punch her right in the face fuck her right in the pussy.”

It was trending on Twitter across Canada Tuesday after it happened to a CityNews reporter outside of a Toronto FC game. Except once they yelled it into her microphone, Shauna Hunt fought back. She asked them why they did it. Now the video of her confronting them has gone viral.

Hunt told them it happens to her ten times per day and I don’t doubt it. My dad called me one evening from Manitoba because he’d seen it happen live on a broadcast — and he fumbled to explain what he heard before I cut him off and told him

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I did my Freethinker column about the death toll from theocratic murderers over the past few months. It’s not a very cheerful story.

Here’s Amnesty Italy, resisting the trend:

… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An NPR story from 2011:

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it’s important to define and describe dehumanization, because it’s what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

“We all know, despite what we see in the movies,” Smith tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “that it’s very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them.” So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings “to overcome the very deep and natural

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Chechnya…

A journalist has left the southern Russian republic of Chechnya amid fears for her safety, after writing that a teenage girl was being forced to marry a police commander much older than her.

Elena Milashina had written that the local police head, Nazhud Guchigov, had threatened reprisals against the girl’s family if she was not handed over.

The police commander was also said to be married to another woman.

Ms Milashina’s newspaper said she fled after her safety was threatened.

That’s an interesting style of “police head.” Sounds more like a crime boss.

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a diehard loyalist of President Vladimir Putin, has in recent years outlawed the abduction of brides and underage marriage.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mediaite also wrote about Shauna Hunt’s encounter with the pussy-fanciers, with some new (to me) information.

Last fall, female journalists at the CBC penned an op-ed calling for the end of “FHRITP” pranks, calling them “violent and offensive” and saying those who engage in them suggest “that a woman who is doing what can be a pretty serious and intellectually rigorous job can be reduced to simply a sexual object which can be taken at will.”

Of course, less than four months later, a man pretending to be a Delta passenger did just that to none other than MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

How did I miss this for so long?!

So, back to November last year.

Even though

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Stewart on Facebook:

… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Hindu reports on anger at the inaction of the Bangladesh government over this string of public murders.

The hacking of another blogger-activist to death in Bangladesh has set off a storm of criticism against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, with noted author Taslima Nasreen saying people had “given up any expectation” that she would act against the killers.

…

In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Ms. Nasreen said the “killings prove that the Hasina government isn’t taking action against the groups that are targeting them because of votes. The government thinks if it arrests them they will be considered anti-Islam.”

While much of Mr. Das’ work was on scientific theories of evolution, he had also written a poem

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How does cruelty and sadism get normalized?

Another passage from the “Humanitarian Revolution” chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature –

Warning: torture, again

But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,

warning

in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. [p 145]

He goes on, but I yanked my eyes away after the first words; no way I’m going to type them.

Yet people watched it for amusement.

How does this … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

City News put together a collection of tv reporters talking about the “Fuck her right in the pussy” harassment they get. There are several women and even one man.

It’s such a peculiar phrase. It sounds like “punch her right in the mouth,” not like anything erotic. I guess that’s the point – it combines punch her right in the mouth with the sexual (but definitely not erotic) note. It does make you think…because it’s so hostile, and so obviously hostile, yet these shits say they think it’s funny. Why is hostility to women so normalized? Why is it so normalized that twisted fucks actually think it’s funny? Why would it be funny? If people kept shouting “kick him right … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment on Oh but it’s so hilarious.

Shawn Simoe, the now ex-Hydro One assistant network engineer (he was paid $106,510 last year; hardly the wage of a peon, stevewatson), is perfectly free to engage in whatever manner of behaviour, public or otherwise, that he wishes, but cannot reasonably expect to do so without risk of negative consequence.

The fact that this apparently didn’t occur to him or his buddies before engaging in on-air sexual harrassment apologetics speaks volumes about the way women are socialized to put up with endless crap in the interest of “getting along” or “being nice” or “having a sense of humour”.

No one, not Hydro One or any other employer, is obligated to employ … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Say what?

A blog post by Lilly Rockwell at the Austin Statesman (Austin, Texas, this is).

The newly-elected 10-member City Council, plus the mayor, is the first majority female City Council in Austin’s history, with seven women and four men.

But apparently this represented such a huge change in governance that the city manager’s office thought the city staff who regularly interact with the City Council needed extra training – in the form of a two-hour training session in March with two speakers from Florida – on how to talk to a female-dominated City Council after decades of rule by men.

How…to…talk? Because what, they would all probably burst into tears? Give birth? Pass out Tampax samples?

The first speaker

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by cuervocuervo on Oh but it’s so hilarious.

Yelling ‘fire’ in a theater is freeze peach innit?

What the men were caught on video doing and being unrepentant about is also up for legal review by the police. Whatever their drunken intent, it’s being seen as a public safety issue. I can’t imagine why, when men’s hilarity results from exploiting a woman’s objectified presence for media infamy; after all, it wasn’t about her at all, it was about their own amusement and team bonding after enjoying a sporting event. Because when a lone woman is zoomed and yelled at by strange men, who might also physically grab at her and her equipment, that’s just a joke. … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)