One thing I learned (or was nudged into noticing more clearly) at the CFI event is that I should be paying more attention to Greece v Galloway.

Or to put it another way, it’s the Supreme Court, stupid.

Eddie Tabash points out that we are one justice away from being second-class citizens. The “we” in that sentence is atheists and secularists.

As the Center for American Progress puts it,

The Supreme Court’s decision in Greece will serve as the basis for what is and is not permitted when it comes to prayers before official public meetings—guidance that could also be applied in cases involving all aspects of religion in the public sphere.

SCOTUS will hear the case November 6. It all hinges on Kennedy. (The ruling will come months later.)

Part of me thinks I should pay less attention to it instead of more, on the grounds that I like to remain cheerful. But that’s just cowardly.

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

I thought it was a great conference, and I know I had a great time there. But there are dissenters registering their dissent.

Sara E. Mayhew @saramayhew

If we want to be good at popularising skepticism, orgs need to cut cheap imitation speakers; Myers, Watson, Benson, Szvan, Skepchick/FTB.

That’s how to popularize skepticism.

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

And from the Halloween party last night – the winner of the costume contest – Martin Marvin the Martian, who was hilarious in person, being very tall, so it was like a 10-foot-tall cartoon character.

http://t.co/Im5C11rC0D

Michael DeDora was a convincing Clark Kent.

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

The last talk at the CFI Summit was perhaps the most inspiring of all: it was by Bill Cooke, the Director of International Programs at CFI, telling us what the programs do. They do enormously important things with a very small budget. I was frankly unaware of the International Programs before. I feel a little less embarrassed about that because I’m not the only one; lots of people were exclaiming that they’d had no idea. Bill said he blames himself for not publicizing it more, because he’s not very techy. Well!! Neither am I, but I do happen to have this noisy blog here, lying around not doing anything, so I can use it to give the International Programs a signal boost.

Herewith begins the signal boost!

(I told Bill I want to do that, and to send me pictures and stuff. Division of labor. He can do the hard work and stretch a tiny budget to do big things, and I can do the soft job of spreading the word about that online.)

There’s a report from last February at CFI.

In January, the Center for Inquiry’s director of international programs, Bill Cooke, journeyed to Kenya, Uganda, and Egypt to meet with CFI’s affiliates in those countries and discuss their work. The trip was very informative, as it revealed the impact these organizations are having in their countries as well as the extent of their need for support to further the cause of critical thinking and humanism.

Here we focus on Bill’s trip to CFI–Kenya, where he spent much of his time.

First on the itinerary for Bill’s five-day engagement, he met with the children involved in the CFI–Kenya program “Humanist Orphans.” This is an ambitious initiative for the education and assistance of kids and their families from all
across rural Africa who have been accused of witchcraft. Bill met with teachers, students, and families, shared stories, and gave them an excellent lesson on humanism and the dangers of superstition, of which they have direct experience.

Bill later met with leaders from various community organizations on the ground in Nairobi, sharing strategies and insight on skepticism and combatting superstition. He even got to spend time engaging with the brilliant young minds of the University of Nairobi Humanists and Freethinkers, giving them a firmer grasp on the ideals of humanism.

Reporting on the visit, George Ongere, director of CFI–Kenya told us that Bill was “inspiring” and that it “instilled confidence in us,” particularly because exposure to international members of the organized global freethought community gives these local activists the opportunity to be “more prepared to defend their stance intellectually” as well as “more confidence in our activities.”

Ok that’s another reason this signal needs to be boosted. I wanted to boost it so that more people will DONATE to the International Programs (which you can do easily just by donating to CFI and earmarking the donation for the International Programs), but of course international solidarity is another huge reason.

I talked about that in my part of the panel, as a matter of fact. The panel was about how humanism and skepticism relate to each other, and I ended up finding it oddly difficult to figure out what to say, so in the end I said I’m not sure I care all that much, because I care more about internationalism and human rights, and that I think if there’s one thing that’s actually useful about my writing, it’s boosting the signal of people like Leo Igwe and Maryam Namazie. I was the last person to speak and Bill was the first person to comment, and much to my surprise he started by warmly agreeing with what I’d said. I’ve gotten used to annoying people whenever I open my mouth or type words, so that made a change.

