Africa’s a big continent. A very big continent. It can be hard to grasp just how big if you’ve grown up on maps that make it look as if the US dominates the universe. Joan McCarter at Daily Kos provides a nice graphic that shows how easily China, India, Western Europe and the UK, and Argentina all fit into the space Africa takes up, with some to spare.

McCarter does that by way of illustrating the cruel ignorance of this story:

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Nov 3 (Reuters) – A teacher at a Louisville, Kentucky, Catholic school has resigned rather than take paid leave after parents raised concerns about her trip to Kenya, half a continent away from the Ebola epidemic

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What a screenshot of mansplaining looks like.

… Read the rest

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Another pointless benighted god-soaked horror out of Pakistan. Dawn reports:

An enraged mob beat a Christian couple to death and burnt their bodies in the brick kiln where they worked on Tuesday for allegedly desecrating a copy of the Holy Quran, police said.

It’s a book. A book. Allah didn’t touch it, Mohammed didn’t touch it. It’s just a book, made in a factory. It’s not a reason to kill people. It’s not a reason to beat people to death.

“A mob attacked a Christian couple after accusing them of desecration of the Holy Quran and later burnt their bodies at a brick kiln where they worked,” local police station official Bin-Yameen told AFP.

“Yesterday an incident of desecration

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Seven years ago an Anglican bishop was saying that laws against “apostasy” are a bad thing.

One of the Church of England’s most senior bishops is warning that people will die unless Muslim leaders in Britain speak out in defence of the right to change faith.

Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, whose father converted from Islam to Christianity in Pakistan, says he is looking to Muslim leaders in Britain to ‘uphold basic civil liberties, including the right for people to believe what they wish to believe and to even change their beliefs if they wish to do so’.

Even change their beliefs, yes imagine that. Beliefs aren’t like friendship or marriage; you’re allowed to leave and loyalty isn’t necessarily … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by blondeintokyo on Dude, just grab her.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking Japanese women are weak or somehow submissive. How a woman would react would depend on her personality. I’ve seen Japanese women yelling at, hitting, kicking, and running chikan (subway gropers) off trains and chasing them down the platform.

I saw one woman determinedly hanging onto a guys coat as he hit her about the head and shoulders in an attempt to break her grasp and escape before the transit police could arrive and grab him. So don’t judge Japanese culture by that one video – I find it highly likely that some women DID hit, kick, or yell at him, but he just … Read the rest

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Act one, Vlad Chituc wrote a post at Nonprophet Status yesterday saying how great Reza Aslan is and how wrong ex-Muslims are to have any quarrel with the things Reza Aslan says.

The hashtag campaign #AnApostatesExperience initially drew my attention because it seemed like a welcome attempt to elevate the experience of ex-Muslims in conversations about Islam.

Instead, the campaign seems to have started as a response to this tweet by Aslan:

Reza Aslan @rezaaslan

I’ve written about Muslims, Jews, Xtians, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists. I’ve never received more venomous threats than I do from Atheists.
8:31 AM – 13 Oct 2014

To quote fellow Patheos blogger Dan Arel, #AnApostatesExperience was meant to show “what real threatening and venomous

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Iram Ramzan reports an appeal for Muslim women to report domestic abuse.

Shaista Gohir, chair of the Muslim Women’s Network, made the appeal after a report highlighted the sexual grooming of Asian girls by gangs.

The MWN report was compiled after high-profile cases showed mostly Asian men were preying on young white girls.

The report showed Asian girls are also a target, most vulnerable to offenders from their own communities.

Now Ms Gohir wants to speak to victims of sexual abuse by family members for a new report. During her research last year Ms Gohir said many victims she spoke to asked if she was looking for stories on sexual abuse in the home, and needed a separate study.

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Adam Lee notices that William Lane Craig has a lot in common with Sam Harris and Michael Shermer. Craig wrote a column about the “feminization” of Christianity, and well you’ve guessed the plot already, haven’t you.

[H]e’s noticed that the audiences for his lectures are nearly all men:

First is my observation that apologetics seems to have far more interest for men than for women.

That observation is based upon an enormous amount of experience in speaking on university campuses, at apologetics conferences, and in classroom teaching… It became very evident to me not only that the audiences which came to these events were largely male but that in event after event only the men stood up to ask

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You have been schooled. Or relegated. Or something.

Peter Boghossian isn’t going to talk to you any more, because he’s the adult and you’re the child.

If you’ve been relegated to the Kid’s Table because you can’t have an adult conversation, I’ve banned you & won’t be able to see your tweets.

That’s not convincing, coming from him. I’m not going to claim I’m always adult and level-headed, because I’m not – but I don’t see him as a paragon of reason and maturity either. On the contrary, I see him as someone who makes a point of provoking people and then jeering when they react; a troll, in short.

And he doesn’t, that I’ve seen, provoke people for … Read the rest

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There’s this guy Bryan Stevenson. He did an interview on Fresh Air a couple of week ago.

When Bryan Stevenson was in his 20s, he lived in Atlanta and practiced law at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee.

One evening, he was parked outside his apartment listening to the radio, when a police SWAT unit approached his car, shined a light inside and pulled a gun.

