There’s a new audio message that IS says is from its beloved führer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whoever it is has a charmingly blunt message for those of us who decline to submit to Allah.

The speaker says: “There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State… joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are.”

He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against infidels.”

So if we give in because of our terror, then we become obliged to join that war of Muslims against infidels. Until every last human on earth has surrendered to the poison, the war will continue.

Their god is a hideous god.

Also, they’re only a mile from Palmyra. That’s terrible news.

Rising out of the desert and flanked by an oasis, Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, according to Unesco.

The site, most of which dates back to the 1st to the 2nd Century when the region was under Roman rule, is dominated by a grand, colonnaded street.

At the southern end of the 1.1km street is the great temple of Bel, considered one of the most important religious buildings of the 1st Century in the East and of unique design.

Syria’s director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim, said that if Palmyra were to fall to IS, it would be an “international catastrophe”.

Wikimedia commons

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There was an exceptionally good interview on Fresh Air yesterday with Richard Rothstein, explaining the way ghettoization in the US was an official government policy, along with the fact that it fully accounts for the massive wealth gap – as distinct from income gap – between blacks and whites. Whites were able to buy cheap decent housing in the 40s and 50s while blacks were not, so that became the equity that is now the wealth that while people have while black people have 5% of that wealth. 5%.

5%. That’s a lot of university educations not paid for, houses not bought, equity not built.

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.

“We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight,” Rothstein tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

Or, at least, that it’s a mix of that and more deliberate causes. I think that’s what I thought. But whatever I thought, I did not know the scale of what Rothstein said.

“It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”

They transcribed highlights.

On how the New Deal’s Public Works Administration led to the creation of segregated ghettos

Its policy was that public housing could be used only to house people of the same race as the neighborhood in which it was located, but, in fact, most of the public housing that was built in the early years was built in integrated neighborhoods, which they razed and then built segregated public housing in those neighborhoods. So public housing created racial segregation where none existed before. That was one of the chief policies.

That’s one. I did not know that. It’s so easy for me not to know it, isn’t it.

The second policy, which was probably even more effective in segregating metropolitan areas, was the Federal Housing Administration, which financed mass production builders of subdivisions starting in the ’30s and then going on to the ’40s and ’50s in which those mass production builders, places like Levittown [New York] for example, and Nassau County in New York and in every metropolitan area in the country, the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans.

And I did not know that. Holy shit. Daly City was another one, just south of San Francisco; all white, thank you very much. Those little houses in Levittown and Daly City? Worth a fortune now. Gee what a shame that African-Americans were never allowed to buy them when they were $10 k. Rothstein broke it down for us: at the time those houses were worth two years at an average wage. Now they’re worth seventy.

Another nice kicker? Rents were higher in black-segregated areas, because segregated housing was scarcer. Lose lose lose every way you turn.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another CBC reporter offers some thoughts on “punch her right in the face fuck her right in the pussy.”

It was trending on Twitter across Canada Tuesday after it happened to a CityNews reporter outside of a Toronto FC game. Except once they yelled it into her microphone, Shauna Hunt fought back. She asked them why they did it. Now the video of her confronting them has gone viral.

Hunt told them it happens to her ten times per day and I don’t doubt it. My dad called me one evening from Manitoba because he’d seen it happen live on a broadcast — and he fumbled to explain what he heard before I cut him off and told him I knew what they said.

In the past year, it’s happened to me on College Avenue in Regina outside of Balfour Collegiate. It happened twice in one day as I tried to film promos outside of the Country Jamboree in Craven. It also happened to my male colleague, Adam Hunter, three times in one week while he covered a story at the Court of Queen’s Bench just last month. It’s happening all the time.

Remember “How do we beat the bitch?” Said to John McCain at a campaign event in 2007 – by a woman? This reminds me a little of that.

As with any job, there’s a lot of assumed ‘occupational hazards’ when you work as a reporter in the public eye and it does require a bit of a thick skin. You might be subject to unfriendly words from people who don’t like your news station, or the news station they think you’re from, or the news altogether.

I can take that.

…

But when people yell something vulgar, misogynistic and rude at me or into my microphone, I shouldn’t need to tell them it is unacceptable.

Shauna Hunt asked her hecklers what their mothers would think about them doing that. Please think about your mothers, sisters, friends and other women in your lives when you yell something that’s meant to degrade me, and all the women you’ve ever met.

