Two of the worst guys in the world have patched up their quarrel. Putin and Erdoğan are besties again.

What brought the two he-men back together?

[A]fter the 15 July coup attempt in Turkey, Mr Putin expressed support for Mr Erdogan. He did not criticise Mr Erdogan’s crackdown on political opponents and purge of alleged “plotters” in state institutions.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford says Russia is keen to capitalise on Turkey’s cooling relations with the West following the failed coup.

Mr Erdogan was angered by criticism from the EU and the US of the mass detentions of suspected plotters.

If people are giving you the stink-eye because of your brisk way with human rights, who ya gonna call? Not the same kind of bleeding heart human rights-lovers who are scowling at you, but a standup no bullshit fuck all this PC nonsense guy like Putin, that’s who.

It’s not all roses and chocolates though. They have their differences.

They back opposing sides in Syria. Turkey is furious at the scale of Russian air support for Syrian government forces, as Mr Erdogan reviles Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia has accused Turkey of backing Islamist anti-Assad groups, including some accused of “terrorism” in Russia.

Turkey is at war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the PKK’s Syrian allies. Mr Erdogan has accused Russia of arming the PKK.

For centuries Russia and Turkey have been rivals for influence in the Caucasus and Black Sea region.

Turkey was also angered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accusing Moscow of violating the rights of Crimean Tatars. The Muslim Tatars have long had close ties to Turkey.

Russia annexed Crimea??! I thought that was Obama! Or Hillary! Or future-Hillary! Someone like that.

From the “what are they thinking?!” files –

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group classified as a terrorist group in Egypt, qualify for asylum in the UK if they are considered under threat of persecution. In its revised guidelines on the group, the UK Home Office said that asylum can be sought over “a fear of persecution or serious harm by the state because of the person’s actual or perceived involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The 22-page document Country Information and Guidance Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood, was updated this month. It said that in cases of high profile supporters of the group, including journalists, at risk of persecution, “a grant of asylum would be appropriate.”

Well don’t stop there. Grant asylum to the people who took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last winter too, because they’re being “persecuted” by the state right now, for breaking a whole bunch of laws.

Jim Wright has an eloquent denunciation of the lying ways of people like Michele Bachmann and outlets like The Daily Caller.

ou know, for somebody who loudly and routinely claims to be such a pious Christian, she sure missed the boat on that whole “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor…” rule.

First, The Daily Caller?

Seriously? The Daily Caller? You should be slapped upside the head repeatedly for using the The Daily Caller as any kind of reference. It’s true! I read it on The Daily Ca <SLAP!> No really it’s <SLAP!> But <SLAP! SLAP! SLAP! AND SHUT THE FUCK UP and SLAP! for good measure> The Daily Caller, Jesus H Christ.

That said, the article she references is just a bunch of random information cobbled together in no particular coherence supposedly describing how 31 ISIS terrorists have been arrested in the US in the last year — except none of the information provided actually supports the headline in any way. Which is pretty goddamned typical of The Daily Caller where the standard editorial technique is to post an inflammatory headline and smear dog shit in the space under it. And this works, because those who use The Daily Caller as a reference can’t actually read anyway.

The headline is: 31 Suspected ISIS Terrorists Have Been Arrested In The U.S. In The Past Year. Sure enough, the article doesn’t demonstrate that.

Jim Wright sums up:

This hysterical, frightened, hateful, bigoted, ignorant, delusional, backward, shameful, false, ridiculous mindset from lily white Christianist Americans is a FAR, FAR, FAR greater threat to liberty, freedom, and America than any immigrant.

Yes but they’re our threat to liberty, freedom, and America.

Gita Sahgal on the Home Office inquiry into Sharia courts:

Feminist campaigners from minority women’s organisations in Britain, backed by prominent women human rights advocates from all over the world, wrote an Open Letter to Theresa May, then Home Secretary, criticising the way she was intending to carry out a long-awaited review of sharia in Britain.  May was forced to defend ‘one law for all’ when she became Prime Minister.

An investigation shows that the concerns of campaigners such as myself were well-founded. The Home Office has established a panel which is fit for the purpose of a theological exercise rather than a human rights investigation. The appointment of a theologian to chair it and imams as advisors to the Review Panel, was a thoroughly bad sign as far as feminists were concerned.

Having imams as advisors is not unlike putting foxes in charge of the hen house, or bankers in charge of bank regulation. Imams have an interest.

If the Sharia Review Panel is examined as an outcome of counter-extremist measures, as well as the battle of the Church of England to create religious exemptions from secular law, then its composition makes perfect sense. That probably explains why the Home Office and the panel Chair, the theologian Mona Siddiqui, have remained unmoved as evidence of discrimination on the panel emerges.

They’re doing an inquiry that ensures a particular finding.

