I find myself wanting to know more the American Enterprise Institute in more detail.

Right Wing Watch has a very out of date page on them, with stats from 2003 and updated in 2006. That makes a useful snapshot from the past, though. Check out its board of trustees at that time, not to mention its finances.

Established: 1943

President/Executive Director: Christopher DeMuth

Finances: $24,934,545 (2003 income)

Employees: more than 50 resident scholars and fellows

Board of Trustees: Chairman Bruce Kovner (Caxton Associations, LLC); Vice Chair Lee R. Raymond (Exxon Mobil Corporation); Treasurer Tully M. Friedman (Friedman, Fleischer, & Lowe LLC); Gordon M. Binder (Coastview Capital, LLC); Harlan Crow (Crow Holdings); Christopher DeMuth (American Enterprise Institute); Morton H. Fleischer (Spirit Finance Corp.); Christopher B. Galvin (Motorola); Raymond V. Gilmartin (Merck & Co.); Harvey Golub (American Express Co.); Robert F. Greenhill (Greenhill & Co., LLC) ; Roger Hertog (Alliance Capital Management Corporation); Martin M. Koffel (URS Corporation); John A. Luke, Jr. (MeadWestvaco Corp.); L. Ben Lytle (Anthem, Inc.); Alex Mandl (Gemplus International); Robert A. Pritzker (Colson Associates, Inc.); J. Joe Ricketts (Ameritrade Holding Corporation); Kevin B. Rollins (Dell, Inc.); John W. Rowe (Exelon Corp.); Edward B. Rust, Jr. (State Farm Insurance Co.); William S. Stavropoulos (Dow Chemical Co.); Wilson H. Taylor (CIGNA Corp.); Marilyn Ware (American Water); James Q. Wilson (Pepperdine University) Publications: Monthly newsletter, dozens of books and hundreds of articles and reports each year, and a glossy policy magazine, The American Enterprise.

It’s considered a think tank; RWW calls it that; but its board is corporate corporate corporate. James Q Wilson is the only one identified with a university as opposed to a corporation.

Principal Issues

• American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a think tank for conservatives, neoconservatives, and conservative libertarians.
• Areas of interest include: America’s “culture war,” domestic policy and federal spending, education reform, neoconservatism, affirmative action, and welfare reform.
• President George W. Bush has appointed over a dozen people from AEI to senior positions in his administration. AEI claims that this is more than any other research institution.

Can AEI really be considered a research institution? Is it considered as such by any actual legitimate researchers? Is it, in short, an “Institute” in the same sort of way the Tobacco Institute is an “Institute”? Does it do any kind of research other than searching for the conclusions its sponsors are looking for?

I suspect the answer is no, but I don’t know for sure.

Background and History

• Most of AEI’s Board of Directors are CEOs of major companies, including ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express, State Farm Insurance, and Dow Chemicals.
• Big donors include the top conservative foundations, including Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
• Corporate supporters have included: General Electric Foundation, Amoco, Kraft Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, General Motors Foundation, Eastman Kodak Foundation, Metropolitan Life Foundation, Proctor & Gamble Fund, Shell Companies Foundation, Chrysler Corporation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, General Mills Foundation, Pillsbury Company Foundation, Prudential Foundation, American Express Foundation, AT&T Foundation, Corning Glass Works Foundation, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Smith-Richardson Foundation, Alcoa Foundation, and PPG Industries.
• Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, was until recently on the board of trustees of American Enterprise Institute. Other famous former trustees include Vice President Dick Cheney.

None of that inspires confidence, or suggests that AEI is anything other than a conservative corporate advocacy organization.

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

Turkish women talk back to Erdoğan.

Sixty-five Turkish women‘s rights organizations took out a full page advertisement in a mass circulation daily newspaper Thursday condemning President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his remarks this week that equality between men and women goes against “nature.”

The advertisement in Hurriyet newspaper, one of the best-selling dailies in the country, comes three days after the president said Islam dictated that women should prioritize motherhood and slammed feminists.

“Women and men have equal rights,” the women‘s groups wrote, adding that Turkey already lags behind international indices in terms of gender equality.

