The Family Research Council doesn’t like Nina Pillard.

Unfortunately for Americans, the Senate won’t have to dig too deep to uncover some of Pillard’s shockers. Among some of her greatest hits, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General argues that abortion is necessary to help “free women from historically routine conscription into maternity.”

Yes – and? Can Tony Perkins really think it’s not true that sometimes women have been made pregnant when they didn’t want to be? Really? Can he even think it wasn’t very common before contraception became widely available, and still is in many parts of the world where women don’t have the right or ability to say no?

As if her militant feminism wasn’t apparent enough, she takes the opportunity in some of her writings to slam anyone who opposes the abortion-contraception mandate as “reinforce[ing] broader patterns of discrimination against women as a class of presumptive breeders.”

The Family Research Council should be called the Family Is Mandatory Council.

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

Amanda also points out something I too have been pointing out for years – “radical feminism” isn’t.

There is no such thing as a “radical feminist” anymore.

Don’t get me wrong! There was. In the 60s and 70s, there were radical feminists who were distinguishing themselves from liberal feminists. Radical feminists agreed with liberal feminists that we should change the laws to recognize women’s equality, but they also believed that we needed to change the culture. It was not enough to pass the ERA or legalize abortion, they believed, but we should also talk about cultural issues, such as misogyny, objectification, rape, and domestic violence.

And media representations of women, and sexist jokes, and who does the housework, and cookies don’t just bake themselves you know. And don’t call me “Honey,” and I’m not here to make coffee, and do you realize you’ve interrupted me every single time I’ve tried to say something this evening? And street harassment, and no, knowing how to clean the toilet is not congenital, and will you please stop using the word “girl” as an insult? And sport, and the military, and double standards in everything, and wtf are cankles?

In other words, what was once “radical” feminism is now mainstream feminism.

Exactly.

I realize there are anti-trans, anti-sex feminists out there who call themselves radical feminists, but I, simply put, don’t agree. What’s radical about them? They are to the right of the mainstream feminist movement. They often have more in common with the conservatives decrying mainstream feminism as “radical” than they do the original radical feminists who had consciousness-raising groups and abortion speak outs and who started Ms Magazine.

When Sarah Palin says she’s a feminist – you don’t have to believe her.

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

Georgia – not the Paula Deen one, the other one – has a “test the bride for virginity” service, the BBC tells us.

Maintenance of virginity before marriage is deeply entrenched in the Orthodox
Christian country, although not everyone’s happy with the idea of it being
documented. One young interviewee branded it “disgusting”. She told the TV
reporter: “I would say no if I were asked to do this… if I am to spend my
whole life with him, he should trust me.” Web users also mocked the inspection
service, circulating a digitally-altered image of an ID card with an added
“virginity status” parameter.

Yes I don’t see that being a very pleasant conversation with the future mother-in-law.

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

Amanda Marcotte takes on the much-recycled nonsense about “radical feminism” – which as used by people who hate feminism means everything beyond the right to vote, and certainly any wild talk about stereotypes or the image of women in popular culture.

For anyone who wants proof that the conservative Republican tendency to accuse liberals and feminists of being “radical” or “militant” is pure projection, Wednesday’s confirmation hearings for Nina Pillard, Obama’s pick to sit on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, served nicely. Pillard is a Georgetown law professor and yes, openly feminist (though not as aggressively feminist as, say, Justice Samuel Alito is anti-feminist), which was enough to put the Republican Senators who showed up at the hearing into a full-blown paranoid lather. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, accused Pillard of arguing that abstinence-only programs were inherently unconstitutional.

You know what she was really arguing?