So anyway – donate to Bill’s program if you can, and spread the word if you have a word-spreading machine.

It heartens all of us at CFI to know what fantastic work is being done by George and everyone at CFI–Kenya, and that interactions that bridge national and cultural divides, like Bill Cooke’s sojourn, make this worldwide movement stronger and more closely-knit.

That.

Source

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

I’m back! So if you’ve been holding any complaints, suggestions, insults, compliments, orders until I had more time to deal with them. you can send them now.

I kid. As if anyone would wait.

But I am back. I had a great time. They’re a great bunch of people.

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

Well for the last talk before lunch I could see Bill Nye in profile a couple of tables away listening seriously.

In the afternoon Leonard Mlodinow talked about the unconscious mind. One item I can’t make any sense of, which is that touch increases trust, even (and especially) very slight unobtrusive touch. There was a study in France that involved (of course) a guy going up to a woman and saying “You’re very pretty and I have to go to work now but can I call you later?” The study found that if the guy touched the woman on the shoulder very lightly- he did better. Syd and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Mlodinow said the study had been replicated in other countries. (Which answered my first question.)

I seriously don’t get that. I could see it in an emergency situation, but a “yer hawt gimme your phone number” conversation? More trust because touching by a stranger?

I don’t understand that.

So that’s interesting. It’s interesting to be puzzled.

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

Here I am. The panel I was on was this morning, and it was good fun. I went last so I thought I might as well tease everyone by preaching on the sermon “Reason isn’t everything.” Surprisingly, though, no one objected (that I heard, anyway).

Ron Lindsay just did an excellent talk on the 10 Commandments. He said just what I think, so naturally it was excellent.

Michael DeDora and I had a chat about movements and allies and rifts and working together.

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

And another item, from the ever-valuable David Robert Grimes: Climate change is real, ignore the denialists in the Irish Times.

…climate change has been scientifically beyond doubt for a long time. Yet despite virtually all climatologists and researchers confirming this with vast swathes of supporting evidence, there are still loud voices doing their utmost to persuade us that the issue is still somehow open for debate.

In the US roughly half of media reports on climate change have doubted its existence. Publications like the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal and numerous Murdoch press give editorial support to these views.

Cynical and insulting

Such contrarian writers and broadcasters paint themselves as climate “sceptics”, but this is a calculated misnomer. Scepticism is an essential part of scientific endeavour. It demands all claims are treated as unproven until evidence and experience either confirm or falsify them. Denialism, by contrast, is the stubborn and persistent refusal to acknowledge what the evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt.

Evidence for climate change is overwhelming, confirmed by measurement, theory and experiment. Self-proclaimed climate “sceptics” are nothing of the sort; they are rank denialists, deliberately refusing to accept the incontrovertible evidence that their position is untenable.

There’s a lot of that around, on a number of subjects.

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

I have to leave for Tacoma and the CFI Summit soon, so I’ll just point to an item or two for your reading pleasure, and possible discussion later.

There’s Jaclyn Friedman in The American Prospect on the “Men’s Rights” movement.

What makes the MRAs particularly insidious is their canny co-optation of social-justice lingo. While Pick Up Artists are perfectly plain that all they care about is using women for sex, MRAs claim to be a movement for positive change, with the stated aim of getting men recognized as an oppressed class—and women, especially but not exclusively feminists, as men’s oppressors. It’s a narrative effective enough to snow the mainstream media: Just this past weekend, The Daily Beast ran a profile of MRAs that painted them as a legitimate movement overshadowed by a few extremists. Trouble is, even the man writer R. Todd Kelly singled out as the great “moderate” hope that other MRAs should emulate—W.F. Price, of the blog “The Spearhead”—is anything but. According to Futrelle, “This is a guy who … blames the epidemic of rape in the armed forces on women, who celebrated one Mothers Day with a vicious transphobic rant, and who once used the tragic death of a woman who’d just graduated from college to argue that ‘after 25, women are just wasting time.’ He published posts on why women’s suffrage is a bad idea. Plus, have you met his commenters?”

