News from the MidAmerica branch of Unitarian Universalistism:

UUMA/UUA Neurodiversity Skill Up Series: Rev. Leela Sinha

Rev. Leela Sinha (ze/zim/zir) is a brown, queer, genderqueer, entrepreneurial community minister with a theology of pleasure and a habit of transformative mischief. In zir work, ze offers leadership coaching, training, and keynotes, working with leaders and organizations to develop and delight in the power and intensity we have, and to use that power for good.

Wait a second. Who is this “we”? Did anyone ask what our pronouns are? And by “our” of course I mean “fm”.

Ze has been a UU all zir life, and lives and works in the Bay Area. Check out zir’s work with zir Sinha Intensive/Expansive Framework,

A euphemism too many:

Police Scotland has used the term “minor-attracted people” to describe paedophiles in a major report despite warnings it normalises child abuse.

It is a literal translation, but the overtones are very different, which is surely the point. Why would it be necessary or useful to come up with a less judgey label for sexual abuse of children? There’s no push to euphemise the words for other crimes is there? No calls to rename murder “premature involuntary termination”? Why euphemise sexual abuse of children?

The term MAP is contentious because child abusers are trying to escape the stigma attached to paedophilia and maintain they should be regarded as a niche group alongside the LGBT community.

The … Read the rest

Not just a social media influencer any more.

Social media influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, prosecutors have confirmed.

Now that’s the big time.

The 36-year-old British-American and his brother Tristan were arrested on Thursday evening and are being detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, prosecutors in the country said.

“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said.

Imagine being a person who would do that – what can it be like? It … Read the rest

Elon Musk is saving Twitter from going broke by not paying the rent. That should work.

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Don’t pay the rent; don’t buy toilet paper. The future looks bright!

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions

But

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 15, 2022

H/t GW… Read the rest

I should check out Greta Thunberg’s Twitter more often. She retweets urgent news items.

More than 120 people were killed Tuesday as the worst floods in years battered DRC's capital Kinshasa following an all-night downpour. Major roads in the city of some 15 million people, were submerged for hours, & a key supply route was cut off. #ClimateCrisis pic.twitter.com/fvPJ4MULLJ

— Fridays For Future Uganda (@Fridays4FutureU) December 14, 2022

Drought, one of the worst in last 50 years, in Peruvian Andes ravages alpaca flocks and potato crops, forcing government to declare state of emergency in more than 100 districts https://t.co/4f47v80szM

— TRT World (@trtworld) December 4, 2022

… Read the rest

David Folkenflik at NPR in September 2020:

Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox’s lawyers: The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “

And … Read the rest

Took his “anti-feminism” a little too far did he?

Anti-feminist social media personality Andrew Tate ‘arrested’ in Romania on human trafficking charges

The self-styled misogynist internet celebrity Andrew Tate has reportedly been arrested in Romania…British-American Tate, 36, has amassed a huge following of young men via Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Training young men to hate women more than they already do for fun and profit; it’s almost as good as charging women $5k and a fancy dinner for the privilege of being shamed.

Former Big Brother contestant Tate has almost 3.5 million Twitter followers. He recently got into a social media spat with climate activist Greta Thunberg. After [his] bragging about the carbon emissions of his supercars, Thunberg replied that

That unpleasant JJ Wells guy who was so merrily abusing JK Rowling and Fred Sargeant yesterday may have taken it a little too far for his own good.

you've published defamatory statements about me and are compounding the offence by saying I'm encouraging the eradication of a group of vulnerable people. All this came about in the context of you attacking @FredSargeant, a gay rights icon, and wishing for his death. 2/3

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 29, 2022

I understand that you and your ilk feel untouchable. I understand that in your own minds you're heroes of unimpeachable righteousness, justified in slurring, defaming and threatening. You were the one who dragged his lawyer into this so, by

One subject of one of Helen Lewis’s new gurus podcast is the “race2dinner” pair Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. Remember them? I did a post on them in May 2021. They’re the ones who charge five THOUSAND dollars for you to make or order in a fancy dinner with you (a white woman) and your white women friends where they (Jackson and Rao) tell you how racist you are. Peak social justice, and a nice little earner!

So they’re still doing it, which means there are still rich white women willing to spend five THOUSAND dollars for this treat.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as racism, or that white people shouldn’t confront it, or that … Read the rest

I’ve been listening to this; it’s brilliant. I expect to listen to it all over again and maybe a third time.

Merry podmas! The first four episodes of The New Gurus are now available online.

Episode 1 tells the story of Steve Jobs’s personal quest for enlightenment, and how it created the smartphone age in which our new gurus thrive. https://t.co/f4AiZa8kiZ pic.twitter.com/7KMBA2T5AM

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) December 19, 2022

… Read the rest

It’s still 1962. Nothing has changed. White men still assault Black teenage boys for using the “whites only” pool.

A violent attack by a group of white men on two Black teenagers at a resort pool in South Africa on Christmas Day has sparked widespread outrage, reviving images from the ugly days of apartheid and serving as a stinging reminder of the country’s unresolved racial tensions.

We get that a lot here, too. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for running in a “white neighborhood.”

Cellphone footage of the assault — which the teenagers said started when they were told the pool was for “white people only” — spread widely on social media. It showed scenes that could have been from

Originally a comment by Freemage on In our religion-deferential country.

This is the kind of thing that first started me questioning my faith. Not the existence of these assholes–I was world-wise enough to know full well that people are people, no matter what granfaloon they belong to. But it was the awful, deadening silence of the mainstream churches when confronted by the undeniable evil of, say, Westboro Baptist Church. Sure, if you mentioned WBC to a practicing Catholic or Methodist, they’d insist that the former didn’t speak for them, and were out of bounds.

But they are never willing to actively do anything about it. Imagine a world where one of those anodyne interfaith councils came out with specific … Read the rest

The FFRF says don’t gloss over the Christian Nationalist aspect of Trump’s attempted coup.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation regrets that the recently released Jan. 6 House select committee report fails to pinpoint the Christian nationalist motivations behind the Capitol attack.

The committee’s official findings do not adequately illustrate the true nature of the insurrection and its participants, asserts the national state/church watchdog. The rioters, white supremacist Nick Fuentes primary among them, frequently engaged in Christian rituals before and during the assault. The “Jericho Marches,” in which rioters walked around the Capitol in the days prior praying for the results of the election to be overturned and calling for “spiritual warfare,” the chanting of “Christ is king,” banners containing biblical

Now that is solidarity.

Astonishing scenes as a Kabul university professor destroys his diplomas on live TV in Afghanistan —

“From today I don’t need these diplomas anymore because this country is no place for an education. If my sister & my mother can’t study, then I DON’T accept this education.” pic.twitter.com/cTZrpmAuL6

— Shabnam Nasimi (@NasimiShabnam) December 27, 2022

Shabnam Nasimi is a former Policy Advisor to the Minister for Afghan Resettlement and the Minister for Refugees.… Read the rest

There are some very bad people in that movement.

Fred is Fred Sargeant and James is James Garvey.

Fred did fuck all, he’s a traitor to the cause. He’s not the reason I’m out and proud- REAL activists were.

— JJ Welles (@jjwelles_) December 28, 2022

Wow couldn't sleep and saw this. The kid is still talking to @FredSargeant. What an absolute psycho. pic.twitter.com/tzc6LVefUD

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) December 28, 2022

Some bad bad bad people.

Updating to add:

Imagine tweeting about your desire to see a woman put to death and your wanting to have a role in it, and thinking you're one of the good guys as @josephjames94 does. Fortunately, the internet has a long memory and

Guy who enslaved women in porn arrested:

The founder of San Diego-based website GirlsDoPorn.com, who had been on the lam for the past three years while facing federal sex trafficking charges, was arrested this week in Spain, the FBI announced Friday.

Michael James Pratt, 40, was arrested Wednesday by Spanish National Police in Madrid, according to a statement from the FBI. Pratt will be held there pending extradition to San Diego.

He was on the FBI ten most wanted list.

The New Zealand native is charged in a 19-count indictment for allegedly running the now-defunct website. Charges against him include sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

Prosecutors allege

Free enterprise, free speech, freedom of the press, all labored and brought forth…Fox News. Next up could be President Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson, as the most-watched host of the most-watched cable news network, holds rare influence over not just Republican supporters, but politicians, too. This year Carlson has been unafraid to wield that power, across issues including war, subjugation of continents and testosterone.

That’s what we want to see – another “personality” dragging the world toward a deeper abyss.

On 22 February, Vladimir Putin’s forces were massed on the Ukraine border. As people in the eastern European country braced themselves for war, and as the Russian leader was widely condemned by the international community, Carlson used his Fox News

This guy is a psychiatrist, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at The University of California San Francisco.

I guess I’m a man then. Short hair, gender-noncommittal T shirts or turtlenecks instead of strappy sundresses, no necklace, no earrings, no lipstick, no perm – zap, I’m a guy.

This adult academic psychiatrist is obsessed with the dopy meaningless cartoon.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Varying beliefs.

Hamline was the first University in Minnesota, founded by the Methodists. They currently emphasize interfaith (including those with no faith) co-existence. When I was thinking of Law School I was seriously contemplating pushing for attending their Mitchell Law School since they place a high value on using the Law as a tool to fight The Man. My son graduated from a charter school sponsored by Hamline, and they emphasized intellectual freedom in education.

So, this comes as a surprise, in one sense, but then when I think about it? Perhaps not so much? I see that so many liberal institutions have taken on fear of offense as a measure of … Read the rest