How to crush a woman

Sep 28th, 2016 11:12 am | By

Via the brilliant Glosswitch on Twitter – buzzfeed and Elle are giving advice on how to rock that binder. Yay, let’s go back to squashing women’s bodies again! And this time let’s pretend there’s something social justicey about it!

Buzzfeed:

For many people, wearing a chest binder is simply part of the daily routine in this thing called life. But it can be a real strain, both mentally and physically.

So can foot binding, or wearing a corset. Here’s a thought: don’t do it.

There are tons of reasons to bind. Many people find that wearing a binder helps ease the discomfort that comes along with gender dysphoria.

Are we sure about that? Are we sure none of those claimed “many” just don’t entirely like parts of their bodies, without having anything severe enough to be called dysphoria? And what about the rest? Are they doing it because being “queer” is trendy and being a horrible titty woman isn’t?

So what are you doing to ease the misery caused by this business of squashing your breasts?

Maybe you make sure you are binding safely — wearing the proper size and taking care not to wear it longer than you need

Maybe the fact that binding can be unsafe, and that there’s an improper size, and that it’s possible to wear it too long – maybe all those facts should hint that wearing a binder is not all that healthy and maybe you just shouldn’t do it.

Elle:

A few months ago, Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram of herself in the gym wearing a corset by shapewear brand Ann Chery. After I got past the white leggings, I had to know more: What was that corset for? A quick Google search and deep dive into the #waisttraining hashtag gave me my answer: Kim was using this device to attempt to cut down the midsection of her already infamous body-oddy-oddy.

That device is also known as a faja, or a girdle, popular in South America. Ann Chery is known for them. A few years ago, The New York Times reported on the trend of women wearing fajas as a “shortcut to an hourglass figure,” and Jessica Alba credits wearing corsets with helping her shed baby weight.

So of course the Elle reporter Danielle Prescod had to do the same thing, so she did.

About 10 days in of waist training, I start to notice something: Waist training gives me a bad attitude. It makes me irrationally mean. I am irritable, cranky, and short-tempered. I am sending rude e-mails. I am blank-staring at jokes, when I could just give a polite giggle. I am walking away in the middle of conversations when I’ve just had enough. It’s the corset—I realize that it’s controlling me. The other thing is, I’m hungry. Actually, I’m HANGRY. The corset is so tight and constricting that I find myself skipping meals. The bladder issues are out of control. I have to pee every 10 seconds. Still, I persevere. Why? Because I am obsessive and crazy and I want a waist like Kim’s. So I accept it. I ignore it.

My rage prevents me from saying anything coherent about this.

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The problem is with the beliefs

Sep 28th, 2016 10:25 am | By

Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker has outstanding commentary on Trump.

For one thing, I appreciate his calling Trump “one of the hyper-nationalist demagogues and autocrats who have emerged throughout Europe and Americas in the last decade” and a sneering loudmouth.

It’s obviously comforting that he lost, Gopnik says, but it’s disturbing to see him normalized. Yes, yes it is – that’s why I keep calling him the very blunt names that fit, like liar thief cheat fraud, and misogynist racist xenophobe. He’s so off the charts terrible on so many criteria, yet there he is, being normalized.

…what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else.

The same applies to his misogyny. Trump talks shit about women as easily as breathing.

Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life. The idea that he had a right to force a black man to go through what Obama rightly saw as the demeaning business of producing his birth certificate showed his fundamental contempt for any normal idea of racial equality.

Emphasis added.

Pass over quickly, for the moment, Trump’s notion that contracts are to be respected depending only on the wayward autocratic impulse of the richest party to the contract. Think, instead, again, of one of the last subjects of the debate—his misogyny. By sexism, we mean something specific, not the business of appreciating beauty—if Trump wants to host beauty contests, let him—but the habit of conceiving of a woman as being a lesser species, one defined exclusively by appearance. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.