My workplace is one of my favourite places in the world. Don’t subject me to sexual harassment while I’m doing my job.

Don’t do your bit to create the assumption that contempt for women is universal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I did my Freethinker column about the death toll from theocratic murderers over the past few months. It’s not a very cheerful story.

Here’s Amnesty Italy, resisting the trend:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An NPR story from 2011:

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it’s important to define and describe dehumanization, because it’s what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

“We all know, despite what we see in the movies,” Smith tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “that it’s very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them.” So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings “to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators.”

Yes, but I think it can also be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings to overcome the at least somewhat natural (in my view) inhibitions they have against treating sentient animals like…cartoon characters. Killing an animal quickly in order to eat it is one thing and torturing it for fun is quite another.

Human beings have long conceived of the universe as a hierarchy of value, says Smith, with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom, and everything else in between. That model of the universe “doesn’t make scientific sense,” says Smith, but “nonetheless, for some reason, we continue to conceive of the universe in that fashion, and we relegate nonhuman creatures to a lower position” on the scale.

Yes but we don’t want to torment sentient animals (in my view) even if we do see them as lower on a hierarchy of value, at least most of us don’t. We may want to use them and be indifferent to whatever discomfort and fatigue that costs them, but that’s some steps away from deliberately tormenting them.

Don’t mind me; I’m just collecting material.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Chechnya…

A journalist has left the southern Russian republic of Chechnya amid fears for her safety, after writing that a teenage girl was being forced to marry a police commander much older than her.

Elena Milashina had written that the local police head, Nazhud Guchigov, had threatened reprisals against the girl’s family if she was not handed over.

The police commander was also said to be married to another woman.

Ms Milashina’s newspaper said she fled after her safety was threatened.

That’s an interesting style of “police head.” Sounds more like a crime boss.

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a diehard loyalist of President Vladimir Putin, has in recent years outlawed the abduction of brides and underage marriage.

Although polygamy is banned under Russian law, reports say the Chechen leader is in favour of it.

He took to his Instagram account on Thursday to criticise Russian media coverage of “this fuss ordered by some liberals”.

“The girl’s parents gave their blessing to this marriage,” he claimed, arguing that reports to the contrary were filled with lies.

That’s nice, but what about the girl herself? She’s not a power tool, to be loaned back and forth as long as the owner is happy with the arrangement.

Elena Milashina was said to have visited the girl’s village of Baytarki on Thursday, but then left Chechnya after being warned by police officers from Siberia of a potential threat to her safety from Chechen police.

The Chechen interior ministry said it was “extremely surprised” by the alleged threat and accused the reporter of acting provocatively by entering people’s homes in the village.

Right. Just the way Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman and Ananta Bijoy Das “acted provocatively” by writing down their opinions about religion. How dare a journalist go to a place and talk to people there?

Oh well, I’m sure the police chief deserves a nice tight teenager.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mediaite also wrote about Shauna Hunt’s encounter with the pussy-fanciers, with some new (to me) information.

Last fall, female journalists at the CBC penned an op-ed calling for the end of “FHRITP” pranks, calling them “violent and offensive” and saying those who engage in them suggest “that a woman who is doing what can be a pretty serious and intellectually rigorous job can be reduced to simply a sexual object which can be taken at will.”

Of course, less than four months later, a man pretending to be a Delta passenger did just that to none other than MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

How did I miss this for so long?!

So, back to November last year.

Even though the first one was a hoax, the phrase “fuck her right in the pussy” has turned into a meme in and of itself, with people shouting it during news broadcasts, in the middle of sports broadcasts, even placing it on signs.

However, they’ve also screamed the phrase at female journalists, two of whom spoke out today against the prank, calling it unoriginal and threatening towards women.

Reporter Morgan Dunlop wrote an op-ed for the CBC, which tastefully edited the phrase to “FHRITP”, arguing that it intimidated women and would hurt their careers:

You are not advancing an organic movement. You are copying what one guy set up as a spoof. We can see your face and hear your voice and so can your girlfriend, your sister, your mother, your daughter.

It’s not funny. It makes women feel uncomfortable. You make women feel uncomfortable.

But that of course is the goal. That’s what makes it “funny.”

