London. Exhibition. Celebrating freedom of expression.

Visitors to a London exhibition celebrating freedom of expression this week found plenty of familiar taboo-busting work, from Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, an eight-foot long cast featuring the genitals of 400 women, to Kubra Khademi’s video of an eight-minute walk she made through Kabul in Afganistan, dressed in lushly contoured body armour.

You know what the next word is.

It’s:

But.

But they will have looked in vain for one work detailed in the catalogue by an artist known only as Mimsy.

Last name Borogoves? Sorry, sorry.

Isis Threaten Sylvania is a series of seven satirical light box tableaux featuring the children’s toys Sylvanian Families. It was removed from the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall galleries after police raised concerns about the “potentially inflammatory content” of the work, informing the organisers that, if they went ahead with their plans to display it, they would have to pay £36,000 for security for the six-day show.

That’s the world we live in now. Hooray for free expression – but – if your free expression is at all capable of chafing the mood of Islamist murderers, either shut up or pay for an army to defend it. But hey hooray for free expression all the same yeah?

The decision to remove the work from Passion for Freedom came after the Mall Galleries consulted the police, who raised “a number of serious concerns regarding the potentially inflammatory content of Mimsy’s work”. The gallery cited a clause in the exhibition contract which allowed it the right to request removal of an artwork.

The organisers of the not-for-profit organisation said: “To our shock the highlighted work was humorously mocking the despised terrorist organisation that causes suffering to many, not only in the Middle East, but also here, in Europe and the America,” adding that, in view of the decision, the word “uncensored” had been removed from all their publicity for the show.

Mimsy isn’t best pleased. Mimsy has good reason.

Mimsy said she had adopted a pseudonym because, as the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had to go into exile in Lebanon when he was a child, she was acutely aware of the potential risk of speaking out.

“I love my freedom,” she said. “I’m aware of the very real threat to that freedom from Islamic fascism and I’m not going to pander to them or justify it like many people on the left are doing.”

She made these rather sweet, silly, whimsical-looking tableaux of animal characters doing pleasant things while the black-clad Islamists lurk nearby, but her tableaux turned out to be not so whimsical at all.

She added that the idea of using Sylvanian Families “just popped into my head” as a way of demonstrating that fanaticism was not a question of race. Though the jihadis in the work are called “MICE-IS”, some are clearly cats or koalas and others have rabbits’ ears popping out of their masks. “I’m sick and tired of people calling criticism of fanatical Islam racist, because racism is about your skin colour and radical Islam is nothing to do with that. There are millions of Muslims who are shocked by it too,” said Mimsy.

She added that she had made the tableaux between December 2014 and May 2015 and had looked on in horror as, one by one, her imagined scenarios came true. In one scene, jihadis lurk outside a schoolroom, while a class of girls sit at their desks; in another, gunmen bristle on the horizon as holidaymakers sunbathe on a beach. “It was creepy, because each time I imagined a scene it happened in reality. I made the beach scene before the Tunisian massacre and the schoolroom scene before Boko Haram abducted the schoolgirls in Nigeria,” she said.

No wonder the police shut it down.

This is a horrible story that Sarah Beamish tells:

Tonight I got into a confrontation with an apparently famous (I didn’t know this) local man named David Zancai. He was very large and strong. He got onto the subway and started storming around, yelling, doing pushups and roaring, and ranting about how “ladies” and “girls” need to “keep their knees together” and “stop showing their monkey” to men on the subway. He went on for about five minutes about why men shouldn’t let their girls out of the house dressed in spandex, and the male pedophiles and rapists and voyeurs wandering among us and how women and girls are responsible for such men’s reactions to them and “know what they are doing” when they dress in yoga pants and other tight clothes “because men are only human.” He was extremely loud and intimidating and very invasive of others’ personal space.

He then began walking up and down the subway car, dragging behind him a huge banner with a woman’s bare legs, commenting on individual women’s clothing and appearances and shaming them for anything revealing. He began to repeatedly target a girl who looked about 17 and was dressed in a tight workout outfit, yelling at her and shaming her for how she was dressed, pointing at her groin and breasts and telling her he could “see her monkey.” She was clearly very upset by this and kept staring out the window trying not to make eye contact with him or cry. I was horrified at this and looked around at the men to see if any of them were going to respond (most of the women were frozen in anxiety or fear that this guy was going to target them next and were trying not to call attention to themselves). None of them were doing anything.

