This again.

A public post by Amanda Marcotte:

Helpful “socialist” sends me friendly messages to persuade me to vote Sanders. (And probably because he friended me.) Edited to add the‪#‎NotAllSandersVoters‬ caveat. Just not going to let these guys harass me in private, thinking no one will know what they did.

Charles W. Belser

How diod a stupid counter-revolutionary motherfucker like you get on my “friends” list? Don’t you EVER post anything on any of my pages again, you ignorant cunt.

A comment:

This is what I received from Charles W. Belser last Thu 8:48pm
“Go back to sucking Hillary’s cock, bitch and stay off my pages. What will you do when the revolutionaries come for you? Don’t worry about it–you’re just another dried-up menopausal loser. They’ll have no interest in a nothing like you.”

So that’s what people mean by “Bernie Bros.”

Oh no, look out, look out – a popular video game is making it so that players can’t choose the sex of their characters. You know what that means – sometimes a man gets stuck with a female character! Ewwwwww.

Rust is a popular first-person survival video game where you start out completely naked, left to a barren environment to build yourself tools, weapons, and a home as other players try to do the same — and potentially try to kill you and steal your stuff. It’s a tense game, one in which your friends can suddenly turn against you and basically ruin everything you worked for just for their own personal gain.

But it’s not the betrayal and tension that has gamers upset with Rust. Instead, it’s a new feature recently added to the game, which has 500,000 players each week, by developer Garry Newman: Your character’s gender and race are now randomized. So even if you’re a white man in real life, you now may be forced to play a black woman.

Some men aren’t happy. Well of course they’re not! Women are weak and stupid.

Men, particularly white men, are not happy. Newman explained the situation in the Guardian, characterizing the reaction to the change as “extreme”:

For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players. With gender it seems to be more of a geography-free complaint.

Here’s one of the many messages we’ve received from disgruntled male players: “Why won’t you give the player base an option to choose their gender? I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play. Not have some political movement shoved down my throat because you make the connection we can’t choose our gender in reality so let’s make it like that in game too.”

Oh, honey. That’s so touching. Try being a woman sometime, just for a few hours. Check out all the tv shows and movies that have no characters a woman can “have a connection” with. I’m told the same thing applies to most games. Pause for a moment and remember that not all human beings are men. Take your time, we can wait.

[T]hese same complaints from male, white gamers would very likely fall on deaf ears if they were made by another group — by, say, a black, Hispanic, or female gamer. After all, originally, everyone on Rust was forced to play a bald white man — and there was no similar uproar.

Because default male. We get tired of having to create an uproar about every damn thing, so we don’t. So default male goes on default maleing.

Sometimes it just collapses into total absurdity and all one can do is laugh.

Like this ad for takeout fried chicken in Australia for example:

Yes but what does she think of the fried chicken?

Anyway the ad was posted to Twitter and Twitter did what Twitter does do.

The ad was immediately criticized as everything from simply inappropriate to downright misogynistic. One critic even wrote that the ad had “set women back 50 years” according to Australian news site News.com.au.

Possibly a slight exaggeration, given everything else that’s going on, but whatever.

The fried chicken people apologized and deleted the tweet.

“We are very sorry for our earlier tweet on H&S – we didn’t mean to offend and removed it when we realised we’d made an error in judgment,” the company tweeted.

In a statement to News.com.au, the company further explained, “this was a genuine tweet to launch KFC’s new Hot & Spicy chicken products next week. It was not intended to offend and we’ve removed the image.”

Whatever.

The really funny part, to me, is that there are people full of solemn outrage about the apology. It’s the end of free speech and it’s all the fault of feminists or social justice warriors or the next door neighbors, choose one.

A religious group organizes a campaign against [religious?] extremism, and the invited Muslim groups don’t attend.

Ahmadi Muslims in Scotland have launched an anti-extremism campaign following the death of the Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, despite the failure of other prominent Muslims to attend the event.

Representatives of the Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland were invited to attend the launch alongside other faith groups, but the Guardian understands that both sent their apologies at the last minute.