The One Law for All campaign looked into the backgrounds of the imams. One of them, Said Ali Abbas Razawi, has a disturbing tendency to talk about end times in apocalyptic and very sexist terms:

“Homosexuality will increase, zinaa [adultery] will increase in society; illegitimacy will increase in society. Men will look like women; women will look like men. What does that mean? What does that mean? That means men won’t be manly anymore….. Heralding the last days… they will be wearing clothes which are tight and will be see through. They will have clothes but they won’t have clothes on.”

It’s like putting Catholic priests in charge of investigating child abuse in the Catholic church. Guess what they will find!

Mona Siddiqui, Chair of the Reveiew Panel, told the Independent that imams are on the panel because they ‘have the ear of the community’; a remark that lead to such outrage, that we decided to call for a boycott of the inquiry.

But the same Imam. Said Ali Abbas Razawi, leads delegations to Iran, and attacks ISIS. His apocalyptic views on the end times are simply not alarming to officials dealing in counter-extremism. The dominant view of counter-extremist officials is that fundamentalists or what they like to call ‘non-violent extremists’ or sometimes ‘moderates’ are part of the solution.

It’s a very low bar. Just “not into blowing people up” is not good enough. Non-bombers who want to keep women subordinate are still a threat to women, even if the women do get to keep all their limbs.

The Home Office responds to all inquires by saying the imams are experts, yes really, experts, they know all about the theology, they’re experts. But that’s not the question.

The government has carefully restricted what the independent panel is supposed to do. Rather than examine the dangers of legal pluralism, as campaigners had suggested, it endorsed ‘sharia law’ as ‘a source of guidance to many Muslims, ‘and limited the panel to ‘assessing whether Sharia may be being misused, or exploited, in a way that may discriminate against certain groups, undermine shared values or cause social harms.’  The focus on group rights and social cohesion gives the game away. Harms to women are to be investigated, but only in the most limited way.

Because women’s rights aren’t among the group rights the Home Office is seeking to protect.

Then the Home Office added a judge who is a Christian theocrat to the panel.

Sir Mark Hedley is a former Judge of the family division. He is an active Christian in the Church of England, the Deputy Chair of the Clergy Discipline Commission, Deputy President of Tribunals and is associated with the Lawyers Christian Fellowship. His knowledge of ecclesiastical courts, and the values of a fundamentalist organisation makes him the closest thing to a sharia court judge that it is possible to find in the English judiciary.

…

Lawyers associated with the Fellowship vigorously oppose equality legislation. They vocally oppose the removal of religious privilege, and are vitriolic about ‘the homosexual lobby’. They have fought hard to exempt religious individuals or groups from complying with legislation on same sex marriage, adoption by single sex couples and other issues important to Christian fundamentalists. The National Secular Society accuses them of bullying tactics. Their recent campaigns have largely failed, but not before both Anglican and Catholic Churches threatened to withdraw their services from vulnerable individuals and teamed up with Muslim groups to try and defeat the proposals which they claimed would force them to ‘actively condone and promote homosexuality.’

Gita made extensive efforts to talk to the people in charge, and they brushed her off.

At the end of this back and forth, all the organisations which had called for the boycott received letters from the Sharia Review. There was no acknowledgement of any of the criticisms made. The campaigners were blandly asked to give evidence at the Review on August 9th, ‘As well as speaking to yourself, the review team are keen to hear from people with first hand experience of the application of Sharia law. ‘

Not a single mention was made of the Open Letter, the boycott, or any of the concerns raised.

As it stands, the Home Office and the Review Panel fail to meet the most basic standards on impartiality, equality impact and safeguarding. It is an exercise in sharia-compliance and a dangerous tool of the government’s counter-extremism strategy.

There won’t be a single chicken left.

On today’s list of horrors – a massive bombing at a government hospital in Quetta, Pakistan.

Police official Afzal Khan says several people were also wounded in Monday’s blast, which took place shortly after the body of a prominent lawyer killed in a shooting attack earlier in the day was brought to the hospital.

Khan says dozens of lawyers and journalists were present inside the hospital when the bomb went off. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Anwalullah Kakar, the government spokesman in southwestern Baluchistan province, says an investigation is underway.

It was also unknown who was behind the killing of the lawyer, Bilal Kasi, who was gunned down on his way to court earlier in the day.

About four hours later the Times updated:

Pakistani police say a suicide bomber carried out the attack at the government-run hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta that killed 53 people and wounded dozens.

Senior police officer Zahoor Ahmed Afridi says bomb disposal experts have informed him that remains of the attacker have been found at the scene after Monday’s bombing.

Ali Zafar, the top leader of Pakistan’s main lawyers’ association, denounced the bombing as “an attack on justice.” He said lawyers across the country will observe three days of mourning and will stay away from court appointments to express solidarity with those killed in the attack.

