The discussion is getting more absurd as it continues, and I’m short on time today, so I’m not planning to wade into it again, but one tweet addressed to me does seem worth disputing, because it encapsulates a trope that’s being recycled a lot.

Beard Nihilist @borednihilist

One can dislike Islam as a religion, as both I and @OpheliaBenson do, but criticizing an individual woman’s choices seems anti-feminist.

Really?

So if a couple of friends discuss a mutual friend who has made the “choice” to (say) marry a man who has repeatedly beaten her up, and the friends criticize her “choice”…that’s anti-feminist?

I don’t see it. Feminism isn’t agreeing with all women no matter what. Feminism isn’t endorsing every choice … Read the rest

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

More on Modi from the New York Times.

The fiery head of India’s leading opposition party, who remains under pressure for his handling of an ethnic riot 11 years ago, won a victory on Thursday in one of the many disputes dogging him as he seeks to become India’s next prime minister, but faced a setback in another.

An Indian court rejected a petition seeking the prosecution of the opposition leader, Narendra Modi, the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party, over his role in riots in his home state, Gujarat, in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

But the government ordered a formal investigation into allegations that Mr. Modi’s top lieutenant, using

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

A Saudi blogger is under threat of being executed for “apostasy” – meaning, daring to leave Islam.

A SAUDI judge has recommended that a liberal activist and blogger be tried in a higher court for apostasy, a charge that could carry the death penalty, rights campaigners say.

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom sentenced Raef Badawi in July to seven years in jail and 600 lashes for setting up a “liberal” network and for allegedly insulting Islam.

On Wednesday, a judge remanded Badawi to the General Court on charges of apostasy, rights lawyer Waleed Abulkhair said.

“Ultra-conservative” doesn’t really cover it. Murderously theocratic, misogynist and racist would be more like it.

Badawi, 35, was arrested in June last year in

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

Not good news.

The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), chaired by former CBI director RK Raghavan who investigated the 2002 Gujarat riots has concluded in its 541-page closure report that the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi took ample measures to control riots rather than stoking the fire as it is made to be believed. The SIT also questioned the motive behind filing a complaint against the Chief Minister by Zakia Jafri four years after the communal violence.

Modi is apparently on the way to being India’s next prime minister…which is appalling.

Get this part -

The SIT has said that even if Narendra Modi had told the police during the riots to allow the Hindus to vent their anger

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

Someone at the invaluable Facebook group British Muslims for Secular Democracy posted an article in the Huffington Post last May by Ali Rizvi, An Atheist Muslim’s Perspective on the ‘Root Causes’ of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia.

It begins by quoting.

The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go

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

It’s funny how feminism gets it in the neck from both directions, isn’t it. On the one hand there are people who say “feminists are silent about stonings and forced marriage and FGM!” To which I murmur replies to the effect that not all feminists are silent about that. On the other hand there are people who claim that “Mean Girls Cis White Feminism” is silent about the marginalization of women who wear the hijab. To which I murmur replies to the effect that I don’t want to see anyone marginalized or bullied, but at the same time I reserve the right to say I think the hijab is a bad, regressive, sexist custom, and why I think that.

I’ve … Read the rest

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

Taslima wonders if anyone is listening.

It’s hard to miss her in Calcutta these days. She beams at passers-by from king-size hoardings at several busy junctions, anxiously marking her “return” to Bengal after six years.

But Taslima Nasreen is not returning to the city. Not in person, certainly — thanks to embargoes on her travelling and living in India. And not on television either, which had been promoting her as the writer of a mega serial that was to have been aired from December 19.

Despite the grand announcements, the show has been stalled. And Nasreen is furious. “Hating Taslima is an essential part of politics in the subcontinent. I feel pity for those who need to violate a

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

It’s ten past four, nearly sunset. Leonard Tremiel informed me the other day that the earliest sunset is actually two weeks before the solstice, and the latest sunrise two weeks after it. He recommended Earth and Sky’s explanation.

It seems paradoxical. At middle latitudes in the U.S. – and throughout the Northern Hemisphere – the earliest sunsets of the year come about two weeks before the solstice and the shortest day of the year.

Why isn’t the earliest sunset on the year’s shortest day? It’s because of the discrepancy between the clock and the sun. A clock ticks off exactly 24 hours from one noon to the next. But an actual day – as measured by the spin of the

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

Why do the wizards of tv keep throwing various iterations of Home Alone at us? What’s that about? How did it become one of those “holiday classics” we always hear about? It’s horrible. The Home Alone movies are awful and everybody should stop watching them.