They noted that Erdogan has made similar disparaging statements towards women in the past and charged that the president‘s remarks violates the constitution and international treaties Turkey has signed.

“We are not going to give in to inequality,” the statement said, calling for women to rise up and defend their protected rights.

Well hey now. He was just talking. It’s just something he said. It’s just culture. Hasn’t Christina Hoff Sommers been telling us to stop objecting to sexism in the culture? That’s certainly the message I’ve been getting from Sommers and her allies – that feminism has already done the necessary and we have total equality, so all this talk about stereotypes and tropes is just melodrama and victim feminism.

Let’s see what Erdoğan did say. The Guardian reported on Monday:

“Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women: motherhood,” Erdoğan said at a summit in Istanbul on justice for women, speaking to an audience including his own daughter Sumeyye.

“Some people can understand this, while others can’t. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don’t accept the concept of motherhood.”

Wut?

Does he think feminists deny that it takes a uterus and Fallopian tubes to gestate a baby?

More likely, that’s how he chose to frame the fact that feminists think women should not be restricted to motherhood. Feminists don’t accept the claim he started with: that any religion or any other system of ideas gets to define a single position for all women. That’s the claim that we don’t “understand” in the sense that we flatly reject it.

“Motherhood is something else,” he said, claiming that it should be a woman’s priority because Islam exalts women as mothers.

He went on to say that women and men could not be treated equally “because it goes against the laws of nature”.

“Their characters, habits and physiques are different … You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men.”

Sure you can. Everybody is different. Individuals are different. People are different. That by itself is not a reason to take away their rights.

Aylin Nazliaka, an MP from the main opposition Republican People’s party said Erdoğan “ostracised” women by portraying them as delicate, weak and powerless and limiting their role to motherhood.

“Erdoğan has publicly committed a hate crime … But I will continue to fight this man who sees no difference between terrorists and feminists,” she said in a written statement.

Sule Zeybek, an anchorwoman at the Turkish broadcaster Kanal D, hit back at Erdoğan’s comments live on television during a news bulletin.

“I am a feminist and thank God I’m a mum. I wouldn’t kiss my mother’s feet but I have great respect for her,” she said.

Culture. They’re all talking about culture. They’re talking about expectations, and stereotypes, and discourse. Soft stuff. Not stoning and FGM and child marriage, but more abstract oppressions and subordinations.

Why? Because all of that matters. It matters in Turkey, it matters here, it matters in the UK and Australia, it matters in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. All the places.

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

You know…if you Google “american enterprise institute climate change” you get a lot of hits, useful relevant hits as opposed to ones that just have some but not all of the search terms. In other words there’s something there. The AEI does pay a lot of attention to climate change and it is the kind of attention you would expect – the kind that CEOs and lobbyists for oil companies want to hear and are willing to pay for. It’s one of their areas, and they take an interested position on it. They’re not disinterested scholars, they’re interested propagandists paid by corporations.

Here is Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, on the AEI’s chief climate-denier Benjamin Zycher.

Benjamin Zycher, the head of the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) energy studies criticizes an article I wrote earlier this week about the climate dangers of approving the Keystone Pipeline Project.

In that article, I said that the Earth’s climate is on a trajectory to raise the mean global temperature by at least 3 degrees C by the end of the century; that the world is experiencing a rapidly rising frequency of extreme climate events such as heat waves; and that keeping unconventional oil reserves like Canada’s oil sands in the ground is key to respecting the global climate budget.

Zycher accuses me of misrepresenting the scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has just issued its AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) on climate science. Indeed, he calls my opposition to Keystone “fact free.” Yet it is Zycher who distorts, misrepresents, or simply ignores the IPCC conclusions.

Read the article for the details.

The AEI tried to buy articles disputing a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

That’s the lobby group that Christina Hoff Sommers works for. They pay her to bash feminism. (Because what? If feminism progresses further it will persuade people to stop driving cars and take the bus instead?) She’s accepted their offer. Mind you, I don’t think she’s changing her views in exchange for their money – but I do think she’s thrown away her own scholarly integrity and self-respect in exchange for their money.

Back to the Guardian article.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work” and ask for essays that “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs”.