The op-ed for the CBC seems to be the video I posted yesterday, of several reporters including one man saying what a crappy idea the whole thing is.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Stewart on Facebook:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Hindu reports on anger at the inaction of the Bangladesh government over this string of public murders.

The hacking of another blogger-activist to death in Bangladesh has set off a storm of criticism against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, with noted author Taslima Nasreen saying people had “given up any expectation” that she would act against the killers.

…

In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Ms. Nasreen said the “killings prove that the Hasina government isn’t taking action against the groups that are targeting them because of votes. The government thinks if it arrests them they will be considered anti-Islam.”

While much of Mr. Das’ work was on scientific theories of evolution, he had also written a poem eulogising Ms. Nasreen recently, in which he had praised her for “not compromising on feminist principles” despite death threats issued against her over two decades.

Protesting the murder, activists of Shahbagh Gonojagoron Mancha, the group Mr. Das headed, took out a procession and held a rally at Dhaka’s Shahbagh. They also condemned the repeated killings of the bloggers and free thinkers and blamed the murder on the government’s failure to arrest attackers and hold trials.

And the government looked fixedly in another direction.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How does cruelty and sadism get normalized?

Another passage from the “Humanitarian Revolution” chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature –

Warning: torture, again

But the practical function of cruel punishments was just a part of their appeal. Spectators enjoyed cruelty, even when it served no judicial purpose. Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,

warning

in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. [p 145]

He goes on, but I yanked my eyes away after the first words; no way I’m going to type them.

Yet people watched it for amusement.

How does this work?

On me it produces a visceral, unavoidable flinching, accompanied by some mild shock-like symptoms.

Now, I’m not a particularly delicate flower. I’m not reporting my reaction to boast of my great sensitivity, because I don’t think my level of sensitivity is at all unusual. I think it’s just normal.

I’ve tried mentally substituting a less charismatic animal, but it doesn’t make much difference.

The explanation is reasonably clear in the case of psychopaths, but they’re a small minority, so that doesn’t help.

There are explanations of how it works when people have to do it in one sense or another – at gunpoint or because they’re part of a disciplined organization and the like, but that doesn’t explain recreational torture-spectating.

I’ve never understood the appeal of bullfights and dog fights and cock fights.

I don’t understand how people can hack a helpless unarmed human being to death with machetes.

I don’t know how this works.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

City News put together a collection of tv reporters talking about the “Fuck her right in the pussy” harassment they get. There are several women and even one man.

It’s such a peculiar phrase. It sounds like “punch her right in the mouth,” not like anything erotic. I guess that’s the point – it combines punch her right in the mouth with the sexual (but definitely not erotic) note. It does make you think…because it’s so hostile, and so obviously hostile, yet these shits say they think it’s funny. Why is hostility to women so normalized? Why is it so normalized that twisted fucks actually think it’s funny? Why would it be funny? If people kept shouting “kick him right in the head” at male reporters would anyone see it as funny? Would it become funny if it were “kick him right in the balls”? It wouldn’t, would it; it would just be weird. But shouting “Fuck her right in the pussy” at women doing their jobs, that’s seen as funny.

It’s bizarre. I’ll never understand it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment on Oh but it’s so hilarious.

Shawn Simoe, the now ex-Hydro One assistant network engineer (he was paid $106,510 last year; hardly the wage of a peon, stevewatson), is perfectly free to engage in whatever manner of behaviour, public or otherwise, that he wishes, but cannot reasonably expect to do so without risk of negative consequence.

The fact that this apparently didn’t occur to him or his buddies before engaging in on-air sexual harrassment apologetics speaks volumes about the way women are socialized to put up with endless crap in the interest of “getting along” or “being nice” or “having a sense of humour”.

No one, not Hydro One or any other employer, is obligated to employ someone so lacking in judgment or knowledge of acceptable social behaviour as this guy apparently is; as someone pointed out upthread, his unrepentant public behaviour suggests he’s a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.

More background on the FHRITP meme; according to Mediaite, it started as a hoax by some sleazy guy trying to start a meme in order to sell t-shirts.

(don’t read the comments; it’s full of people insisting it’s hilarious, free speech, people complaining suck the fun out of life, defense of liberty, etc., etc.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Say what?

A blog post by Lilly Rockwell at the Austin Statesman (Austin, Texas, this is).