That’s another thing I’ve been saying. He’s a bad man. He’s bad all the way down; there’s nothing good about him.

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When all else fails, just say she’s too good at it

Sep 27th, 2016 4:57 pm | By

From the You just can’t win files, or is it the Balance at all costs files, or the Let’s not get too smartyboots around here files, or the Women who know stuff aren’t feminine files, or the We have to say something bad about her files.

Meet the Press on Twitter:

#debatenight exposed Trump’s lack of preparation, but Clinton seemed over-prepared at times.

Over-prepared. She’s running for a huge complicated job with a lot of moving parts, and she seemed “over-prepared.” What would that even be?

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Created by and for the Chinese

Sep 27th, 2016 4:44 pm | By

Jim Wright:

Clinton: Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese…
Trump: <interrupting> I NEVER SAID THAT

Oh rilly? Jim provided the screenshot:

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

11/6/12 1:15 PM

He said it.

Trump lies like a rug.

 

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Who should know her place and do as she was told

Sep 27th, 2016 11:56 am | By

The story of how Trump treated Alicia Machado is truly ugly. Janell Ross reported on it today in the Washington Post:

The Clinton campaign viewed Machado’s experience with Trump behavior as so damning that Monday night, the campaign released a new commercial — almost a short documentary — featuring Machado. Speaking in Spanish, Machado described Trump as a man filled with grudges, racism and frightening anger, a man who contributing to her struggle with an eating disorder and, in keeping with another Trump critique Clinton raised on the debate stage, the owner of the pageant which did not pay her what she was due under the terms of her contract.

He defended his non-payment of contractors and others during the debate by shouting that their work wasn’t good enough. I guess he decided that he didn’t have to pay Machado because her body wasn’t thin enough?

Machado went into the pageant hoping it would lead to a career in entertainment.

Trump purchased the Miss Universe pageant just in time to become her boss. All Machado knew was that Trump, a wealthy American businessman, had big plans to boost the pageant’s profile and profits.

In the end, she came to view Trump as an insensitive bigot, a misogynist who seemed to view the pageant and pageant contestants alike as his personal property, Machado told me in an interview earlier this year for the Washington Post’s Trump biography, “Trump Revealed.”

“Now, 20 years later, I can not believe that piece of shit could possibly be president,” said Machado. “It was a nightmare I wouldn’t want my daughter or any other little girl in this country to ever, ever encounter. This man behaved like a tyrant when I was Miss Universe and has behaved like a potential despot during this campaign. He lacks the basic skills to govern and is not a good human being.”

That’s what I keep saying. He’s not a good human being. You can watch him and read up on him forever and not find one good thing about him. He’s a bully, he’s cruel, he steals from people less rich and powerful than he is, he lies, he cheats, he talks shit about women, he’s a racist. He’s not a good human being. I don’t recall ever thinking that about any other candidate – I don’t recall ever thinking Bush Junior or Reagan was terrible to everyone.

Over the course of the year that Machado held the Miss Universe title — and, as Trump often reminded her, worked for him — she would feel intense pressure to shed the weight pounds Trump told many, many television reporters, viewers and magazine readers that Machado had gained. He considered it an outrage, a potential violation of her contract. That in turn prompted officials with the Miss Venezuala pageant system to also comment on Machado’s weight in both the English and Spanish-speaking international press.

The only upside that Trump could see: potential weight-loss related endorsement deals for Machado. Under the terms of her contract, The Miss Universe organization would get the majority cut. To drum up interest and keep the press focused on Machado’s weight, Trump set up a workout with a trainer at a Manhattan gym. When Machado arrived, the trainer, Trump and a bank of mostly male reporters and photographers were waiting. Trump insisted that she follow the trainer though a full workout. As Machado did jumping jacks, sweated her way though the trainer’s routine and rode a stationary bike, the photographers stationed just a few feet way snapped pictures and made comments, she said. Some of the footage of this moment appears in the new Clinton ad.