I call that corruption. Frank, unabashed, shameless corruption.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

“Right now, the whole debate is polarised,” he said. “One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don’t think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy.”

I might almost believe that if it weren’t for that $1.6 million from ExxonMobil.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific institute, said: “The IPCC is the world’s leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that ‘business as usual’ would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise.”

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: “The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.”

And Christina Hoff Sommers, who is on the payroll of the AEI, has the fucking gall to announce that “today’s 3rd wave intersectional feminism” is “the intellectual equivalent of creationism.” She works for a highly partisan reactionary think tank that tries to bribe scientists to undermine a scientific report that they see as against their financial interests – yet she accuses feminists of being the intellectual equivalent of creationism.

What.a.sleaze.

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

I’m curious about what standards Christina Hoff Sommers relies on to call a piece at Breitbart.com “fantastic,” so I’m reading it. That tweet, just in case you don’t believe me:

Christina H. Sommers ‏@CHSommers 3h
Fantastic article by @Nero on #GamerGate, feminist melodrama, lazy journalists. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/11/27/An-open-letter-to-Bloomberg-s-Sheelah-Kolhatkar-on-the-delicate-matter-of-Anita-Sarkeesian …

I’m finding it not fantastic. I’m finding it very bad. I would find it bad even if I agreed with the politics of it.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the author (“Nero” on Twitter), is addressing Sheelah Kolhatkar, who wrote a profile of Anita Sarkeesian for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Since you have failed to perform a basic survey of the literature surrounding the GamerGate controversy, or, worse, purposefully elected to exclude it from your reporting, and since you have placed your critical faculties on ice in the manner the “listen and believe” feminists are always so insistent on—largely, it turns out, because their claims don’t stack up—allow me to sketch out the real reasons Sarkeesian is controversial in the video games industry, and, to fill in the blanks in your writing, to explain why her ideas are so universally loathed among gamers.

That’s not a promising start. It’s tendentious, it pretends “GamerGate” is a serious academic subject with a serious literature that journalists are supposed to survey, it’s rude, it’s horrendously badly written, and it ends up in just vulgar abuse.

Sarkeesian, however, believes in an old social-science myth, long since debunked, that culture creates behaviour. This idea is on its way out in academia, having been mortally crippled by the “cognitive revolution” epitomised by the works Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman, which emphasises the innate drivers of human behaviour.

Nope.

Sarkeesian, like many of her followers, believes gamers create an environment in which “women are excluded”. But the facts tell a different story. GamerGate, lazily stereotyped by the media as the highest expression of misogyny in gaming, successfully green lit a female developer’s game on the Steam marketplace via a Twitter campaign while opponents of GamerGate want to boycott her, just because she has “the wrong opinions.” GamerGate has also contributed over $20,000 to the Fine Young Capitalists, a feminist movement.

Feminists say they want to help women, but it’s always someone else—in the gaming world, usually a man—who gets their wallet out to do it.

In reality, it’s not women that some gamers have a problem with: it’s people like Sarkeesian and McIntosh. They have claimed hatred of them and people like them is tantamount to hatred of women. But it isn’t. People don’t hate Anita Sarkeesian because she’s a woman: they hate her because they see her as a disingenuous, divisive, sociopathic opportunist.

That’s enough; I don’t need to read the rest. It’s garbage; trashy, hack-y, MRA-ish garbage. It’s beneath the notice of a serious academic and philosopher – yet Sommers calls it “fantastic.”

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

The BBC reports on slave brides in India.

The prevalence of gender-selective abortion has, of course, led to a shortage of female human beings. (Ironic, isn’t it. The men don’t want daughters but they do want wives [or female slaves]. Tragedy of the commons – it’s someone else’s job to bear and raise daughters for these men to have.)

In Mewat district in the northern state of Haryana the situation is particularly acute: there are 879 women for every 1,000 men. The national average is 927 women for 1,000 men.

As many men cannot find women to marry, bride trafficking has become prevalent. Girls are bought from their families in other states when they are still young and married to local men.

They are often badly treated both within the home and in the wider community where they are seen as outsiders.

Female people just can’t win, can they.

Salma was trafficked from the north-eastern state of Assam when she was only 12.