…

The event’s organiser Ahmed Owusu-Konadu said: “We are undertaking this campaign as part of our stand on the rejection of all forms of extremism and as a message of solidarity with all who have been its victims, including Asad Shah, and others in Paris, Turkey, Brussels, Pakistan, Nigeria.”

Abdul Abid, president of the Ahmadiyya community in Scotland, admitted he was disappointed that other Muslim leaders had not attended the launch. Representatives of Glasgow’s Sikh and Jewish communities and the Church of Scotland’s inter-faith group were all present, alongside local politicians, representatives of Police Scotland and Glasgow’s lord provost.

The choice of victims hints that it’s Islamist extremism that the campaign is addressing. It’s sad that representatives of the Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland failed to grab the opportunity to distance their branch of Islam from the Islamist branch.

Abid said: “We are not asking them to stand united in faith with us but to stand united against extremism. If Glasgow Central Mosque is against extremism, they should be here today.”

And you would think they would want to, because why would they want to stand united with Islamists?

Police Scotland are investigating alleged links between the head of religious events at Glasgow Central Mosque and a banned sectarian group in Pakistan. A recent BBC investigation claimed that Sabir Ali was president of Sipah-e-Sahaba, a militant political party that has accepted responsibility for deadly sectarian attacks against Shia Muslims and Ahmadiyya minorities in Pakistan, and was banned by the Home Office in 2001.

Following Shah’s death, Aamer Anwar, one of Scotland’s most outspoken Muslim reformers, helped to broker a unique event where representatives of Sunni, Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistani Christian communities shared a platform for the first time, and vowed to stand shoulder to shoulder against extremism.

At the time, Anwar said: “A very small minority of the community may think it’s OK to meddle in the cesspit of violent extremist politics in Pakistan, but we are united in saying that we do not want to import sectarian violence that has caused so much division and so much bloodshed to our community or to our streets.”

He has since received death threats himself, which are under investigation by the police.

Because life just isn’t fun enough without violence and bloodshed every few days.

Zahira Patel notes that ten years after the murder of Banaz Mahmod honor killings haven’t gone away.

Working in the legal sector has also brought to light for me just how difficult it has become for victims of domestic violence to secure legal aid since the changes introduced by LASPO (The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012), which came into effect in 2013. As a result of these changes, a third of domestic violence victims are unable to provide the required evidence to secure legal aid, according to a Parliamentary watchdog report. Further, in 2014, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) released a damning report which concluded that “only 8 out of 43 forces respond well to domestic violence.” This report was followed by a subsequent investigation last year into the effectiveness of police responses to ‘honour’ based violence. Unsurprisingly, the report concluded that  just 3 of the 43 forces were fully effective in their response, despite the fact “that no force in England and Wales can afford to say: ‘It doesn’t happen here’.”

It is clear: ten years after the murder of Banaz, we are still failing to safeguard victims of abuse and violence. How many more have to die before we demand adequate funding to safeguard all victims?

Well they’re only women, you know.

Joshua Hammer at the Wall Street Journal tells us about a guy in Timbuktu who did a lot to keep the city’s libraries, books and manuscripts out of the hands of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The story begins in April 2012, when [Abdel Kader] Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city. He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.

He has quite a book collection himself.

Mr. Haidara knew that many of the works in the city’s repositories were ancient examples of the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the jihadists, with their intolerance and rigid views of Islam, wanted to destroy. The manuscripts, he thought, would inevitably become a target.

They are people of One Book. People of One Book tend to be very dangerous.

He met with other librarians and archivists and suggested a plan to store books with individual families around the city, so that they wouldn’t be all together for ease of destruction.

And then he gave up his own interests for the sake of saving the archives.

Months earlier, the Ford Foundation office in Lagos, Nigeria, had given Mr. Haidara a $12,000 grant to study English at Oxford in the fall and winter of 2012. The money had been wired to a savings account. He emailed the foundation and asked for authorization to reallocate the funds to protect the manuscripts from the hands of Timbuktu’s occupiers. The money was released in three days. Mr. Haidara recruited his nephew, and they reached out to archivists, secretaries, Timbuktu tour guides and a half-dozen of Mr. Haidara’s relatives.