Then he went to move toward her and yelled that he was going to take a picture of her and “her monkey”, and went to take out his phone. She was so scared and humiliated and began to cry immediately. At this point I got up and walked down the car and stood in front of her to prevent him from taking photos of her. He began yelling at me about “what right do I have to stop him from taking photos” and how “this was for my own good as a woman”, and I turned my back to him and began talking to her, asking what stop she was going to, telling her I was going to stay with her and that I was sorry this was happening. He began getting very verbally aggressive with me so I turned and went through a few minutes of yelling back at him to leave us alone and stop acting like an asshole, ignoring him, continuing to block the girl with my body so he couldn’t see her, etc. Still no one did anything, other than a couple women close to me telling me not to talk to the man – they were clearly afraid he would come over.

They got out at the next stop, but he followed them. They got into the next car, but he followed them.

I got in front of her again. The man was storming down the car toward us, continuing to yell, and the girl began to cry again. I began yelling at him repeatedly to “leave her alone and get off the train”, and telling others around us that he had been harassing her. Other than one woman who quietly asked the girl if she was okay, no one did anything. This went on for another minute or so until a woman came up to me and quietly told me who this guy was and that he had a long history of bothering people on the subway, had sexually harassed her while she was in her teens, and that he was banned from the subway.

He ended up getting off one stop before the girl. I stayed with her nearly till the end of the subway line. When we got off, the girl and a few women thanked me for intervening. The girl was clearly terribly shaken up. This entire time, not a single man other than that harasser had said or done a thing.

At the end of this, I stood and talked with a woman who had watched part of this, and the discussion was really disturbing. She said “I’m glad you helped her, but you’ve got to admit he has a point. I know she’s just young and doesn’t know better but hopefully now she has learned her lesson and will carry a wrap with her so she can cover herself up.” I said that he was the one who needed to learn a lesson (hopefully that he has no right to police women’s appearances, but at the very least that he should keep those views to himself and not harass girls and women), and that that girl had every right to ride the subway with the expectation that she would be treated with basic respect.

I then headed back on the subway towards home, shaking with adrenaline, realizing how scared I had been the whole time that he was going to hurt me. When I got home I googled the guy and found out that he’s a cult figure around the city, has been the subject of a graphic novel, a Vice article, a documentary, etc. He is often talked about like a humorous, kooky, and even endearing person. Unsurprisingly, he has some serious mental health issues due to an accident that left him in a coma, and some serious issues with women probably connected to his girlfriend apparently leaving with their daughter after he became ill (which given the behaviour I witnessed, was probably a good parenting call). He is banned from many places.

His story sounds like a sad one, with some good lessons for how we as a society deal with mental illness. But that’s not my point here. I’m sharing this so that girls and women in Toronto know that this guy’s unstable behaviour extends into sexual harassment and that you may very well not be safe around him. I’m sharing it to express my anger that I had to put my own safety in danger to protect that girl, which I have had to do so many times before in similar situations over the years. I’m sharing it to call out all the men who did nothing, not because I expect men to fight him or otherwise live up to some kind of “masculinity” standard, but because I do expect that they will use their privilege and power in a situation like that to, at the very least, ask the girl if she was okay, ask me if I was okay, tell the guy to leave her alone, put their bodies between her and the man, push the alarm strip, take a photo of him for helping her to make a report if she wants to, acknowledge that the situation is even happening, SOMETHING, because it is totally understandable that the women in the situation may be in fear for their own safety in the presence of a man who is aggressively and exclusively targeting them because of their gender.

He has a Wikipedia entry, which does indeed mostly portray him as a quirky Toronto eccentric.

This stinks. Maryam reports:

I was invited to speak at Warwick University by the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists’ Society on 28 October 2015. The University Student Union has declined the request for me to speak saying the following:

This is because after researching both her and her organisation, a number of flags have been raised. We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus.

