CNN reports on Vietnamese girls trafficked into China to be rape-married.

The villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for human traffickers. Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged, then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. Young Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the gender ratio.

To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides.

Of course, “valuable commodity” doesn’t mean “to be respected and well treated”; it means “to be paid a high price for.” The money goes to the pimp, and the “bride” enters a life of slavery.

Nguyen was just 16 when a friend’s boyfriend drugged her and smuggled her into China. She tried to resist a forced marriage. For three months, she refused, even though her traffickers beat her, withheld food and threatened to kill her, she says. Finally, she relented. She says her husband was kind to her, but she never stopped missing her family in Vietnam.

“My desire to go home was indescribable,” Nguyen said. “I agreed to marry the man but I could not stay with a stranger without any feelings for him.”

When her mother-in-law realized Lan was never going to warm to the marriage, the family returned her to the traffickers. They got their money back, Nguyen says, after which she was forced into a second marriage.

Heads they win, tails she loses.

The good news is, China is co-operating with Viet Nam in trying to stop the trafficking.

During CNN’s trip to the border, the government called and told us the police had just rescued five girls as they were about to cross the border with a trafficker. We met the girls, who are just 14 years old. They said they were promised $600 to go to work in China by a neighbor from the same village. They didn’t tell their parents they were going. The neighbor is now under arrest.

The Vietnamese police are sometimes able to rescue women even after they have crossed into China, by enlisting the help of Chinese authorities. Nguyen Tuong Long, the head of the government’s social vice prevention department in Lao Cai, says last year they rescued and returned 109 Vietnamese trafficking victims.

“Because of cooperation between the Vietnamese and the Chinese police, we have found and caught trafficking rings,” Nguyen says. “We’ve found women far inside China, at brothels where they’re forced to become sex workers.”

Slaves. Sex slaves, not sex workers. But it’s good about the trafficking rings.

H/t Freemage

Human Rights Watch did a big report in 2007 on Nicaragua’s total ban on abortions, including those to save the woman’s life, and its predictable results.

Nicaragua is one of only three countries in the world to maintain a blanket ban on abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.[1]Such blanket abortion bans are incompatible with international human rights obligations, including obligations on the rights to life, health, and non-discrimination. Their imposition can, and most often does, have serious effects on the lives and health of women and girls.

Nicaragua’s blanket ban on abortion was initially enacted in November 2006 and reaffirmed in September 2007, and includes a ban on previously-legal therapeutic abortions.[2]It allows for prison sentences for doctors who carry out abortions under any circumstances-even to save a pregnant woman’s life-and on women who seek abortions, again, regardless of the reason. Although it appears that actual prosecutions are rare, the ban has very real consequences that fall into three main categories:

1. Denial of access to life- or health-saving abortion services;
2. Denial or delay in access to other obstetric emergency care; and
3. A pronounced fear of seeking treatment for obstetric emergencies.

The net result has been avoidable deaths.

It’s hard to think of a more thorough dismissal of women as people than this – a law forbidding hospitals and doctors to save the lives of women if their pregnancies are killing them.

At that point there had been no prosecutions that HRW or its informants knew of, but the fear of prosecution was having a terrible effect all the same.

It is impossible to ascertain how many women the blanket ban has prevented from accessing safe therapeutic abortion services and with what effect. Nicaragua’s Health Ministry officials told Human Rights Watch that they did not have any official documentation of the effects of the blanket ban and no plans for gathering such documentation.[18]

A medical doctor at a large public hospital in Managua, however, testified to one case:

Here [at this hospital] we have had women who have died. For example, [name withheld] came here and had an ultrasound. It was clear that she needed a therapeutic abortion. No one wanted to carry out the abortion because the fetus was still alive. The woman was here two days without treatment until she expulsed the fetus on her own. And by then she was already in septic shock and died five days later. That was in March 2007.[19]

Her life doesn’t matter, apparently.

Valerie Tarico has an extraordinary essay about what’s really behind the idea of “fetal personhood.”

The notion that life begins at conception is a variation on a very ancient cultural theme: penis worship.

I’m slow sometimes, but after years of writing about abortion rights it finally occurred to me that “life begins at conception” is one more version of a multi-millennial infatuation with the penis as symbol and proof that manliness is next to godliness.

Because it’s magic.

What creates the wonder of a new person? Forget about the maturation of germ cells, and the nine-month labor of a woman’s body, and painstaking parental nurture. It’s a sperm, a penile projectile shot forth by the ultimate organ of demi-divinity. Sperm penetrates egg and voila! A person! A new soul! All the extraordinary and unique value we accord to human life is created instantaneously.

