From A Mighty Girl:

Happy 62nd birthday to Ruby Bridges! As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her.

One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who served on her escort team, recalls Bridges’ courage in the face of such hatred: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her.”

Once Ruby entered the school, she discovered that it was devoid of children because they had all been removed by their parents due to her presence. The only teacher willing to have Ruby as a student was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents’ refusal to have their children share a classroom with a black child.

Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father’s job loss due to his family’s role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges’ inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.

The BHA’s Stephen Evans on the “faith” schools issue.

Theresa May confirmed today that the government plans to capitulate to the demands of religious groups by relaxing admissions rules for faith-based academies, allowing them to select all of their pupils along religious lines.

It’s hard to think of a more regressive policy than the facilitation of greater religious segregation of children and young people in our education system.

And what are we to make of the government’s warnings about schoolchildren having little or no understanding of others, when their policies seem destined to exacerbate exactly that? Only last year the schools minister Lord Nash said the government had “no plans to review the 50% limit for faith-based admissions to free schools”, describing the cap as “an important way of supporting these schools to be inclusive and to meet the needs of a broad mix of families”. So what changed?

Well the PM changed, for a start, but Evans cites the fact that more school places are needed and “free schools” are seen as part of the solution.

The success of free schools policy very much relies on school sponsors coming forward – and until now the Catholic Church has been reluctant to do so, rejecting limitations on the extent to which it can discriminate against non-Catholics. It insists that the public money it receives to run schools should be spent on providing schools to serve only people of the Catholic faith.

Here’s the thing, though, education is one thing and indoctrination is another. Good education, properly understood, is fundamentally opposed to indoctrination. Schools should not be Catholic or Islamic or Lutheran any more than they should be Nazi or SWP.

It’s clear that this latest proposal to relax admission arrangements follows relentless lobbying from religious organisations of the government to remove the 50% cap. But by rushing to satisfy the demands of faith-based education providers, the government risks recklessly neglecting the civic purpose of state education – which surely includes preparing children for their role as equal citizens of a multicultural, religiously diverse liberal democracy.

Not just the civic purpose. The government even more risks neglecting the intellectual purpose of state education.

The British Humanist Association:

New Government plans announced today are very serious – and we need to mobilise against them.

Theresa May’s plans entail removing the current cap on religious discrimination in English schools so that new schools can discriminate by religion in 100% of places.

This is a direct result of lobbying from the Catholic Church, whose policy has been against any requirement for Catholic pupils to mix with those of other faiths and no faith.

But the evidence is crystal clear that discrimination by religion compounds social selection and leads to segregation by class, race, and even gender in schools across the country. More discrimination of this sort serves no one’s agenda but those of religious leaders – and it threatens to undermine integration in our communities.

We have to act quickly and we need your support to act decisively. Joining the BHA adds to our weight as a campaigning organisation and fund us to do more to stop these plans. Please, will you join us? The link to do so is humanism.org.uk/join. Thank you.

Well I’ll be damned – the Obama admin has paused the construction of the Lake Oahe section of that North Dakota pipeline.

The Obama administration said it would not authorize construction on a critical stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline, handing a significant victory to the Indian tribe fighting the project the same day the group lost a court battle.

The administration said construction would halt until it can do more environmental assessments.

The Department of Justice, the Army and the Interior Department jointly announced that construction would pause on the pipeline near North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, a major water source on the Missouri River for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The agencies will now decide whether they need to reconsider permitting decisions for the pipeline under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The Army will move expeditiously to make this determination, as everyone involved — including the pipeline company and its workers — deserves a clear and timely resolution,” the agencies said in a statement. “In the interim, we request that the pipeline company voluntarily pause all construction activity within 20 miles east or west of Lake Oahe.”

The Lake Oahe crossing was a major concern for the tribe, which worries about the impact a leak in the pipeline would have on the lake.

In the light of the Flint disaster maybe we should be more careful with people’s water supplies, yes even people who aren’t rich and powerful and gleaming-white.

A federal judge Friday denied the tribe’s request to halt construction on the 1,170-mile pipeline. The administration’s decision came shortly after that decision.

The tribe had sued over the Army Corps’ approval of the project under a historic preservation law, but the judge ruled that regulators had acted properly when issuing permitting for the project.

Despite the ruling, the agencies said, “important issues raised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other tribal nations and their members regarding the Dakota Access pipeline specifically, and pipeline-related decision-making generally, remain.”

You don’t see that happen every day – agencies actually paying attention to concerns and protests.

Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, hailed the decision, and vowed to continue fighting against the project.

“I want to take a moment and reflect on this historic moment in Indian Country,” Archambault said in a statement. “But I know that our work is not done. We need to to permanently protect our sacred sites and our water. There are areas on the construction route that do not fall within federal jurisdiction, so we will continue to fight.”

Let’s do this kind of thing more often.

And now Facebook has admitted it was being ridiculous.

On Friday, following widespread criticisms from news organizations and media experts across the globe, Facebook reversed its decision, saying in a statement to the Guardian: “After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case. An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our Community Standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”

The statement continued: “Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed.”

It said it plans to do better in future.

