Paul Krugman thinks it’s not particularly reasonable to make comments on the internet while pretending to be Paul Krugman.

I do think that it’s kind of curious that I’ve had repeated incidents in which people pretend to be me, usually in an attempt to make trouble. Is my real output so hard to criticize that people looking for a way to discredit me have to make stuff up?

And for that matter doesn’t making stuff up kind of defeat the purpose?

 … Read the rest

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This is a terrible thing.

Very sad news tonight that a member of Movement for Justice, Jackie Nanyonjo, has died in Uganda last friday due to injuries she sustained during deportation from Yarl’s Wood 2 months ago.

This is another one of those stories that are under the radar.… Read the rest

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Dr Jen Gunter has weighed in; I was hoping she would. She was informative and passionate about it last fall.

Savita Halappanavar was admitted at on a Sunday to Galway hospital at 17 weeks into her pregnancy with ruptured membranes, a dilated cervix, and an elevated white blood cell count (a marker of infection). It is clear that her diagnosis was chorioamnionitis, an infection of the fetal membranes. When left untreated the bacteria of chorioamnionitis march across the umbilical cord into both the maternal and fetal circulation. Left untreated, the outcome is maternal death.

Just walking through the door with ruptured membranes at 17 weeks Ms. Halappanavar baseline risk of chorioamnionitis was 30-40%. Her presentation should not have posed

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That Al-Jazeera report on the “Muslimah pride” reaction to Amina and Femen -

It has some odd stuff.

• Sofia Ahmed This event is open to ALL muslim women, Hijaabi’s Nikaabis and women who choose not to wear it. Muslimah pride is about connecting with your Muslim identity and reclaiming our collective voice. Most importantly it is about diversity and showing that muslim women are not just one homogenous group. We come in all shapes and sizes, all races and cultural backgrounds. Whether we choose to wear hijaabs or not is nobodies business but ours. So please get clicking, get creative, get loud and proud. #Muslimapride

That’s incoherent. It wants everything. It wants to combine all the incompatibles. It wants identity … Read the rest

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And then another post the same day.

It didn’t stop there

Chapter 2 of the ‘I’m more postcolonialist than you’ follies.

Another respondent:

Why do feminists still have to analyze everything using the concept of ‘oppression?’ Why are -you- using the term as though everything feminist has to be talked about in terms of oppression. There are times when that’s okay, but there are other times when it is not…When feminists label some kinds of behaviour problematic, by naming them oppressive, for instance, they may be putting other women into situations which could be dangerous for them, or which could at least change the course of their lives, and not always favourably, if they decided to act on this new

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The disagreements over “colonialist” feminism caused me to go digging in the archives for an account of a previous such dispute. It was January 11, 2008…and I had jury duty…

Ethnocentric feminism

I had a hard time tearing myself away from the computer Wednesday and Thursday mornings to catch the bus downtown to the courthouse, because there was a lively (not to say acrimonious) discussion on a Women’s Studies list I subscribe to, about Female Genital Mutilation. I may have done something myself to contribute to the acrimony. Okay I did. I got annoyed. Repeatedly. (But one is limited to two messages a day, so there was a limit to the damage I could do.)

It started with the (astonishing, … Read the rest

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Just after posting a comment about the non-desirability of calling Female Genital Mutiliation FG “Cutting” instead, I check Twitter and see a tweet from Ex-Muslims Forum:

Grace Dent is a wonderful writer – here she is on FGM http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-book-of-mormons-lesson-in-genital-genocide-8554496.html …@gracedent +

So I’m reading it. Grace Dent has no truck with euphemism on this subject.

By rough estimates, there are 20,000 girls at risk of FGM in Britain and 66,000 coping with the botched consequences. There has never been a prosecution, either of a mother taking her child out of the country, or a cutter travelling into Britain. I’ve read cases about little girls in Stratford – home of Olympic hope – being whisked off to Mogadishu.

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An organization that represents some (or all?) doctors in Ireland has said no thanks to abortion legislation to protect the lives of pregnant women.

The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has rejected a motion calling for regulation in relation to the provision of abortion where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.

In a heated and occasionally bad-tempered debate at the organisation’s annual conference in Killarney, doctors also voted against a motion calling for legislation to allow abortion in Ireland in cases of rape or incest. They also voted against a motion calling on the Government to legislate for the provision of abortion for women with non-viable foetal abnormalities.

So the majority is fine … Read the rest

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The BBC’s Panorama asks, are Sharia councils harming women? It includes a bit of undercover video in which a guy sitting high up as if he were a judge gives a woman a lot of very bad advice. He tells her she should be “brave” and ask the husband who hits her why he does it. “Is it my cooking?” That way she can correct herself.

He also tells her that reporting the hitting to the police is the very last resort and that a shelter is terrible.

In a small terraced house in east London, a woman and her husband argue before an Islamic scholar who sits on a dais above them in a room that looks and

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