Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

But suddenly everything is dead. Everybody is silent.

Dec 20th, 2013 12:06 pm | By

Taslima wrote a post about banning and censorship two days ago, when the axing of her serial was threatened but not yet a reality. Go read it and look at it; it’s full of pictures of Taslima on billboards advertising the serial. There was a huge buzz about this serial.

But suddenly everything is dead. Everybody is silent. The channel, the producers, the artists all are shocked.

The police and a bunch of Muslim fanatics both asking the channel to ban my TV serial. The funny thing is that the serial has not started going on air but fanatic Mullahs started claiming that my serial ‘could hurt the sentiments of the community’. Mullahs don’t know about the story of the

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



Dignity or prison, those are the choices

Dec 20th, 2013 11:31 am | By

A new amnesty law was passed in Russia this week, so Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina will be freed from prison three months sooner than scheduled. They were in the slammer for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility.” They’ve been in for nearly two years. Putin has no qualms.

In a news conference, President Vladimir Putin expressed no regret for the Pussy Riot members. “I was not sorry that they ended up behind bars,” he said. “I was sorry that they were engaged in such disgraceful behavior, which in my view was degrading to the dignity of women.”

Ah, I see – so women doing something that a guy views as “degrading to the dignity of … Read the rest

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Taslima’s tv serial axed

Dec 20th, 2013 10:53 am | By

You already know why, without looking for more. Concerns; community; sentiments; been told; might hurt; controversy. The Times of India tells the sordid tale:

Abdul Aziz of minority group Milli Ittehad Parishad said they had written to the producers asking them to withdraw Taslima’s name and reference from the serial and withdraw scenes that might create a controversy. “We have been told that there are some scenes in the serial that might hurt our sentiments. Through this serial she is trying to come back to Kolkata. Therefore we have opposed this,” Aziz said.

Oh well then. If you have been told there are some scenes in the serial (that you have not seen) that might hurt your sentiments (which of … Read the rest

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Long long night

Dec 19th, 2013 6:09 pm | By

Ah, yes. I know this one. The Stare.

I know this one and it made me laugh and it’s almost the longest night of the year, so I figure you need it.

Via Life With Petz

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Guest post by Bernard Hurley on making judgements

Dec 19th, 2013 4:47 pm | By

Originally a comment on Why the one and not the other replying to “Minow”.

It would surprise me, because it would seem to be a very upfront admission that you are not applying any principle at all, but merely wanting to permit those freedoms that you find amenable and forbid those you don’t like the look of. This is generally the position of liberals I meet, but it is rare to have them own it.

Nice try, Minow. So you have some debating skills after all! I have to say that being as ancient as I am – I was born in the first half of the last century – I have been called many things, but I can’t recall … Read the rest

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Pastors hate him! Learn this one weird trick

Dec 19th, 2013 4:40 pm | By

American Atheists has a new advertisement

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The dog ate it

Dec 19th, 2013 12:28 pm | By

David Futrelle has more on the oh so funny campaign to flood an anonymous survey on sexual violence with fake claims.

Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.

So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including GawkerBusiness InsiderRawStory, and LAist. In a followup post,

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You don’t believe unless

Dec 19th, 2013 12:07 pm | By

A philosophical aphorism seen on Twitter…

You don’t believe in freedom of speech unless you believe in freedom for speech that you consider ugly, offensive, deplorable, dangerous…

What?

The first three adjectives are standard fare, and reasonable, and so on. But the last one? That’s a whole different category, and it’s far from obviously true. Depending on how “dangerous” we’re talking about, it’s not true at all.

There have been many examples in very recent history of speech used to foment hatred of outgroups with a view to getting rid of said outgroups, and the result was “ethnic cleansing” aka genocide.

No, I don’t believe in freedom for speech that’s dangerous in that way, and no that doesn’t mean I … Read the rest

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LSE apologizes to Chris and Abhishek

Dec 19th, 2013 11:37 am | By

Yes really. It’s not a solstice version of April Fools. There’s an actual statement on their actual website.

LSE statement on events at LSE SU Freshers’ Fair

The London School of Economics and Political Science has today apologised to two students from the LSE Students’ Union Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society (ASH) who wore t-shirts depicting Mohammed and Jesus at the SU Freshers’ Fair on 3 October 2013 and who were asked to cover their t-shirts or face removal from the Fair. The Director of the School, Professor Craig Calhoun, has written to the students acknowledging that, with hindsight, the wearing of the t-shirts on this occasion did not amount to harassment or contravene the law or LSE policies.

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Acid attacks in Egypt

Dec 19th, 2013 11:01 am | By

At Women Under Siege, Reem Abdel-Razek writes about a recent incident in Cairo.

A few weeks ago I received a message from a friend in Cairo about a horrible attack on her sister, Esraa Mohamed. Esraa was walking in her own neighborhood at 3 p.m. when she realized she was being followed by a well-dressed, respectable looking stranger. He said, “I am not harassing you but don’t forget to wipe off your pants.”

She suddenly began to feel a burning pain in her backside and rushed into a cafe to see what was wrong. It was then that she realized she couldn’t remove her pants and took a cab home. By that time the pain was so excruciating that

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Next jape, how about a little arson or gbh

Dec 18th, 2013 5:59 pm | By

So some shits wanted to think up a new way to harass people and they thought of a brilliant plan: to spam a college’s online anonymous sexual assault reporting system with sarcastic fake reports. Hilarious. Right? Yes. Hilarious.

“Late Monday, the 16th we started seeing a stream of what we would call suspicious reports that were being submitted” to Occidental’s Google-based assault reporting form, said Jim Tranquada, director of communications for the Los Angeles college, which has faced scrutiny in recent months for underreporting sex assaults involving its students.