[N]ot that it’s unconstitutional to scold kids to keep it in their pants to your heart’s content, but that the specific gender roles taught in many abstinence-only courses violate the students’ right to equal protection. Her actual argument:

Double standards about sex drive and chastity in abstinence-only curricula are embedded in a larger picture of women and men playing traditional roles in the family and the public sphere. A decision to practice abstinence until marriage assumes early, heterosexual marriage and early childbearing. The expectation is not that marriage will be delayed until a person’s late twenties or early thirties so that both parents can complete higher education and establish themselves at work, but that couples will marry young and the woman will become a family caretaker, principally supported by her husband, who remains relatively free of care-giving duties to pursue his career. Women, one abstinence-only curriculum teaches, need “financial support,” whereas men need “domestic support” and “admiration.  Another maintains that “[ w ]omen gauge their happiness and judge their success on their relationships. Men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments. Young women, according to a leading abstinence-only curriculum, “care less about achievement and their futures” than do their male peers.  These curricula suggest that there are two tracks in sex and two tracks in life, one male, and one female.

Terrifyingly radical, isn’t it.

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

Alabama. Alabama’s really pushing the envelope these days.

The Alabama Public Service Commission apparently begins all of its meetings with a prayer session, but a recent one from last week took on what some consider an unusually political message, lamenting the “sinful” ways of those who allow gay marriage, abortion, and the “removal” of God from public schools.

APSC commissioner Twinkle Cavanaugh introduced her friend, John Delwin Jordan, a member of her local baptist church and an active Prattville Tea Party leader.

Wait. Twinkle? Prattville? For real?

Apparently.

Jordan began his prayer session imploring the meeting attendees to hold their hand up if they “believe in the power of prayer.”

The end of the four-minute prayer saw a turn from the theological to the political, with Jordan lamenting aloud: “God, we’ve taken you out of our schools, we’ve taken you out of our prayers, we’ve murdered your children, we’ve said it’s OK to have same-sex marriage. God, we have sinned. And we ask once again that you’ll forgive us of our sins.”

Oh shut up. It’s not “we” – you mean “they,” and you want god to punish us and forgive you. Own it. Just tell god to smite all the infidels and throw them into hell, then say “thank you for inviting me” and get out.

Meanwhile somebody should take the Alabama Public Service Commission to court.

H/t Christopher.

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

Aha, clever. There’s a priest high up in the Catholic church in Australia, Brian Lucas, who is also a barrister (non-practicing), who thought of a good dodge for occasions when he had to talk to priests accused of child-rape: don’t take notes.

…the senior figure within the Catholic Church on Wednesday told an  inquiry  into sexual abuse he never made notes when dealing with about 35 priests accused  of sex crimes.

The inquiry also heard that Father Brian wrote advice for clergy that it was  a good idea not to take notes during interviews with accused priests to avoid  the material being exposed during any ”subsequent legal process”.

Attaboy, Father Brian. Always protect your institution at the expense of its victims. Always stack the deck in favor of yourself and your colleagues, and be completely indifferent to the people you and your colleagues harm. Then lecture the rest of us and how to be as good as you and your colleagues.

He testified that he never reported priests accused of sexually abusing  children to police. He had no recollection at all of a meeting in 1993 when the  paedophile priest Denis McAlinden ”opened up and confessed … freely” to him,  as stated by McAlinden in a letter tendered as evidence.

For about six years from 1990 it was Father Brian’s  job to confront priests  accused of sexual abuse around NSW and the ACT and persuade them to leave the  ministry, he told the inquiry.

In that time he dealt with about 35 priests, ”seducing” more than 10 of  them with ”strong armed” tactics into agreeing to resign the priesthood. He  said the best way of keeping children safe from priestly abuse was to take the  offending priest out of the ministry, and that was his priority.

He said ”it staggers me and shocks me” that McAlinden practised as a priest  and worked at a school of 7000 children from kindergarten upwards in the  Philippines after his priestly faculties were removed in Australia in 1993.

”Were you satisfied after your dealings with McAlinden that appropriate  child protection steps had been taken?” asked the counsel assisting the  inquiry, Julia Lonergan, SC. ”It was probably the best that was on offer at the  time,” Father Brian replied.

“On offer”? By whom? What a ridiculous, evasive, don’t look at me reply. He could have “offered” better himself! That was the point of the question, I think.

“Is the real position as to why you didn’t want to take any note that you didn’t want it to have to be exposed in any subsequent legal process?” Ms  Lonergan asked.