And Dawn Foster in Eurozine on (the dearth of) women in journalism.

If there are plenty of women working as correspondents and reporters, but relatively few female opinion writers and editors, then this indicates a problem in the industry. Women may be blogging more, make up more than 50 per cent of Twitter users^[3], and piling into varieties of journalism, but the biggest newspapers in the United States, Britain and Europe still reserve pages of the most serious political and foreign policy analysis for older men, and unsurprisingly, they’re usually white.

A study by Women in Journalism earlier this year found that across national newspapers, 78 per cent of bylined front page stories were written by men, and of those quoted as experts or sources in lead stories, 84 per cent were men.^[4]The Women’s Media Centre in the United States, on conducting similar research reported that during the 2012 presidential election, 75 per cent of front page bylined articles at top newspapers were written by men and that women made up a mere 14 per cent of Sunday TV talk show interviewees, and 29 per cent of “roundtable” guests.^[5] Women in Journalism were quick to highlight one of the most worrying aspects of this imbalance: most stories involving women in the four week period surveyed, portrayed them as either victims or celebrities.

Later.

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

Amanda Marcotte is just a little surprised to find Fox News pundits saying “You can’t legislate behavior.” Huh, yeah, I’m surprised by that too. You can’t legislate behavior? So there are no laws against murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion? Or are we to understand that murder, theft, assault, fraud, rape, kidnapping, extortion are something other than behavior?

And whatever happened to the old law&order brand of conservatism? Did it get washed away in the flood of tea, or what?

Anyone who has ever subjected herself to right-wing talk radio or Bill O’Reilly’s show knows that conservatives have an affinity for a good, old-fashioned bully. Even so, it was a bit surprising to see Shannon Bream on Fox News host a segment worrying that anti-bullying rules at schools violate “free speech.” Bream was deeply concerned that homophobes and anti-choicers wouldn’t be able to express their “political views” at school.

Maybe Bream really does think that people of her political persuasion really can’t make their case without bullying. That would be a bit…incriminating.

“But we see in some of these cases in some of these schools that kids who want to put on pro-life displays, who are pro-Second Amendment, those kinds of things, things that are viewed as a more conservative viewpoint, in some cases the bullying stuff is being used against them so they can’t speak their positions,” Bream argued, declining to offer any examples. Does “speak their positions” mean arguing for an abortion ban in debate class, or is it more a situation where kids are “speaking their positions” by targeting individual students for harassment because they believe those kids are gay? I guess we’ll just have to assume the worst!

Exactly. Bream herself said it! It wasn’t those pesky liberals!

“You can’t legislate behavior,” David Webb, Fox News contributor, said, causing one to wonder when it was that conservatives decided that having school rules is fascism, man. Where was Webb when kids needed him after getting detention for cutting class or speaking out of turn?

He actually said that. Well at least there’s no law against laughing at Fox News contributors.

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

Guest post by Stacy Kennedy.

The Men’s Rights Movement emerged in the early 1970s. If we set the beginning of American Second Wave feminism at the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the two movements are approximately ten years apart.

Inspired by the recent mini-surge of interest in the MRM from 20/20 and The Daily Beast, I decided to compare and contrast the two.

CULTURAL PRESENCE/VISIBILITY

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

•  By 1971, eight years after The Feminine Mystique, everybody in the United States had heard of the Women’s Movement (aka “Women’s Lib”). Everybody was talking about it. Everybody was arguing about it. Numerous books on the subject had been published. Movies, television, theater, fiction, and magazines reflected the movement and its impact.

MEN’S MOVEMENT

•  In 2013, after approximately forty years, mention the Men’s Rights Movement and most people will give you a quizzical look and ask, “The wutnow?”

THEORY

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

•  Large body of feminist theory (more accurately, theories.) Vigorous intramural and extramural debate with general intramural agreement that obligatory conformity to gender roles oppresses men, women, and the genderqueer. General intramural agreement that there are internalized and unexamined biases that work against women’s equality and that these biases are at least mostly cultural in origin.