There a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker that indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus. This is in contravention of our external speaker policy:

The President (or equivalent) of the group organising any event is responsible for the activities that take place within their events.  All speakers will be made aware of their responsibility to abide by the law, the University and the Union’s various policies, including that they:

• must not incite hatred, violence or call for the breaking of the law
• are not permitted to encourage, glorify or promote any acts of terrorism including individuals, groups or organisations that support such acts
• must not spread hatred and intolerance in the community and thus aid in disrupting social and community harmony
• must seek to avoid insulting other faiths or groups, within a framework of positive debate and challenge

You see that last one? Must seek to avoid insulting other faiths – so Warwick University might as well be Saudi Arabia then, which imprisons and tortured people for “insulting” its chosen religion by writing about secularism.

This is a university.

It’s outrageous.

Lauren Rankin wrote about abortion rights as a “not just women” issue at Truthout in July 2013.

The subhead, by Rankin or an editor, puts it this way:

The “War on Women” isn’t just a war on women. Trans men and gender-non-conforming people are losing their rights too, and we need to rework how we frame these “women’s issues.”

The war on women is in fact just a war on women; that’s merely tautological. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on anyone else. Saying there’s a war on women isn’t saying there is no war on trans men and gender-nonconforming people. I think when people start telling us we should rework how we frame women’s issues, with women’s issues in scare quotes…we need to be skeptical.

Trans people have their own issues. I don’t see why we need to stop talking about women in order to talk about trans issues. I don’t see why we can’t do both.

The last month has been particularly brutal for abortion rights activists and women’s health advocates, as state after state has proposed and/or passed various bills that restrict abortion access and undermine abortion care. In response, there has been a re-energized reproductive rights movement, with many across the nation stating that they “Stand With Texas Women” or “Stand With North Carolina Women.” But in this response, abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman.

But everyone who has an abortion does have a female reproductive system. The trans men and gender nonconformists who need abortions are oppressed by misogyny and sexism and the system that controls female reproductive systems in exactly the way that women are, and for the same reasons. They didn’t ask to have that reproductive system, but then neither did anyone else. The social arrangements that demand the right to control those systems really don’t give a fuck how anyone identifies, they just want to maintain their lock on the baby factories.

Abortion is so often framed as a women’s issue by both those who advocate for abortion rights and those who seek to dismiss abortion as frivolous. And for abortion rights, a movement that took root in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this makes sense. Prior to a deeper understanding and problematizing of gender and the way that it works, in our social construction, only women had abortions because only women could get pregnant. But in 2013, we should know better, and we need to do better.

But it isn’t better. Trans men are harmed by misogyny too. It doesn’t help them to try to obscure the fact that attacks on abortion rights are highly political in a particular way – a sexist way, a misogynist way, an anti-women way. A trans man who needs an abortion is caught in a system that was organized to thwart women’s autonomy. If we start to obscure that fact, we start to lose the accumulated energy and power that feminism has painfully worked to gain over the past few decades.

This is from two years ago but it’s amazing enough to point and exclaim at now – naturally occurring mechanical gears. Phys.org had the story (the beginning of the sentence is missing for some reason):

a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure“.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Credit: Malcolm Burrows/Gregory Sutton

How about that?

“In Issus, the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t,” said Burrows. “This emphasises the importance of considering the properties of the skeleton in how movement is produced.”

“We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we’ve found that that is only because we didn’t look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.

“These gears are not designed; they are evolved – representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”

It’s only the juveniles that have them; they’re lost in the transition to adult stage.

H/t Josh Larios

At least 717 people have died in a stampede near Mecca; 863 were injured.

During the Hajj, pilgrims travel to Mina, a large valley about 5km (3 miles) from Mecca, to throw seven stones at pillars called Jamarat, which represent the devil.

The pillars stand where Satan is believed to have tempted the Prophet Abraham.

That sounds like a harmless game, except that it involves huge crowds of people.

Tchima Illa Issoufou, BBC Hausa, whose aunt was killed reports:

People were going towards the direction of throwing the stones while others were coming from the opposite direction. Then it became chaotic and suddenly people started going down.

There were people from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Senegal among other nationalities. People were just climbing on top of others in order to move to a safer place and that’s how some people died.

People were chanting Allah’s name while others were crying, including children and infants. People fell on the ground seeking help but there was no-one to give them a helping hand. Everybody seemed to be on their own.

