The people of Manbij in Syria have been liberated from IS.

Ecstatic Syrian civilians have been shaving off their beards, burning their burqas, smoking and dancing in the streets after being freed from Isis.

The jubilant celebrations were seen in the Syrian city of Manbij on Friday, where militants have been driven out after months of fighting by US-backed rebel groups.

Families ran through rubble-strewn streets, past the ruins of buildings destroyed in air strikes, carrying their babies and belongings.

Men jubilantly had their beards cut off as women ripped off their veils and set them on fire in an act of rebellion after years living under Isis’ brutal interpretation of Sharia law.

Heartwarming report footage from the recently liberated #Manbij pic.twitter.com/o4IrXpAws8

— Syria Today (@todayinsyria) August 13, 2016

They just can’t get it right, can they.

The San Jose Mercury News, this time. Headline:

Michael Phelps shares historic night with African American

Um. In other words, Simone Manuel won a gold medal in the 100m freestyle final, shared with Canadian Penny Oleksiak. (They touched the wall at the same instant.)

The headline was widely criticised on social media for omitting Manuel’s name completely – and yet at the same time including both parts of Phelps’s name.

Mercury News sportswriter Tim Kawakami wrote on Twitter: “Sorry to my tremendous co-workers, but I’ve never been as upset at a headline in my own publication as I was with that one.”

The Mercury News tweeted an apology shortly afterwards.

We get it, Phelps has name recognition and Manuel doesn’t, yet. He’s a celebrity and she isn’t. Fine, but if you’re going to mention her, then mention her.

The spirit of international hatred:

Egyptian judo fighter Islam El Shehaby was loudly booed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after his first-round loss to Israel’s fifth-ranked Or Sasson, when El Shehaby refused to shake Sasson’s hand, in a major breach of judo etiquette.

Sasson defeated El Shehaby with two throws for an automatic victory, with about a minute and a half remaining in the bout. Afterwards, El Shehaby lay flat on his back for a moment before standing to take his place before Sasson, in front of the referee.

When Sasson extended his hand, El Shehaby backed away, shaking his head. The referee then called El Shehaby back to the mat and obliged to him bow; El Shehaby gave a quick nod of his head. El Shehaby refused to comment afterward. Judo players typically bow or shake hands at the beginning and end of a match, as a sign of respect in the Japanese martial art.

Thank you, religion, for fostering this kind of hatred and anger.

El Shahaby had come under pressure from Islamist-leaning and nationalist voices in Egypt to withdraw entirely from the fight. On Thursday, Mataz Matar, a TV host in Al-Sharq Islamist-leaning network urged el-Shehaby to withdraw.

Maybe he felt forced to spurn the handshake. Goddam humans.

Let Clothes Be Clothes on Facebook:

We’re FOR choice, but not for this – why? Children’s feet are not meant to wear heels, wedges or platforms! All on sale in the F&F school range.

Heels can cause PERMANENT damage to feet, ligaments and posture… so it’s not prudish to say “I’m not ok with this.” When parents see big brands selling this it’s easy to normalise, it’s easy to think “it must be ok…”

Play shoes, occassionwear – becoming more acceptable – but school shoes? No. Tesco F&F could you imagine a boy wearing these? Yet acceptable for girls… please help END this – share if you agree, and help us raise awareness on this issue.

Well, little girls have to be trained to wear high heels, or else they might resist. And after all it’s not as if they need to run around and be active.

A nasty item out of Brighton:

A senior lecturer convicted of beating a former student he was in a relationship with was allowed to continue teaching, despite the protests of his traumatised victim.

Dr Lee Salter, a media and communications lecturer at the University of Sussex, remains employed by the institution after being found guilty of assaulting Allison Smith, a 24-year-old student he met during an induction day at the university.

He was convicted on July 13th.

Ms Smith had been punched in the face, knocked out and stamped on, and said she had salt poured into her eyes and ears.

Pedagogy at its finest.

Dr Salter was charged on 20 June and, despite repeated complaints made to the university, was allowed to continue teaching as normal.

When The Independent contacted the university two weeks ago, a spokeswoman said Dr Salter remained an employee. The Independent understands that as such he could have been able to teach in the coming term.

It was only when The Independent continued to pose questions that a source involved in the trial said his employment status had “changed” in that he has now been suspended from teaching.

