Here’s an exciting new way to treat people badly – offer them passage on a ship and then once the ship is well out into the sea…leave. What the hell, you have better things to do, right?

Italian authorities have taken control of a ship with 450 migrants, thought to be Syrian, that was abandoned by its crew off Italy’s coast.

The Italian coastguard said it was now being towed to an Italian port after a rescue team managed to board.

The Ezadeen, sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone, lost power in rough seas overnight off the south-east of Italy.

A total of 796 migrants were rescued from another ship found abandoned without any crew earlier in the

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

A great comic on the whole “let’s make a special pink fluffy version of this toy for girls” approach to toy-making and -marketing. Maritsa Patrinos is the artist.

“Why do girls need their own Legos?”

“We wanted Legos to appeal to girls more.”

Why not just make them appeal to children? Just children?

There’s no need to sell tricycle for girls and tricycles for boys. There’s no need to sell baseball bats or wagons or toy cars or stuffed animals or train sets or dolls or in fact anything for girls or for boys. There’s no need for all this shepherding and herding and nudging. Leave us alone. Let us play with whatever we want to play with, … Read the rest

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

Sweden has a tv journalist who confronts internet trolls, Robert Aschberg.

The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been

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

A woman member of parliament in Afghanistan, Shukria Barakzai, escaped death in a suicide bombing last November.

Barakzai, who rose to prominence when she ran underground schools for girls when the Taliban ruled the country, says both the previous Afghan government and its Western benefactors have failed to defend the hard-won rights of women.

“For me, what they do to support women’s rights is just lip service, nothing more than that,” says Barakzai, interviewed in hospital where she was recovering from burns to the left side of her face and her left hand from the attack.

And Afghanistan needs support for women’s rights more than most countries.

World Bank data show Afghanistan still lags far behind even its impoverished

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

My first awareness of Mark Danner, I think, was reading his long article in the New Yorker The Truth of El Mozote, about a massacre by the army of El Salvador. The full article is on his website. That was December 1993. I kept the magazine sitting around for months because of the cover.

I’ll share a little, because it’s all connected. This wasn’t about Osama bin Laden, it was about the Cold War and the military versus the guerillas, but it was the US behaving badly again. We backed the military despite knowing it was up to its armpits in atrocities.

This is about a massacre, so, be warned.

This is after the men have been killed, … Read the rest

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

Tahmima Anam on early marriage in Bangladesh.

A recent study by the development organization Plan Bangladesh and the nonprofit International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, showed that 64 percent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18. Early marriage and early motherhood are the cause of a host of social and health problems, from a greater incidence of domestic violence to an increased risk of child and maternal mortality. Young brides stop going to school (according to Unicef, 5.6 million Bangladeshi children have dropped out of education early because of marriage) and thus have fewer opportunities for employment, and, crucially, little knowledge of their rights within marriage.

To the dismay of Bangladeshi NGOs, health workers

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

Mark Danner talks to Hugh Eaken at the New York Review blog about the CIA torture program.

Danner notes that the Senate’s report on the program contains a lot that was already known, but tells it “in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen before.”

The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques; the totality of their effect when taken together—walling, close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things—is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.

What is new, he says, is how … Read the rest

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

From Deep Dark Fears on Facebook –

More Deep Dark Fears.… Read the rest

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

NPR’s Goats and Soda blog reports that more than 360 African health workers died of Ebola this year. It has photos of 36 of them, a poignant collection.

More than 360 African health workers died of Ebola this year. Some of them made headlines around the world, such as Dr. Umar Sheik Khan, the Sierra Leonean physician who treated more than 100 Ebola patients before contracting the disease himself.

But most of the fallen health workers didn’t get that degree of attention. They were doctors, nurses, midwives, lab technicians. They didn’t have the proper protective equipment. As they tried to save the lives of others, they sacrificed their own.

Liberia and Sierra Leone can’t afford to lose all those … Read the rest

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

The trouble with Facebook is that it lets just anyone use it. It should be just for men. It should be…Manbook!

But that’s ok, he’s way ahead of me, whatever his name is (he has several).

The founder of a  men’s only social media site modeled on Facebook issued a warning this week threatening the lives of women who attempt to sign up.

The creator of ‘Manbook,’ identified as Joschua Boehm — but who also uses the names Peter Nolan, Peter-Andrew: Nolan, and Joschua-Brandon: Boehm — wrote on his newly-launched site, “We would ask you women to respect our rights as you wish your rights to be respected. If you are unwilling to respect our right to

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

New Internationalist has a terrific interview with Kate Smurthwaite. I’ll just give you a couple of highlights to make you want to read the whole thing.

If you could banish one person from the earth, who would it be and why?

No-one, that’s too cruel a punishment. Really that’s the death penalty, in a way. I don’t think harsh punishments achieve anything. We should be rehabilitating people. Rupert Murdoch would make a lovely gardener. Jeremy Clarkson could drive a Meals On Wheels van. Katie Hopkins could teach spin classes. [Prime Minister David] Cameron and [Chancellor of the Exchequer George] Osbourne could pick up litter. Although that might lead to a massive rise in people dropping bags of their own

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

Oh yay, Canada gets to have a Pope John Paul II Day.