”I think that would be a reasonable comment,” he replied.

She asked whether he wrote his views for other clergy to the effect that it was a good idea not to take notes “so that a subsequent legal process that would  compel production of them cannot be successful”.

“In some instances that would be accurate,” Father Brian responded.

The Mafia with rosaries.

H/t Ian.

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

Last week Jesus got interested in the increasing your Twitter followers by offering them time off Purgatory wheeze. Mo got all superior.

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

There’s a thing, or a fake thing that turned into a real thing, or not a real thing but a fake thing that people shouted at women for having anyway, that is called Bitchy Resting Face.

it wasn’t coined until – amazingly – May of this year. Needless to say, it instantly grabbed the media’s attention. Truly, a titbit with such potential for female anxiety and self-loathing is like an iron filing to the media’s magnet. The term emerged in a public safety announcement video – and we’ll get back to this video in just a tick – in which several women discuss the terrible problem that afflicts so many of their gender: Bitchy Resting Face. “They might not be bitches at all – they might just have faces that look bitchy,” one of the films several narrators clucks sympathetically.

Uh huh. I’ve had that my whole life. I’ve actually explained to people on occasion that I’m not as horrible as I look. I am very horrible, admittedly, but not as horrible as I look.

The weirdest thing is the BRF does not actually exist: the video that coined the term was made by comedian Taylor Orci and is a joke, as some of you might have guessed from the very name BRF. Yet this has not stopped plastic surgeons eagerly offering cures for this non-existent problem. In this sense, BRF is the new cankles. Hail the new cankles! Someone wheel out the gilded easel and announce its arrival!

It’s the kind of joke that needs a Dan Cardamon, I think.

There’s another issue here: the original video doesn’t just talk about BRF. It addresses Resting Asshole Face, the male equivalent of BRF. Needless to say, that has not garnered anywhere near the amount of comment that BRF has. As far as I’m aware, Jon Hamm has not appeared on US talkshows apologising for his Resting Asshole Face as Anna Paquin did for her BRF. Nor has the RAF (with apologies to the Royal Air Force) featured in the Mail Online’s sidebar of shame whereas BRF has already become almost as much of a regular feature there as drool-splattered photos of 14-year-old girls looking “grown up for their years”. To be fair, RAF is made up. But then, so is BRF.

I know this one! I totally know it. It’s because men are supposed to look like that, and women aren’t. Men who look like that just look strong and reserved and maybe intimidating. Women who look like that look like evil witches kill them kill them kill them.

The reason BRF has attracted so much more attention than RAF is not just because it’s more instinctive for the media to mock women’s bodies – although there is that – but because, clearly, the former underlines the expectations on women. To be an acceptable woman is to be feminine and that means being compliant and smiley. It doesn’t matter how many Anne-Marie Slaughters or Sheryl Sandbergs out there tell women to be more aggressive, the current public image of businesswomen in this country is one who bakes cupcakes and who injects Botox, two things that would presumably help sort out any woman’s BRF.

All BRF means, really, is “not at that moment smiling”. And how dare a woman not do that all the time, right? Cheer up, love it might never happen! Female characters in books, movies and on TV are meant to be likeable and, as nymag.com points out this week, if they’re not, the problem is usually explained away as a medical problem (such as Homeland’s Carrie being bipolar.) If they’re simply difficult, grumpy or selfish in the way male characters are, they provoke outrage and astonishment in the way male characters never do (hello, Lena Dunham.).

Precisely. They even get men, total strangers, shouting at them on the street for not smiling. Really: they do. We do. I do. Remember that? Two years ago? That guy was seriously pissed off by the audacity of my walking past his house with a bitchy witchy resting face.

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

Oh come on, laydeez, you can’t expect to have women on the money and the postage stamps, for cryin out loud. There’s a limit.

Caroline Criado-Perez started a battle on this principle: if the Bank of England wanted to take Elizabeth Fry, the only woman on any banknote, off the fiver, it had to replace her with another woman. We couldn’t live in a society that was only prepared to celebrate the achievements of men. What kind of a message is that to the nation, that the only declaration of legacy people will see most days, the only open declaration many of us will ever notice, includes no women?