They yelled, “Move and I’ll blow your head off!” according to Stevenson. Stevenson says the officers suspected him of theft and threatened him — because he is black.

It was terrifying. One cop kept saying that, over and over, while Stevenson tried to explain that he lived there. Stevenson thought he was about to be … Read the rest

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That’s a question in India.

When one travels as a woman or indeed as someone who is not an upper caste, middle or upper class, Hindu, heterosexual, able-bodied, young male, one has to be just that little bit more careful because one is marked, by one’s location at some margin or the other, sometime multiple margins intersecting with each other or running parallel to each other often vying for first place.

A trip with a woman friend in the Hindi heartland first alerted me to how much one strategizes as a woman to be able to access public space. My travel diary from this trip became the foundation stone for a research project on women’s access to public space

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New Brunswick (the one in Canada, not the one in New Jersey) has exceptionally harsh restrictions on abortion.

In 1994, the province banned abortions in clinics outside of hospitals. Federal rulings changed that in 1995, but people needing the procedure were forced to pay out of pocket.

Since then, the province’s Morgentaler Clinic saved many from unwanted pregnancies. But following its closure in July, the government’s restrictions on abortion are too tight to accommodate people’s needs. Newly sworn-in premier Brian Gallant has pledged to remove barriers to abortion in the province, but has not yet come through with anything in the way of solid action.

Sounds like Canada’s Texas.

Reproductive Justice NB tried to raise the money to save

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The New Statesman has an unpleasant piece by Chris Allen that treats all anti-IS Muslims as co-opted if not worse.

First the background, via the BBC:

A fashion designer has created a ‘poppy hijab’ to commemorate the centenary of the first Muslim soldier being awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery.

Tabinda-Kauser Ishaq, a final year student at the University of Arts in London, also hopes the piece of clothing will give Muslim women a new way to mark Remembrance Day.

That would be a very dubious thing if the poppies were meant to commemorate, say, an imperialist massacre or a genocide. But you can remember and mourn the mass slaughter of World War I without endorsing that war itself.… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by nathanaelnerode on In which I surprise them.

I’m a solidly-built, six foot tall white male in my mid forties, and for at least two decades I have had absolutely NO idea what it’s like to be scared walking down a street.

Well, y’know, how shall I put this… I’m a thinly-built, 5 foot 2, “weak” looking, often “effeminate” looking male, and I have ALWAYS known what it’s like to be scared walking down a street.

I’ve been sexually harassed, I’ve been in a hostile environment, I’ve been physically assaulted. This is probably actually fairly common for boys who went through US schools, unfortunately. My threat assessment is turned WAAAAAY up, all the time; I have … Read the rest

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More video of Julian Blanc lecturing a room-full of young men on how to coerce women into having sex.

It’s nauseating to look at, because it’s so inhuman. It’s as if women are food and the men are all ravenously hungry. They just want to eat, that’s all. They don’t want to eat people, they just want food.

They just want to fuck something. For some unfathomable reason, the somethings all have these useless brains perched on top of the part that has the penis-holder, so you can’t just fuck them just like that – you have to “strike up a conversation” and “steer them to where you want to go” and “get them on the bed” and “take … Read the rest

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A friend did some digging and found out who that guy in the “just grab her” video is. He’s PickUpArtist Julian Blanc. Tim Samuels went to Florida for the Daily Mail to listen to him talk. (Cool that his name is actually “White,” isn’t it, given his attitude to Japanese women.)

In a sweltering Miami afternoon, hundreds of guys are sitting in an airless hotel reception room taking notes, hanging on every utterance by the speaker.

They’ve paid up to $3000 to be here – to learn from the master himself.

On the podium at the front isn’t a religious guru. It isn’t a business leader imparting the secrets of getting rich. It’s a guy dressed in jeans and

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The BBC mentioned a petition to free Ghoncheh Ghavami, so here is that petition in case you want to sign it.

Since June 2014 my younger sister is in solitary confinement in Tehran. She was arrested for going to a men’s volleyball match.

Ghoncheh is a British Iranian dual citizen. She was there to watch a game. She was arrested because of a misunderstanding.

Amnesty International has called for an Urgent Action for my sister. Amnesty believes Ghoncheh has been put under psychological pressure and been told she “would not walk out of prison alive.” 

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has said it was “aware of reports” of her imprisonment but its diplomatic powers are limited in Iran. We know

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Iran has sentence a woman to a year in prison for going to a volleyball game.

A British-Iranian woman detained in Iran after trying to watch a men’s volleyball match has been sentenced to a year in prison, her lawyer says.

Ghoncheh Ghavami, 25, was found guilty of spreading anti-regime propaganda, lawyer Alizadeh Tabatabaie said.

Iran banned women from volleyball games in 2012, extending a long-standing ban on football matches.

Doing it one item at a time are they? Football matches, volleyball matches – movies, grocery stores, bus stations, schools, hospitals – until presto all the items are checked and women can’t set foot outside.

Amnesty International has described Ms Ghavami, who is from Shepherd’s Bush in west London,

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Wow, a lecture on how to rape women in Japan. “If you’re a white male, you can do what you want.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=grV1iDns87s… Read the rest

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