The inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar ended on Friday and Praveen Halappanavar still doesn’t have answers. He told us what he thinks of the whole thing.

The medical care she received was in no way different to staying home. Medicine is all about preventing the natural history of the disease, and improving patients’ lives and health. And look what they did. She was just left there to die. We were never – we were always kept in the dark. If Savita had known her life was at risk she would have jumped off the bed and seeked a different hospital. She was, we were never told, and it’s horrendous, it’s barbaric and inhuman the way Savita was treated

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The Ada Initiative did an interview with Rebecca; she says a number of amusing and/or insightful things. (No not “inciteful” – that’s not a word. Insightful.)

On why she stipulates a minimum of 35% women speakers as a condition of speaking.

I’ve also seen that the more women who speak on stage, the more women show up in the audience. People feel more at home when they see people like them in prominent positions. Because the conferences I attend are usually heavily male-dominated, having a minimum of 1/3 female speakers is another easy way that conference organizers can show they place a high value on diversity. 35% is actually ridiculously low considering women are 51% of the population, but

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Repeating things 50,000 times has to rank high. It could always be worse though. It could be repeating things 100,000 times. Or 500,000 times. Or a million.

It’s a real thing in Turkey though.

A teacher in Istanbul has allegedly ordered his students to say God’s name 50,000 times and “prove it” for homework.

The teacher of a Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge class at Sancaktar Hayrettin Primary School in Istanbul’s Fatih district set fifth grade students the task of repeating “salawat,” meaning “peace be upon him” in Arabic, a phrase often used after the name of the prophet of Islam. The task was to be completed as homework during Islam’s holy week.

And “prove” it? How the hell … Read the rest

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Avicenna has a horrific post about rape in India.

His conclusion:

The anger is rising again in India. It doesn’t matter what laws you make. In order to stop rape you need to change the culture of India and empower women. You need to teach men to not rape women, not blame everything else. The real fault here lies in the rapist and a culture of harassment, denigration of women and rape. The protests will keep happening and they SHOULD. Society cannot afford complacency on this.

There are no excuses here. Culture Must Change. You aren’t going to protect girls by keeping them away from boys. You are going to protect them by teaching boys and girls responsible behaviour

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

CNN keeps telling us it feels like a decisive moment, it feels like the end of the story. We don’t care what CNN thinks it feels like. Just tell us what you know.

I want him not to be killed. I want to know why.

I once lived in Boston, for a short time.

“We are getting the feeling that this is it.” Oh shut up.

I also once lived in a house with an old boat of the landlord’s in the yard.

They don’t want him to deploy the suicide vest. Well clearly he doesn’t want to deploy it either.… Read the rest

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From Dave Muscato of American Atheists:

As part of a joint effort amongst national groups, and in partnership with Boston Atheists and the Humanist Community at Harvard, we want to educate public officials about the diversity of their communities in times of tragedy and atheists’ desire and need to be included.

Atheists are hurting from this news as much as anyone else, and part of the grieving process for atheists affected includes things such as representation at the official memorial service and in the community response. When memorial services include exclusively religious language, and especially when public officials use terms such as “godless” as a slur to describe these attacks, atheists who are affected are excluded and shut out from … Read the rest

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Jerome Taylor of the Independent seems to be remarkably under-informed on the subject he reports on.

They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion.

But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam.

No they’re not. They’re never described as “the Unholy Trinity” – he made that up.

And Hitchens wasn’t an academic.

And Taylor seems not to … Read the rest

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The weirdnesses of modern life, you know? Texting. Cupcakes. Wheely bags. Granite counter tops.

One such weirdness is the recurrence of photographs of young men on their way to kill and maim a lot of random people.

There are some of Timothy McVeigh, I think – renting the truck was it? Getting gas? Or maybe there aren’t.

But there certainly are of some of the 9/11 young men. There are of the July 2005 London bombers. And now there are of the Tsarnaev brothers.

Walking along the street, dapper and casual, with their pressure cookers packed full of shrapnel in the backpacks they carry.

So we can see them. We can see how people look in the process of … Read the rest

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Ottawa

On April 25, an international coalition of atheist and humanist organizations led by the Center for Inquiry, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and American Atheists will protest the arrest and persecution of atheist bloggers in Bangladesh with demonstrations scheduled in London, New York, Washington, Ottawa and Calgary.

Bangladesh has recently been at the centre of a human rights crisis as authorities have detained several prominent bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments” and have arrested two more young people for making “derogatory remarks” about Islam on Facebook. Tens of thousands of protestors, led by the Islamist group Islami Andolan Bangladesh, have rallied in Dhaka, the country’s capital, to demand more arrests.