That men are more important, of course. Which they are. Aren’t they?

The thing that triggered my interest was when people started laughing, and the laugh was always this: “Look on the other side, you dumb cow! The Queen is a woman! She’s on all of them!” Just as a thought experiment (redundant, now that Criado-Perez has won), try to explain to a hypothetical person why the Queen does not count as a “woman of note”. Do you feel as though you’ve regressed 50 years, even 100 years, to a time when it actually needed explaining, the difference between attainment and an accident of birth?

What I’ve been saying. An accident of birth didn’t magically make Charles Windsor a medical expert with no training.

Meanwhile, there was something interesting going on in the Council of Europe (I know, there’s a sentence you may not have read very often). It held a conference in Amsterdam on gender equality, in which Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project – so far 25,000 women have tweeted examples of often eye-popping misogyny – gave evidence. Her highest-profile campaign recently has been to get Facebook to apply its own moderator-standards – the rules it uses to prevent racism and anti-semitism on the site – to images of violence against women. As she points out in a brilliant video: “There are images of women being raped, being killed, being tortured, pictures of women with black eyes and bloodied faces with the caption, ‘Next time, don’t get pregnant’.”

Facebook, with that distinctive, MBA, small-c conservatism, will come down hard on abuse if it can see itself getting bad press over it, but cannot make a moral decision of its own about whether or not a joke about violence towards women might be equivalent to a joke about violence towards a particular race.

Women are more irritating, you see.

Following Bates’s and other testimony, on 10 July the Council of Europe made a set of recommendations (which it announced this week): member states should adopt an “appropriate legal framework” that would ensure “respect for the principle of human dignity and the prohibition of all discrimination on grounds of sex”, as well as of incitement to hatred and to any form of gender-based violence within the media.

Naturally, the Council of Europe doesn’t have the power to enforce it; and David Cameron, with his craven fear of the attack-labrador Europhobes in his party, will probably not simply reject the recommendations, but use his rejection of them as a calling card. The opposition to the call will be hideous to behold, uniting all the people who hate Europe “telling us what to do” with the people who treasure, above most things, their right to make hilarious jokes about rape; and what a cesspit that will be (hang on – unless this is not a Venn diagram at all, but a picture of one circle overlapping entirely with another circle?).

Pretty much. “Don’t tell me what to do, bitch” – that’s the Weltanschauung.

But this is potentially huge: imagine some crazy future, some post-angry time, when people listen to sustained argument and take it seriously. This “respect” would go far beyond Facebook. How could the Sun defend page 3 from the charge that it discriminated on grounds of sex? How could lads’ mags exist; what would happen to the Sunday Sport? The landscape of the printed media in the UK would change completely. And it would change because of Laura Bates and Everyday Sexism; because of Kat Banyard, and Lose the Lads Mags; because of Lucy-Anne Holmes and No More Page Three; because of Caroline Criado-Perez and her campaign on banknotes; it would change because of the 34,000 who signed the Bank of England petition, the 220,000 who tweeted about the Facebook campaign.

Two things are unarguable about this century; the first is that it is more sexist than the end of the last, raunch and postmodernism having converged to normalise the presentation of women as meat; the second is that the internet has had profound consequences for privacy and, inevitably, personal freedom. But pause to consider the vivacity of the feminist fourth wave, its energy and victories, the way it has honed and deployed the power of social media rather than surrendered to the misogynist tropes it throws up. It is fearless and pugnacious and alive with a sense of possibility.

Campaigning is better than it was in the 90s or the noughties; it is more determined, its weapons are more lethal; it is Buffy to yesteryear’s Mary Poppins. Look on its works, ye Mervyns, and despair.

But if whatever wave this is is so much better than all the previous waves, why is this century so much more sexist than the last? If Buffy is so great why is she losing?

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

By Susan at Popehat.

Hey, my dogs got vaccinated and now they are unable to talk!!!!!!!!!