Dear god.

Some news reports at the time indicated that Machado had already engaged in long hours of exercise and severe food restriction to get in what Venezuelan pageant directors described as ideal shape. And, Machado admits, she became more difficult, less compliant, more willing to stand up for herself in the Miss Universe office, to reject appearances Trump wanted her to do and to demand that her handlers put more charity work on her schedule.

That combination was too much for Trump, Machado said.

It prompted Trump to ask Machado and Miss Universe staff — who Machado said were often aghast — ‘who she thought she was,’ on multiple occasions. In both angry conversations and casual ones, Trump referred to Machado as “Miss Piggy,” “Miss Housekeeper,” and “Miss Housekeeping,” who should know her place and do as she was told. He said it to her face. And he said it to Miss Universe staff.

Who, I wonder, does he think he is?

Machado did get work in the entertainment industry, and is a permanent US resident with a green card; her daughter is a US citizen and also a citizen of Mexico.

When Trump declared that he would compete for the White House and, in the same speech, described illegal Mexican immigrants are “rapists” and “criminals,” Machado says she was alarmed and sickened. As his campaign developed, it became clear that Trump’s thinking, his attitudes and opinions had not really changed, Machado said.

“It became clear to me that hate and ugliness, disrespect for women, for Latinos, for African Americans is part of this man’s political philosophy,” Machado said. “This is the way his mind works.”

If you can call it a mind. It’s more like a set of blurts and urges.

In June, Machado joined Clinton supporter Delores Huerta at a press conference where she explained that her concerns for what effect a President Trump might have on America had prompted her to become a U.S. citizen who can vote in November. Her reasoning is both personal and political.

“He is a danger to this beautiful country,” Machado said, “which I love, and feel an obligation to protect from men like Donald Trump on behalf of my daughter, on behalf of women, mothers, Latinas like me. He is a threat to democracy.”

He’s a blight on this country. He’s the shame of this country.

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The bully quantified

Sep 27th, 2016 11:24 am | By

FiveThirtyEight on Twitter:

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So we have to get very, very tough on cyber

Sep 27th, 2016 10:20 am | By

Ezra Klein notes the coherence gap between Clinton and Trump, and what it means.

Of course, it’s obvious what it means. You couldn’t miss it. It rose off the debate like steam. Clinton has the skills needed for this job, and Trump does not. Trump does not remotely have those skills – not even a little bit. He doesn’t have truncated versions of those skills, he has their opposites. He doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Trump did his best to be fair. He interrupted Clinton 25 times in the debate’s first 26 minutes. He talked over both her and moderator Lester Holt with ease. But the show of dominance quickly ran into a problem: Trump would shout over his interlocutors only to prove he had nothing to say.

Trump’s riffs were dotted by baldfaced lies of the kind the press will easily check, but, more consequentially, he spoke in a barely coherent stream of consciousness.

He did. It was garble. At times he even interrupted his own self, by interjecting something completely random and then pausing, as if at the end of a sentence.

Klein does some compare and contrast. The “cyber” one was good:

Take Trump’s answer on cybersecurity:

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.

She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don’t know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.

And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem.

I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

Then he gives Clinton’s response, and it’s not like that.

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Trump called her Miss Piggy and Miss Housekeeping

Sep 27th, 2016 9:53 am | By

Then there’s Trump’s attitude to women.

At the end of Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of taunting one of his former Miss Universe contestants about her weight.

Clinton said the Republican nominee’s criticisms of Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996, was “one of the worst things he said” about women. “He called this woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina.”

It’s a wonder he didn’t make her clean his toilets.

While Trump appeared to dispute Clinton’s accusation on the debate stage, he called into Fox and Friends Tuesday morning and once again called Machado fat.

“I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person,” Trump told the Fox News morning show. “And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible,” he said. “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude.”

Trump had bought the Miss Universe pageant or contest or whatever it is, so he apparently considered Alicia Machado his property too.

