John Stuart Mill on how women are trained to accept subordination:

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for

Shawn Vestal points out that it’s really not a matter of not knowing sexual harassment is not ok.

As a man, on behalf of men, speaking with the full power and authority of the patriarchy at my back, let me just say: We don’t need sexual harassment training.

None of us needs a seminar to learn not to swap a job offer for sex. None of us is just one bullet point shy of understanding he shouldn’t lock the door and start masturbating in front of a woman. No man requires a PowerPoint to get that he shouldn’t ask a subordinate to watch him take a shower or text [her] a nude picture of himself.

Knowing they shouldn’t is part … Read the rest

A horror out of Karachi: a pair of teenage neighbors tried to run away together from their poor neighborhood of Ali Brohi Goth, and were murdered by their male relatives. First the 15-year-old girl, Bakhtaja, was tied down and electrocuted, and the next day it was 18-year-old Ghani’s turn.

His father finished dinner, then returned. With the help of an uncle, he strapped his son to a rope bed, tying one arm and one leg to the frame with uncovered electrical wires.

Bakhtaja had endured 10 minutes of searing electrical jolts before she died. The boy took longer, and eventually the uncle stepped in and strangled him. The couple were buried in the dead of night.

You’d think parental … Read the rest

Updating to add: disregard the whole “the minute they” part, because I overlooked the date. This is actually about how they did both at the same time…which is even more ridiculous but also less sneaky. My source was an excoriating Twitter thread by Ben Wikler.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the minute they get their slash taxes on the rich bill signed, they say they’re going to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Of course they do. Inch by inch they get closer to their goal: heavy taxation on the poor and zero taxation on the rich.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and

A couple in Virginia were shot to death three days before Xmas by a teenage boy they’d told their daughter to stop seeing on account of he was a racist.

The teenager shot Scott Fricker, 48, and his wife, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, around 5 a.m. Friday before shooting himself, the police said.

The couple, who lived in Reston, Va., about 20 miles west of Washington, were pronounced dead at the scene. The teenager survived and was hospitalized in “life-threatening condition,” according to a statement from the Fairfax County Police Department.

…

Family members recently tried to persuade Ms. Kuhn-Fricker’s 16-year-old daughter to stop seeing the teenager because they worried he was sharing white supremacist ideas with her, Janet Kuhn,

This crap again.

Police have arrested a blogger [at] Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on Monday evening on charge of defaming Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) in a blog post.

According to the officer-in-charge of Barguna’s Amtali police station, the blogger Asaduzzaman Nur, more commonly known as Asad Nur, has been on the run after a case was filed against him on January 11 this year under ICT act. The case was filed for a blog post which allegedly carried defamatory language against the prophet.

You can’t “defame” dead people. Defamation applies to alive people only, people who can be harmed in their real, contemporary lives. The law doesn’t protect the reputations of dead people. They don’t mean “defamatory,” they mean “obnoxious … Read the rest

Barry Duke at The Freethinker reports that the BBC recently appointed James Purnell Radio and Education Director at the BBC, and then word got out that he’s…hold onto your hats…A Natheist.

He was talking to Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Today about the BBC’s plan to set up a new unit for improving religious coverage, and Robinson asked him if he’s a godbotherer. (Not his exact words.) Purnell said he wasn’t.

I’m not. I’m an atheist but I think the issues around belief are incredibly important to how we live.

Robinson asked him:

Is that not a problem though? You are head of the BBC’s religious programming, you got the job because the BBC decided to abolish the post of

Also Happy Return of the Light.

… Read the rest

Nearly a week ago the president of Wilfred Laurier University issued a statement.

It’s a gratifying thing to read.

When the issue first broke, I erred on the side of caution. As a person, and as the president of Laurier, I am sensitive to the viewpoints and concerns of our students, staff and faculty. As an employer, I am cognisant that the four people who were in that meeting room are employees and one is also a student. All four are entitled to due process. I did not want to rush to judgement; rather, I wanted to ensure we were able to objectively assess the facts and make sound decisions flowing from that assessment.

We hired an external fact-finder

A not very festive item I was unaware of: a friend mentioned the deregulation of neurotoxins “resulting in an entire generation of cognitively impaired humans” and I asked what he meant and he replied with Children of Color Hit Hardest as Environmental Enforcement Tumbles Under Trump. Ah yes. I knew that – I knew that poison and pollution in general is much more likely to be perpetrated on poor people than on rich people and more on people of color than white people – but I didn’t know about this particular example. It’s not cheerful.

Public health researchers have found elevated levels of manganese, a heavy metal that can cause neurological disorders and other health problems, in the toenails

In the Telegraph:

Academics say they have been forced to leave the country to pursue their research interests as British universities are accused of blocking studies over fears of backlash on social media.

The Twitter armies are marching, marching.

The academics have decided to speak out as James Caspian, one of the country’s leading gender specialists, revealed that he is planning to take Bath Spa University to judicial review over its decision to turn down his research into transgenderism.

Well but you see there’s no need to research transgenderism, because we already know all there is to know: that gender is how people “identify” and that sex is wholly beside the point.

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, a fellow