It affected some members of our group. I lost my aunt as a result of the stampede and at the moment, two women from our entourage – a mother and her daughter – are still missing.

The Saudis rushed to place the blame where it belonged:

Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV reported that the head of the central Hajj committee, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, blamed the stampede on “some pilgrims with African nationalities”.

Uh huh.

So much for the ummah.

The Feds have been looking at Martin Shkreli, the “that lifesaving pill you need is now $750 apiece” guy, for months.

Since at least in January, Shkreli has been under criminal investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, court records show. And Shkreli is not alone—some of his business associates have also received grand jury subpoenas in the case.

…

The criminal investigation involves Retrophin, a public company where Shkreli served as an officer, director, and 10-percent owner of the outstanding stock before being ousted amid multiple allegations of misconduct. Retrophin focuses on the development, acquisition and commercialization of therapies for the treatment of catastrophic or rare diseases, and was founded by in 2011 by Shkreli.

The inquiry, according to court records and people with knowledge of the inquiry, involves such a vast number of suspected crimes it is difficult to know where to start. A quick summary of the government’s theory: If there was money, Shkreli took it. If there were facts to be revealed, Shkreli hid them. If there were securities laws, Shkreli broke them.

But hey, it was all in order to develop better drugs with fewer side effects. He said so himself.

And that’s why Shkreli’s decision to dramatically raise the price of a decades-old life-saving drug—and then appearing on television, smiling broadly as he justified actions that put lives at risk—was such a bad move. Overnight, he transformed himself from a relatively obscure corporate executive to a boldfaced, widely vilified name, known by presidential contenders and lawmakers alike. It is a truism that prosecutors pursue public figures with the greatest vigor, not only because the publicity set off by their indictment serves as a broader deterrent against wrongdoing, but also because such cases can boost a prosecutor’s career.Public disgust of the type raining down on Shkreli now make the cases even more attractive to bring.

Which is tragic when he was just hoping to develop better drugs with fewer side effects!

Shkreli’s price-gouging involves Daraprim, a 62-year-old generic drug used to treat malaria and toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease often found in HIV-positive individuals and others with weak immune systems. The drug is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, which are the most important medications needed in a basic health system. Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired Daraprim in August, and boosted the price shortly afterward from $13.50 a pill to $750. The Infectious Diseases Society of America, composed of the top medical doctors who work with conditions like toxoplasmosis, sent a letter on September 8 to top officials at Turing, stating that the cost was “unjustifiable” and was putting patients at risk. Moreover, the doctors said that, since Turing’s acquisition of the drug, hospitals around the country were reporting they could no longer obtain it because of Turing’s significant distribution problems.

But all that was just a necessary step on the way to to developing better drugs with fewer side effects. Wasn’t it?

Another Newsweek story reveals a…distasteful mindset.

On Bloomberg on Monday, Shkreli praised the price hike as, basically, absolutely wonderful.

“We’re the first company that really focused on this product. And I think that’s a great thing, because ultimately companies before us were actually just giving it away, almost,” Shkreli continued. “The price that they were pricing it at, $13.50, you only needed less than 100 pills, so at the end of the day the price per course of treatment—to save your life!—was only $1,000.”

He’s saying it’s a bad thing that a drug needed to save your life costs “only” a thousand dollars for a full course. Clearly he thinks Jonas Salk was a damn fool not to become a billionaire.

The Guardian reports that Shkreli thinks he knows more about toxoplasmosis than anyone in the world.

Shkreli declined to say how much he would cut the cost of Daraprim, the standard treatment for the dangerous blood infection toxoplasmosis. Daraprim is a daily drug many patients have to take for a year or more.

“We have to do a lot of calculation. When we make the new price, we are going to make it so that Turing is a break-even or only slightly profitable company,” he said.

“There are very few people who care about toxoplasmosis more than me,” he said. “I think I know more about toxoplasmosis than anyone in the world.”

Sounds plausible.

But medical experts cast doubt on the assertions of the former hedge fund manager-turned-pharmaceutical entrepreneur.