Ahahahahaha – so it is. One touch of the penis and presto, a miraculous human being is formed.

They also insisted that a man’s magic wand could permanently transform a female from one kind of being to another, from a prized “virgin” into a worthless “whore.” In medieval Catholicism’s recipe for sexual hang-ups, the prior touch of a penis (or lack thereof) became the most defining aspect of a woman’s identity, economic value, and moral virtue. Penis penetrates female and voila! No longer a whole person! The same magic wand that made her valuable could also do the reverse.

Fundamentalists who are anchored to the Iron Age by sacred texts and patriarchal traditions still hold to this archaic view, though they may use updated terms like “licked lollypop” or “chewed gum”—and some do offer second chances through “born-again virginity.”

But at least in the West, millennials finally are catching on to how ridiculous the whole virginity thing is. As one Facebook meme put it recently, “I don’t believe in virginity. Why? Because nobody’s penis is important enough to change any part of my identity.”

Now that is the way to talk about identity.

Men read hate-tweets sent to two women sports reporters.

[W]ith its #MoreThanMean campaign, the Just Not Sports podcast is trying to make people understand that online harassment is very real, and very harmful.

This powerful PSA video features male volunteers reading hateful tweets (which they didn’t write) that have been sent to two Chicago-area women sports personalities, Sarah Spain, a columnist and radio host with ESPN, and Julie DiCaro, an update anchor for WSCR-AM 670 The Score and writer at the Cauldron.

The women had seen all the tweets before, but the men — who thought they were being recruited for a much more light-hearted, Jimmy Kimmel-style “mean Tweets” segment — had no idea what was coming.

Do they find it painful? They seem to…or maybe they just find it awkward, with the women sitting right in front of them.

The men’s faces fall, horrified and embarrassed. They stumble and struggle to continue. Most of them do, eventually, reluctantly, without looking the women in the eyes, because this is what they agreed to do for the video. A few of them just have to stop.

They apologize — for themselves, to their mothers, on behalf of the entire male gender.

The video concludes with the caption: “We wouldn’t say it to their faces. So let’s not type it.”

Online harassment of journalists and commentators falls hardest on women and people of color. It’s especially true for those who write about controversial topics.

But sometimes all a woman has to do to invite torrents of online hate is to remind people that she’s a woman — either by writing specifically about “women’s issues,” or by writing about topics, like sports, that some people don’t seem to think women should have opinions about.

The video is tough to watch. Which makes it a little easier to imagine how tough it is to read these kinds of messages every day.

Well if we don’t like it we can just stop being journalists and commentators, bloggers and essayists, writers and critics.

Alabama fanatics hope to get Alabama to emulate El Salvador in banning all abortions without exception, meaning even the ones that would save a woman’s life. Sorry, bitch, your life isn’t worth saving.

A co-sponsor of the bill, State Representative Jack W. Williams of Mobile, says the Personhood Amendment would allow Alabama voters to answer the question of whether or not life begins at conception through a referendum vote on the November ballot. If enacted as is, Williams says the bill will totally ban abortion at any time during pregnancy with no exceptions.

Ahem. Life is not the same thing as personhood.. The vast majority of life is not a person. No one disputes that fetuses are alive.

If the bill becomes law the Republican lawmaker from Mobile says Alabama would be the first state in the nation to enact a total ban on abortions.

“Oh I feel very personally. I’m all against abortion completely. I’ve lost a daughter myself I know how precious life is. I just don’t see how anyone can at four months abort a child and throw it in the garbage can when we’ll spend $1 million on a 4 1/2 month old preemie,” said Williams.

Well as long as he feels it personally, there’s no more to be said. Some guy’s feeling is all that counts.

Nick Cohen said yesterday “I told you so you fucking fools.” He did, yes. Today his article on identity politics appeared at Standpoint.

Everyone everywhere apologises to everyone else. Everyone demands the banning of everyone else. Societies where citizens bite their tongues and retract honestly-meant statements are neither particularly free nor particularly happy. And I don’t think our one will last.

Well racism can be honestly-meant, as can antisemitism. Some statements merit retraction. But I take Nick to mean that there’s a limit you fucking fools, and I agree with him there.

He points out the (absurd) absence of class in most identity check lists, and that an ex-miner with black lung disease is not obviously more privileged than say Sheryl Sandberg or Robert Mugabe. And then there’s the issue of specifics.

There is a distinction between believing in the value of anti-racism, say, or women’s rights, and defending a marginalised group regardless of what those who purport to speak for it say or do. Bertrand Russell’s “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed” floors you if you cannot grasp it.