One imagines the administrative grumbling…”Oh all right then, if you’re going to make such a big fuss about it…”

During the 10-month period between his arrest and conviction, Dr Salter continued to teach, the university has admitted, while Ms Smith said she remained so traumatised she was afraid to leave the house.

This is despite regulations laid out on the university’s own website which say “staff and students are subject to disciplinary procedures that, amongst other things, proscribe violent behaviour”.

The policy reads: “The University will take disciplinary action in accordance with its procedures against anyone who behaves in a violent manner including, should it be necessary, the immediate exclusion of the perpetrator from the campus.

“The University may also seek injunctions to exclude the perpetrators of violence from University premises in order to protect staff and students from further violent incidents.”

Unless it’s violence against female persons? Is that it? Or violence committed by cool dudes who teach media and communications?

BuzzFeed has a long piece about how thoroughly for what a long time Twitter has failed to do anything about Twitter harassment.

[H]arassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” So much so that numeroushigh-profileusershavequittheservice, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a barrage of racist comments and death threats, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself. Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “horrific and racially charged” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.

Indeed. They’ll look at the most obvious, sustained, targeted abuse and just say nope, we don’t care.

According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.

The “abiding commitment to free speech” thing is so infuriating – because free speech isn’t about enabling and protecting abuse. It’s never been a charter for assholes to torment people for giggles. Twitter should have figured that out from the beginning.

This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which have always banned content and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the Just Not Sports podcast posted video of sports fans reading a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.

…

Looking back on Twitter’s early years, multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern. “The original sin is a homogenous leadership,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color.”

Abuse doesn’t have the same meaning to white men as it does to women and people of color.

All the while, the abuse intensified and the public began to take notice. In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez launched a campaign to put Jane Austen on UK currency and quickly became the target of more than 50 rape threats per hour — which forced Twitter to roll out a “report abuse” feature for individual tweets. The feature came roughly six years into the company’s history and more than five years after Waldman’s ordeal. “It feels like, not only did they have opportunities early on to tackle this, but they had the ability to step up and be a leader in this space — to be proactive instead of reactive,” Waldman said. “That they haven’t done that is beyond me and it’s reckless.”

Around that time, high-profile harassment cases became a weekly, if not daily, occurrence, especially in the UK. Sinéad O’Connor was driven off the service in 2011; she later told the Daily Mail she was “getting too much abuse.” Downton Abbey actor Lily James quit after she became the target of hundreds of hateful tweets about her appearance. Actor Matt Lucas had to shut down his account after trolls wouldn’t stop harassing him after the death of his partner.

In the US, stories of Twitter harassment of women, people of color, and religious minorities appeared with increasing frequency, coming to a head in August 2014, when Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda was forced to quit Twitter after trolls flooded her mentions with photoshopped images of her recently deceased father. Williams’ departure from Twitter went viral and prompted Twitter’s Trust and Safety head, Del Harvey, to condemn the attacks. “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature,” she said, noting that the company would work to find policy fixes to prevent cases like Williams’.

But of course they would and will and did.

It was also around this time that Twitter began broadcasting grisly ISIS beheadings and Gamergate’s multipronged misogynist harassment campaign toward female gamers. Harvey’s team rolled out more streamlined forms for reporting abuse, dispensing with its cumbersome nine-part questionnaire and adding back-end flagging tools for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team. One month later, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and video game critic, took to her Tumblr page and posted 157 of examples of misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, incitement to suicide, and rape and death threats she’d received in a recent six-day stretch on Twitter. Despite the overtures from Twitter, the trolls were winning.

…

Nearly all the former employees BuzzFeed News spoke to praised Harvey’s Trust and Safety team for its commitment to curbing harassment, but suggested that failures on the product side left it hamstrung. “They were on the front lines working with users and trying so hard,” a former senior employee said, “but getting caught in a rock and a hard place between what the stated mission of the company was and the resources available to create that environment.”

They were also limited by a workforce that multiple former employees say fundamentally didn’t understand what abuse looks and feels like. “The decision-makers were not people who got abuse and didn’t understand that it’s not about content, it’s about context,” Miley said. “If Twitter had people in the room who’d been abused on the internet — meaning not just straight, white males — when they were creating the company, I can assure you the service would be different.” A 2015 Women, Action, and the Media study revealed that, as of 2014, Twitter’s leadership was 79% male and 72% white.