“I’m highly skeptical. I don’t trust that we are going to see a return to a price that’s economically feasible or truly justified,” Tim Horn, HIV project director at the Treatment Action Group, a global research and policy advocacy group in the fields of HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C, told the Guardian. Another specialist called Turing’s actions “repulsive”.

When all he wants is to make a better drug with fewer side effects.

A public post on Facebook a couple of days ago:

A colleague just returned from a luncheon to benefit the National Women’s History museum, which is proposed for the Mall in Washington. Here’s what was in the bag of shwag they gave everyone who attended: lip gloss, nail polish, copy of “Glamour” magazine, candy, bracelet, dishwashing detergent.

One commenter called bullshit on the dishwashing detergent, but the poster said

No it was a bottle of some eco bullshit dishwashing detergent.

So there’s that.

Are missionaries missionaries, part 2. The Atlantic:

From 1769 until his death in 1784, Serra was the head of the missions in the northern portion of California, helping to establish nine communities where natives lived under the supervision of priests in a life of prayer and work. “One of their major goals was to assimilate the native peoples and eventually make them productive peoples of the Spanish empire,” said Senkewicz. “The mission was to contribute to that assimilation in two ways: by making the native people Catholic, and by teaching them European-style agriculture.”

All of which applies a lot of assumptions – that the Spanish got to make California (and Mexico and all points south) part of the Spanish empire; that they got to come in and take over; that they were the bosses of the native peoples; that the native peoples were there for their convenience; that they were entitled to shape the native peoples to make them more useful to themselves, the interlopers.

Historians have found that this wasn’t a net gain for the native peoples, at least in terms of numbers – more died than were born. Also, they lost a lot of freedom.

“With the missions came terrible diseases and population decline in two ways: elevated mortality … and a reduction in fertility among women because of STDs, most likely, and poor health in general,” said Steven Hackel, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and the author ofJunípero Serra: California’s Founding Father. There were cultural effects, too, he said: Living year-round in the missions was a big adjustment from the tribes’ normal custom of moving periodically around the countryside. Once Indians were baptized, they were expected to live a Catholic lifestyle, including going to mass, not having pre-marital sex, and marrying the spouses chosen for them by the priests.

Not to mention working in the fields all day.

In the six decades following Serra’s arrival in northern California, more than 80,000 Indians were baptized, Hackel said. But “they were not driven into missions by soldiers on horseback with guns or lances into the arms of waiting Franciscans, who then baptized them.” It was more that the missions represented a way to survive. “California Indians were under terrible pressure to find a new lifestyle,” he said. “Spain essentially colonized the region, bringing in plants and animals and horses and sheep and goats and pigs that really wreaked havoc on the countryside and made Indian lifestyles simply unmanageable.” The priests offered food and stability; Catholic life was the price of entry.

It always is, isn’t it. The priests offered a roof and a bare minimum of bad food to the children they imprisoned in industrial “schools,” but the price of forced entry was abuse and cruelty and even slave-work in rosary bead factories. The priests offered a roof and a bare minimum of bad food to the women they imprisoned in laundries, but the price of forced entry was slavery, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

That’s not the only way to perform altruism, we now know. Look at MSF – they don’t make people convert to anything before giving them medical assistance. The better organizations help people because they need help, and that’s the end of it – they don’t pay themselves back by enslaving the people they help.

“What’s missing in a lot of this stuff is that it’s no accident that the pope who’s canonizing Serra and the major supporter of that canonization in the American bishops, [Archbishop José Gomez of L.A.], were both born in Latin America,” said Senkewicz. There, “missions were regarded as places which genuinely did protect native peoples from brutal exploitation by conquistadors, who pressed native peoples to work to death on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, who forced them to work in the silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia.”

Ok, but again, they could have just protected native peoples from brutal exploitation by conquistadors without charging a price.

Throughout his papacy, Francis has encouraged evangelization. This was a major topic of his first big apostolic letter, Evangelii Gaudium, in which he writes whole sections about the joy of proclaiming the gospel. Even though Catholics’ approach to mission work today is arguably different than it was in the past, there’s still an awkward truth in its premise: the Church, and Pope Francis, believe Christianity holds the definitive truth about existence and salvation.

Yes, and they’re wrong. However well-meaning they are, they’re wrong.