Facebook v Norway, part 2.

Facebook has deleted a post by the Norwegian prime minister in an escalating row over the website’s decision to remove content featuring the Pulitzer-prize winning “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam war.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or swear or question one’s grip on reality.

Erna Solberg, the Conservative prime minister, called on Facebook to “review its editing policy” after it deleted her post voicing support for a Norwegian newspaper that had fallen foul of the social media giant’s guidelines.

Solberg was one of a string of Norwegian politicians who shared the iconic image after Facebook deleted a post from Tom Egeland, a writer who had included the Nick Ut picture as one of seven photographs he said had “changed the history of warfare”.

But Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t take any crap from Scandinavian prime ministers.

In her intervention on Friday, the Norwegian prime minister wrote that the photograph, entitled The Terror of War and featuring the naked nine-year-old Kim Phúc running away from a napalm attack, had “shaped world history”.

Solberg added: “I appreciate the work Facebook and other media do to stop content and pictures showing abuse and violence … But Facebook is wrong when they censor such images.”

The Guardian asked her what she thought of Facebook’s deletion of her post. She said, probably sardonically, at least we have to give them credit for not discriminating. Yes it’s very egalitarian, but on the other hand not discriminating between child porn and the photo of Kim Phúc is not the right kind of non-discrimination.

Now I have to go post that photo on Facebook.

Oh, Zuckerberg.

The Guardian headline: Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes ‘napalm girl’ post

Yes that sounds like Facebook. Remember the time there was that group posting photos of an allegedly gay man being burned alive, and Facebook kept telling us (and many others) it didn’t violate Facebook’s community standards? But it’s well known that photos of women nursing infants do violate those standards.

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco reports:

Norway’s largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company’s decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as “the world’s most powerful editor”.

Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Aftenposten, accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly “abusing your power” over the social media site that has become a lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world, writing, “I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.”

“I am worried that the world’s most important medium is limiting freedom instead of trying to extend it, and that this occasionally happens in an authoritarian way,” he added.

The controversy stems from Facebook’s decision to delete a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured The Terror of War, a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut that showed children – including the naked 9-year-old Kim Phúc – running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Egeland’s post discussed “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare” – a group to which the “napalm girl” image certainly belongs.

You know the photo of course.

Nick Ut/AP

But it gets worse.

Egeland was subsequently suspended from Facebook. When Aftenposten reported on the suspension – using the same photograph in its article, which was then shared on the publication’s Facebook page – the newspaper received a message from Facebook asking it to “either remove or pixelize” the photograph.

You know someone who gets suspended from Facebook regularly? Meaning often? Maryam, that’s who. Maryam Namazie, human rights activist.

In his open letter, Hansen points out that Facebook’s decision to delete the photograph reveals a troubling inability to “distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs”, as well as an unwillingness to “allow[ing] space for good judgement”.

“Even though I am editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper, I have to realize that you are restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility,” he wrote. “I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly.”

Hansen goes on to argue that rather than fulfill its mission statement to “make the world more open and connected”, such editorial decisions “will simply promote stupidity and fail to bring human beings closer to each other”.

…

In his open letter, Hansen points out that the types of decision Facebook makes about what kind of content is promoted, tolerated, or banned – whether it makes those decisions algorithmically or not – are functionally editorial.

“The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case,” he wrote. “This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California.”

“Editors cannot live with you, Mark, as a master editor.”

Speaking in Rome last month, Zuckerberg addressed the question of Facebook’s role in the news media and appeared to downplay his editorial responsibilities.

“We are a tech company, not a media company,” he said. “The world needs news companies, but also technology platforms, like what we do, and we take our role in this very seriously.”

Yes, Facebook is a platform, not a “media company” – it aggregates and shares content as opposed to creating it. But that’s still an editorial thing to do, and they do edit, so they need to edit well instead of badly.

Siri Hustvedt on the subtle (I don’t think it’s all that subtle myself) misogyny of Matt Lauer’s performance in those back to back “interviews” with Clinton and Trump.

I am interested in the far more subtle variation of the misogyny illness, the one that lurks behind phrases such as “even-handed” and “fair-minded,” that low-grade fever that caused Matt Lauer to continually interrupt Hillary Clinton’s sharp, specific answers to his questions in the Commander in Chief Forum on NBC (thank god Clinton stood up and ignored him), and which also prompted him to allow Donald Trump to ramble on in incoherent sentence fragments about secret plans for defeating ISIS in thirty days, as if such nonsense were serious political discourse. Would our “fair-minded” journalist have treated a male candidate the way he treated Hillary Clinton? I ask you to search your souls, men and women alike. My answer is no.

And isn’t it interesting that after all these decades of talking about this shit, professional media types like Matt Lauer (who is paid 20 million dollars a year for his professionalism) still don’t bother to watch for that kind of thing, and correct it? It’s certainly interesting to me.