It what? Why would it even want such a thing? Why would anyone want such a thing?

The Catholic Register gives us the skinny.

The bill to establish Pope John Paul II Day passed the Senate Dec. 16 and has received royal assent.

Conservative MP Wladyslaw Lizon introduced private member’s Bill C-266, an Act to establish Pope John Paul II Day, in 2011. The bill designates April 2 as Pope John Paul II Day, though does not make it a legal holiday or non-juridical day.

In a statement, Lizon described the passage of the bill as a “proud but very emotional moment.”

Lizon’s bill passed the House

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

Donal O’Keefe at thejournal.ie urges repeal of the Eight Amendment.

I’m in my mid-forties and the early 1980s were the backdrop of my early teens. I have odd, snapshot recollections of the time. I remember those frantic men and women with their rosary beads and their placards of aborted foetuses and the mania that seemed to grip the country. It was a very strange time in Ireland.

I remember Garret and Charlie like Saint George and the Dragon, seemingly locked in eternal conflict for the Taoiseach’s job, and I remember 1983, the year after GUBU, when they tried to out-Catholic each other as both agreed to support the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign’s amendment to outlaw abortion.

In later life, Fitzgerald

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

Maajid Nawaz points out a comrade in Pakistan. Newsweek Pakistan calls him an unlikely icon.

Mohammad Jibran Nasir, a 27-year-old serial do-gooder from Karachi, has become the inadvertent leader of Pakistan’s post-Peshawar anti-extremist discourse.

Hours after the Dec. 16 attack, Nasir joined a 200-strong vigil for the Peshawar slain in Islamabad.

The numbers weren’t exactly bad, but the venue caused him some concern. “Why do people in Islamabad have to hold vigils at such places where no one can see you and no one can hear you?” he tells Newsweek. So he decided to take his protest to Lal Masjid, a “mosque” linked up with both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and whose cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, brazenly

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

This is a sick country.

A young mother was shot and killed by her 2-year-old son today in an Idaho Walmart, police said.

Lt. Stu Miller of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said that the boy was sitting in the shopping cart when pulled the handgun from his mom’s purse and pulled the trigger. The victim, whose name hasn’t been released, was 29 years old.

Walmart of course sells guns among other things. One-stop shopping – you can buy a gun there and get shot with it in one easy trip.… Read the rest

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

So, I’ve learned something. I’d never head of “vocal fry” until I read that Slate piece, so I had to look it up. Apparently it’s big among the Kardashians. (I wonder if it’s also big among Rachel Zoe [who – gasp – dresses Kardashians omg!!] too. She’s like a walking textbook of bizarre vocal affectations – I bet she does vocal fry all the time.)

I’d never heard of it, but I recognized it when I watched this. Oh that; right.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqVgtLQ7qM… Read the rest

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

There’s a heated discussion of vaccinations on a Facebook thread of mine, on which Pedram made such informative comments in response to a claim that whooping cough was coming back because of “over use of vaccination” that I requested and got permission to quote them here. The rest is Pedram.

No, high vaccination rates in the population means that a pathogen cannot replicate as quickly–many fewer hosts will be available. Vaccination is just a way of inducing a regular adaptive immune response (the adaptive immune cells are exposed to antigens that mark the dead or inactivated pathogen used in the vaccine, without the danger of an infection). If this is done extensively enough, the pathogen can quickly be suppressed … Read the rest

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

Hmm. Is it sexist – or even misogynist – to advise women to talk with authority? Marybeth Seitz-Brown at Slate is more or less arguing that, and I don’t think I agree.

Last week, I gave an interview on NPR, and while most of the reactions were overwhelmingly positive, I also received several messages suggesting I change my voice so that people will take me seriously. Why? Well, I uptalk. But I’m not ashamed of it, and no one else should be either.

Uptalk, in case you’ve missed several years of media frenzy, is using a rising intonation at the end of a phrase or sentence. What’s the matter with that? Well, that rising intonation is similar (although not

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

My new Freethinker column is posted. It’s stuff I’ve been saying here, but it’s chafing my mind rather, so I wanted to say it there too. It’s about police fascism in the US, and the way our mephitic heritage of genocide and slavery (notice how both are rooted in racism? funny coincidence, isn’t it?) has produced a stratified society which means police work can be a tough job. It’s a vicious circle, and to break out of that vicious circle we’d need to do things that are not part of the Church of the Free Market, so we don’t do them. We’d rather spend billions on locking people up than on ways out of the trap.

The one comment is … Read the rest

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

So, working backward, let’s consider what Scott Aronson said.

First we need what Amy said, because he was responding to it.

As for the “shy and nerdy” bit…you know, some of the gropiest, most misogynistic guys I’ve met have been of the shy and nerdy persuasion. I can only speculate on why that’s so, but no, I would certainly not equate shy/nerdy with harmless.

In fact I think a shy/nerdy-normed world would be a significantly worse world for women. (Not least because so many nerdy guys are certain that they’re extremely fairminded and rational, when instead what they are is naive about both social structures and how many things play out in reality, and unwilling or unable to

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