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

Dr Paul Offitt is on the case.

A pediatrician who spent years defending childhood vaccines against the likes of actress/activist Jenny McCarthy has launched an assault on megavitamins and dietary supplements.

“If you take large quantities of vitamin A, vtamin E, beta carotene [or] selenium you increase your risk of cancer, risk of heart disease, and you could shorten your life,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The good thing here is, he has actual training in this field, unlike a certain eldest son I could mention.

One big problem with dietary supplements is a 1994 law that exempts them from the tighter scrutiny the FDA applies to its regulation of medicines, Offit says. So the makers of a garlic supplement can say that it “supports cardiovascular health” even though a government study found that garlic supplements didn’t lower cholesterol. Meanwhile, Offit says, patients clearly benefit from a range of FDA-approved statin drugs that actually do what garlic supplements claim to do.

I remember the lobbying for that law. Every time I wandered into a health foods store I would see 47 signs and notices shouting about the horror of regulation of dietary supplements. The forces of No Information Please won that fight: makers of supplements get to say any old bullshit, which consumers believe, because they know the gummint wouldn’t allow anybody to tell lies on packaging.

Offit says doctors are partly to blame for the growing popularity of high-dose vitamins and other dietary supplements. Rather than pushing back against patients who want to take them, he says, doctors have acted like waiters at a restaurant, simply asking, “What would you like?”

Many hospitals also include unproved dietary supplements in their list of medicines available to patients, Offit says. But he says his own institution, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, plans to remove nearly all supplements from its list later this month.

Offit says his attack on dietary supplements has generated a steady stream of hate mail. But he says it’s not as harsh as the hate mail he used to get from people who believe vaccines cause autism. “This is more, I’m ‘a liar and a shill for the pharmaceutical industry,’ ” he says, “not, ‘You’re going to hell.’ “

We need an official scale for hate mail.

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

Guest post by Claire Ramsey. Claire is the author of The People Who Spell, Gallaudet University Press 2011.

I’m not a philosopher and I dread to think how many years it’s been since I read Searle. But I’ve spent years not only trying to transmit knowledge and prod the youth of America into some kind of understanding but doing it on the actual topics of knowledge and understanding. In some models (I think ed psych but I could be wrong) they talk about different kinds of knowledge – declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge and probably other kinds, I think some models include temporal knowledge, all of the time-related parts like sequence, and duration. Obviously declarative knowledge is just knowing what something is = that is a shoe and that other thing is a nectarine. Procedural knowledge is knowing procedures to accomplish something – it might be strategies for memorizing vocabulary or how to fix a carburetor. Conceptual knowledge is knowing the “why” of something – that’s the sky and it looks kind of blue and here’s why we see it that way even though it’s not really blue. I think both procedural and conceptual knowledges lead to a kind of understanding. All of this stuff unrolls inside an individual’s head, which is mostly what ed psych is interested in grasping.

Then there’s another kind of understanding that is key for being a good teacher and, I’d argue, a good talker, citizen, person, writer, story teller.  In other words it’s the kind of understanding that we develop – some more than others – so that we can be in the social world w/other people and do things with them, like have a conversation. In education circles there is a jargon term  – “Pedagogical Content Knowledge” – I think this business is the basis of many other interactions in life, not just teaching & learning & explaining.  It means knowing something so well from all angles that you can figure out (even predict) where another person (a learner in this case but it could be your interlocutor or your reader) stopped getting it and why, and figuring out another way to explain it so that it’s clear or figuring out what the background info or sequential info or whatever to add that the other person does not seem to be getting . . . and that is the stuff that takes empathy plus a big dose of knowing what you’re talking about.

In the tortured arguments and/or explanations of the MRA and the atheist sexist pests, their seemingly intentional pretense that they know what X means drove me nuts because it’s an example of intentionally being anti-social and anti-understanding while pretending that they aren’t. I hate that shit. And I think that’s why. We’ve all run into people who pretend that the whole world is completely literal (in their way) and all of that other stuff doesn’t matter. Well, they are wrong. And they don’t know jack about how conversation works or how language operates in social interactions.