It fascinates me that although few Democrats would deny that deep-seated prejudices against women exist in our culture, the sexism that has dogged Hillary Clinton her entire career, the absurd scrutiny of her hair and clothing and cleavage, has not elicited the outrage one might expect in the popular media, despite the fact that feminist sites on the Internet have kept a scrupulous record of the ongoing petty assaults on Secretary Clinton. Matt Lauer has done the country a service, and I thank him for it. Interrupting women, treating them with condescension and disdain are symptoms of the low-grade infection caused by the virus that has afflicted millions of people in the United States, and not only in red states. Watching it play out on national television caused countless women and men to express justifiable fury. There is no pill for the virus. What is required of every one of us is self-examination and a high degree of reflective consciousness about who we are as citizens of the United States and who we want to be in the future.

But this is the United States in which Donald Trump is a candidate for president. We’re doomed.

Via a friend on Facebook –

Samantha Rea says there was the Twitter lark about #IfMenHadPeriods and then there was the inevitable ridiculous reaction to same.

It was a bit of fun, but not everyone thought so. One Twitter user wrote, “While this highly cisnormative hashtag is trending, I want to remind everyone that trans men do exist + some have periods.” Another complained, “Men do have periods. Not every man is cis and it’s disgusting for people to still be assuming that they are.” There were numerous other tweets along these lines.

I’m sorry, Social Justice Warriors, but here’s the science bit: Men don’t have periods – women do. That’s biology. It doesn’t matter how we identify, what we wear, who we sleep with, or which pronouns we prefer – our reproductive organs simply don’t care.

Some people have decided that’s not how we define “women” and “men” any more. They’ve decided it no longer is to do with reproductive organs, it’s to do with declaration. Period. If you say you’re a man you’re a man, therefore menstruation isn’t something only women do any more. It used to was, but now we know so much better. How? People on Twitter telling us so.

You cannot choose your sex, and neither can you change it. Gender is a set of stereotypes associated with each sex. They’re society’s ideas about how men and women should behave, and how they should appear. A woman may prefer the stereotypes associated with being male, but identifying as a man won’t stop her getting pregnant, and nor will it necessarily stop men from treating her as a woman, in the very ways she wishes they wouldn’t.

In Canada, also in May this year, a woman who identifies as a transgender man was sexually assaulted by a taxi driver. The victim of the assault has been quoted as saying: “I think he just didn’t care that I was a trans man… he still continued to call me a woman even though I had explicitly told him I was a male and I had been transitioning for a while.” It’s almost as if the victim thinks that identifying as male gives her an opt-out from sexual assault, while other women are fair game for it. But it didn’t matter how she identified, the taxi driver still recognised her as a woman, and he still sexually assaulted her.

Child abuse in Toronto:

When music class begins this week at Toronto’s Donwood Park elementary school, Mohammad Nouman Dasu will send a family member to collect his three young children. They will go home for an hour rather than sing and play instruments – a mandatory part of the Ontario curriculum he believes violates his Muslim faith.

The school tried to accommodate the religious fanatic, but nothing would do – music has to be banned from his children’s lives entirely.

According to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail, some parents insist they cannot allow their children to be in the same room where musical instruments are being played. Mr. Dasu, a Koran teacher who sometimes leads prayers at Scarborough’s Jame Abu Bakr Siddique mosque, says he has led the fight on behalf of parents. He has consulted with national Islamic bodies, and requested a letter from the leader of his mosque.

“We here believe that music is haram [forbidden]. We can neither listen to it, nor can we play a role in it,” said the mosque’s imam, Kasim Ingar.

That’s one of religion’s more disgusting tricks – declaring beautiful aspects of life and of human culture Forbidden. This man’s unfortunate children are to be prevented from sharing the joys of music, because it’s Forbidden.

Conceding that Muslims have to adjust when they send their kids to public school, he suggested that some matters, such as teaching music, are beyond debate.

“We do not compromise with anyone on the clear-cut orders and principles conveyed by the Prophet,” said Mr. Ingar, who also leads the Scarborough Muslim Association.

That’s your biggest mistake right there – refusing to rethink particulars, and just mandating a mindless, slavish, obedient Rule instead. Humans who forbid themselves to rethink particulars are dangerous.

Yesterday evening in Dublin about 200 people showed up to protest outside that “clinic” that tells women lies about abortion.

In a report for The Times (Ireland edition), reporters Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz secretly recorded a consultation in the clinic between a staff member and a woman seeking advice on a crisis pregnancy.

It is alleged a staff member at the Women’s Centre, on Berkeley Street in Dublin 7, advised the woman that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer and that women who have had abortions are “known to neglect their children”.

It’s alleged and it’s on video that we can all look at.

Protesters – some carrying placards, others wearing high-vis clothing – began to gather outside the centre at around 6.30pm. The centre is located next door to Reproductive Choices, an advice clinic aligned to the Marie Stopes organisation.

AAA-PBP TD Bríd Smith and a number of other speakers addressed the demonstration. Many protesters wore ‘Repeal the 8th’ t-shirts and sweatshirts.

Rónán Duffy (who wrote this article) tweeted photos:

Crowd of about 150-200 protesters outside Dublin centre filmed providing false information on abortion pic.twitter.com/LXSG46mPLu

— Rónán Duffy (@ronanduffy_) September 7, 2016

He says this priest walked past twice.

Ireland still priest-ridden.