A little slice of life in Nepal…

The 60-year-old woman was stripped naked and had her head shaved. She was fed excrement and badly beaten.

The woman was reportedly accused of using witchcraft to cause death and misfortune. The assault was apparently sanctioned by the village council.

Such attacks on vulnerable women are not uncommon in remote areas of Nepal.

Last year, villagers burnt alive a 40-year-old woman after claiming she was a witch.

 … Read the rest

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So the Muslim Women Against Femen page posted a faked-up picture of Femen with a Holocaust denial written on one woman’s chest.

The unfaked up picture.

They’ve taken it down now, since they got caught at it.… Read the rest

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Huh. So there’s a high school in Georgia that has racially segregated proms. If any non-white kids try to go to the white prom, the police are called and the non-white kids are escorted out. This is apparently not a hoax or a joke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopLZ-_dFw8

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More goodies from the Muslim Women Against Femen Facebook page.

A message from a sister in Birmingham to Femen…

A sign held up: You talk about FREEDOM? Then let me be free to wear my HIJAB!!

Sister from France–> “My freedom is to wear my Hijab…I don’t do anything to please people.” Hear that Femen?

A woman in full hijab holding a sign saying “I chose my hijab by myself. I don’t need women using their breasts in protest to free me. My freedom is to wear my Hijab in front of my haters. #Muslimahpride #Femen

…I don’t do anything to please people. I don’t care.

What I do is to please my Lord, mind you!

This one is … Read the rest

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Still arguing about Amina and the protests and white-imperialist-Orientalist feminism. On Twitter for one.

this is where an intersectional approach is so vital. Attempting to impose white western “feminism” w/o listening to the very ppl they’re trying to “liberate” = doomed & counterproductive enterprise.

Sigh. “White western feminism” as opposed to the brown eastern kind which is just fine with arresting and whipping or stoning a woman who takes a picture of herself with her shirt off.

Don’t do that. Don’t pretend there’s “white western” feminism or human rights or liberalism as opposed to brown eastern ones. Human rights are universal; that is the whole point. The whole point is to make them exceptionless, because if we don’t we’re … Read the rest

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A blood-chilling post on FGM by Musa Okwanga. His mother is a GP and she’s been looking into the issue of FGM for some time. She gathered several women from Somalia, Egypt and Sudan in her living room to talk to her and her son.

One of them spoke of the agony that the procedure still caused her three decades later.  Frequently, when bent over with pain, she would receive little understanding from those in her community who did not know what she had experienced.  “Sometimes they just call you lazy”, she explained.

Three decades of crippling pain caused by a mutilation that serves no useful purpose.

This, she said, is how it typically happens.  When you’re six years

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Well here’s a horrible piece of crap posted at Jezebel. Callie Beusman looks down on the protests in support of Amina because Islamophobia and white and European and blah.

While it is unquestionably necessary, brave, and noble to stand with Amina (who is reportedly not free to move or speak safely), the protests were distressingly and distractingly Islamophobic. A photo from one of shows a white woman with crescent moons covering her nipples, wearing a fake beard, a unibrow penciled in with eyeliner, and a bath towel on her head. Another photo, highlighted on FEMEN’s Facebook page is of a topless woman protesting at a mosque in San Francisco (because, when you’re fighting the good fight of “TITS AGAINST

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Guest post by Dan Bye in a comment on She said the s word.

Does everyone know the Mr Men series of children’s books, originally by Roger Hargreaves (since his death the franchise has been picked up by his son)?

There was a subsequent series of Little Miss books, which you could see as a response to accusations that the original series was too male-orientated. The accusation wasn’t without some substance, but if you compare the Mr Men characters with the Little Miss characters, you notice something very interesting.

Here’s the list of books, in case you don’t know them:

http://www.mrmen.com/en/books.html

Notice a few things (I’m generalising, but the stereotypes are there nonetheless).