The current body count is 67 killed, 92 injured. Another update:

A breakaway faction of the Taliban in Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the suicide attack at a hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta which killed at least 64 people.

In a statement, Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militant group, also said their men killed Bilal Kasi, the president of Baluchistan Bar Association, and then targeted the mourners who had gathered at the government-run Civil Hospital. The group has been behind several acts of terrorism in Pakistan in recent years. The claim could not be independently verified.

God hates humans.

Speaking of the Republican party…Politico points out that there are fewer Republican women in Congress than there were ten years ago.

So far this year, Republicans have nominated women in just 26 of the 308 congressional districts that have held primaries. That’s a mere 8 percent—and it’s in line with the current makeup of the House Republican Conference, which is 91 percent male and 9 percent female.

Welllll, you know, Christina Hoff Sommers would say that’s because women prefer not to go into Congress, and you can’t mess with people’s preferences. It’s not at all structural or systemic or a result of the several thousand roadblocks there are in the way of women who seek public office. The way things are is exactly how they’re supposed to be, because they’re exactly how everyone intended them to be, so relax and go back to sleep now, after sending a large donation to the American Enterprise Institute.

During the past decade, that disparity has actually grown wider, as wave elections swept out a number of established Republican members of Congress (in 2006, 2008 and 2012), and swept in a lot of new ones (in 2010 and 2014). Since 2006, the proportion of women in the House GOP caucus has dropped from 11 percent to just 9 percent today. Although there are now 247 Republicans in the House, up from 229 a decade ago, there are fewer women: 22, down from 25.

Over the same period, Democratic women took advantage of these electoral shifts, replacing men from their party’s old boys’ network with women backed by EMILY’s List and other advocacy groups seeking to increase women’s representation in office. From 2006 to today, women grew from 21 percent of the House Democratic Caucus to 33 percent. And the party isn’t about to let anyone forget it: Their new class was on display in full force when the House’s Democratic women gathered on stage behind Nancy Pelosi during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Women cominna getcha!

This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon.

It’s almost as if the Republican party doesn’t really feel all that welcoming to women.

The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.

It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them.

Look like? Look like? They don’t look like, they are.

To be honest, though, I don’t consider this a problem, because I don’t think women should be Republicans; Republicans don’t look out for the interests of women. If the Republican party doesn’t want to fix that problem, that’s their tough luck.

One of the tributaries that flowed into the river of Nazi antisemitism – a pastoral letter by a senior German Polish cardinal read out in every Catholic church in the country in 1936 included this assertion:

It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free-thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people is a negative one.

Other than that…

I’m finding this one hard to read without nausea. Gang rape videos are a hot item in Uttar Pradesh.

According to Reuters, gang rape videos have become a popular seller in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state located in the northern region of the country.

Graphic cellphone videos depicting gang rapes are being bought and sold inside shops in the state. The videos last anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, and can cost between 75 cents and $2. The disturbing trend is indicative that there has been an increase in gang rape perpetrators using mobile phones to document their horrific crimes — and an increase in demand to view such depraved content.

So there are gang rapes, and there is filming of gang rapes, and the resulting films are sold, and they’re popular.

There just is no limit to how much women are hated, is there.

The police say they’re trying to stop it, but it’s really difficult, Mom.

Reuters has more.

Last week, a woman and her 14-year-old daughter were dragged from their vehicle at gunpoint on a major highway and gang-raped for hours in nearby fields. Local media reported that initially the police did not respond to a call for help.

The daily Indian Express reported that this week another woman was gang-raped in Uttar Pradesh, and said the incident had been recorded on a mobile phone.

Increasingly, perpetrators are recording their crimes on mobile phones to use as a blackmailing tool and to dissuade victims from going to the police, the Times of India said.

That’s pretty astonishing – the perps document the crime, to prevent police action. I’m more used to a setup where documenting a crime makes it more possible to prosecute, not less.

Story via the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change.

Out Sports tells us about a not so festive chant in Rio:

Soccer fans at the opening matches of the Olympic women’s soccer tournament chanted homophobic slurs, among other horrible things, at various players on Wednesday. Reports from various sources say the Portuguese term “bicha” was tossed around liberally by fans during the matches; That is similar to the “puto” chants we have heard from fans of Mexico and other Latin American countries.

…

The Los Angeles Times‘ Kevin Baxter, who is in Brazil covering the Olympics, said that the homophobic slur was aimed at the U.S. Women’s National Team during its 2-0 victory over New Zealand on Wednesday. At least one of the USWNT players — Megan Rapinoe — is gay, as is head coach Jill Ellis.

You know what else about them? They’re women. Ew, sick, right?