MEN’S MOVEMENT

• MRAs think traditional gender roles are just fine, and they resent women’s incursions into “men’s spheres.” At the same time, they complain a great deal about the ways in which the traditional masculine role harms men. An incoherent framework exists in which traditional masculinity is simultaneously held up as praiseworthy and natural AND as evidence that men qua men are, and always have been, oppressed.
•  Women have all the power because pussy.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

(partial list)

•  Increased presence of women in workforce, including professional, blue collar, academic, STEM, and military spheres.
•  Abortion and women’s access to contraception legalized. (Defense of legal abortion and access to it is ongoing.)
•  Laws regarding domestic violence have been transformed. Greater awareness of domestic violence. Creation of domestic violence shelters and hotlines..
•  Greater awareness of rape. Fight to change public and law enforcement attitudes toward rape ongoing. Existence of rape hotlines and victim’s advocates.
•  Creation of laws regarding sexual harassment. Anti-sexual harassment policies and training now commonplace.
•  New perspectives have led to scientific findings, including evidence for the existence of unconscious sexist biases, and corrections to previous stereotyped views of human and animal behavior.
•  Stigma against unmarried mothers significantly decreased.
• Ongoing fight against sexual double standard.
•  Women admitted to military academies. Fight to allow women in military combat positions all but won.
•  All the “Firsts”—first female astronaut, first female Vice Presidential candidate on a major-party ticket, first female Presidential candidate on a major-party ticket, etc.
•  Widespread recognition of the many problems inherent in societal insistence that people conform to gender roles.
•  Stereotypes regarding women, and gender roles generally, no longer sure to go unchallenged.
•  Countless little girls have grown up hearing the message “You can be anything you want to be.”

MEN’S MOVEMENT

…

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

The first duty of a desperately impoverished nation most of which is under water is to find somebody or something that is unIslamic and pitch a fit.

After being accused of “sucking blood” from the poor, Bangladesh’s only Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus faces a new state-backed hate campaign seeking to paint him as un-Islamic and a spreader of homosexuality.

Following years of attempts to discredit his legacy as a pioneer of micro-finance – since copied the world over as a development tool – the hounding has turned more personal and dangerous.

The perceived crime of the 73-year-old was to sign a joint statement along with three other Nobel laureates in April 2012 criticising the prosecution of gay people in Uganda.

Little remarked at the time, it has since been seized on by the Islamic Foundation, a government religious body, and amplified through tens of thousands of imams on its payrolls.

Protests have been held, leaflets calling him “an accomplice of Jews and Christians” have been distributed, and a “grand rally” has been called for October 31 in the capital Dhaka to denounce him.

What a disgusting conglomeration of bad reasons and bad actions and bad thinking, not to mention bad governance. When in doubt, whip up hatred at somebody who objects to the whipping up of hatred. The first duty is to hate some people for no good reason.

The hate-object used to be my friend Taslima.

“How can a state-run organisation run a campaign of criminal intimidation? It’ll instigate violence against professor Yunus,” Sara Hossain, a top lawyer and rights activist, warned in an interview with AFP.

The harassment has echoes of another movement against feminist writer and religious critic Taslima Nasreen who was forced to flee the country after being denounced like Yunus.

“It’s unfortunate that he’s facing the kind of campaign that I faced in 1994,” Nasreen told AFP. “I was forced to leave the country because of the campaign by the fundamentalists, which the then government actively supported.”

Don’t do this, Bangladesh.

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

A horror I didn’t manage to catch up with last week -

Glenda Xiomara Cruz was crippled by abdominal pain and heavy bleeding in the early hours of 30 October 2012. The 19-year-old from Puerto El Triunfo, eastern El Salvador, went to the nearest public hospital where doctors said she had lost her baby.

It was the first she knew about the pregnancy as her menstrual cycle was unbroken, her weight practically unchanged, and a pregnancy test in May 2012 had been negative.

Four days later she was charged with aggravated murder – intentionally murdering the 38-to-42 week foetus – at a court hearing she was too sick to attend. The hospital had reported her to the police for a suspected abortion.