That’s about the same time that commenters on Reddit’s r/MensRights subreddit began discussing plans to spam the college’s reporting system with phony accusations.

Haha. Hahaha. Because how dare a college try … Read the rest

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Rupert Sutton clears up some things

Dec 18th, 2013 5:38 pm | By

Rupert Sutton of Student Rights has a reply to Priyamvada Gopal’s article at the Rationalist Association. It’s calm

Unfortunately, [Gopal's] attempt to persuade greater numbers of people to criticise reactionary religious practice was marred by a number of inaccurate attacks on my organisation, Student Rights, which seeks to highlight political and religious extremism on university campuses regardless of provenance. This included claims that we had brought the issue to national attention despite a lack of evidence for its occurrence, and presented the campaign as part of a running battle between white conservatives intent on imposing their views on others, and the beleaguered representatives of minority communities standing against this. This is simply not the case, and both misrepresents Student Rights

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The Yuk-Factor

Dec 18th, 2013 4:04 pm | By

This is an article I wrote in 2003. I thought I’d lost it because it was removed from the page where it was originally published, and I’d failed to stash a copy securely and couldn’t find it on the internet archive. Then just now I realized what the right search term would be to find it, and sure enough it was. So I’m publishing it again.

There is a famous morality tale in Herodotus.

Darius…called together some of the Greeks…and asked them what they would take to eat their dead fathers. They said that no price in the world would make them do so. After that Darius summoned those of the Indians who are called Callatians, who do eat

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Some state sponsors?

Dec 18th, 2013 3:37 pm | By

I wish I could find a better source for this story than Murdoch’s New York Post

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report.

Not just redacted, not just covered with black lines, but blank pages where approximately 7,200 words should have been.

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked”

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Annoying aspects

Dec 18th, 2013 1:40 pm | By

Tehmina Kazi, director at British Muslims for Secular Democracy, has an excellent list of

Aspects of the gender segregation debate that have annoyed and perplexed me.

That’s on Facebook; there’s also a version re-posted on a blog (in case you can’t see the Facebook one).

3. Those who are unable to see why it is problematic for a public body like Universities UK to prioritise the whims of external speakers over university public sector equality duties, and THE SPIRIT of equalities law.

That; very exactly that.

9. Confusion over the distinction between discretionary segregation (where people randomly sit where they wish, perhaps in same-sex clusters) and organised segregation (which is either enforced by the event organisers, or requested by

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Where is the real scandal?

Dec 18th, 2013 1:15 pm | By

A different set of battle-lines…The Guardian reports via the AP in Delhi:

An Indian diplomat said US authorities subjected her to a strip search, cavity search and DNA swabbing following her arrest on visa charges in New York, despite her “incessant assertions of immunity”.

The case has sparked widespread outrage in India and infuriated the New Delhi government, which revoked privileges for US diplomats to protest against the woman’s treatment. It has cast a pall over India-US relations…

Devyani Khobragade, India’s deputy consul general in New York, was arrested on Thursday outside her daughter’s Manhattan school on charges that she lied on a visa application about how much she paid her housekeeper, an Indian national.

Prosecutors say the maid

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Misery in Mississippi

Dec 18th, 2013 4:40 am | By

From the Southern Poverty Law Center:

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit in federal court today to stop pervasive anti-LGBT bullying and harassment committed by students – and even faculty members and administrators – within the schools of Mississippi’s Moss Point School District.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Destin Holmes, a district student who endured such severe harassment she was eventually driven out of school. She temporarily left the district in March 2012 to be homeschooled after the then-principal at Magnolia Junior High School called her a “pathetic fool” and told her, “I don’t want a dyke in this school.”

The principal. Not a classmate, but the principal. One who is supposed to have a fully … Read the rest

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Ah there he is now

Dec 17th, 2013 6:08 pm | By

So, to complete the picture, who should chime in at the Spectator but…Douglas Murray himself. And what do you know, he gets it all wrong too. But of course he gets it wrong from the opposite direction.

He starts by quoting someone unknown who announced that ‘The left doesn’t really matter’. Hooray, he says.

If there is anyone who thinks that a shame they should just look at the contortions ‘the left’ is going through now over the issue of gender segregation. This is the process – which has been occurring on certain university campuses for some time and which a number of people, including colleagues of mine, have long highlighted – that consists of separating audiences according

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Concerns about the motivation

Dec 17th, 2013 3:48 pm | By

Daniel Trilling at the Rationalist Association blog offered their position on gender segregation today. He started with Gopal’s article.

The piece raised concerns about the motivation of the pressure group Student Rights, which has been campaigning on the topic, and the way in which the story had been picked up by the media, but argued that such concerns should not prevent people from criticising the policy.

No, not exactly. Gopal was exceedingly unclear that her concerns were only with Student Rights and the way the media picked up the story. Exceedingly unclear. It was not at all clear that she wasn’t talking about the people who organized and publicized the December 10 protest that triggered the media coverage. If that’s … Read the rest

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Why the one and not the other?

Dec 17th, 2013 11:56 am | By

Catching up with Catherine Bennett on gender segregation in the Observer on Saturday.

Naturally, much speculation, not all of it fanciful, has addressed the further privileges that intolerant faiths might soon, with the support of UUK’s useful idiots, be extracting from academe. Some speakers, for example, feel equally incapacitated by the prospect of women’s faces in a university audience, or “congregation” as a Muslim chaplain, Saleem Chagtai, referred to it last week on the Today programme. Can they, too – lawfully, and with the continued backing of Fenella Morris QC – demand that women cover up, be screened from sight, or evicted altogether, supposing, of course, this is consonant with genuinely held religious beliefs?

The answer is probably no, … Read the rest

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