Instead watch Alastair Sim as Scrooge. You might want to skip the parts where he’s offscreen (Tiny Tim, you know), but when he’s on screen it’s a gem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP2HnAXHHqg… Read the rest

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

Update: see comments, especially Tony Sidaway’s @ 10, for context that makes sense of this.

An item from the Independent more than two years ago. It’s more than a little unnverving.

A man who used a social networking website to post sectarian comments about Catholics and Celtic supporters has been jailed for eight months.

What?

Stephen Birrell, 28, from Glasgow, was also handed a five-year football banning order at Glasgow Sheriff Court for writing the comments on a Facebook page titled Neil Lennon Should Be Banned.

He admitted writing the religiously and racially motivated comments between February 28 and March 8 this year.

Sentencing him, Sheriff Bill Totten said the courts had to send “a clear message to deter

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

For any future gifting needs you may have, Ezra Resnick suggests a Magic Dogma Ball for those on your gifting list who like easy answers.

Ask any question, no matter how complex, and the Magic Dogma Ball™ will give you the definitive answer (according to your selected tradition). No thinking required!

The Magic Dogma Ball™ answers questions about ethics, politics, metaphysics, fashion, sex, and more. Possible answers include:

• It is certain
• Without a doubt
• It is forbidden
• Don’t even think about it

Gifting made easy.

 … Read the rest

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

Spain: women protesting new anti-abortion law: police get rough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xNkYj-hED8… Read the rest

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

A commenter pointed out a storify in a comment and I took a look at it. What I saw made me curious about the person behind it so I looked at her Twitter and that led me to her blog. Her most recent post there is titled So, What’s It Like Being a White Muslim, Anyway? The title is symptomatic of the post itself.

It’s a stupid title, because Islam is not officially unwhite, and because it represents a category mistake. It’s getting to be a boring trope to point out that Islam is not a race, but all the same, it’s not, even though it’s true that Muslims are often treated as a despised racial group. Islam is … Read the rest

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

All your bases are belong to us.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that gay marriages can continue in Utah, denying a request from the state to halt same-sex weddings that have been occurring at a rapid rate since last week.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ rejection of Utah’s request for an emergency stay marks yet another legal setback for the state. The same federal judge who ruled that Utah’s same-sex marriage ban violates gay and lesbian couples’ rights previously denied the state’s request to halt the marriages.

Next stop, Arizona.

Utah’s last chance to temporarily stop the marriages would be the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s what the Utah Attorney General’s Office is prepared to do, said spokesman

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

Originally a comment on In their efforts to discredit advocates of women’s international human rights.

In the 80s & 90s, one faced the same sort of thing in Japan, with what was called ‘nihon-jin-ron’, the ‘theory of the Japanese’, a thoroughly and cynically racist and chauvinistic outpouring which depended in part on taking certain questionable and often racist assertions about Japan made over a century or so by some Westerners and throwing them back in the face of the West: ‘we Japanese’ understand one another not through logic, like coldly rational Westerners, but through intuitive feeling, through ‘hara’ (guts); our arts are so extraordinarily sensitive that Westerners cannot possibly appreciate them; even though Westerners may parrot the Japanese language, they … Read the rest

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

More from Mayer’s long 2000 article on gender apartheid. The article is very apposite to what we’ve been talking about lately.

The discussion will point out how those seeking to defend what amounts to gender apartheid have tried to turn the discussion away from actual patterns of oppression of women, endeavoring to depoliticize this phenomenon by, among other things, minimizing the important role of the state. Instead of acknowledging that governments of modern states are controlled by men and that these men may have vested interests in retaining a status quo that favors them, they pretend that religion and culture are independent determinants of women’s status.

It’s just a coincidence that all these religions and cultures make women subordinate … Read the rest

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

More than ten years ago I published at ur-B&W a long article by Ibn Warraq, adapted from a longer one with full references and notes, on Debunking Edward Said. I think it’s relevant to things we’ve been discussing lately, so I want to pay it a visit.’

Consider the following observations on the state of affairs in the contemporary
Arab world :

The history of the modern Arab world – with all its political failures,
its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing
production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development – is disfigured by a whole series of out-moded and discredited ideas, of which

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

So have a nice rescue of a yellow Lab who was swept out to sea off the Norfolk coast.

You’re welcome.

… Read the rest

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