Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), on atrocities and the moral high ground and international humanitarian law:

Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well.

The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this path to opprobrium. Indeed, such an abusive response may be exactly what Hamas wanted to provoke.

Hamas also thinks … Read the rest

Harvard students don’t actually know everything.

A letter from Harvard University student groups blaming Israel for violence in the region has drawn a backlash from prominent alumni and US lawmakers.

The letter, authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, stated that students “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.

Glad they’re not dogmatically absolutist about it.

“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” the letter added.

And what was going on 75 years ago? 76 years ago? 77, 78, 79? That might have given Jews the idea that they needed a Jewish nation?

… Read the rest

I overlooked this news last week:

Donald Trump has dropped his $500 million lawsuit against Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer who is now a key witness in a criminal case against him, Cohen and a Trump spokesperson said Thursday night. But the former president did not waive his right to sue again.

Trump had accused Cohen of “spreading falsehoods” “with malicious intent” and causing “vast reputational harm” for talking publicly about hush-money payments made to women during Trump’s 2016 campaign that are at the heart of criminal charges he faces in New York. Trump has also accused Cohen of breaking a confidentiality agreement that he signed as a condition of his employment.

In other words Trump … Read the rest

Trump doesn’t have enough legal action going on so he’s suing, suing I tell you.

Donald J. Trump has claimed in a lawsuit in a London court that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, inflicted “personal and reputational damage and distress” on him by leaking a dossier detailing unsavory, unproven accounts of links between him and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

…

In a court filing last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said he was “compelled to explain to his family, friends, and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing” for him, the filing said, asserting that Mr. Steele had presented the claims in a “sensationalist manner” that was “calculated

… Read the rest

A month ago, on September 11, the president of Penn State explained about free speech and the First Amendment, while carefully also wringing her hands about how hurtful some speech can be – “not only offensive but deeply hurtful” she emphasized, without explaining the difference.

Today, it seems, Penn State canceled a talk by Riley Gaines, on account of how…um…er…

https://twitter.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1711514058870910994… Read the rest

Phoning it in much?

Is it, as the South East Technological University (SETU) claims, “unlawful” to refuse to address someone by their preferred name or use their chosen pronouns? It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. But it is bad manners – and deliberate discourtesy is not a trivial matter.

I don’t understand why anyone has a problem calling people by the names they prefer. I’ve been doing it almost all my life.

If Fintan O’Toole really doesn’t understand then he hasn’t been paying attention. Easy for him, isn’t it. Women, on the other hand, have compelling reasons to be wary of men who order us to call them “Nellie” while taking over our spaces and even our feminism.

It started

… Read the rest

A good thing for a change.

The women of Matobo, Zimbabwe paint their dwellings with intricate designs using charcoal, ash, water and soil, an annual ritual with continually changing imagery #womensart pic.twitter.com/amcolVsgPs

— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) October 10, 2023

… Read the rest

Outside Sydney Opera House:

Australian police said on Tuesday they were investigating a pro-Palestinian protest outside Sydney Opera House, after footage emerged of a small group appearing to chant anti-Semitic slogans at the demonstration.

…

Unverified footage shared by the Australian Jewish Association and featured on Sky News appeared to show a small group outside the Opera House lighting flares and chanting “gas the Jews”.

…

Protest organiser Palestine Action Group Sydney defended its right to protest “apartheid” in Israel but said a small number of “vile antisemitic attendees” had no place in their movement.

There was an interesting (and heated) discussion about Israel and apartheid on Start the Week yesterday.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Just dissolve that sucker.

I suspect that the reasons that they formed a ‘church’ were tax avoidance and lack of oversight; the latter enabled them to avoid prosecution for years, despite numerous complaints, injuries and deaths.

Because of the abuse of autistic children, there were a lot of campaigns from autistic advocates over the years; but the wheels of justice were clamped until governments finally made it illegal to administer the specific ingredients to children.

The ‘church’ had got away with it by handing out the ingredients and then giving unrecorded spoken instructions to the ‘congregation’ which, when followed, turned the MMS into a powerful industrial bleach.

Parents enthusiastically shared photos in online … Read the rest

It’s interesting that one way to poison people for $$$ is to tell them you’re a church. God and poison in one easy visit, hurrah!

A Florida man and three sons who used a business masquerading as a church to sell more than $1 million of a deadly bleach solution that they claimed was a “miracle” cure for Covid-19 and other diseases were each sentenced on Friday to several years in prison, federal prosecutors in Miami said.

Mark Grenon, 66, of Bradenton, Fla., and one of his sons, Joseph Grenon, 36, were sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to defraud the government, while the two other sons, Jonathan Grenon, 37, and Jordan Grenon, 29, were sentenced to

… Read the rest

Good to know Musk is careful with information at least.

As false information about the rapidly changing war between Gaza Strip militants and Israel proliferated on the social media platform X over the weekend, owner Elon Musk personally recommended that users follow accounts notorious for promoting lies.