This is a real issue. I think much of the friction at the corner between feminism and trans activism is because of the tragic accident that a lot of Twitter trans activists happen to be assholes. It’s not because they’re trans, it’s because they’re assholes. You can be a disabled black lesbian and be a narcissistic bullying shit. In a way it’s a form of disprivilege to be a shit, but it’s also an oppression of all of us who encounter the shit.

What if the oppressed are not virtuous? What if a favoured group is the victim of racism one moment but sexist and homophobic the next? What if the rainbow coalition isn’t a coalition at all, but a collection of people of wildly different interests? What happens, in other words, when the colours of the rainbow clash?

The refusal to stick to principle and be against racism whoever the racist is, or be in favour of women’s rights regardless of whether the woman is white, brown or black, accounts for the hysteria on today’s middle-class Left. Feminists are banned as “whorephobes” or “transphobes”. Liberal Asians are derided as “house Muslims” and “native informants”. Jews are baited as “Zios”. Gay men are told they no longer suffer from the right kind of oppression.

Lesbians are hassled about the “cotton ceiling.”

There was a channel 4 program recently that discussed the popularity of reactionary views on women, gay rights, free speech and secularism among British Muslims, and ended with my friend Elham Manea.

This programme would not have been broadcast until recently because of fears of encouraging white racism. It is not an entirely disreputable way to think, even though it contradicts the journalistic duty to tell it like it is. I have good Muslim friends who are thoroughly secular but fear that any discussion of religious fanaticism will just encourage their white enemies.

Against them Channel 4 gave us Elham Manea, a Swiss Yemeni academic who put the case against turning a blind eye better than I ever could. She did not think it politically correct to tolerate cultures where husbands could tell wives, “If you don’t behave in a way that suits me, I will simply get another woman. If you get sick, I will get another woman. If you can’t have children, I’ll get another woman.” Or to allow sharia courts which have a “Taliban” interpretation of Islam to impose their verdicts on British citizens.

It is a sign of how corrupt our culture has become that it thinks it “liberal” to tolerate the oppression that shocks Manea and to denounce her and men and women like her as “Islamophobes”. The day will come when that corruption will sink it. Let us hope it is soon.

The past couple of days may have brought it a little closer.

And speaking of Bradford – let’s also speak of Liverpool. Suzanne Moore is one of many who wrote about the ugly class prejudice in the lies told about the Hillsborough disaster.

Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see. Those who died did not die because they were “animals” or drinking too much or behaving badly. They were unlawfully killed. Their families did not grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally incontinent or full of working-class mawkishness; they grieved because they lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances. Still, to read the details of how these people died tightens my stomach. Of the 96 who died, 37 were teenagers. The reality is that the dead were all sorts of people from different backgrounds. But very quickly they became no longer individuals but part of a mob who somehow deserved this awful fate. As life was squeezed out of them, then too their humanity was taken from them by the police, by politicians and parts of the press.

The lies the police told to cover up the way they botched their job that day was that the people who died were a drunken mob who crashed through a gate without tickets. The reality is that the officer in charge ordered the gate opened and then did nothing to direct traffic to the sides where there was space.

It must be somewhat galling for those in power now to have to accept this ruling, for they do not hide their class contempt either. They have elevated it to actual policy: all schools must be modelled on the schools they went to, but with fewer resources. All hospitals must be run to make a profit. Taxes are for the little people. Those who don’t “get on” have only themselves to blame. An increasing range of theories come into play about why poor people are poor, which is never to do with lack of money but lack of civility. Or perhaps there is something wrong with their actual brains! Imagery of working-class people invariably invokes moral deprivation by showing a tendency to excess.

The Guardian’s 11 minute video is well worth watching.

In the Independent, Ben Judah says that to understand Naz Shah and the things she said you have to understand Bradford.

Because Naz Shah, and everything she said, is normal politics in Bradford.

Had Britain a writer as dark and politically incorrect as Michel Houellebecq, the French author of the dystopian novel Submission, in which France converts to Islam, he would, without doubt, set his first novel in Bradford. This would be his dystopian plot.

Along comes a by-election. A dark and unknowable force with a Dickensian name – Mister Galloway – descends on the unsuspecting, segregated, depressed Northern town. Suddenly he is everywhere, the white Scotsman, and the large and miserable Muslim population apparently think that by voting for him – a total outsider – they can change the course of conflict in the Middle East.

And yet it’s not a dystopian plot but reality.