With his past statements about Machado playing into critiques Clinton wanted to make at Monday night’s high-profile debate, the Clinton campaign was quick to pounce. An hour after the debate ended, her campaign tweeted a two-minute video about Machado’s experience with Trump.

“He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him,” she says in Spanish. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me ‘you look ugly’ or ‘you look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say ‘Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.’ “

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/780611407221960704

Something else she says in that video is that she did a lot of commercials as Miss Universe, and her contract said she got ten percent of the revenue. She never got it. So she’s yet another employee stiffed by Trump the billionaire. Yeah, let’s make that guy president.

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They put sand in his shoes

Sep 27th, 2016 9:41 am | By

Trump says they tampered with his microphone.

“I had a problem with a microphone that didn’t work,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “My microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose? My microphone, in the room they couldn’t hear me, you know, it was going on and off. Which isn’t exactly great. I wonder if it was set up that way, but it was terrible.”

“It was on and off, and it was much lower than hers. I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling, and she didn’t have that problem,” he added. “That to me was a bad problem, you have a bum mic, it’s not exactly good.”

Is that right? I could hear him perfectly well – he was quite loud in fact. I could hear him the many times he interjected and interrupted. I could hear his “That’s called being smart” when Clinton pointed out he hadn’t paid any income tax in the two years for which we have the information. I could hear his “That’s good business” when Clinton pointed out that he rejoiced at the slump because it meant he could buy up properties cheaply. I could hear him clearly when he failed to complete sentence after sentence after sentence.

Trump also insisted that he does not have a cold or allergies when asked whether he was sniffling during the debate.

So it was coke?

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Nightmare in session

Sep 26th, 2016 5:40 pm | By

Can I watch this thing? I don’t know. It will be torture.

Here’s one place to watch it: ABC on Facebook Live.

If we don’t see each other again…it was a good ride.

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Symbology

Sep 26th, 2016 3:11 pm | By

Maajid Nawaz on Facebook:

Protecting your right to do something, doesn’t mean I think you’re right to do it. Don’t ban the hijab, but don’t exoticise or glamourise it either. The#RegressiveLeft‘s pandering to conservative Islam has become so entrenched that Playboy magazine just featured a hijabi model, unironically billed as a symbol of an ‘independent woman’, a ‘Renegade’.

Image result for playboy hijab

Wearing the hijab does not make a woman a symbol of an independent woman. On the contrary, it makes her a symbol of a dependent, submissive, obedient woman, owned by men and dressed according to the dictates of clerical men.

 

 

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Led by luminaries

Sep 26th, 2016 12:22 pm | By

God damn. Sometimes you just have to wonder…Do they have blackouts between words, or what? What can explain a grotesque juxtaposition like this in an article by Phil Torres asking if new atheism is irrelevant?

To this day — 12 years after the movement was inaugurated by Sam Harris’ compelling book The End of Faith — new atheism remains dominated by white men, even though women comprise 44 percent of the “religiously unaffiliated” demographic in the contemporary United States.

Despite these shortcomings, I would argue that new atheism — led by luminaries such as Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian — is not only more important today than 12 years ago, but that it could be one of the most important cultural movements in the coming decades.

Maybe he wrote the first paragraph a few weeks ago, and the second a couple of days ago, and didn’t bother to refresh his memory of the first before writing the second. Or maybe he was kidnapped after writing the first and the rest of the article was written by an impostor.

Otherwise…I just cannot figure it out.

Updating to add a tweet:

https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/779800751119953920

“Happy to have mentioned”? Three men already well known among people who pay any attention to atheism? “Happy to have mentioned”? Why, so that they’ll let him sit at their lunch table? Who says things like that?