Her husband, Aas Mohammed, chose Salma over another trafficked girl and paid $60 (£38) for her to the trafficker.

Salma looks different from the women in her village in Haryana.

It took her a long time to get used to the language and social mores of her new home.

Over the years, Salma gave birth to nine children in quick succession. She says she was abused by her husband and was treated as a slave.

The trafficker openly admits to trading women for marriage in Haryana.

“I have helped so many men find a wife… It is a noble cause,” he says.

It’s stunning how normal it is to treat and consider men as people and subjects, and women as objects with no minds that matter. Men have to have “a wife” so somebody has to find a supply of these objects for the men to have.

Ghausia Khan was 14 years old when she was trafficked from Hyderabad in southern India and married to a man in Haryana.

Now she works for an NGO which supports trafficked women. She also wants to stand for election.

She says “laidback bureaucrats and obnoxious traffickers” are to blame for the situation, and is resolute about bringing change if elected to power.

The situation almost makes me hope the enslaved women don’t have much mind left. I almost hope they’re numb enough to stand it.

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

She’s gone.

James’s apprenticeship in crime fiction became a lifelong commitment, as she came to believe “it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live”. To suggest that the formal constraints of crime fiction prevent its practitioners from producing good novels “is as foolish as to say that no sonnet can be great poetry since a sonnet is restricted to 14 lines”, she argued.

Speaking in 2001 at the launch of Death in Holy Orders, her 11th Dalgliesh novel, James explained that her success was founded on the belief that plot could never make up for poor writing and that authors should always focus on the reader.

“At the end of a book, I want to feel, well that’s as good as I can do – not as good, perhaps, as other people can do – but it’s as good as I can do. There are thousands of people who do like, for their recreational reading, a classical detective story, and I think they are entitled to have one which is also a good novel and well written. Those are the people I write for. They don’t want me to adapt to what I think is the popular market. They want a good novel, honestly written and I think they are jolly well entitled to it.”

Her good was pretty good, if you ask me.

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

Petty tyranny in Saudi Arabia. I could also label it everyday misogyny in Saudi Arabia, or minor oppression in Saudi Arabia.

Restaurants in Saudi Arabia have been asked to remove signs which forbid entry to single women, it appears.

The request comes from the kingdom’s National Society For Human Rights, which says the signs on the doors of eateries are “illegal”, the Arabic-language Al-Hayat newspaper reports. A restaurant owner says he put up the signs because of “numerous incidents” of flirting. “We’ll only remove these signs when we make sure such incidents never happen again on our premises,” he told the paper.

One wonders (ok I wonder) what the owner considers “flirting.” I suspect it’s anything beyond eyes down ignoring – on the part of women, that is. Clearly men are allowed to ogle. Why clearly? Because the owner wants to exclude women, not men.

And how much “flirting” is it possible to do when one party is enveloped in an abaya?

It’s interesting what seems to be assumed in all this kind of thing – which is that the only real people are men, and that real people (men) go about their business as they should when things are properly arranged, but that’s disrupted when the contaminant of women intrudes on the normal space of Men. Men are protagonists and subjects, while women are like a virus.

NSHR spokesman Khalid Al-Fakhri tells the Saudi Gazette that restaurants have no legal right to exclude single women from their premises, or insist that they [be] in the company of a guardian. “These signs are against the law and reflect the personal opinions of the restaurant owners,” he says, urging establishments to devise alternative arrangements if they think that customers are behaving inappropriately. The paper quotes one woman as saying, “If they’re going to ban us from entering restaurants, where are we supposed to go?” – pointing out that restaurants are some of the few establishments where Saudi women can go unaccompanied.

Well that’s a silly question. Women aren’t supposed to go anywhere. Good women stay inside.

Still. The right to go into restaurants is a trivial thing. Stoning is a worse thing, so we shouldn’t be talking about not being allowed to go into restaurants.

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

Sommers is still being a hack.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers ·  8 hours ago
Dear liberals, When you side with today’s 3rd wave intersectional feminism, you are siding with the intellectual equivalent of creationism.

Don’t forget, she used to be an academic. There are standards in academia. Academics aren’t supposed to say flagrantly untrue things like that.

