On a pleasanter note – the Curiosity Rover is close to Mars and will be landing in about ten hours. This is seriously exciting.

The Nasa robot’s flight trajectory is so good engineers cancelled the latest course correction they had planned.

To be sure of touching down in the right place on the surface, the vehicle must hit a box at the top of the atmosphere that is just 3km by 12km.

“Our inbound trajectory is right down the pipe,” said Arthur Amador, Curiosity’s mission manager.

It’s been on the way for eight months. It’s got the best scientific equipment evarrr to drill into rocks and scoop up samples. It’s got energy to last for 14 years.

JPL Mars program… Read the rest

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

There’s a guy in Pakistan who, according to some reports, has been holding drink and dance parties during Ramadan.

So the fuck what, you ask. So he and a woman were forced by police to walk naked to the police station.

Really. There’s this religious holiday, which requires participants to drink nothing (including water) and eat nothing from dawn to dusk. Some guy didn’t participate, therefore the cops humiliated him and some woman on the way to the police station. That’s some totalizing religion! No opting out. Don’t like it? Fine, take your clothes off, you’re busted.

The BBC’s Shahzeb Jillani says incidents of public dishonouring are not uncommon in Pakistan, but this incident is particularly shocking because it

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

The theocratic group Sharia4Belgium responded to Sophie Peeters’s documentary about street harassment by remarking that she dresses like a whore.

In Thursday’s video message Sharia4Belgium said of Ms Peeters that “She walks the streets half-naked and dresses like a cheap prostitute. She has painted her face like a clown. She has done all this to attract the attention of men.”

The fundamentalist group believes that Ms Peeters provoked the men in the film.

“Why do you think that women go about scantily-clad and with painted faces? It’s to get reactions from men.”

And men “react” by calling her “salope” – and that’s her fault. Charming.

 … Read the rest

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

Asks the blogger at Above the Field. He can and he should, he answers himself.

Yesterday I read of a sexual assault in Washington DC that occurred not long ago. A bicyclist cruised up to a woman and stuck his hand up her skirt, violating her very being before riding away laughing. It would be easy to pass this off as an isolated incident of some pervert getting his kicks, except that this particular woman victim (Liz Gorman) wrote a blog about it, and hundreds responded with their own stories of similar experiences and worse.

Thank goodness this woman and others like her are speaking out instead of staying silent. Thank goodness they’re upsetting the status quo. Thank goodness

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

Seen on Twitter.

Dissing FtB is no more naughty than dissing HuffPo. It’s obviously a reaction to aspects, not every square inch. Ob-vi-ous-ly.

No. That’s completely wrong. Clearly lots of people are thinking something like that, but it’s wrong. The Huffington Post has editors. It’s like a magazine. Magazines have editors. They have a style, and a policy, and criteria; they have a lot of elements that make them a unified entity. It makes sense to generalize about The New Yorker or The Atlantic or The New Statesman – or the Huffington Post.

Freethought blogs is a network of blogs. There is no editor of all the blogs. There is no directive, there is no style, there is … Read the rest

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They’re talking about the “don’t mention the religion” problem at the Freethinker, too. Barry Duke Mentioned in the last paragraph of the post.

Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.

But that’s the Freethinker, not the BBC or the Guardian.

 … Read the rest

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

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been convicted of her murder. There is much admirable refusal to excuse them because that’s “their culture.” All very well, but something is missing. Their “culture” is condemned; tradition and values and traditional values are declared non-exempt from competing values and from the law…but something is missing.

Consider what the judge said, according to the BBC.

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: “A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel.”

Consider what the Guardian editorial… Read the rest

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

Sexual harassment? What sexual harassment?

When Sofie Peeters moved to Brussels for a film degree, she found herself confronted with a depressing problem almost every time she left her front door. Walking around her local neighbourhood, the mixed, working-class district of Anneessens, at any time of day she would be greeted with cat-calls, wolf-whistles and jeers of “slag” and “how much do you cost?”

Sick of wondering whether it was her fault for wearing particular clothes, she made her end of year film on the topic, armed with a hidden camera to record the street harassment.

You can see a short clip which shows how bad it is.

The student film, Femme de la Rue, a shocking account of

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

So there was this girl of 13 in Pakistan. Her parents took her to a pir to evict some djinns that had possessed her. Well any parent would. A relative had recommended the pir.

 “He told me that the pir was an expert in evicting djinns and did not charge anything for his services,” [her father Manzoor Hussain] said.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hussain said the girl was tied to a charpoy and burned with a heated iron rod. He said the pir had poured red chilli powder on parts of the girl’s body before burning them with the rod. He said the parents were made to leave the room after midnight. “He told us to wait outside. He

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

Soraya Chemaly on girls turning anger into depression.

To become a woman, especially a woman of color, in our culture is cognitively dissonant, and girls respond differently to that experience. Girls, like boys, feel fully human, but culture tells them that they are not. Even the most privileged girls, those that can afford doctors, psychologists, good schools excellent teams, etc. etc. get this message. Sometimes they rebel, sometimes they compartmentalize, sometimes they agitate for change, sometimes they bury their heads in the sand, sometimes they conform, sometimes they get angry. Sometimes their anger is pathologized instead of given free expression because we’d rather call it anything but anger.

I think it took me an exceptionally long time … Read the rest

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Iiiiiiiiiit’s Brendan! Pissing on Caitlin Moran this time, but recycling his stupid trope about how contemporary feminists are just like Victorian women passing out on the drawing room floor.

Remember when feminism was about The Sisterhood? About women clubbing together to stick it to The Man, patriarchy or whatever they were calling the system that kept them in a state of social subjugation?

Those days are gone. Today, if Caitlin Moran’s wildly successful feminist tract How To Be A Woman is anything to go by, feminism is less a universal club and more a bitchy sorority, made up of well-connected women like Moran who consider themselves better, more spiritual and more “real”, than other women, than lesser women, than what

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