And, again, why happy to have mentioned the already familiar yet again while carefully not mentioning one single god damn woman? Right after saying “new atheism remains dominated by white men” and then calling that a shortcoming? “New atheism remains dominated by white men and that’s a bad thing, but here, let me mention the same familiar white men (plus one rando) yet again while ignoring all the women…and then say I’m happy to have mentioned the men.” What is that?

People baffle me.

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He has routinely criticised all religions

Sep 26th, 2016 12:01 pm | By

Another item for blasphemy week – except of course it’s blasphemy week every minute, every second.

A self-proclaimed atheist youth was arrested in Indian city of Kolkata for ‘hurting religious feelings’ after he re-posted a critique of Islam on Facebook.

Tarak Biswas, 32, reportedly routinely criticised several religions on the social media, evoking strong reactions and sparking debate. The youth, however, was held after he re-posted the material relating to Islam from another website.

People ought to be free to criticize religion. Religion claims huge power over people, so we have to be able to dissent from it. But of course part of the huge power religion claims over us is the power to prevent us from dissenting from it, including killing us if we try.

Police arrested Biswas on September 16 under various clauses of the Information Technology, saying he had hurt the religious feelings and offended people with various messages online.

“Not only has he [Biswas] written offensive comments, he has also tagged and posted materials from a dubious website,” said the complainant Wasim Akthar’s lawyer Mohammad Arif.

Wasim Akthar and Mohammad Arif should mind their own business. The judicial system should ignore their “complaint.”

Biswas’ family, however, disagreed with these views, “Tarak is an atheist. He has his own belief. He has routinely criticised all religions. Why should a post on Islam – which was mostly a repost and not original – be considered so offensive,” elder brother Moloy Biswas told NDTV.

Because the Allah of Akthar and Arif is an angry, hostile, vindictive god.

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But the problem is there is no answer

Sep 26th, 2016 10:58 am | By

The BBC:

A petition signed by more than 14,000 Saudi women calling for an end to the country’s male guardianship system is being handed to the government.

Women must have the consent of a male guardian to travel abroad, and often need permission to work or study.

Support for the first large-scale campaign on the issue grew online in response to a trending Twitter hashtag.

I’m sure the government will be very conscientious about exactly how it cuts the petition into strips.

Many workplaces and universities also demand a guardian’s consent for female employees and students, although it is not legally required.

Renting a flat, undergoing hospital treatment or filing a legal claim often also require a male guardian’s permission, and there is very little recourse for women whose guardians abuse them or severely limit their freedom.

No recourse, really, but the BBC is being cautious in case there’s one woman somewhere who managed to get her brother to persuade her husband to let her get hospital treatment.

In July, an Arabic Twitter hashtag which translates as “Saudi women want to abolish the guardianship system” went viral after a Human Rights Watch report was published on the issue. Saudi women tweeted comments, videos and artwork calling for change. Bracelets saying “I Am My Own Guardian” appeared.

Human Rights Watch researcher Kristine Beckerle, who worked on the report, described the response as “incredible and unprecedented”.

“I was flabbergasted – not only by the scale, but the creativity with which they’ve been doing it,” she said. “They’ve made undeniably clear they won’t stand to be treated as second-class citizens any longer, and it’s high time their government listened.”

It’s been high time for a long time, but will the government listen? My bet is no.

However, there has been opposition from some Saudi women, with an alternative Arabic hashtag, which translates as #TheGuardianshipIsForHerNotAgainstHer, gaining some traction, and opinion articles, like this one on the Gulf News website, arguing that the system should be reformed and applied better.

The government will just point to them – or it will just ignore the whole thing.

She and other activists first raised the issue five years ago. “We never had a problem with campaigning, but the problem is there is no answer. But we always hope – without hope, you cannot work,” she said.

There has been no official response to the petition yet.

Nor will there be.

Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but this is Saudi Arabia we’re talking about. The oil has to dry up before anything will move there.

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Show your solidarity with those with the courage to speak out

Sep 26th, 2016 9:45 am | By

CFI is throwing a dissent party all week in honor of blasphemy day Friday.