The newly-elected 10-member City Council, plus the mayor, is the first majority female City Council in Austin’s history, with seven women and four men.

But apparently this represented such a huge change in governance that the city manager’s office thought the city staff who regularly interact with the City Council needed extra training – in the form of a two-hour training session in March with two speakers from Florida – on how to talk to a female-dominated City Council after decades of rule by men.

How…to…talk? Because what, they would all probably burst into tears? Give birth? Pass out Tampax samples?

The first speaker was Jonathan K. Allen, who was a city manager of the relatively small Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. Allen was considered an expert in this field because his local city commission was all-female.

Well thank god they called in a man who is an expert on the subject. Naturally it’s only men who are intelligent and thoughtful enough to probe this difficult issue. Remind him to put the gloves on.

His advice included:

• Women ask lots of questions. He learned a valuable lesson on communicating with women from his 11-year-old daughter, who peppered him with questions while they were on the way to volleyball. “In a matter of 15 seconds, I got 10 questions that I had to patiently respond to,” Allen said. Allen says female City Council members are less likely to read agenda information and instead ask questions. He says it’s tempting to just tell them to read the packet, but “my daughter taught me the importance of being patient” even when they may already know the answer to the question.
• Women don’t want to deal with numbers. Allen said in his city they used to have background information and financial analysis on the front pages of agenda forms. Allen says he normally would have presented the financial argument, but that his female commissioners would balk and say “Mr. Manager, I don’t want to hear about the financial argument, I want to hear about how this impacts the whole community.” He said that it may make good financial sense, but if he wants to get the votes, he has to present his arguments “in a totally different way.”

And again I say, thank god they got an expert. Imagine, a non-expert would have no idea how to extrapolate from a conversation with his daughter to all women everywhere. That takes years and years of training.

The city also brought along Dr. Miya Burt-Stewart, who owns a business development and marketing firm, to offer some training, and her session touched on the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” philosophy:

• Openly acknowledge gender differences. Burt-Stewart says the author of the “Men are from Mars” book says men act on facts, women act on emotion. She also share such insights such as “Men have egos, women have wish lists,” and that men are more likely to use a “dominating” management style than women, who use a “compromising” style. Men think women ask too many questions, Burt-Stewart said, and women often don’t feel included. Men like acknowledgement, women want to be part of a team. Men, typically, communicate less often than females, she said.

Men like to shout “fuck her right in the pussy!” on the street, and women like not to be shouted at on the street. I can expert too.

But after watching this training session (you can watch the video of the session yourselfhere), I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it sexist to make these generalizations about women, or is there something to the idea that women do process decisions differently?

I reached out to Emily Amanatullah, who studies gender issues and is an assistant professor of management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, to help sort this out. “At the outset, it definitely feels archaic, like ‘The women are usually in the kitchen, how do we deal with them now that they have power,’ ” Amanatullah said. “It does reek of old norms and often it’s called benevolent sexism – they are not putting women down, but they are in a way.”

And she said it’s basically bullshit – I mean, she said there’s not much research that etc etc etc. On the other hand there’s one thing –

Amanatullah did agree with one point that Allen made – women do tend to ask more questions. There is research that indicates that women communicate differently, and they are less likely to assert themselves in a group context or meeting, and are more likely to ask a question “as a way to get their voice heard. in a non-threatening, non-aggressive way,” she said.

Hey, you know what? Maybe just maybe that’s nothing to do with What Makes Women So Weird but is rather that getting constantly talked over and interrupted at best, and put down hard at worst, trains women to find ways to get a motherfucking word in edgewise.

Also, asking more questions is a good thing, and it’s certainly a huge improvement on people who make confident assertions without having a clue what the hell they’re talking about.

Or maybe that’s just me. That was your seminar in how to talk to me for today.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by cuervocuervo on Oh but it’s so hilarious.

Yelling ‘fire’ in a theater is freeze peach innit?

What the men were caught on video doing and being unrepentant about is also up for legal review by the police. Whatever their drunken intent, it’s being seen as a public safety issue. I can’t imagine why, when men’s hilarity results from exploiting a woman’s objectified presence for media infamy; after all, it wasn’t about her at all, it was about their own amusement and team bonding after enjoying a sporting event. Because when a lone woman is zoomed and yelled at by strange men, who might also physically grab at her and her equipment, that’s just a joke. No harm done. No hyper vigilance built and psychological assault involved.

