I agree with Fredrik deBoer up to a point, but only up to a point.

I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from both critics and supporters, this has resulted in a common refrain: that I must be something other than a leftist, that to differ with (for example) Oberlin college students on the question of cultural appropriation must mean that I’m a closet whatever.

In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left.

Same here. I think a lot of accusations of appropriation are wrong and decidedly unhelpful – which is not to say that all of them are.

But after that comes the point where I stop agreeing.

In fact, I critique that practice because I am on the left. I’m part of a small but growing collection of people who feel that the left has lost its way, and that it must be steered back to its traditional roots: in materialism, in class solidarity as the basis of political organizing, in recognizing that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change, in privileging the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, and in defining our purpose as building a mass movement — and thus necessarily reaching out and convincing those who are not already convinced.

I agree that class solidarity is one basis for political organizing, and is badly neglected by the left these days, and should be recuperated…but I don’t agree that it should be the basis, to the exclusion of other categories. I absolutely don’t agree that racism and sexism can only be meaningfully addressed through structural economic change – that used to be the standard left approach and look at the result: sexism and racism were all but ignored. I don’t think I agree that the left should privilege the material over the symbolic or the linguistic, because I think they all matter. I think it matters that popular culture is so packed with all-dude entertainment, as if women were a tiny insignificant minority. I think it matters what culture we grow up in.

That said, I think his post is a useful corrective.

Kenan Malik in the New York Times compares and contrasts Donald Trump and Maryam Namazie.

What links them is that there are many people in Britain who do not wish to let one or the other speak.

Mr. Trump’s recent call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” caused outrage across the world. More than half a million Britons signed a petition to Parliament demanding that he be barred from Britain, a demand that has been backed by senior political figures.

The furor over Ms. Namazie’s views has caused fewer ripples, but is no less significant. Ms. Namazie is a founding member of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, an organization that campaigns on behalf of those facing hostility for renouncing their Islamic faith, or “apostasy.”

But, Kenan points out, there are people fatuous enough to think and say that Maryam is “Islamophobic” and thus in the same category as Donald Trump.

All this reveals the odd relationship that many on the left have with Islam. They view all Muslims as helpless victims, and regard any criticism of Islam as a form of bigotry. A columnist for The Guardian, David Shariatmadari, called the attempt at Warwick to muzzle Ms. Namazie “reasonable” because “we don’t want to have any part in the further stigmatisation of Islam.” Some academics disdainfully dismiss liberal Muslim critics of Islam as “native informants” — defined by one academic as “insiders” who “air the dirty laundry of Muslim communities.”

So what’s left? If Exes are “Islamophobic” and liberals are “native informants” – what’s left?

Uncritical endorsement of reactionary Islamists, that’s what.

Just as Mr. Trump seems unable to distinguish between Muslims and terrorists, do many on the left seem unable to distinguish between criticism of Islam and bigotry against Muslims. And just as Mr. Trump views Muslims as an undifferentiated lump, all potential terrorists, those on the left also often view Muslims as a homogeneous community speaking with a single voice. Both ignore progressive Muslim voices as not being truly of that community, while celebrating the most conservative voices as authentic.

I once interviewed Naser Khader, a secular Muslim and a Danish member of Parliament. He recalled a conversation with Toger Seidenfaden, then editor of the left-wing newspaper Politiken, about the “Muhammad cartoons” that had caused global controversy in 2005 when published in another Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten.

Mr. Seidenfaden claimed that “the cartoons insulted all Muslims.” “I am not insulted,” Mr. Khader responded. “But you’re not a real Muslim” came the reply. To be a real Muslim is, from such a perspective, to find the cartoons offensive. Anyone who isn’t offended is, by definition, not a real Muslim.

And yet people who think that way call Maryam Islamophobic.

It’s Jesus and Mo day, i.e. the day a new J & M appears.

So that means people like Maajid Nawaz and Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah and Tehmina Kazi and Sarah Khan are totally outsiders, right? Of course.

Volume 7, Wrong Again, God Boy, with a foreword by ME, is out now.

The Patreon.

It gets more degrading every day.

Trump, last night:

“Even her race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama,” the GOP frontrunner told a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I don’t know who would be worse, I don’t know. How does it get worse? But she was gonna beat — she was favored to win — and she got schlonged. She lost.”

See what he did there? She got penised. The weak worthless pathetic woman got penised, because she’s so weak and pathetic and vagina.

I don’t like the way we do things here. It’s bad.

See everybody scream and jump and scream.

Had you heard of the Harvard placemats? I hadn’t heard of them until just now.

The Washington Post reported:

It was just a matter of time before the campus debates over free speech and racial injustice took on a festive tone.

At Harvard, this has arrived in the form of a “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice,” an initiative from the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which was met with a recoil and an apology from two Harvard College deans this week.

These placemats, distributed in undergraduate dining halls, offered a script for answering questions about some of the more controversial topics of the year, from “Islamaphobia [sic]/Refugees” to “Black murders in the street.”