This week, let’s take a stand for the right to question and criticize ideas and beliefs, and demand an end to the attacks and arrests of those who exercise that right.

International Blasphemy Rights Day is this Friday, September 30, and in the days leading up, we invite you to be a part of the fight for this most fundamental of human rights. On Friday we’ll make a very important announcement to help us do even more.

In too many countries around the world, criticizing religion is illegal. We’ve seen the consequences of these laws too many times — when a tweet or a post on Facebook declaring one’s atheism or questioning a tenet of religion leads to arrests, beatings, prison, and sometimes death sentences.

Sometimes religious militants make their own laws, deciding for themselves that expressions of dissent justify brutal killings, like the grisly murders of secularists in Bangladesh, or attacks on religious minorities in Pakistan.

During the week of International Blasphemy Rights Day, show your solidarity with those with the courage to speak out, and stand in defiance of those who would silence them.

Starting today, Monday, visit CFI’s Campaign for Free Expression, and keep coming back each day this week. There you’ll find new action items for getting involved in the fight for free expression, and for bringing more allies into that fight. On Friday, we’ll announce something very special for International Blasphemy Rights Day.

These are the themes for each day of this week:

  • Today, Sept 26: Put Blasphemy on the 2016 Campaign Radar
  • Tuesday, Sept 27: Get Educated
  • Wednesday, Sept 28: Get the Word Out
  • Thursday, Sept 29: Take Action
  • Friday, Sept 30 – International Blasphemy Rights Day: Save Lives

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A fox and a hedgehog walk into a gender neutral restroom

Sep 25th, 2016 5:02 pm | By

Seen on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/780158557786210304

Newt Gingrich: Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check. Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change

Popehat: A former professor of history, reduced to sneering at knowledge of facts. How dignified.

Furthermore, this “one big thing: we need change” item – come on. We always “need change.” There are always countless things large and small that need alteration, so saying that is empty. Of course we need change; that’s not one big thing, it’s just a pointless truism.

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Tell Jibril to bring me some cashews

Sep 25th, 2016 3:59 pm | By

In August the Clarion Project (a contentious source) published the cartoon that Nahed Hattar posted on Facebook, with a translation of the dialogue:

The cartoon is translated below by Clarion Project Arabic Affairs Analyst Anwar el-Iraqi.

The allegedly sacrilegious cartoon. (Photo: Nahed Hattar)

 

In Green: In paradise…

Allah: “May your evening be joyous, Abu Saleh, do you need anything?”

Jihadist: “Yes Lord, bring me the glass of wine from other there and tell Jibril [the Angel Gabriel] to bring me some cashews. After that send me an eternal servant to clean the floor and take the empty plates with you.”

Jihadist continues: “Don’t forget to put a door on the tent so that you knock before you enter next time, your gloriousness.”

He was being prosecuted for that. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

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Women’s bodies as community property

Sep 25th, 2016 11:52 am | By

Paul blogs Katha Pollitt’s conversation with Annie Laurie Gaylor:

“We have to start talking about abortion as a normal part of women’s lives,” Pollitt told us. “It always has been.” And in fact, even religions have not been, and are not always, tied to the notion that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a full person. She talked about the “wiggle room” that Southern Baptists allow for abortion, and how in Judaism, the woman is the “first person” of priority when there is a question of primacy.

A major stumbling block when it comes to abortion is the ingrained perception of women’s bodies as somehow being community property. Part of this is exacerbated by what Pollitt called the “baby-fication” of the fetus, treating a glob of cells like it’s a cute little infant in a onesie. But more to the point, the problem is that much of society views the woman’s body as violable.

Violable, judgeable, open to criticism and grading – just plain public in every way. The whole woman, at the same time, is profoundly unimportant and negligible. She’s the “and his wife” in newspaper headlines about awards she won along with her husband. She plays the bit part, often with no dialogue. She does not count – therefore her wishes about what happens to her body are entirely beside the point.