The result was a heist worthy of “Ocean’s Eleven.” They bought metal and wooden trunks at a rate of between 50 and 80 a day, made more containers out of oil barrels and located safe houses around the city and beyond. They organized a small army of packers who worked silently in the dark and arranged for the trunks to be carried by donkey to their hiding places.

Over the course of eight months, the operation came to involve hundreds of packers, drivers and couriers. They smuggled the manuscripts out of Timbuktu by road and by river, past jihadist checkpoints and, in government territory, suspicious Malian troops. By the time French troops invaded the north in January 2013, the radicals had managed to destroy only 4,000 of Timbuktu’s nearly 400,000 ancient manuscripts. “If we hadn’t acted,” Mr. Haidara told me later, “I’m almost 100% certain that many, many others would have been burned.”

Thank you, Mr Haidara and fellow rescuers. Thank you on behalf of humanity at large, and Mali and Malians. Well done.

The University of Washington (which is up the road from me) Q Center has a glossary of terms.

A note about these definitions: Each of these definitions has been carefully researched
and closely analyzed from theoretical and practical perspectives for cultural sensitivity,
common usage, and general appropriateness.

There’s something odd here. Look.

Gay – 1. Term used in some cultural settings to represent males who are
attracted to males in a romantic, erotic and/or emotional sense. Not all men who
engage in “homosexual behavior” identify as gay, and as such this label should
be used with caution.

Lesbian – Term used to describe female-identified people attracted romantically,
erotically, and/or emotionally to other female-identified people.

Notice a certain…asymmetry?

More on Sheikh Hasina’s view of the freelance murders of atheists in Bangladesh, which is basically “go right ahead, we approve.”

In a recent exchange with the ruling awami league supporters and active leaders, Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina has brazenly supported the machete wielding killers of Bangladesh atheist bloggers who have already hacked to death at least seven atheist bloggers and publishers of free thinking writers. Many of the bloggers had been hacked to death in open daylight on the streets of Dhaka the capital while the police had been reluctant or incompetent to arrest anyone responsible. The wording of the premier who has been the chief executive of the government since the questionable one party election in earlier 2014, has effectively given the killers a green signal that they can carry on their business and the government will not interfere. “Everyone has to hold their tongue, has to maintain a level of decency in what they write. If they write something provocative and something bad happens, the government will not take responsibility.”

So, that’s blunt. Nobody can say that’s not clear enough. If a murderer murders you for writing something “provocative,” you had it coming and the murderer will not be rebuked.

Talking with the similar minded party workers and leaders the questionably elected premier also opened up and frankly expressed her thought about the recent happenings in the countries webspere.

She was quoted as saying, “If someone writes filthy things about my religion, why should we tolerate it? ”

The premier also said, “Recently it has become a fashion to call someone a freethinker who says nasty things about religion. I do not see any free thinking here. All I see is filth.”

“Why would they write such nasty things”, she asked. “I obey the commandments of my religion, if someone writes bad things about the person whom I obey as my prophet; it would not be acceptable to me. Those who do this only make their filthy mind known to the world” said the premier elected in an election widely viewed as a sham.

Well there you go. She may not have meant a word of it; she may have said it to mollify the religious maniacs in Bangladesh, out of fear or ambition or both; it doesn’t matter. She put into words the thing that makes religion so dangerous and so destructive of all human projects. She treats the make-believe “commandments of her religion” as if they were both real and binding. They are neither. Laws are human things, contingent and temporal, and they must be subject to change. The result of treating them as sacred and immutable is what we see here – a head of state telling religious fanatics to go ahead and murder dissenters.

Deborah Cameron wrote about default male today, in the wake of Green Party Women’s “non-men.”