A script. Who wants a script? Can’t people create their own scripts? Especially when they’re talking to friends and family?

For example, in response to the question under “Yale/Student activism” — “Why are Black students complaining? Shouldn’t they be happy to be in college?” — students are instructed to tell their relatives:

When I hear students expressing their experiences of racism on campus I don’t hear complaining. Instead I hear young people uplifting a situation that I may not experience. If non-Black students get the privilege of that safe environment, I believe that same privilege should be given to all students.

Are students so helpless and hapless and feeble now that they need the Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to write scripts for them? Can’t they figure out what to say all by themselves? Based on the thoughts in their own head, which will have been shaped by other conversations and reading and reflection?

Also, do they need such bad scripts? “Uplifting a situation”? That’s not what “uplift” means.

A note at the bottom of the page states that the guidelines were adapted from the “Showing Up for Racial Justice Holiday Placemat” created by a national community organizing network of the same name which “moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.”

Well that’s a whole different thing. It makes sense coming from a community organizing network; you know where you are with that. But coming from an office of the university and distributed at dining halls? Not so much.

Well now look at that, Godless Utopia is doing a Woman Atheist of the Year poll with four categories (with four nominees in each category). It’s a Twitter-based poll, i.e. you vote by clicking a box on the relevant tweet.

One is for comedian; I of course voted for Kate Smurthwaite. There’s also actress and blogger (I voted for Maryam). The fourth is author; I voted for Taslima. But here’s the shocker: somehow I’m one of the nominees in that one. I won’t win of course but feel free to vote for me anyway! (But really you should vote for Taslima.)

(Voting has already started.)

Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.

Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.

“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.

There are no kitchens, because bleeding women aren’t allowed to cook. A thick sheet on the ground is the only bed; during the day it’s folded to serve as a chair. The huts are isolated, so forest animals pay visits; there are reports of women dying from snakebites.

The practice of banishing women and girls is most prevalent among the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups. The Gonds are the largest indigenous group in central India and hail from the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.

Girls miss school while they are in the huts. An estimated 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating. “Many times a menstruating girl is unable to take her exams because of this practice. It means that few girls from this region study beyond matriculation [high school],” says Barsagade.

They have to stay there for five days.

There are two gaokors in Sitatola, home to about 20 families. Although there have been incidents of harassment, women are generally left alone because they are considered impure while they have their periods. There have been moves to improve the conditions of the gaokors, but not to end the practice.

It’s very important not to rape a woman when she’s impure. Keep that for when she’s not bleeding.

Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa say thanks but no thanks to the whole “wearing ‘hijab’ in solidarity” thing – not for the familiar and irritating reason that it’s “appropriation” but for the much better reason that it’s sexist shit.

Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah, the women smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The media obligingly reported this interfaith gesture.

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful joke and reminder of the well-financed effort by conservatives to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting unsuspecting well-intentioned do-gooders, while promoting the headscarf for women as a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars,” the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. We reject this interpretation. We are not too sexy for our hair.

It’s been grating on me for ages, the way the media and would-be progressives beam approval on the headscarf for women, as if it stood purely for mutual love and respect and not at all for the subordination of women.

This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf,” furthering a sexist interpretation of Islam that women and girls must “protect” their “honor” by covering their hair. Hijab literally means, “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.

I did not know that. I’ve been calling it hijab all this time. Damn.

Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shia sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have experienced bullying to cover our hair from men and boys – and women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” for example, telling jokes about “hijabis” in skinny jeans actually being “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”

…

To us, the headscarf is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and, thus, we must cover ourselves. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.

And treats her like so much garbage if she doesn’t cover up.

Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf for women, duping well-intentioned “interfaith” supporters, is promulgated by efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shia proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day,” the TV station arguing “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Yikes. Bad move, University of Calgary.

In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”

Also, the notion that “the woman is awrah” presupposes that the only people who count as people are men. The woman is forbidden to men, and therefore she’s just plain forbidden, because only men count. Since only men count, the way to deal with these forbidden women is to imprison them. Problem solved…as long as you assume women don’t count as people.

The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”

Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.

These things always disturb me. They just send the message that Muslim women and girls are expected to wear the damn curtains.

As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.

In the name of “interfaith,” well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity,” pushing a platform to put a headscarf on every woman.

Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.

I do!

I tried to find some evidence to rebut (or not) something I claimed.

Ed Cara on Twitter said in response to my link to the first collection of misogynist comments about Germaine Greer:

Those are all certainly vile, but I absolutely do think there’d be vile racist comments over quotes from a famous AA speaker

So I looked around, and found a rapper who obliged. Pink News reported last September:

Waka Flocka Flame made a series of transphobic comments on a New York radio station on Friday.

The rapper told ‘The Breakfast Club’ that Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was an: “Affront to God.”

He went on to accuse “transgenders” of “marketing evil, man.”

Flame continued to wax lyrical about the danger of non-traditional family units, accusing men and women of forgetting their gender roles as “husbands and wives”.