After two emergency operations and three weeks in hospital she was moved to Ilopango women’s prison on the outskirts of the capital San Salvador. Then last month she was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the judge ruling that she should have saved the baby’s life.

Ten years in prison.

That’s appalling.

Xiomara’s father describes the conviction as a “terrible injustice”.

He testified in court that his daughter had endured years of domestic violence at the hands of her partner. And yet the prosecution – which sought a 50-year jail term – relied heavily on this man’s allegation that she had intentionally killed the foetus.

Xiomara has not seen her four-year-old daughter since the miscarriage.

El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Since 1998, the law has allowed no exceptions – even if a woman is raped, her life is at risk or the foetus is severely deformed.

That’s just outright, frank, unabashed hatred of women.

More than 200 women were reported to the police between 2000 and 2011, of whom 129 were prosecuted and 49 convicted – 26 for murder (with sentences of 12 to 35 years) and 23 for abortion, according to research by Citizens’ Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Seven more have been convicted since 2012.

The study underlines that these women are overwhelmingly poor, unmarried and poorly educated – and they are usually denounced by public hospital staff. Not a single criminal case originated from the private health sector where thousands of abortions are believed to take place annually.

That sounds like Ireland, where poor women were locked up in the Magdalene laundries and poor children were locked up in industrial not-schools.

Munoz has worked with 29 of the incarcerated women, helping secure the early release of eight. “Only one intentionally induced an abortion, the other 28 suffered natural obstetric complications but were jailed for murder without any direct evidence,” he says.

Last year when Maria Teresa Rivera suffered a miscarriage, she was sentenced to 40 years in jail for aggravated murder.

Like Xiomara, Teresa, 28, had no pregnancy symptoms before sudden severe pain and bleeding, and was reported to police by the public hospital where she had sought emergency help.

The scientific evidence was flimsy, according to Munoz who will soon lodge an appeal, and the prosecution relied heavily on a colleague of hers, who testified that Rivera had said she “might be” pregnant a full 11 months before the miscarriage.

A textile factory worker, she was the family’s only breadwinner and her eight-year-old son is now living in dire poverty with his grandmother.

There’s much more. Read the whole thing. The BBC does do a good job of reporting on subjects like this. Outrages like this.

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

There’s a Facebook group called Misogyny Overheard at Oxford University. It’s an open group, so its content is public. (Our Alex is a member, because he’s been an Oxford student.)

It has this poster, which has appeared at university poster sales.

First things first, eh?

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

A UN Human Rights Council resolution against child marriage is only that, but it is a start. But not everyone even agreed to that much. Want to know one country that refused? India. Yes, the world’s largest secular democracy said No.

India, the world’s child marriage capital, has once again failed its under-age brides.

The country has refused to sign the first-ever global resolution on early and forced marriage of children led by the UN.

The resolution was supported by a cross-regional group of over 107 countries, including almost all countries with high rates of child marriage—Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Guatemala, Honduras and Yemen.

Almost all? That doesn’t look like almost all to me. Nowhere near almost all.

Brides Not Wives provided the list:

The States presenting the resolution were: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Armenia, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, Congo, Cuba, Czech Republic, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Djibouti, DRC, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ghana, Guinea, Haiti, Hungary, Honduras, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Maldives, Montenegro, Namibia, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Timor Leste, Togo, Tunisia, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, Uganda, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia. 

Missing? Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mali, Algeria to name a few.

The Centre for Reproductive Rights says governments in the South Asia region have failed to enact and enforce adequate laws that prohibit child marriage.

“The practice persists with impunity. In South Asia, 46% of women between ages 20-24 report having been married before age 18 in 2010. This translated to 24.4 million women in the region. Estimates project that from 2010 to 2030, 130 million more girls in the region will be married.”

“Child marriage does not constitute a single rights violation – rather, every instance of child marriage triggers a continuum of violations that continues throughout a girl’s life. Child marriage endangers the survival and well-being of women and girls by exposing them to forced initiation into sex and sexual violence as well as to early, unplanned and frequent pregnancies. Further, women and girls married as children are often denied educational opportunities, are isolated from society and face a lifetime of economic dependence,” the Centre said.