The chant surfaced during the Australia-Canada match as well, in which at least four players identify publicly as LGBT. One of those players is Stephanie Labbé, the Canadian goalkeeper. Given the chant surfaces when the goalkeeper occupies the ball, it’s particularly gross that they would use it specifically targeting Labbé.

The use of “bicha” by fans in men’s matches isn’t new. Janet Lever talks about it in her 1995 book,Soccer Madness: Brazil’s Passion for the World’s Most Popular Sport, describing up to 100,000 people chanting the slur in unison. However, it’s a bit odd for the slur to surface in women’s matches, as it’s a term aimed at men.

Maybe everybody could chant whatever their own language’s word is for human being. Human being! Human being!!

It would make a change, at least.

Jesus and Mo last month:

That’s a core difficulty, isn’t it. It always surprises me how easily believers jump over it or ignore it or wave it away. Even if you accept ad arguendo that a god did reveal a holy book to a human being or some human beings, how do you know that the transmission has been unbroken? How can you be confident you can rely on the chain of transmission from then to now?

You could say the god has seen to it that the transmission has never broken…but then why hasn’t the god made that unmistakable to everyone? Believers say the god has done that, we unbelievers are just willful and bad – but if the god had made it genuinely unmistakable we wouldn’t be able to unbelieve, would we. It’s pretty impossible (barring a particular mental disorder) to disbelieve in one’s own existence, for instance – the god could have made it unmistakable in that way. The god didn’t do anything like that. All we have, from our secular point of view, is some people saying things year after year. That’s all.

And then if you don’t accept that a god did reveal a holy book to a human being or some human beings, you have that problem to deal with too. Why should anybody believe that? Because people have said so, but that’s not a good enough reason (given the nature of the claim). Why aren’t believers more bothered by the fact that human claims are all we have as “evidence” that a god revealed a holy book to one or several humans?

And then, as the barmaid points out, they all claim that.

It’s fallibility all the way down.

The Patreon

From the “oh dear god how many times do we have to spell this out before you get it” files – the American Bar Association needs to add a rule telling male lawyers not to make sexist remarks to colleagues in court.

When Lori Rifkin asked the opposing lawyer to stop interrupting her while she questioned a potential witness, he replied: “Don’t raise your voice at me. It’s not becoming of a woman.”

The remark drew a rebuke and fine in January from a federal magistrate who declared that the lawyer had “endorsed the stereotype that women are subject to a different standard of behavior than their fellow attorneys.”

Of course a lawyer is always going to want to throw off “the opposing lawyer” because that’s how opposing works – you use every trick you can think of. But some tricks are impermissible, and sexist remarks should be one of those.

“I got the pat on the head,” said Jenny Waters, chief executive of the National Association of Women Lawyers, referring to what she encountered while in private practice.

The group, which represents 5,200 women, has been backing an effort to add to the American Bar Association’s model rules of professional conduct an amendment to prohibit harassment and discrimination by lawyers in the course of practicing law. Bar associations in 23 states and the District of Columbia already have some kind of protections against harassment and discrimination by lawyers in the conduct of their profession, but the proposal would establish a standard nationwide.

Thus interfering with our precious freedom to have individual states where women can be belittled freely, as God intended.

But critics of the proposal argue that a rule would inhibit lawyers from speaking freely on behalf of their clients and circumscribing the way they run their practice.

“It would change the attorney-client relationship and impair the ability to zealously represent clients,” said Kim Colby, director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the Christian Legal Society, which opposes the amendment.

Oberlin has placed Joy Karega on administrative leave while it investigates her anti-Semitic postings.

In February, the news site The Tower published the posts made by Dr. Karega, an assistant professor who teaches rhetoric and composition, most dated back to early 2015. The private liberal arts school in Ohio at first defended its faculty members’ rights to express personal views, but in March, Clyde S. McGregor, the board chairman, wrote in a statement on behalf of the college’s board of trustees that “these grave issues must be considered expeditiously.”

That statement also described the posts Dr. Karega made as “anti-Semitic and abhorrent.” In her posts, Dr. Karega suggested that the Islamic State was funded by the C.I.A. and the Mossad organization, the Israeli intelligence service, and that Mossad was behind the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.

But what about academic freedom? But then again what about basic intellectual values?

On Facebook, Dr. Karega seemed to respond: “Equitable?” she wrote on Wednesday, before adding that she had no comment and was on vacation with her daughter.

On Wednesday evening, Dr. Karega shared a statement written on her behalf by Chui Karega, an attorney based in Detroit. The statement accused Oberlin of “pandering to the dictates of a handful of vocal and wealthy religious zealots.”

The statement continued: “It is truly regrettable that an institution such as Oberlin College, with a historical legacy of activism and social justice, particularly in terms of African Americans, is being used as a personal tool of religious extremism by a small number of people.”

It’s also regrettable that an institution such as Oberlin College should employ academics who peddle tin-hat conspiracy theories.