The idea behind substituting ‘non-men’ for ‘women’ was to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people. It will be news to nobody that this is a contentious issue in contemporary feminist politics. But whatever position you take on the issue itself, ‘non-men’ remains problematic from a linguistic point of view. It cannot easily be made to function as an inclusive, feminist or non-sexist term, because it repeats the most basic and ubiquitous of all sexist linguistic gestures: treating men as the default human beings while relegating women to what the radical feminist linguist Julia Penelope dubbed ‘negative semantic space’. ‘Non-men’ defines a subordinated group in relation to the dominant group, ‘men’: consequently it ends up, in today’s jargon, ‘centring’ the dominant group, even if that isn’t the intention.

She then discusses a study that found Disney princess movies had given more dialogue to the female characters in the past than they do now.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with the ‘default male’ principle, the answer is, quite a lot. According to the researchers, what’s mainly driving the trend for male characters to dominate the dialogue isn’t primarily a change in how much the central female characters speak. It has more to do with the move (first made in TheLittleMermaid) to Broadway musical-style ensemble casts featuring more supporting characters–the majority of them, as it turns out, male. In Karen Eisenhauer’s view, what’s behind the imbalance is an unconscious form of male bias:

My best guess is that it’s carelessness, because we’re so trained to think that male is the norm. So when you want to add a shopkeeper, that shopkeeper is a man. Or you add a guard, that guard is a man.

Ahhh yes, the generic male in addition to the default male. Everybody’s male except for a few aberrant females, whom you have to explain and who thus distract from everything.

It isn’t just the people at Disney who display this ingrained tendency to imagine the prototypical representative of a category like ‘shopkeeper’ or ‘guard’ as a man rather than a woman. We all do it. We only have a female prototype for roles which are very heavily stereotyped as female (like ‘secretary’ or ‘witch’). By contrast, the tendency to assume that a ‘generic’ X will be male doesn’t just apply to the most stereotypically male roles (like ‘drill sergeant’ or ‘construction worker’), it applies to any role that isn’t almost exclusively reserved for women.

And not just humans, either; people do this to animals. Any random animal or bird is a “he,” because…well because it would be weird if it were a she. When I worked at the zoo I heard people referring to Nina the gorilla as “he” – including when she had her infant actually on the nipple. People always called the elephants he, when all four of them were female.

Then Cameron goes on to an extremely interesting analysis of a couple of cartoons and why it’s hard to get away from default male without ruining the cartoon. I can’t summarize it so you have to read it and look at the cartoons.

These are not overtly sexist cartoons. They aren’t making a point about women, or male-female relations; the women (where there are any) aren’t being mocked or belittled or objectified. Yet I’ve been arguing that they are, in fact, examples of low-level sexism. What they exemplify is the kind of pattern ethnomethodologists call ‘seen but unnoticed’: like the background noise in a coffee shop, we tune it out so we can concentrate on the important stuff in the foreground. I tuned it out: they all made me laugh. But should feminists be so willing to tune it out?

When we criticise sexist representations, or look for alternatives to them, we are typically—and understandably—most concerned about what’s in the foreground. Our first question when choosing books or films for children, for instance, will often be whether there’s a ‘strong’ female central character, someone active and resourceful who doesn’t just waft about looking pretty. Contemporary producers often share that concern. In the case of Disney princess films, as Karen Eisenhauer notes,

If you watch the behind-the-scenes documentaries, there’s so much explicit discourse on what the princess is going to be like, and always it’s a feminist discourse in some way. They want her to be powerful.

The trouble is, as she also says, that this kind of discussion ‘never, ever seems to have gone beyond the princess’. Concerns about sexism and stereotyping do not extend to the depiction of the larger social world which forms the backdrop to the central character’s story.

We have to worry about the princess (or the warrior or artist or whatever she is) and everyone else – the crowds, the people on the bus, the shopkeepers, the chorus.

Social change only really succeeds when new ways of thinking, speaking and acting become normalized, taken for granted and treated as unremarkable. To put it another way, when the background changes. When we stop needing extra time to process a sentence that refers to the boss as ‘she’. When we don’t think ‘hey, a woman!’ if it’s a female voice that addresses us from the flight-deck. When the minor characters in stories and jokes—generic shopkeepers, guard dogs, stone-age people or space aliens—are as likely to be female as male, and no one thinks anything of it. When no-one is a ‘non-man’—or more importantly, a non-person.