“Women are afraid to be a wife and young males is afraid to be men.” he said.

“It’s like, it’s not cool, they’re not marketing that. They don’t market families and husbands and wives no more.

“They marketing young girls, you know what I’m saying?” he said, as it became increasingly clear that few around him did.

“Transgenders — they’re marketing evil, man,” he said, before accusing the trans community of doing the “devil’s work” and as a test that society needed to “outbeat [sic]”.

“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after he did.

“That’s how I just feel. You rebuking God, man.

“God didn’t put them feelings in you, man, that’s the Devil playing tricks on your mind,” he added.

“That’s a test from God. If you can’t outbeat [sic] that one task and you believe that, then you’re going to believe everything else.”

However, Mr Flame didn’t reserve his hate fuelled philosophising for trans people alone – he also criticised the African American community, insisting that they need “get over slavery”.

So I found the Pink News Facebook post of the story. Ed was at least partly right – the comments are certainly abusive. On the other hand they’re not explicitly racist the way so many of the comments about Greer were misogynist – and there are only 34, compared to her 223.

But plenty of them are implicitly racist. Like the second one for instance:

Gideon John Kramer Waka flaka wtf all theses idiots with the brain the apsize of an ant who brag about fucking bitches selling drugs and people are so fucking stupid they pay these idiots attention rap takes no talent what so ever these idiots call themself artists and then say stupid things like this moron its sad to see how many people actually even listion to anything these idiots say

And others:

Pete Smith Looks like a trans human.

Scott Sherman I’m not a fan of ignorant, bigoted talentless twats holding themselves out like theyre a role model and spewing their hate in interviews

There’s a rather cryptic one…

Donny Ball WAKA your baby girl is waiting for you.

The misogyny sneaks in even when the sinner isn’t a woman.

But anyway: my claim is at least partly rebutted.

Whooooooo – Phil Plait alerts us to an amazing NASA photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This incredible photo was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been mapping the Moon since it achieved orbit in 2009. Its cameras are usually pointed straight down (what’s called nadir viewing), but sometimes the whole spacecraft is rotated to point them toward the horizon, or even up into space, to measure the Moon’s incredibly thin atmosphere (called an exosphere, which, c’mon, is an extremely cool word) or to take calibration measurements.

In this case, on Oct. 12, 2015, when it took the images used to make this image, LRO was over the large crater Compton, which is just over the visible edge on the farside of the Moon. LRO was 134 km above the Moon’s surface, so it could peek over the horizon and see the Earth.

In the Times today – behind a paywall as always, but the free first two paragraphs are of interest all the same.

Britain’s biggest Islamic organisation and its largest Muslim student group have undeclared links to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist network that has at times incited violence and terror, a government report claimed yesterday.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body of more than 500 Islamic organisations, claims to be non-sectarian, but Brotherhood supporters are said to have “played an important role in establishing and then running” it, according to the review.

Wait, the MCB claims to be non-sectarian? What sense does that make? It’s sectarian right in the name. The issue isn’t sectarian / non-sectarian but theocratic / secular, or tolerant / intolerant, or liberal / illiberal. It’s whether or not you respect human rights. It’s whether or not you think your religion has the right to demand and enforce universal obedience.

It’s also whether or not you exclude women in the name of your organization.

Speaking of Al Jazeera…last January it had some issues with Charlie Hebdo. National Review saw the emails.

As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their own by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide e-mail.

…

Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was “really an attack on ‘free speech,’” discuss whether “I Am Charlie” is an “alienating slogan,” caution viewers against “making this a free speech aka ‘European Values’ under attack binary [sic],” and portray the attack as “a clash of extremist fringes.” “Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr wrote. “Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response — however illegitimate — is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.”

Excuse me? A principle virtually no one contests? If virtually no one contests it, what were all those dead bodies then? If virtually no one contests it, why did the Kouachi brothers murder 12 people at Charlie Hebdo? If virtually no one contests it, why do so many people get in such a rage of opposition to it? What a cowardly, blaming, contemptuous, horrible thing to say. The whole point is that a great many people absolutely do contest it, and a great many of them contest it with violence. They contest it by murdering people. Those guys with machetes in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who draw up lists of people to be killed in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who threaten to kill my dear friend Taslima? They contest it. That guy who shot up the conference in Copenhagen, killing a Danish film director, and then later killed a guard outside a synagogue? He contested it. I could go on. People do contest it and they use force, they use murder, to make their contesting stick. So yes, actually, the people at Charlie Hebdo were bravely defiant.

His denunciation of Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed didn’t sit well with some Al Jazeera English employees.

Hours later, U.S.-based correspondent Tom Ackerman sent an email quoting a paragraph from a January 7 blog post by Ross Douthat. The New York Times’ Douthat (film critic for National Review) argued that cartoons like the ones that drove the radical Islamists to murder must be published “because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”

I hate having to agree with Ross Douthat, but these things happen.

H/t Lady Mondegreen