You know that video that “mykeru” did a couple of days ago? The one that prompted some stranger to tweet at me that I’m an immoral little twat who should get a fucking hobby? It’s now the featured video at A Voice for Men – with my face on it, looking like a nightmare-idiot, because it caught me in mid-blink.
Fabulous. I love being a target.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
South Africa has its own recent horrific rape-combined-with-mutilation-murder, and there are people who want that too to be a catalyst for outrage and change.
… Read the restThe gang-rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl in South Africa has triggered expressions of outrage from politicians and calls for Indian-style protests against a culture of sexual violence.
Anene Booysen was reportedly lured away from her friends and raped by a group of men. She was badly mutilated and left for dead on a building site in the town of Bredasdorp, 80 miles east of Cape Town, and found by a security guard on Saturday morning.
Hospital staff who fought to save her life were given counselling because of the horrific nature of her
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Edna Adan is one of the heroic women I learned about courtesy of the Half the Sky series. She built and runs a hospital in Somalia. A Safe World for Women gives us her statement on Female Genital Mutilation.
… Read the restAs a midwife, I have been delivering babies for 50 years, many of whom were being born to women who had undergone FGM. Witnessing the FGM-associated complications that many were suffering caused me to speak out against it in public in 1976 which at that time shocked my family and my people.
37 years later, and after so many resolutions have been passed to eradicate the practice, we sadly found that 97% of our women still suffered FGM as
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Before she died, Anene Booysen, 17, identified her former boyfriend as one of her attackers.… Read the rest
“Witnessing the FGM-associated complications that many were suffering caused me to speak out against it in public in 1976 which at that time shocked my family and my people.”… Read the rest
The chair of the Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, says the “Muslim patrol” problem will probably get worse.
He compared the Islamist vigilantes to extremists like the far-right Golden Dawn supporters in Greece and right-wing vigilantes in France who ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp.
Countries such as Denmark and Spain have also seen Islamist extremists trying to enforce their own sharia law, he noted.
All were imitating Hitler’s Brownshirts by “enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods,” said Mr Nawaz, who spent years in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group.
What a nightmare.… Read the rest
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Well this is foul.
One of the self-styled “Muslim patrols” that have been wandering the streets of east London bullying anyone they don’t like posted this one that shows them bullying a man they take to be gay. All the more offensively, they keep mixing “mate” in with their abuse – “you’re a bloody fag mate, get out of it mate, what’s wrong wiv your face mate.”
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A group under the name of “Muslim Patrol” post YouTube videos showing them harassing people who they think are not conforming to sharia.… Read the rest
A group calling itself the Muslim Patrol posted a video showing a gang hurling abuse at a gay man and described white women as “naked animals with no self–respect.”… Read the rest
A post by Jadehawk pointed me to an article from 2011 in the Irish Times, posted by Paddy Doyle.
… Read the restTWO OF the religious congregations which ran Magdalene laundries in the State set up and continue to run the Dublin-based Ruhama agency, which is funded by the State and works “with women affected by prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation”.
According to its website, the agency receives funding from the Department of Health and the Department of Justice.
Ruhama, which means “renewed life” in Hebrew, is described as “a joint initiative of the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, both of which had a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those
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One cheerful little item on a horrible day. Larry Moran did a post at Sandwalk about Golden Palace egg rolls.
I’ve taken many friends to the restaurant and recommended it to visitors.
Recently the talk.origins moderator, Dave Greig, sampled the food and pronounced
it tolerable. More recently, I brought lots of food to the hotel at Eschaton
2012 and treated PZ Myers, Veronica Abbas, Chris DiCarlo, and Ophelia Benson.
They all liked the egg rolls. Everyone likes Golden Palace egg rolls.
He did, he did! And we did, and I did. They were goooood.
Thanks, Larry!… Read the rest
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Jessica Valenti has a great article in The Nation, written as a letter to male relatives on Facebook who “like” things like haha-funny videos of men running up to women to grab their bums. Haha funny, right? Great joke?