“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk posted on the platform formerly called Twitter on Sunday morning to 150 million follower accounts. That post was viewed 11 million times in three hours, drawing thanks from those two accounts, before Musk deleted it.

Both were among the most important early spreaders of a false claim in May that there had been an explosion near the White House. The Dow

… Read the rest

Nobel Prize in economics goes to a woman. Guess what her field is.

This year’s Nobel economics prize has been awarded to Claudia Goldin, an American economic historian, for her work on women’s employment and pay.

Prof Goldin’s research uncovered key drivers behind the gender pay gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

By “gender pay gap” the BBC means the fact that women earn less than men. Funny that it’s so taken for granted they don’t feel a need to spell it out.

And then the punchline:

She is only the third woman to receive the prize, and the first to not share the award with male colleagues.

Gender prize gap innit.

Isn’t it interesting that this … Read the rest

Grown-up news outlets shouldn’t be talking about manufactured babies this way:

This Is Going to Hurt author and ex-doctor Adam Kay is shattered, which is hardly surprising – he’s just been mopping up baby vomit and is clearly sleep-deprived.

…

Kay and his husband, Games of Thrones producer James Farrell, share Ruby, aged 10 months, and Ziggy, six months, whom they had via surrogates.

They didn’t “have” anything. Two nameless women who obviously don’t matter did the having. Kay and his husband paid two women to carry and gestate and push out babies for them. It’s revolting to see an adult institution like the BBC prattle about babies that two men “had via surrogates.”… Read the rest

A music festival before dawn in a forest clearing near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel:

The music festival, known as Nova, was so loud that Cohen, who is thirty-one and lives in Tel Aviv, saw the rockets before he heard their sound. A handful of police officers soon arrived and broke up the party, shouting “Color Red”—code in Israel for incoming rocket fire.

As partygoers scrambled toward their cars or lay on the ground waiting for the barrage to pass, another kind of fire began. Cohen watched as four pickup trucks filled with armed militants and gunmen on motorcycles encircled the road leading out of the event venue, which was bottlenecked with cars attempting to flee the area. “They

… Read the rest

The Sydney Morning Herald last month:

Hatred against trans people and a “radical precedent” in anti-discrimination law would flow from a lesbian group being allowed to invite only biological females to its events, Victoria’s peak union body has warned.

It’s not hatred for lesbians to have lesbian-only events. Women are the only people who can be lesbians; men can never be lesbians. Men who call themselves lesbians remain men. It’s not “hatred” to understand that men can’t be lesbians.

An application by the recently formed Lesbian Action Group to lawfully exclude trans women from a “Lesbians Born Female” event has caused a heated rift, with equality and inclusion advocates squaring off against women’s rights groups.

What about equality for … Read the rest

That’s nice. UN Women celebrates International Lesbian Day by shoving lesbians aside to celebrate men who call themselves lesbians. How solidaritious.

Remember, trans lesbians are lesbians too.

Let's uplift and honour EVERY expression of love and identity!

Happy International #LesbianDay! @free_equal pic.twitter.com/h0jTxhDoSI

— UN Women (@UN_Women) October 8, 2023

… Read the rest

Women speak.

https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker/status/1710980763145863247 https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker/status/1710989450719768837 https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker/status/1711027642437075271… Read the rest

Vice tells us

…we are recirculating this article by British poet, model and activist Kai Isaiah-Jamal about how allies can make the world a better place for trans people. 

But what if we have no ambition to “make the world a better place for trans people”? What if we’re not moved to single out that one particular (very small) set of people for extra concern and pampering? What if, on the contrary, we think they should stop making all these demands for extra special treatment?

Let’s cut the shit – there’s no positive way a cis person can dictate or speak on a life that you do not live and a world you do not have to navigate as

… Read the rest

This. This is what I keep talking about. Self self self – it’s a trap! Get out of it! There’s a big huge enormous world out there that’s not You: go out and explore it, and do what you can to improve it in some way. Look outward. Let your “personality” and your “identity” and your “true self” take care of themselves. No one is as interested in them as you are, so wriggle out of the trap and embrace the bigger world.

Our society encourages us constantly to look inwards. Of course this is driving a mental health crisis! This is absolutely the last thing an anxious over-thinker (take it from me) needs. The answer is keeping busy and

… Read the rest

Narges Mohammadi:

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Iranian human rights activist and journalist Narges Mohammadi. The award citation said Mohammadi received the prize for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for promoting human rights and freedom for all.

The chairperson of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, made the announcement in Oslo. Reiss-Andersen began by quoting the slogan of Iranian human rights campaigners, in Farsi and English: “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom.”

Reiss-Andersen said that altogether the Iranian regime had arrested Mohammadi 13 times, convicted her five times and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. Mohammadi remains incarcerated in Iran’s notorious

… Read the rest