Yes.

Jessica Valenti is the woman who gets the most blocked comments at the Guardian’s Comment is Free.

When the Guardian examined the 1.4 million comments that have been blocked by moderators since 1999, they found that eight of the 10 writers receiving the most blocked comments were women, and topping the list was … well, me. Sure, there’s a small part of me that’s proud – I’m No 1! – but the bigger truth is that I’m mostly just exhausted.

I’m tired of laughing it off and rolling my eyes. Because while misspelled threats or entreaties for me to get back in the kitchen are certainly easy to mock, the disdain with which they’re employed is not very funny.

For all the progress women have made, there’s always an online comment section or forum somewhere to remind us that, when given anonymity and a keyboard, some men will use the opportunity to harass and threaten.

“Some” meaning “a lot of.” That’s the part that’s not very funny.

[I]t’s not a coincidence that the articles of mine that attract the most abuse on social media are those about rape, harassment, political representation or everyday examples of sexism. Anything that suggests there’s still work to do for true gender equality sends some men into a rage – a response that mostly serves to prove my point.

If the mere act of writing about women’s issues sets off a stream of harassment and threats, surely we are nowhere near where we need to be.

No, we’re not. It always surprises me, but we’re not.

She points out that other people get interesting conversations on their threads. She would like that too, but it doesn’t happen.

I’m tired of having to explain, over and over again, why the tone of the comments under my pieces is indeed sexist. It’s not just a matter of critique – all writers get that – it’s the way that criticism manifests. Are my male colleagues called cutesy nicknames? Do they have their appearance commented upon?

I’m tired of seeing people call it “criticism” when it’s actually sexist harassment and abuse.

What may be the most difficult – for anyone who faces these kinds of harassment or threats – is that it just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Harassers largely go unchecked by social media companies and media platforms; law enforcement agencies still haven’t sorted how to deal with online abusers; and perpetrators are still celebrated as “free speech” warriors.

Oh well, soon climate change will mean we won’t have to worry about that kind of thing.

In case the absurdity of Germany’s charging a comedian with insulting Erdogan isn’t enough for one day, we can turn our attention to Kuwait:

A prominent female academic and human rights activist in Kuwait has been charged with blasphemy.

Sheikha al-Jassem was summoned to the public prosecutor’s office after legal complaints were filed against her over a recent interview she gave on TV.

She asserted that the constitution of Kuwait should be above the Quran and Islamic law in governing the country.

So, you can’t win, can you – not if you think a government should be secular when you live in a theocracy. You can’t say that in a theocracy, because the theocracy defines it as “blasphemy,” and you don’t get to define it another way, because you live in a theocracy. It couldn’t be any more tightly circular. It’s exactly parallel to, in fact it’s really the same thing as, a dictator making it a crime to criticize or make fun of or tease the dictator. This is dictator-god doing the same thing, despite the fact that dictator-god doesn’t exist. Dictator-god doesn’t need to exist for this to work: the clerics and the theocratic legislators and judges will stand in for dictator-god, and act as if dictator-god did exist and did get in a tantrum when humans tried to escape his dictatorial rule. The result is the same: you cannot escape. No one can escape. You’re in a closed system and escape is forbidden.

During the interview, Ms Jassem was asked about radical Islamists who said that religion was more important than the Kuwaiti constitution.

She responded by saying that this was dangerous and that, in her opinion, politics and religion should be kept apart.

Who did the interview? IS? That looks like a trap.

Ms Jassem made reference to the violence across the Middle East and divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. She said that if you just went back to holy books and relied on them, society could not move forward.

Her remarks provoked a storm of attacks against her, spearheaded by Islamist members of Kuwait’s parliament.

“They were terrifying me – everywhere, not just from Kuwait, even from Saudi Arabia,” she told the BBC. “They were talking against me, they were saying bad things, they were ridiculing me. But I’m used to it now.”

Calls were made for Ms Jassem’s dismissal from Kuwait University, where she is a professor of philosophy, and a legal complaint was issued against her.