She brought up the fact that Christopher Hitchens had expressed his opposition to abortion, saying that to end a pregnancy must be a societal decision. Exasperated, Pollitt said, “Is society going to die in childbirth?”

Is society going to be flattened by exhaustion for the first trimester? Is it going to nurse the baby? Is it going to raise the child?

Also at the conference was Kristine Kruszelnicki, an anti-abortion activist who had a table there.

She’s an anti-abortion atheist. “Prolife” is an obnoxious and dishonest label for opposition to abortion. People who support abortion rights are not “antilife” so “prolife” is a dishonest way of framing the opposition.

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For sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam

Sep 25th, 2016 10:45 am | By

Terrible news:

A prominent Jordanian writer, who was on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam, has been shot dead outside a court in Amman where he was due to appear.

Nahed Hattar, 56, was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam after posting the cartoon on Facebook this year.

The cartoon, entitled The God of Daesh (Isis), depicted an Isis militant sitting next to two women and asking God to bring him a drink.

Hattar was arrested in August and released on bail early this month. On Sunday, he was shot in the head three times as he arrived for a hearing.

Because he shared a cartoon deemed “offensive” to Islam – to Islam, which is not a person and so cannot be offended. For sharing a cartoon on Facebook he was prosecuted and also murdered.

Saad Hattar, a cousin of the victim, said: “Nahed was accompanied with two brothers and a friend when he was shot. The brothers and the friend chased the killer and caught him and handed him over to the police.”

He said the family held Jordan’s prime minister, Hani al-Mulki, responsible for Hattar’s death. “The prime minister was the first one who incited against Nahed when he ordered his arrest and put him on trial for sharing the cartoon, and that ignited the public against him and led to his killing.”

Much like the way the government of Bangladesh keeps saying how terrible atheists are, thus igniting the public against them and encouraging all these murders.

In a statement, the family called on the government to hold accountable all those who had incited violence against Hattar. “Many fanatics wrote on social media calling for his killing and lynching, and the government did nothing against them,” they said.

The government prosecuted him for a cartoon dissing a fundamentalist form of a religion, and did nothing about people inciting murder.

Hattar had insisted that he had not meant to insult Islam by posting the cartoon, but wanted to expose how Isis “envisions God and heaven”. He accused his Islamist opponents of using the cartoon to settle scores with him.

A controversial figure on the left of Jordanian politics, Hattar has faced charges before, including for insulting the country’s king, Abdullah II. He has also been a prominent supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and advocated depriving Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their legal and civil rights.

Those last items seem dubious, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered.

Bonya Ahmed, again.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


Guest post: A fistful of cash in one hand and the leash of the university administration in the other

Sep 24th, 2016 7:32 pm | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on If not at a Center for Ethics, then where?

The school where I did my masters slipped in my mind when they caved to the demand of a donor that they censor an art exhibit. Students being told their art couldn’t be hung because it offended someone who walked through the building with their nose in the air, holding a fistful of cash in one hand and the leash of the university administration in the other. What lessons do those students learn? They learn that they will need to conform to a lifeless, commercial art if they want the chance to be seen, to work in the field they love.

I watched our local community theatre rewriting a play to take out the parts they worried would offend the local population. I sometimes catch myself hesitating in writing my own plays, wondering, if I write this, will anyone ever put it on? When I catch myself doing that, I slap myself on the wrist, go get a cup of hot coffee, roll up my sleeves, and write what I think needs to be written. Someday I may find someone with guts enough to tackle my women of the Bible series, or my piece that spits in the eye of our local masters of the universe.

And when I teach my class, I say the word “evolution” loud and proud. I refuse to go through life with my head down just because some donor doesn’t think we should teach actual science in the science classes. I hope I have the guts to continue to do that if they threaten to fire me just a few years before I am eligible to retire.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog