Once again people lose their damn minds over a long-dead guy who called himself a “prophet.”

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, demanding a boycott of French goods amid a row over France’s tougher stance on radical Islam. They burned an effigy of President Emmanuel Macron, who has defended cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Police blocked the marchers from reaching the French embassy. Mr Macron has become a target in several Muslim-majority countries after his defence of French secularism.

Muhammad is gone; he’s been gone for centuries. There are more important things to worry about.

On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called for a boycott of French goods. In a televised speech,

… Read the rest

The student inquisitors had Kevin Price in their sights a month ago:

Cambridge University Liberal Association (CULA) released a statement last Sunday (27/09) condemning the “shocking and pervasive” transphobia among leading members of the Cambridge Labour Party, including prominent councillors.

“Liberal”! Ha!

The statement accuses the Cambridge Labour Party, who currently control Cambridge City Council, of “tolerating a stream of transphobia by leading members of its council group.”

CULA particularly highlights that the Labour Party have failed “to take action against former Cambridge Deputy Leader, Councillor Kevin Price, who has been regularly retweeting anti-trans content for at least six months.”

Except of course the content is not “anti-trans,” it’s pro-truth.

Price has retweeted accounts which call trans people “fetishists”

… Read the rest

James Kirkup has more on the persecution of Kevin Price:

Mr Price is now facing the sort of ‘hostile response’ he spoke about – calls for his employer to dismiss him from his job, because of his thoughts on sex and gender and ultimately, because of his reluctance to say the holy words.

According to Varsity, a student paper, the Union of Clare Students has condemned him and demanded the college authorities act against him. By discussing issues of policy and law at a council meeting, Mr Price had jeopardised the ‘safety’ of the college’s trans and non-binary students, the union suggested in a statement.

Varsity further quotes one Clare student as saying Price is ‘unfit both to

… Read the rest

Now we go from Edinburgh students to Cambridge students:

A Labour councillor of 10 years and former deputy leader at Cambridge City Council has resigned over a motion on transgender rights.

The motion, brought by the Liberal Democrats to a session of the full council on Thursday (October 22), began with the words: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary.”

In other words the brainless reality-denying mantra that people are being forced to agree to or be shunned and possibly fired. This situation is grotesque – that people are being forced, on pain of losing their jobs and facing persecution, to say they agree with a stupid reality-denying lie.

The mantra being forced … Read the rest

They’ve found another witch.

https://twitter.com/EdLabStudents/status/1320681076185014281

The statement via Facebook:

Edinburgh Labour Students strongly condemns the recent behaviour of our University Rector, Labour NEC Equalities Chair and NEC candidate Ann Henderson. There is evidence that Ann attended a Woman’s Place UK meeting two weeks ago, whereby she made a comment implying that the party rulebook should require members to state their birth/legal sex for official party records. Such a comment implies opposition to self-identification as a principle; yet, self-identification is a principle that the Labour Party officially supports.

In August 2018, we reached out to Ann as she failed to comment or respond to concerns from a Labour Party member as to why she followed Woman’s Place UK on twitter.

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Donald Trump recently called Sacha Baron Cohen a “phony” and a “creep.”

The comedian responded with a job offer:
https://t.co/UmiTiwZtok

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 26, 2020

“To me, he’s a creep," adds @POTUS about @SachaBaronCohen. #Borat2

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 24, 2020

Donald—I appreciate the free publicity for Borat! I admit, I don’t find you funny either. But yet the whole world laughs at you.

I’m always looking for people to play racist buffoons, and you’ll need a job after Jan. 20. Let’s talk!https://t.co/itWnhJ8TQF

— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) October 24, 2020

Speaking of Trump and Baron Cohen, a video has resurfaced of a 2003 interview between the two: https://t.co/UmiTiwZtok pic.twitter.com/tOIXtEuJ7z

— Los Angeles Times

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Erase erase erase erase.

There’s a Twitter account named FemCare Community Health Initiative. It’s a puzzle that it hasn’t done something about that “Fem” yet, because elsewhere they’ve been scrubbing dutifully.

https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1311697734819250176 https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1313872050814099457

A menstruator doesn’t menstruate during pregnancy, so is it still virtuous to call her a menstruator?

https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1314234224837263366

Stupid menstruator. They’re so incompetent, having all these miscarriages all over the place. Clearly FemCare is the wrong name altogether, it should be MenCare.… Read the rest

These “revolutions” keep happening because…the problem never goes away.

For women and girls in Egypt, sexual assault has long been endemic – but victims are now fighting back like never before, writes Salma El-Wardany.

Except we’ve heard that before.

It began in July when claims were shared online against student Ahmed Bassam Zaki. Nadeen Ashraf, a 22-year-old fellow student, set up the Instagram account Assault Police to share these allegations and received an outpouring of messages from women claiming that Ahmed Bassam Zaki had blackmailed, assaulted, harassed and raped them.

Within days he was arrested and is on trial charged with “sexually assaulting three girls under the age of 18 and threatening them, along with blackmailing a fourth girl”.

… Read the rest

Erdoğan says Macron is crazy for not being a fan of political Islam.

France has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

He said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.

Mr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.

That is, for showing cartoons of Mo as part of a class on freedom of speech. The BBC should have included that instead of making it sound as if Paty showed the cartoons just for the hell of it.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad

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Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books on William Barr’s passion for authoritarianism:

There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and [his son] William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is a defining feature of hierarchical institutional Catholicism. The magisterium of the church flows from the pope, who, on matters of faith and morals, may create doctrines that are infallible and therefore unquestionable. These include the bans on contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage. As a devout Catholic with links to the powerful Opus Dei movement, which galvanized the successful reaction against

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Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.

The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.

All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.

The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to

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That’s how to do it.

Protesters have disrupted church services across Poland in the latest show of discontent against a court’s near-total ban on abortion. The protesters staged sit-ins and held pro-abortion banners, interrupting Sunday Mass at some churches.

The protests are considered unusual in a country where the Roman Catholic church has great influence. They follow a ruling by Poland’s top court that ending the life of a deformed foetus is unconstitutional.

…

Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe, with an estimated 100,000 women seeking a termination abroad each year to get around the tight restrictions.

The Catholic church as an institution hates women, whatever some nuns and priests may think.

In a park

… Read the rest

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us:

Four in ten young men do not consider punching and hitting to constitute domestic violence, a national survey has found.

The survey of 1074 adults for anti-violence campaign group White Ribbon found 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 34 did not consider “hitting, punching or restraining” another person to be “a type of domestic violence”.

Were they raised by wolves? In what world is punching not violence? Also in what world is it ok for men to hit women?

The research found older men were more likely to recognise domestic violence. The proportion of men who did not consider hitting and punching to be domestic violence dropped to less than a

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Originally a comment by Omar on Here for you.

It is at times like this that I am reminded how improbable our individual lives are against the backdrop of human history and evolutionary biology.

My maternal great-grandmother Mary-Ann Connor was a refugee from the Irish potato ‘famine’ of the 1840s, when social arrangements in Ireland somehow resulted in the export of a large part of its agricultural produce. She went as a refugee to New Zealand, where by chance she met my great grandfather, who was a sailor.

Mary-Ann had eleven children in all, ten of whom died in infancy: probably of TB, which was raging at the time. My grandmother was the only survivor of those eleven children. … Read the rest

In a word: no.

Join Charlotte Clymer @cmclymer and other panelists this Monday for an upcoming Town Hall on the #EqualRightsAmendment and the impact in the LGBTQIA+ Community. You can register here: https://t.co/MYEtIpF8Dh
Hope to see you there! #ERAnow #Equality pic.twitter.com/XWqgmuaiyG

— ERA Coalition (@ERACoalition) October 24, 2020

Join a man who is roleplaying a woman for a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, in other words to remove women from second-class status. There are plenty of women who can discuss the rights of women, there is no need to turn to men who are roleplaying women instead of actual women. … Read the rest

They were what?

“A federal health agency halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included.”

They…you…what…

They can’t even do things in a non-criminal way when there’s no need for the criminality!

“Listen up, Santa dude – promote the vaccine or … Read the rest

The White House chief of staff is fine with all this coronavirus-defying:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows defended Vice President Pence’s decision to continue traveling and campaigning despite his exposure to staff who have tested positive for COVID-19, saying Sunday that Pence is exempt from CDC guidelines because he is “essential personnel.”

But is campaigning essential activity?

Meadows told CNN that “we are not going to control the pandemic,” dismissing the notion that the appropriate COVID policy should be to “quarantine all of America.” Instead, Meadows argued, the focus should be on developing vaccines and therapeutics “to give Americans the relief that this is not a death sentence.”

And in the meantime it’s fine to infect people … Read the rest

So Pence’s staff is riddled with coronavirus.

At least five people in Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus in recent days, including chief of staff Marc Short and outside adviser Marty Obst, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.

…

Despite the slew of coronavirus cases around him, Pence — who is the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force — is not quarantining, as per US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Instead, he plans to continue traveling and campaigning in the final stretch to Election Day.

Because, you know, the hell with CDC guidelines, the hell with safety, the hell with everything except the self-interest of Trump and his dummy.… Read the rest

This one really struck a nerve. Not in a good way.

https://twitter.com/SandsUK/status/1314855702343680002

Sands is here for you, but not so here that it will call you a mother instead of a “birthing parent” (or a father instead of a “non-birthing parent”).

The replies are genuinely painful to read.

Can you please have the decency & respect to refer to a woman who loses her baby as the mother? I've seen so many women crying out for their lost babies to be remembered & their short existence to be acknowledged. Let them be the mothers they wanted to be, the mothers they ARE.

— Jayne (courage calls to courage everywhere) (@ScouseJayne) October 24, 2020

I have never experienced the loss of

… Read the rest

Ok…

https://twitter.com/GailRossSNP/status/1319740452258676736

Commence piling on. If love, respect and humanity should be the bedrock of society then why are you calling people bitches? I know it’s hip and everything but what’s it got to do with love respect n humanity?

Also, how does “equality” come into it? What do “pronouns” have to do with equality?

In reality, nothing. In the jargon-world these two apparently inhabit, part of “equality” is bespoke pronouns and forcing everyone else to use those bespoke pronouns. How they get there, though, remains obscure.

And then from the Jason Michael tweet, what does treating other human beings with love, dignity and respect have to do with pronouns?

In reality, nothing. In the jargon-world these two apparently inhabit, … Read the rest