George Galloway became Bradford West’s MP in 2012. By the time I started visiting the town in 2015, as a reporter for Jewish magazine Tablet, he had made local politics about Palestine. I contacted all the candidates vying to replace him. Most had photos exhibiting themselves at pro-Palestine rallies. One Labour hopeful responded, rather bizarrely, to my request for an interview with a video of herself speaking at a pro-Palestine rally. Naz Shah herself, whom I contacted over Twitter, stopped responding to me when I explained Tablet was a Jewish publication.

Within months, every local candidate was imitating the man in the fedora. Across town, in the constituency of Bradford East, the Liberal Democrat[ic] MP David Ward was using Twitter to question how long the “apartheid state of Israel” could last, and tweeting that he too would probably “fire a rocket” if he lived in Gaza. Later, he declared himself “#JeSuis #Palestinian” in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks on a kosher supermarket, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Naz Shah didn’t like Galloway, Ben Judah goes on, but he shaped her, as he shaped all other Bradford politicians.

When it comes to anti-Semitic comments, Shah is not even the worst offender. In 2014, former councillor Istiaq Ahmed, who works at the charity Shah chairs, posted on social media “Is Kosher slaughter in the Eternal Jew accurate?” – a link to an anti-Semitic propaganda movie originally commissioned by Goebbels. The YouTube channel that hosted it? ”HitlerMyFuhrer”.

The former Lord Mayor of Bradford Khadim Hussain commented on Facebook that Israel was “no doubt” arming Isis, and shared another Facebook post that complained that the deaths of millions of Africans are not taught in schools but “your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler”. The list goes on and on.

It’s a popular trope that anti-Zionism must not be confused with antisemitism, but by the same token, Jews must not be confused with Zionists. It is very far from the case that the six million Jews Hitler killed were all Zionists.

A horrifying observation by Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham:

6 people have been shot by toddlers since last Thursday.

Five of the six are dead.

Via Science Moms:

Finally!!

41,000 Doctors to Join Lawsuit Against Catholic Hospital Over Denial of Care

It’s about fucking time.

Religious directives, written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, forbid doctors at Catholic facilities [to provide] birth control and [perform] common reproductive health procedures.

Even when that could mean the death of the woman. An incomplete miscarriage with its risk of deadly infection? Too bad, must wait until there is no fetal pulse. If the woman develops a raging infection before the pulse stops, that’s just too damn bad, according to the loathsome USCCB. Bishops have ordered hospitals and medical conglomerates not to perform abortions in such circumstances. Not requested, not begged, but ordered.

California’s largest medical association will join a lawsuit against the state’s largest hospital system for using religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to patients.

The 41,000-member California Medical Association (CMA) filed a motion Wednesday in state Superior Court to join an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit against the Catholic hospital chain Dignity Health, the fifth largest health-care system in the country.

Oh yeah – that’s fantastic news. I’ve been waiting for that to happen.

The ACLU lawsuit stems from the case of a Dignity Health patient who was denied a tubal ligation. The patient’s physician agreed to perform the procedure during her cesarean section, but the hospital refused the doctor’s request, citing religious directives written by Catholic bishops that classify sterilization as “intrinsically evil.”

Notice how grotesque that is. Catholic bishops get to veto a medical decision and the patient’s wishes, because of a stupid empty theological boogieword.

The ACLU of Northern California and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP in December filed the lawsuit on behalf of the patient, Rebecca Chamorro, and Physicians for Reproductive Health.

The plaintiffs argue that forcing doctors to deny basic health care on the basis of religious objections creates a conflict between the medical well-being of patients and the directives of the Catholic hospital system. They also contend that withholding medical care for reasons unrelated to medicine is illegal in California.

Many other states have that Nixon-era exemption, thanks to John Haldeman, a Christian scientist.

Dignity Health operates 29 hospitals across California. Nationally, ten of the 25 largest hospital systems are Catholic sponsored, according to a statement released by the ACLU. One in nine hospital beds is in a Catholic facility.

Which is terrifying. In Seattle they’re all Catholic except for University Hospital.

“Patients and their physicians, not hospital administrators following religious or any other non-medical directives, should be the primary decision-makers in each and every case to ensure each patients’ health care needs are met and the most appropriate, highest quality care is being provided,” Dr. Ruth Haskins, president-elect of the California Medical Association, said in a statement.

Absolutely they should Religion should have nothing to do with it.

How useful: a petition to universities to “Suspend Social Justice Courses” – !

Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist. Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.

Social justice has become a victim of its own good intentions and in the desperate attempt to make the world better for some it is creating a world better for none.  It has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.