And so far there’s not even official government-level agreement that that’s a bad thing.

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

Last month the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling for the elimination of child, early and forced marriage to be considered in the post-2015 development agenda. This is a first.

Girls Not Brides reports:

The Ambassador of Sierra Leone, Yvette Stevenes, introduced the resolution to the Human Rights Council, stating that “efforts [to end child marriage] need to be strengthened to address this breach of human rights of some of the most vulnerable groups in society”. According to UNICEF, 44% of girls are married before the age of 18 in Sierra Leone; 18% before the age of 15.

…

The resolution also stresses the value of empowering and investing in women and girls for “breaking the cycle of gender inequality and discrimination, violence and poverty” and for bringing about “sustainable development and economic growth.”

It acknowledges the multi-faceted impact of child, early and forced marriage on the “economic, legal, health and social status of women and girls” as well as “the development of the community as a whole”.

The Human Rights Council is the leading UN body responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights around the world. The resolution calls for a panel discussion on the issue of child, early and forced marriage at an upcoming session of the Human Rights Council in 2014.

A resolution is only that, but it’s a step.

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

Good news for the people of Turkey: they now have access to a halal online sex shop. W00t!

Yes that’s right, a halal sex shop. A shop where the sex products are halal as opposed to haram. Good eh? Reassuring. If only everything in life were halal as opposed to haram. How much more tidy everything would be.

The website describes its products as completely safe and halal according to Islamic rules.

When Internet users enter the online shopping site, there are two different links for men and women that lead visitors to separate sections for male and female products.

Well all right! That makes it halal right there all by itself – strict separation of women and men. That’s the only kind of halal sex there is: the kind where women and men are kept strictly separate. Women and men are halal when they’re separate, but put them in proximity and oh no, they get more and more haram the closer together they get. Quick, somebody fetch the walls and the body-tents!

That’s a beautiful graphic, don’t you think? The man looking kind of gloomy and limp, wondering where his next halal shag is going to come from, and the woman looking not there at all, but merely represented by an empty hood.

There are also other sections on the website that discuss sexual intercourse in terms of Islam.

Oh, I know this one! It goes like this:

1. ——->
2. <——

Repeat if necessary.

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

Yes that’s right – it’s not some horrible joke.

The Sultan of Brunei introduced tough Sharia-law punishments on Tuesday including death by stoning for crimes such as adultery, hailing what he called a “historic” step toward Islamic orthodoxy for his country.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah — one of the world’s wealthiest men — said a new Sharia Penal Code in the works for years was officially introduced on Tuesday in the tiny, oil-flush sultanate and would be phased in beginning in six months.

Based on individual cases, punishments could include stoning to death for adultery, severing of limbs for theft, and flogging for violations ranging from abortion to alcohol consumption, according to a copy of the code.

The code applies only to Muslims.

“By the grace of Allah, with the coming into effect of this legislation, our duty to Allah is therefore being fulfilled,” the sultan, 67, said in a speech.

Fuck Allah. Fuck you. Fuck everyone who perpetrates this evil punitive murderous vengeful shit.

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

Just in case you were thinking Boko Haram was taking a break…it’s not.

Two days ago:

Militants wearing army uniforms have killed 19 people at checkpoints on a road in Nigeria’s Borno state.

The armed men reportedly stopped motorists on the road and ordered them out of their cars before shooting them or hacking them to death.

…

The latest attack happened early on Sunday morning near the town of Logumani, not far from the Cameroon border.

Survivors said the gunmen were dressed as soldiers and were riding motorcycles before they ambushed their victims.

“We were asked to get out of our vehicles and lie face down by nine men dressed as soldiers who blocked the road,” one man, who gave his name as Buba, told the AFP news agency.

“They shot dead five people and went about slaughtering 14 others before someone called them on the phone that soldiers were heading their way,” he said.

God is great.

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

Via Imad Iddine Habib, who translated.

The Jihadist: “it’s Haram to eat UN Food, it’s from the Kuffars.”
The woman: “what about the bomb you’re holding?! Isn’t it made by the Kuffars, too?!”

Heartbreaking.

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