Twitter put out a statement about the BuzzFeed article today, saying the usual blah blah blah. They haven’t fixed it and I doubt they ever will.

I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical. It’s from a transgender dating site, TransSingle. The post is titled Why Get A Transgender Girlfriend.

The modern cis dating market is almost a Mad-Max Thunder Dome dystopia. Anyone who has been in the cis dating market for some time finds to his dismay that cis-women in the modern dating market have more issues than Time magazine. It is a ruthless winner-takes-all-situation. Cis-women are hyper judgmental beings, and men have been reduced to being circus performers who have to constantly entertain the cis-women non-stop or face rejection.

Wow. Talk about Assumed Male.

It starts with the cis dating market, as if the subject is dating from all points of view, but then we realize with a jolt that it’s solely from the male point of view – and the “cis” male at that. The “anyone” at the beginning of the second sentence turns out to be male halfway through. So it’s not “anyone” after all, it’s any man – but the author apparently doesn’t even notice the difference between the two. And then, moving briskly on, we get to the part where we hear about how awful “cis” women are…but not, oddly enough, anything about “cis” men. Cis women are mentioned repeatedly, but cis men, never. Trans men are not mentioned either. For some reason men are taken for granted, without being labeled cis, but women are not – men are men, but women are cis women. Why is that?

And, furthermore, cis women are terrible while men are just folks, just like the rest of us, just good people looking for relationships. It’s almost as if the author of this post detests women.

And then there’s the substance of the complaint – women are judgy demanding bitches, and men have to keep them entertained every second. Hmm. That sounds more like MRAs on speed than trans dating advice.

But it gets worse.

Modern women have a plethora of issues which make them caustic; it can even be argued that modern cis-women would not get any male attention if the almighty love hormones were not at play. Add to that the vast majority of cis-women do not act feminine, care little about their appearance, and do not know how to respond to male affection appropriately.

Yeah, clearly a full-on misogynist here, one who thinks women have some sort of duty to “act feminine” and “care about their appearance” and “respond to male affection appropriately” (i.e. accept all overtures?).

Then comes the peripateia: the trans woman takes over the duties.

The first thing that you have to understand is that, despite what the mass media and the society says, transgender woman are women, and in many ways they are probably the only women around.

Right. Women aren’t women, only trans women are women. I’ve seen that claim before, but have always told myself it was only outliers who said things like that.

A transgender woman responds to male affection with feminine gratitude, which is rare among your average cis-woman. Cis-women, with their mentality of entitlement, conclude that male affection and attention are their birthright, and hence treat the men around them like toys to be played with and discarded at will.

The bitches.

See what I mean about the pattern? Cis-women on the one hand, and men on the other. Men need trans women, and women need to fuck right off. Might trans women like trans men? That’s not discussed.

Transgender women are also very attractive, and a simple overview of a Transgender Dating Site will prove that the cultural myths about transgender woman are just petty lies that have no truth in reality. Trans-women take much better care of their appearance than the slovenly modern cis-woman.

The bitches. The ugly, slovenly, filthy bitches.

The average man is so disillusioned with the dating market that he can be forgiven for his lack of enthusiasm. In fact, many men have just given up and are no longer interested in finding their soul mate. Men cannot be blamed for what is essentially the caustic nature of cis-women. However, men would be losing out if they allowed their lack of enthusiasm to stop them from trying Trans dating. Men have to understand that cis dating has reached its end and Transgender dating in the way of the future. It is about time that dating was about love and fun, rather than joyless work as cis dating has become.

Men are fabulous, and women are horrible. Trans women are also fabulous, and trans men – say what? Never heard of them.

So. I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical.

Orac found some choice photos of Phelps with the cupping in progress.

https://www.instagram.com/p/7djtuUyx7j/

And there’s Natalie Coughlin – saying it hurts a lot. Benign?

Laughing because it hurts so bad. Gonna leave a mark! #AthleteLife

A photo posted by Natalie Coughlin (@nataliecoughlin) on Dec 9, 2015 at 11:02am PST

And here she is looking downright scalded:

Gee, I hope my #GoldenGoggles dress is open-backed.

A photo posted by Natalie Coughlin (@nataliecoughlin) on Nov 20, 2013 at 3:54pm PST

Orac also shares a photo of cupping bruises turned necrotic.