Anyhow, like I said, I’m not a philosopher or an epistemologist or even a psychologist. I’m a  sociolinguist who gets annoyed easily by those who mishandle language. Then I just want to start slapping them.

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

Crissy Brown describes a nightmare that happened to her.

She was driving to work in Tuscaloosa (Alabama) and got pulled over for having expired license plate tags. The cop told her there was a warrant out for her arrest (for expired license plate tags???), handcuffed her, and searched her car. Then he took her to the police station.

As soon as I arrived at the police station, before I could make it through the metal detectors, I was pushed against a wall and made to stand there until a female officer could take the time to inappropriately touch – I mean frisk – me. As the woman ran her hands down my body and between my legs, three male officers stood behind me, watching the show.

From there, I was processed, which included stripping down in front of a female officer. While I stood before her naked, I asked the cop why it was necessary for me to be strip searched; she responded by calling me an asshole and deciding I needed to take a shower to, I suppose, wash the filth out of my mouth. I didn’t even get a towel to dry off with. She handed me a large, burlap-like orange set of scrubs, bedding, and a mattress. I was escorted down to population, made to walk along gray tape on the ground (it really pissed them off if you deviated from the “inmate line”), and then put in a holding cell that had more women than beds, two metal picnic tables, and an old fuzzy TV set.

For expired license plate tags.

This country has a completely crazy attitude to imprisonment.

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

Ireland is changing.

Traditionally Catholic Ireland has allowed an atheist group to perform weddings this year for the first time, and the few people certified to celebrate them are overwhelmed by hundreds of couples seeking their services.

Demand for the Humanist Association of Ireland’s secular weddings has surged as the moral authority of the once almighty Catholic Church collapsed in recent decades amid sex abuse scandals and Irish society’s rapid secularization.

Ah not just the sex abuse scandals. Don’t forget the enslavement and brutality scandals; don’t forget the industrial “schools” and the Magdalene laundries.

Until now, those who did not want a religious wedding could have only civil ceremonies. Outside of the registrar’s office, only clergy were permitted to perform weddings.

But statistics show rising demand for non-Church weddings. In 1996, 90 percent of Irish weddings were performed by the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. But by 2010 that percentage had fallen to 69 percent.

The pent-up demand from those who want more than a civil ceremony in a registry office but reject a religious wedding has created a major backlog for the humanist group’s ceremonies director.

And a seller’s market, apparently.

The law says solemnizers cannot work for profit. Whiteside said he usually asks 450 euros per wedding, although it might be more if long distance travel is involved.

“We don’t have salaries, so we have to have some kind of income,” he said, noting that priests had salaries and used their own churches for weddings.

Hmm. Sounds like profit to me.

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

Here’s a question for you. What’s the relationship between knowledge and understanding? What does epistemology have to say about understanding?

I’m thinking about the role of empathy and experience in understanding and, I think (but I’m not sure), in knowledge. If you experience something and thus come to understand it better than you did, is that knowledge?

I’m not a bit sure it is. If the understanding depends on experience, then it’s not sharable, and I think of knowledge as being generally sharable…but perhaps that’s a mistake.

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

Ah it turns out it was all a misunderstanding about Al Mana Interiors and its firing of Marte Dalelv for being slutty enough to get herself raped. Al Mana Interiors behaved impeccably the entire time; it says so itself.

DOHA, Qatar, July 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Hani El Korek, spokesperson for Al Mana Interiors W.L.L., today released the following statement:

“We are sympathetic to Marte Dalelv during this very difficult situation.  Al Mana Interiors has repeatedly offered Marte support and company representatives were by her side throughout the initial investigation and police interviews, and spent days at both the police station and the prosecutor’s office to help win her release.

“Company representatives have been supportive and in communication with Marte throughout her ordeal.  Only when Ms. Dalelv declined to have positive and constructive discussions about her employment status, and ceased communication with her employer, was the company forced to end our relationship with her. The decision had nothing to do with the rape allegation, and unfortunately neither Ms. Dalelv nor her attorneys have chosen to contact the company to discuss her employment status.