To clarify, we are calling for the teaching of social justice courses in universities to be temporarily suspended.  What follows is up for debate, but as it stands now, social justice is causing far more harm than good and it must be halted and reassessed.

This must have been drawn up by someone who spends way too much time on Twitter and therefore thinks the right-wing term of art “Social Justice” (also a left-wing term of art but it’s obviously not being used as such here) is universally understood as such. You have to be pretty Twitter-confined to think a phrase like “social justice is causing far more harm than good” is going to make any sense to most people.

The next line of the petition confirms the isolation of the petitioner:

For more information visit: https://www.youtube.com/user/SargonofAkkad100

Yeahhhhhhhh universities are really going to check out a Sargon of Akkad video in order to decide whether or not to suspend “social justice courses.”

The Independent tells us that the advertising watchdog is going to look into the sexism issue.

The UK’s advertising watchdog has launched an inquiry into the prevalence of negative gender stereotyping in ads. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced they are commissioning new research on the topic and invited members of the public and interested organisations to contact them to share their views on the issue in a bid to gauge public opinion.

In the US that would set off agonized protests about free speech. I have some qualms about the state schooling advertisers on sexism, but I also have massive objections to routinely insulting and belittling sexism in advertising. Competing qualms here.

A spokesperson for the ASA said: “The objectification and sexualisation of women in ads, presenting an idealised or unrealistic body image, the mocking of women and men in non-stereotypical roles, the reinforcement of stereotyped views of gender roles, and gender-specific marketing to children are all issues that have gained considerable public interest.”

And all of that is done to serve the agenda of persuading people to spend money on a product. They should be able to do that without belittling women.

Adverts aimed at children have also subject to criticism. Last year, a study of adverts broadcast on UK television found the majority of adverts for children’s toys are “sexist” and reinforce “narrow and limiting” gender stereotypes.

The study by Let Toys Be Toys followed moves by retailers Toys R Us, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Boots and Sainsbury’s to drop gender-based marketing.

Guy Parker, Chief Executive of the ASA, said: “We’re serious about making sure we’re alive to changing attitudes and behaviours. That’s why we’ve already been taking action to ban ads that we believe reinforce gender stereotypes and are likely to cause serious widespread offence, or harm.”

Do that. Gender stereotypes are useful to no one.

Anyone who wishes to submit evidence or comments on the issue is invited to email gender@asa.org.uk

So now Corbyn has suspended Ken Livingstone. The left is so brilliant at eating itself.

Jeremy Corbyn has denied Labour is in crisis after Ken Livingstone was suspended for comments made defending an MP accused of anti-Semitism.

The party leader said there were “grave concerns” about language used in a BBC interview by the former London mayor.

But he said: “There’s no crisis. Where there is any racism in the party… it will be rooted out.”

MP John Mann, who called Mr Livingstone a “Nazi apologist” in a public confrontation, has been reprimanded.

The Labour MP had been referring to comments Mr Livingstone made about Adolf Hitler.

Comments Livingstone made when he was defending Naz Shah on BBC Radio London and saying he had never heard anyone in the Labour Party say anything anti-Semitic.

He added: “When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

Welllll…in a manner of speaking. He was supporting “get them the fuck out of Germany and out of Europe and far far away to somewhere hot and dry where we can forget about them. Madagascar, Israel, whatever, just get them out of here.” Not really Zionism properly understood.

Labour MP John Mann then accused Mr Livingstone of being a “Nazi apologist” in front of a media scrum as he arrived at Westminster’s media studios.

Asked about the confrontation on the BBC’s Daily Politics, Mr Livingstone said: “He (Mr Mann) went completely over the top… I have had that with John Mann before.”

But Mr Mann stood by his remarks, saying: “He is a Nazi apologist.”

Is he? Or is he more of an anti-Zionism apologist? And are there different flavors of anti-Zionism, some of which are antisemitic?

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his longtime ally Mr Livingstone had been suspended amid “very grave concerns about the language he used in the interview this morning” and would face an investigation by the party.

He added, in an interview with BBC deputy political editor John Pienaar: “Anybody that thinks this party is not cracking down on anti-Semitism is simply wrong. We have suspended where appropriate, we have investigated all cases. We will not tolerate anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever in the party.”

Stephen Law is hosting an energetic discussion on Facebook of the suspension as a free speech issue. I’m not sure it’s a genuine free speech issue, since political parties have to have criteria for membership and thus get to treat some claims as incompatible with party membership. On the other hand Stephen points out that this is also a party factional matter and the Blairites have their agenda too. It’s complicated.

So have some Georgia O’Keefe:

The Red List

The Whitney

The Whitney