First of all, the male characters … Read the rest

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So Sheryl Sandberg was on the Daily Show on Wednesday. Guess what she said. That women are held back by a lot of things…and one of them is stereotypes. Yes stereotypes. Omigod! Radfem alert! Somebody summon franc hoggle to fantasize about kicking her in the cunt!

But we’re also held back by stereotypes. Go to a playground and you’ll hear little girls called bossy! You don’t hear little boys called bossy, because we expect boys to be assertive and lead.

Oh oh oh! That’s crazy talk!! That’s the diametric opposite of skepticism!!! Where’s the evidence?! Where’s the peer-reviewed science?! Where’s the PhD in sociology?! Where are the three whole classes in Women’s Studies? That’s misandrist, and professional victim, … Read the rest

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Oh guess what! Thunderfoot has yet another video about why he hates feminism so much. It’s chapter 3 in this exciting series. What inspired this one? Richard Carrier’s talk at the American Atheists convention in Austin last weekend. I was at that talk. I thought it was damn good – but then I have reasons for thinking that, which Thunderfoot doesn’t share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95LG9crl3yo

He starts with Richard talking about doing atheism and other things – which one would think needn’t be particularly contentious, because who wants to do nothing but atheism all the time always? But Thunderfoot claims it’s doing things the wrong way around, because

most sensible people start out as critical thinkers and because of that methodology that

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I have a good idea. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I truly think that people who run human rights agencies for governments ought to support human rights.

Cue fireworks! But that’s what I think. Call me a dangerous radical, but that’s what I think.

Not so the Brazilian House of Representatives, apparently.

A row has erupted in Brazil after the House of Representatives elected an evangelical politician with homophobic views to run the country’s Human Rights and Minority Commission.

Hmmyes you see that’s my point – I think that’s a bad fit.

Marco Feliciano has previously said AIDS is a gay cancer and that Africans are cursed.

The Latin America Bureau reports he stated:

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You know Nate? He needs help getting to Women in Secularism 2. Any surplus will go to CFI.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/affording-the-hotel?c=home

If you want something specific from the conference, like a SurlyRamic if Amy’s selling them, some autographs, or anything else, just let me know when you donate and I’ll be sure to get that for you.

And maybe a guest post here, hmm?… Read the rest

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Crommunist has a hilarious terrifying fantasy warning about what’s really been going on all this time…

One particularly funny tragic and blind passage at the beginning:

Up until now, my position on this kind of over-wrought conspiracy mongering has been fairly consistent: FTB is not the boogey-man; it’s a network of blogs that (mostly) existed before there was a network to begin with. Atheism+ isn’t ruining atheism; it’s a reaction to the fact that it was already ruined for a lot of people. Skepchick is not rounding up all male atheists to throw them into a witch’s cauldron of menses and liquid misandry.

At least so he thought. Read on.

 … Read the rest

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Anthony Grayling was on the Colbert Report last night. Again! It was his second time. He was on the first time two years ago, right after he was on a book tour here for The Good Book. He came to Seattle on that tour and as long-time readers may remember, I had tea with him. It was a memorable afternoon. It was great to see him again at the AA event. The AAs loved him.

Amanda Knief (dedicated ED of American Atheists) was in the audience at the Colbert Report, and apparently she’s the one you can hearing whooping.

Now Stewart has to have Dave on. Has to. He keeps sniping at atheists, so it’s time … Read the rest

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I don’t have Richard Reed’s phone number (nor do I know that Richard Reed is the real name of that particular harasser), so in lieu of picking up the phone and giving him a jingle, I’ll do a post about his argument for the legitimacy of photoshopping pictures of people’s faces onto goats post.

Where I “harass” Barack Obama and Ophelia Benson

There is still a lot of talk in the skeptic community about “harassment”, and what constitutes it. Ophelia Benson claims that people photoshopping her constitutes harassment. In this post, I will show how ridiculous that idea is!

Here is a goat. Lets call him Clive:

Now, lets say for sake of argument that I want to mock

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