If you were thinking of going to Kuwait for a holiday, I suggest you reconsider.

The public prosecutor told her that the complainant said he had been psychologically damaged by her remarks.

But Allah is all-powerful. Why be psychologically damaged by such things when Allah is all-powerful? Why not just trust that Allah will see to it that everything is really all right, whatever the appearances may be?

An item that Vanina shared with me on Facebook, via comments on a Sarah Palin article. It has so many layers of meaning…

Apparently Erdoğan gets to tell Merkel to prosecute German citizens for making jokes about Erdoğan. Philip Oltermann in the Guardian:

Angela Merkel has been criticised by members of her cabinet after acceding to a request from Ankara to prosecute a comedian who read out an offensive poem about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The German chancellor insisted her government’s decision did not amount to a verdict on whether Jan Böhmermann was guilty or not, but should be understood as a reaffirmation of the judiciary’s independence.

Oh please. The issue is whether such a thing should be prosecuted in the first place, not whether the comedian is “guilty” or not.

“In a constitutional democracy, weighing up personal rights against freedom of the press and freedom of expression is not a matter for governments, but for public prosecutors and courts,” Merkel said in a press conference on Friday.

What personal rights is she talking about? Is she saying Erdoğan has a personal right not to be joked about in Germany? What other rights could be at issue here?

Merkel was left with the final decision on whether Germany’s state prosecutor should start proceedings against Böhmermann after Erdoğan requested the comedian be prosecuted.

Under an obscure section of Germany’s criminal code, prosecution for insults against organs or representatives of foreign states requires both a notification from the offended party and an authorisation from the government.

Golly. So German law allows for prosecution of insults against organs or representatives of foreign states. Why?

Merkel and other ministers confirmed reports that there had been disagreements on how to handle the Böhmermann affair between ministers within her coalition government.

The foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Social Democrat[ic] ministers, including himself and the justice minister Heiko Maas, had been overruled by Merkel in allowing the prosecution to proceed. “It is our view that the prosecution should not have been authorised,” Steinmeier said. “Freedom of the press, freedom of expression and artistic freedom are the highest goods requiring protection in our constitution.”

There are also issues of freedom of information, freedom of inquiry, freedom to hear and see and read. It’s not just that the comedian should be free to “insult” foreign heads of state, it’s also that German citizens should be free to listen to comedians who do that kind of thing. The German people have an interest in this as well as the German performing and writing class.

“I consider this to be the wrong decision,” said Thomas Oppermann, leader of the Social Democratic party’s parliamentary faction. “Prosecuting satire on the basis of a lèse-majesté law is not appropriate to the modern age.”

(Side bar: There we go, they got it right that time – Social Democratic party, not Social Democrat party.)

Quite so. One wonders why they have a lèse-majesté law on the books at all.

The little-used paragraph of the German legal code that had allowed the Turkish president to request the prosecution is likely to be scrapped in the aftermath of the affair. Merkel said on Friday that she considered the law unnecessary, and that legal steps would be taken towards deleting it from the penal code within the next two years.

Under section 103 of the criminal code, insults against organs or representatives of foreign states are punishable with up to three years in prison, or three months to five years if a court judges the insult to be slanderous.

Several opposition parties, including the Greens and Alternative für Deutschland, had called for the law to be scrapped in the wake of the scandal.

Well good, but in the meantime – how ridiculous to prosecute Böhmermann.

The poem was read in a short clip on a late-night programme screened on the German state broadcaster ZDF at the end of last month. Böhmermann sat in front of a Turkish flag beneath a small, framed portrait of Erdoğan, reading out a poem that accused the Turkish president of, among other things, “repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians”.

The scene was broadcast shortly after it emerged that Turkey had demanded the deletion of a satirical song from a German comedy show, extra3, and Böhmermann’s poem was deliberately framed as a test of the boundaries of satire.

Throughout his reading, the comedian is advised by another comedian impersonating a media lawyer, who tells him this poem is precisely the sort of thing that does not qualify as satire and is therefore illegal.

Definitely. Heads of state should always be immune from criticism and satire. Hail Caesar.