And she retweeted this piece of shit –

@CHSommers have you seen this? I think it’s pretty funny.

“This” is a four panel cartoon of a bratty little girl having a tantrum, shouting “Boys are icky and gross” and other classics of feminism, and an adult women with “BASED MOM” on her shirt giving her a bottle and sending her off for a nap.

Yeah. We’re all bratty little girls and Sommers is the calm wise adult. Sure.

Sommers used to be a philosopher. I’m not even making that up.

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

Another jerk who is still flailing away at Matt Taylor almost two weeks after his apology should have ended it.

Paula Wright ‏@SexyIsntSexist
.@RoyalAstroSoc Are you for progress or for regression? This is a bona-fide cutural war. @mggtTaylor

With the meme of Ayaan Hirsi Ali saying “I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt?”

So we get bashed for objecting to his shirt and then accepting his apology and moving on, but they keep endlessly ranting about our objections and even direct their ranting at Matt Taylor. They even send their spiteful trivial nonsense to the Royal Astronomical Society.

And we’re the ones engaging in trivial bullshit? Really?

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

Originally a comment by jesse on Guest post: A meta-history lesson on states’ rights.

One of the things about Brazil (and Jamaica for that matter) was that by the time Brazil abolished slavery slaves just weren’t that important to the economy any more, which was smaller than that of the US (in fact it was smaller than that of the American South, I think) in any case. In Jamaica, the slave system was much less entrenched and on it way out by the time they were emancipated in the 1830s (this had less to do with principled British planters and more to do with changes in the sugar market). In Brazil, ironically enough, mismanagement of the local economy by dependence on slave labor and lack of investment in roads and such meant that the whole economy was relatively unconnected to the rest of the world compared to the US. So the market forces that made slavery such a good deal weren’t there as much. Add in the British pressure on the slave trade, and by the 1880s you didn’t have a viable institution anymore unless they did what we did here in the US. In Brazil that wasn’t an option.

Russian serfdom was also not really a human chattel system like in the US. You didn’t have people being bought and sold and forced to move great distances — serfs were tied to the land and the “market” for serfs was such that you wanted the serfs to stay where they were.

One of the things that made Cuban slavery (and in what was left of the Spanish Empire by that point) different was that a slave who married a free person had free children. There were mixed-race and black slaveholders in Brazil and Cuba as a result (that existed here and there in the US as well, but obviously in really tiny numbers).

Another interesting twist was the Cherokee and Choctaw nations in Oklahoma. The question of slavery split the nation; even there passing of slavery on through generations wasn’t done in the same way as in the white Confederacy and marrying slaves wasn’t such a problem — the miscegenation laws familiar to people elsewhere didn’t exist. And in some areas — Florida — slaves would run south because they could be free among the Seminoles.

One more interesting bit: slavery still existed in the US until 1880 or so, if you were a Native American. It was basically legal to claim the labor of any Native in California and while there were supposed to be terms for this, it was de facto slavery. I don’t know if any person was actually sold under that system, since the Civil War amendments were in place by that point.

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

It’s late November, it’s dark at 4:30 (and darkish all the time), so have this.

Sociedad Argentina de Horticultura

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

An apt strip by David Malki at Wondermark: Old Dog, Oldest Trick.

© 2003-2014 David Malki

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

The US is very far from being a beacon of human rights, and so is China.

Seven university students linked to jailed Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti have reportedly gone on trial in China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang.

Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment in September for separatism and fanning ethnic tensions.

The students are accused of contributing to a website run by Tohti on Uighurs.

Human rights? Not in evidence.

The BBC’s Celia Hatton in Beijing says the trial is so secret that even the Xinjiang court will not confirm the proceedings.

Tohti’s lawyer, Li Fangping, told the BBC that the students contributed to Uighur Online, a now defunct website run by their teacher that promoted discussion between Uighurs and other ethnic groups in China.

The authorities, however, claim the site advocated Xinjiang’s independence.

Mr Li, who was speaking on behalf of the students’ lawyer so as to protect his counterpart, said the students face between five to 15 years in prison.