“We continue to be open to helping Ms. Dalelv and extending her resources during the Dubai legal process.  We are hopeful that we can resume a positive discussion about the assistance she needs during this difficult time.”

See? It was all her fault. Despite what Wissam Al Mana said in that “you’re fired” letter. He was just joking.

As mentioned is the suspension letter dated 20th March 2013, your employment agreement is termination due to your unacceptable and improper behavior during your last business trip in Dubai, which has resulted in your arrest by the Police Authorities in UAE.

Kidding! Kidding!! Totally kidding. Wissam and Marte were always kidding each other like that, around the water cooler in Doha. But for some reason the other day she just totally declined to have positive and constructive discussions about her employment status, so if she’s going to be a bitch about it, what do you expect? We’re not running a home for wayward sluts here.

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

That’s what Marte Dalelve’s company told her after she was arrested for being raped in Dubai. She behaved improperly, you see.

Ms. Dalelv received a letter from her employer Al Mana Interiors three weeks after she reported the rape, informing her that she was suspended from her position, effective immediately.

The ninth of april she got a new shocking letter: Her contract was terminated due to «unacceptable and improper behavior». This time it was the company’s managing director, Mr. Wissam Al Mana, who himself signed the letter.

It’s a very sweet letter. It doesn’t come right out and call her a whore.

Al Mana writes the following in the letter he personally signed:

Dear Ms. Dalelv,

Further to the suspension letter notified to you on 20th March 2013, we hereby inform you that you employment with Al Mana Interiors W.L.L. is terminated for misconduct and breach of your employment duties, effective immediately.

As mentioned is the suspension letter dated 20th March 2013, your employment agreement is termination due to your unacceptable and improper behavior during your last business trip in Dubai, which has resulted in your arrest by the Police Authorities in UAE.

The full and final settlement of any outstanding benefits can be discussed wih Mr. XXXX XXXXXX. At the same time, you are requested to hand in any company property given to you on account of company work.

The present letter has been given in accordance with article 61 of the Qatar Labour Law no 14 of (2004), and a copy of which will be submitted to the Labour Department, for their records.

Sincerely,

Wissam Al Mana
Managing Director

You just can’t let them out of the house, can you. If you try it just all goes horribly wrong.

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

At least, according to a DC Superior Court decision on Friday, there’s enough evidence that it does to make it ok for Michael Mann to proceed with a defamation suit.

A stunning DC Superior Court decision Friday on behalf of climatologist Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) found:

There is sufficient evidence presented that is indicative of “actual malice. The CEI Defendants have consistently accused Plaintiff of fraud and inaccurate theories, despite Plaintiff’s work having been investigated several times and found to be proper. The CEI Defendants’ persistence despite the EPA and other investigative bodies’ conclusion that Plaintiff’s work is accurate (or that there is no evidence of data manipulation) is equal to a blatant disregard for the falsity of their statements. Thus, given the evidence presented the Court finds that Plaintiff could prove “actual malice.”

Sounds like actual malice to me – being shown over and over again that there is no data manipulation, and continuing to say there is just the same. Yup, I call that malice. I see a lot of it, too – a lie being repeated over and over and over and over again no matter how many times you point out that it’s a lie.

There were actually two decisions handed in DC Superior Court affirming Mann’s right to proceed in his defamation lawsuit against CEI and the National Review Online for their accusations of data manipulation and fraud. The Court eviscerated the Defendants’ arguments (made in their Motion to Dismiss) that their attacks are somehow First Amendment “protected speech” — merely “opinion,” “rhetorical hyperbole,” or “fair comment.”

The determination of “malice” is critical, as the decision explains:

The Court of Appeals has stated that to recover for defamation, a public figure must prove that the defamatory statement was made with “actual malice.” Nader v. de Toledano, 408 A.2d 31, 40 (D.C. 1979); see also, Foretich v. CBS, Inc., 619 A.2d 48, 59 (D.C. 1993) (quoting New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 297 (1964). This means the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Which is malicious.

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