Here’s the thing: those guys running up to women just to grab their ass? Stuff like that happens to women all the time. It’s happened to me. When I was your age, guys—from boys in school to men on the subway—used to grope and touch me against my will too. I don’t know if any of them videotaped it or if they did it as a “joke”—all I know was that it was really scary.
Well yes but that’s … Read the rest
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The headstrong survivors of the Magdalene laundries are threatening to go on a hunger strike if the Irish government doesn’t set up a redress board.
… Read the restSteven O’Riordain, a representative of the Magdalene Survivors Together, has warned some women will go on hunger strike if the government does not meet their demands.
“There is a possibility that this will happen. Some of the women have said if they do not get proper redress from a state which was responsible for being abandoned in these institutions. Many of them say they are at that age now where they have nothing to lose if the government fails to set up a scheme that will give some compensation for what happened to them,” he
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John Walsh on the Irish government and the Magdalene laundries.
These were places where “loose girls” or “fallen women” could be packed off to, girls impregnated by their fathers or uncles or the local priest, girls who were considered too flightly or flirtatious or headstrong to be biddable members of society. They could be put to work all day, washing sheets for the military, fed on bread and dripping, forbidden to speak and offered no way out, or any explanation about why they were imprisoned. Half of them were teenagers, doomed to spend their best years in a workhouse, being humiliated by nuns, told they’d offended God and that their parents didn’t want them.
Prisons. Slavery. For girls who … Read the rest
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“It was both very funny and also chilling, showing that, in fact, the class system was very active.”… Read the rest
A Catholic bishop says Obama is a negation of Lincoln because Lincoln was all “freedom” and Obama hates freedom.
He has chosen to use the bully pulpit not to call upon us all to be nobler and to embrace each child, regardless of origins and circumstances; rather, he has been a proponent of an expediency that is shameful and criminal in the eyes of Almighty God.
The bishop knows that about the eyes of almighty god how? No how. He doesn’t. He just says he does. He may think he does, or he may pretend he does, but either way, he’s wrong.
… Read the restIn my view, those who voted for President Obama bear the responsibility for a step deeper in the
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Boy Scouts say they need more time to reconsider ban on gay scouts. Wait, isn’t their motto “be prepared”? http://bit.ly/WubiMp… Read the rest
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A woman in Somalia said she was raped by some security forces, so she has been given a year in jail “for making a false accusation and insulting a government body.”
Judge Ahmed Aden Farah said the woman would not go to jail immediately as she is caring for a young child.
How very generous.
The woman had reported the alleged rape at a police station in Hodan, a district in Mogadishu where many displaced people live.
“We sentence her for offending state institutions by claiming she was raped,” the AFP news agency quotes the judge as saying.
“She will spend one year in prison after finishing the breastfeeding of her baby.”
State institutions in Somalia sure are easily offended, … Read the rest
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As you may have seen via this comment on A fabulous Manly Meal, Harriet Hall has a long post on Gender Differences and Why They Don’t Matter So Much. The key point is -
Average Differences Don’t Tell Us Anything About Individuals
The point that often gets overlooked in these discussions is that gender differences are averages for the group. They are irrelevant to a discussion of what jobs any individual woman is qualified for or interested in. And it doesn’t mean we can predict what proportion of men or women will gravitate to any given area of human endeavor.
Precisely. I keep saying exactly that.
But even more interesting than the post, perhaps, is a comment by David … Read the rest
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The report on the Magdalene laundries in Ireland is out.
… Read the restBetween 1922 and 1996 around 10,000 women are known to have entered Magdalen laundries, working for no pay in what were lonely and frightening places.
Senator McAleese and his committee were asked to outline the extent of state involvement and knowledge of the women in these laundries.
In each of the five categories it examined, it found evidence of state involvement. Most notably, 26% of the women who entered the laundries were referred there by the state.
The authorities also inspected the laundries, funded them, and registered the departures and deaths of the women there.
But it found that there was a legal basis for the state’s involvement as
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