The students disappeared after being taken into police custody last January, then resurfaced later giving testimonials on national television incriminating Tohti.

I’m sure those testimonials were very reliable.

The trial follows last week’s rejection of a court appeal lodged by Tohti against his sentence.

Tohti was known as an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uighur minority, who largely live in Xinjiang.

And that could explain why he’s now in prison for life.

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

The BBC reports on the global media response to the Ferguson protests and their cause.

There has been enormous headline reaction in the world’s media to the Ferguson protests, and many commentators have taken the opportunity to question America’s credentials as a human rights champion.

European papers highlight inequalities in American society, and a South African commentator sees echoes of his country’s own grim racial history.

Well yes. Of course they do, of course they have – because it’s true. As I’ve pointed out before, the US is an outlier among developed democracies in a whole shocking slew of ways. We suck on universal provision of health care, we imprison a shamefully huge fraction of our population, we have a huge racial disparity in prosecutions and convictions, we allow capital punishment, we’re up to our knees in guns, we have a sky-high murder rate, we have high maternal and infant mortality rates, we have grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality, we saddle college students with crippling debt, we do almost nothing to ensure that even poor people can have decent housing – and on and on. This country is just a bad place in a great many ways.

The death of Michael Brown, whose killing sparked the unrest, is “a stark reminder for Uncle Sam that there are a lot of human rights violations on its own soil,” says China’s official news agency Xinhua.

“It should first fix its own problems before criticizing other countries.”

Xinhua adds that few other countries are “as self-righteous and complacent as the United States when it comes to human rights issues, but the Ferguson tragedy is apparently a slap in the face”.

True. On the other hand China has little to brag of. Uighurs, anyone?

Iran’s State TV said the grand jury decision “indicates the existence of racial discrimination in the USA”.

The protests in Ferguson are also one of the top stories in the Iranian press.

The conservative newspaper Kayhan carried a collage of pictures from Ferguson, including a US flag being set on fire. Its headline said: “A rebellion in 90 American cities as a result of the non-indictment of the murderer policeman.”

They’re not wrong.

Ferguson is also a front-page story in the German press.

Uwe Schmitt, the former Washington correspondent for Germany’s centre-right daily Die Welt, writes it is a “predictable explosion” given the juxtaposition of a “grotesquely over-armed police force” with a black community “untouched by economic recovery”.

He accuses many Americans of “self-delusion” when they ask how such violence can recur again and again, while abroad “people shake their heads unsurprised, either in mourning or glee”.

One more thing – it’s also the juxtaposition of a “grotesquely over-armed police force” with a grotesquely over-armed population. The police might not be so over-armed if the population were not so over-armed. Thanks a lot, NRA.

An editorial in France’s Liberation newspaper says: “Ferguson is a long way from being the post-racial America dreamed of by Barack Obama.”

In Spain, Pere Vilanova writes in El Periodico that “perhaps the symbolic value of the election of a black man as president in 2008 has been overestimated and inter-communal wounds will never be healed”.

In Italy, La Stampa‘s New York correspondent Paolo Mastrolilli says the discussion has become one about the race problem “connected to inequality and economic disparity”. He notes that some of the white demonstrators in New York and Los Angeles wanted to broaden the debate in that direction.

Indeed. The debate should be about all of it.

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

Jian Ghomeshi has been arrested. The CBC – his former employer – reports:

Former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi was granted bail today during a court appearance in Toronto to face four sexual assault charges, among the five he faces.

Ghomeshi’s bail was set at $100,000. He must live with his mother and stay in Canada.

The charges come several weeks after he was fired by CBC.

Ghomeshi, 47, surrendered to police on Wednesday morning and was formally charged under the Criminal Code with four counts of sexual assault and one of overcome resistance – choking.

I hope Julien Blanc is paying close attention.

Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said he could not shed any more light on the charges.

“I have no additional information other than what was released by the office this morning,” he told reporters. “All matters will be dealt with before the court.”

Blair did add that police are encouraging any other victims to come forward

“I want to offer them my assurance that they will be treated with dignity and respect,” he said.

The police department’s sex crimes unit began investigating Ghomeshi on Oct. 31 after three women filed complaints alleging he was physically violent without their consent.

