Another one. Another medical coughcoughcoughcough threatens to sue Simon Singh to make him stop saying the medical coughcoughcoughcough is full of coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough. Josephine Jones collects all the links again, and many links there are.

The medical coughcoughcoughcough is a new “alternative health” magazine jauntily called What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Jones has a picture, so you can see what it’s like:

See? Every item looks like coughcoughcoughcough. Doctors don’t know shit but listen to us and we will fix whatever it is, because it’s that simple.

Singh dared to suggest that it could be irresponsible of high street retailers to stock the title and shared his concerns with the distributor, Comag.

They apparently (essentially) told him to shove off and

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The Jerusalem bus company Egged has decided to stop carrying any advertising on its buses – not because it dislikes advertising but because of “Haredi violence and vandalism.”

“This matter has something important to say to Israeli society,” says [the religious freedom movement] Yerushalmim CEO Uri Ayalon. “We can’t abandon the capital city.  Today, there are no pictures of men or women in Jerusalem. Tomorrow,  there won’t be any in Tel Aviv. It’s inconceivable.”

“Egged’s  decision is absurd,” says [Rachel] Azaria, the [Jerusalem] councilwoman [and Yerushalmim activist who successfully petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice to stop Egged's and Cnaan's censorship of women's faces and bodies]. “If Egged buses are  vandalized, then instead of going to the police and demanding 

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At ur-B&W. Here is a big excerpt.

In the time it takes you to read this article, over 50 young girls will have their clitoris hacked out. What are you going to do about it?

Each girl will be pinned down, with no anaesthetic, whilst 8,000 nerve endings cringe at the touch of an unclean scalpel. Each girl will scream and writhe and howl – but you won’t hear any of them. Each girl will be irreversibly, unbearably, agonisingly mutilated.

“I heard it,” described Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs”. Skin rips, blood pours, cries screech. But it wasn’t over for her just … Read the rest

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Since Vacula used his resignation as an opportunity to do more hissing and finger-pointing, I’ll give it a bit more attention. Apart from anything else the editor in me is refusing to be silent. He writes really badly, which is another drawback in a director.

Following a lengthy period of self-reflection and deliberation, I am freely resigning from my position…

Bad right out of the gate. Tin ear. “A lengthy period”? “Of self-reflection and deliberation”? Who talks like that? Dude, just say you’ve thought about it carefully. Talk normal. This impulse to inflate the vocabulary is fatal.

Unfortunately, some persons in this community who have been quite vocal in objecting to my appointment – and many who were quick to

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And blames his critics.… Read the rest

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Arvind Iyer has a wonderful post at Nirmukta arguing that tales of shared ancestry or the threat of a common enemy are not the only way to unite people around a cause. Popular culture can also do that.

There was this Japanese tv series in the early ’90s, Oshin, which is affectionately remembered by people all over Asia.

What makes people even of warring nations forget their differences while watching this show, is not just a single dialogue like the impassioned imploring of the conscientious army deserter Shunsaku Anchan^2a that “War is not the answer” to resolve differences. The forgetting of differences is thanks to some reminders which suffuse this show’s every episode in both their everyday settings

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The Washington Post blog The Root has an African-American atheist, Mark Hatcher, saying what that’s like.

[One day] I’m walking across campus, and normally don’t have it on, but I had my Atheist t-shirt on. Somebody came up to me and said “Oh my God, I thought I was crazy, I thought I was the only one. Thank you for letting me know I’m not insane.” That’s understandable in our community. You gotta love Jesus. If you don’t love Jesus, you gotta love somebody. My mom’s first question to me was ‘What, so you don’t believe in anything?!” And that’s hard in the black community. You gotta believe in something in order to be a complete person. This person

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Great. There was a “symposium” in Ireland at which some boffins concluded to their own satisfaction that “abortion is not necessary to save the mother’s life in any circumstance” so PersonhoodUSA naturally gives a yell of triumph. Go right ahead and force Catholic hospitals to let pregnant women die rather than provide an abortion, Catholic church!

According to the Irish organization Youth Defence, “Leading medical experts speaking at a major International Symposium on Excellence in Maternal Healthcare held in Dublin have concluded that ‘direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a mother.’”

Over 140 medical professionals attended the Symposium where new research and extensive clinical experience was presented by experts in obstetrics and gynecology, mental

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Seen Half the Sky? It’s pretty good, not surprisingly. One thing I liked is that they specifically took on cultural relativism, and said no thank you. Sheryl WuDunn made a point that I often raise, because it illustrates the issue very well – but she could make it even better, because of her grandmother. Her grandmother had bound feet. She simply said that, and that said she’s delighted that that particular “cultural” item is dead and gone.

It took force to make it dead and gone, you know. The commies did it. The commies forced that cultural tradition to die out, by forcing people to stop breaking all the bones in their daughters’ feet. How cruel and coercive of … Read the rest

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