Centre for Inquiry is leading protests in Canada and … Read the rest

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Yes, I’m recognizing the landscape. I share Kaminer’s dislike of difference feminism. But then – if people are thinking we are difference/protectionist feminists in Kaminer’s sense, they’re batty.

More from Kaminer’s article:

The Comforts of Gilliganism

Central to the dominant strain of feminism today is the belief, articulated by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, that women share a different voice and different moral sensibilities. Gilligan’s work—notably In a Different Voice (1982)—has been effectively attacked by other feminist scholars, but criticisms of it have not been widely disseminated, and it has passed with ease into the vernacular. In a modern-day version of Victorian True Womanhood, feminists and also some anti-feminists pay tribute to women’s superior nurturing and relational skills and their

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Reading the long article on feminism by Wendy Kaminer from 1993, pointed out by hjhornbeck.

Today, three decades of feminism and one Year of the Woman later, a majority of American women agree that feminism has altered their lives for the better. In general, polls conducted over the past three years indicate strong majority support for feminist ideals. But the same polls suggest that a majority of women hesitate to associate themselves with the movement. As Karlyn Keene, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed, more than three quarters of American women support efforts to “strengthen and change women’s status in society,” yet only a minority, a third at most, identify themselves as feminists.

And that’s … Read the rest

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One of the inescapable tropes about feminism is that there are two kinds of feminism, the good kind and the bad kind. You know how that goes. There’s the good sensible who-could-possibly-disagree kind that’s about equal pay and maybe more daycare, and there’s the bad crazy who-could-possibly-agree kind that’s about how people actually think and talk about women. This binary gets different names depending on who’s talking. One popular pair of labels is equality feminism v gender feminism. A new one I hadn’t seen before is equal rights feminism v protectionist feminism.

Protectionist. Hmm. That’s interesting. It’s interesting because it’s so insulting – as if not wanting to be treated like shit is somehow precious and spoiled and princessy.

Anyway, … Read the rest

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It’s funny how there’s Sheryl Sandberg, and there’s also Facebook. Sandberg is the COO of Facebook, and she’s a critic of sexist stereotypes, yet…Facebook is notoriously bad at doing anything about overt, vicious misogyny-mongering on Facebook. Soraya Chemaly wonders why that is.

For example, this morning, a Duracell battery ad is visible on a group page called “I kill bitches like you;” Sexy Arab Girls, “join our page for more porn videos,” was sponsored by the Wilberforce Dinner “Honoring Cardinal Timothy Dolan,” and the now-removed page, “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” populated by photos of women beaten, bruised and bleeding, was the platform for Vistaprint.

“We occasionally see people post distasteful

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Heartwarming update to the Katelyn Campbell story. Her principal threatened to call up Wellesley, where she is accepted as a student next year, to tell them what a backstabbing slut she is. After posting about it I went to find her on Twitter, and found this -

Wellesley College ‏@Wellesley19h

KatelynCampbell, #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall. http://bit.ly/13jqRet 

Ahhh. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Nicely done, Wellesley.… Read the rest

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Another brave high school student stands up to religio-conservative coercion.

A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”

George Washington High School recently hosted a conservative speaker, Pam Stenzel, who travels around the country to advocate an abstinence-only approach to teen sexuality. Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire

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Terry Glavin doesn’t approve of forced ingestion of bromides from Mr Rogers in the wake of horrible events like the Boston bombings.

The Iranians have a word for it. It’s “hambestagi.” It roughly translates as “solidarity.” It is a condition of humankind that is always present and quite ordinarily blossoms in crisis. It was everywhere in evidence Monday in Boston and well beyond.

Solidarity is a good thing. I’m very big on solidarity. The more solidarity the better, especially international solidarity.

In place of actual acts of journalism related to Monday’s barbarism, was it  really necessary for the Globe and Mail, Time Magazine, Slate and the Washington  Post to gang up on everybody with pieties out of the cardigan-wearing  Presbyterian

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How to get around those pesky religious rules that say women are sluts unless they’re nailed and sealed into a marriage? How can men have fun if women are all nailed and sealed into a marriage? There is a way. The men can marry them, but just for a few minutes. Win-win!

I knew this was popular in Iran, but it’s apparently big in India. too.

Men from around the Islamic world have been traveling to Hyderabad, India, to purchase marriage contracts lasting four weeks. These “one-month marriages” provide men with young Indian wives, generally from poor families, who must consummate the short-term arrangements. Essentially, men—often already married—come to India with the intent of having religiously sanctioned sex with

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