And ppffft, multiply to several times a day in public for the woman? She’s over-reacting to being a pissing post for strangers who care more for their own bravado than the humanity of people around them. The question also arises how many women who don’t have a camera handy while out in public are getting this done to them? He-larious putting that stunned and likely scared look onto a woman’s face, anytime, anywhere.

Yeah, take that ‘tude back to work and expect co-operation and trust from your fellow employees. Tell the story around the coffee machine. Walk that role modeling.

There’s been at least one instance of this being yelled at a male reporter and people using that weak excuse as it not being misogynist. Oddly, what was yelled was not “fuck him right in the ass.” Is that not as funny? We keep getting told that there are many more male reporters out there doing shoots, so are we going to hear about the overwhelming times this has been done to interrupt their work? Or, for some reason, has the “humour” been disproportionately aimed at female reporters?

Meanwhile, the White Ribbon Campaign is taking the Toronto reporter incident as a teaching awareness opportunity and is now teaming up with the MLSE owners of the stadium where this specific incident happened; building antimisogyny and anti-harrassment space and profile.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Guest post by Leo Igwe.

The murder of a secular blogger in Bangladesh, Ananta Bijoy Das, is yet another demonstration of the growing threat of Islam-based phobia in the contemporary world. This is a stark reminder of the dangers which freethinking, atheist, secular writers and critics of religion face not only in Bangladesh, but in many countries around the globe.

Ananta is the third blogger linked to a freethought blog site Mukto Mona to be killed in Bangladesh in the past four months. Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi born US writer, was murdered in February. He was attacked along with his wife who sustained serious injuries.

Washiqur Rahman was murdered in March. Islamic militants are suspected to be behind these horrific attacks and killings. An extremist group, Ansar al-Islam , has claimed responsibility for the murder of Ananta. The police have arrested two men identified as students of the Madrassas in connection with the murder of Rahman.

These bloggers were reportedly targeted and killed because they have in their writings taken on religious extremism, particularly Islamic fundamentalism in their country.

My question is: What is wrong in challenging religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh? Is it not important that we tackle Islamic fanaticism before it consumes us? Why should people be killed for criticizing Islam? Is Islam now more valuable than human life? Why should some Muslims deem it justified to take the lives of other people just because they wrote or drew something which they found offensive or objectionable? Writing or drawing something does not kill, does it? Do Muslim extremists and their sympathisers think they can live in a world where they are not offended by what some people write, draw or say?

If we are to rid the world of Islam-based phobia and abuses then Islamic religious practices must be criticized, Islamic teachings must be questioned. The Quran must be critically examined. If we are to achieve the much needed intellectual awakening in Islamic societies, if we are to realize a new enlightenment in the ‘Islamic world’ then Islamic texts and doctrines have to be critically analysed.

The Madrassas school project must be revised to reflect 21st century educational values, so that these ‘schools’ begin to produce and graduate students with cutting edge ideas of how to make the world a better and more peaceful place to live for all humans, both those who confess and those who criticisize Islam, not a breeding ground for extremists and jihadists, of merchants of death and destruction in the name of Allah.

Today a lot of atrocities are being committed in the name of Islam, in the name of Mohammad; should we allow them to continue? Should those issues not be critiqued and evaluated in the light of reason, science and freedom of inquiry? Like the Christian Bible, the Quran and the Hadith contain provisions that sanctify violence and murder of those adjudged blasphemers or insulters of Islam, those categorized as unbelievers or apostates.

Is it not high time Muslims started disregarding these hateful passages for the sake of intellectual and moral progress of their societies and the world at large?

It is important to state that Islam like all other faiths is a human phenomenon. Islam is a product of human thought. Like every human creation, Islam has its shortcomings and limitations as a moral guide for human beings. Muslims should begin to see those who highlight these shortcomings and limitations, those who denounce the dark side of Islam, as champions of Islamic reformation, as ‘friends’ not enemies of Islam, who should be protected, not killed.

Yes, criticizing Islam should not be a form of death sentence in Bangladesh or anywhere in the world.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An exciting conference this weekend in Melbourne.

13 human beings, and 3 crude dolls.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)