Coincidentally, or not, Ghomeshi has withdrawn his lawsuit against the CBC.

News of the charges against Ghomeshi came a day after it was revealed a $55-million lawsuit he launched against the CBC last month, after he was fired in late October as host of the program radio arts, culture and entertainment program Q, was being dropped. CBC has said Ghomeshi will pay $18,000 in legal costs.

But Ghomeshi is fighting the dismissal through the CBC union, having filed a grievance through the Canadian Media Guild.

CBC has said it decided to terminate his employment after seeing “graphic evidence” that he had physically injured a woman.

Ghomeshi admitted in a lengthy Facebook post, published on the day he was fired, that he engaged in “rough sex,” but insisted his encounters with women were consensual.

Since his dismissal, nine women have come forward with allegations, some dating back a decade, that Ghomeshi sexually or physically assaulted them.

Nine is a substantial number.

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

News from Baluchistan Province – yet again men with guns have murdered polio workers in a region where polio is endemic.

Pakistan is one of three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where polio remains endemic. But even as Nigeria has managed to halt any rise in new cases, the virus has spread at alarming rates in Pakistan, with 260 new cases reported so far this year, compared with 64 at the same point in 2013, according to Global Polio Eradication Initiative statistics.

Two hundred sixty – I didn’t know that. That’s appalling. Polio is a horrible disease.

Immunization workers have repeatedly come under fire by Pakistani militants, and that appeared to be the case again on Wednesday, though no group claimed responsibility. Militants have widely viewed immunization workers as potential spies and agents of the West.

They have reasons to think so, as that link confirms. Which was the worst threat to the people of Pakistan – bin Laden, or polio? I don’t know.

The vaccination campaign in Quetta and the surrounding district was immediately halted, but officials said it would continue in other districts of Baluchistan.

“Three women and one man died in the attack,” Noor Baksh Mengal, the police official in charge of the neighborhood where the killings took place, said by telephone. “Three other females workers are also wounded.”

They were on their way to meet up with their security detail.

In most cases, however, health workers remain vulnerable to militant attacks even with a security detail. Baluchistan and northwestern regions, like Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and the tribal areas, have seen both the most intense violence against health workers and the biggest rise in polio cases.

An ongoing military campaign against militants in the North Waziristan tribal region has factored in as well, causing a huge flood of refugees out of an area that had many polio cases.

And polio is contagious – more contagious, if I have my facts right, than Ebola.

It’s an ongoing nightmare.

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

So Team We Hate Feminism is pleased that Dawkins withdrew his apology for Dear Muslima by telling Kimberly Winston that he gets impatient with American women who talk about things that he considers trivial instead of about women being stoned to death in Iran. Team We Hate Feminism wants more of that kind of thing. Team We Hate Feminism thinks it’s worthwhile to summon other Team Members, or rather Thought Leaders, to chortle over more of that kind of thing. Team We Hate Feminism can’t see a tweet about contempt for women in Turkey without making it a rebuke of feminists who have the gall to talk about sexist culture in STEM fields.

Ryan J Holder ‏@RyanJamesHolder Nov 24
Turkish President says women arent equal to men “our religion has defined a position for women: motherhood” @SamHarrisOrg @RichardDawkins

Russell Blackford ‏@Metamagician
@RyanJamesHolder @RichardDawkins @SamHarrisOrg Hmmm, this just *might* be a bigger problem than pop art imagery on men’s shirts.

So let’s see, now. The Turkish President’s expression of contempt for women is a bigger problem than pop art imagery boob art on men’s shirts. How big a problem is feminists talking about boob art on men’s shirts compared to the Turkish President’s expression of contempt for women? Shouldn’t Blackford be talking about the Turkish President’s expression of contempt for women only instead of talking about it as an excuse to talk about feminists talking about boob art on men’s shirts?

How do we calibrate these things? How to we adjudicate them? How do we know which Thought Leader on Twitter to listen to on the subject? How do we know for sure what problems we should be talking about? I suppose we could run everything past Blackford and Dawkins and Harris first, but then how would they have any time to talk about the most important things? Because there are more important things than telling feminists what we should be talking about, surely. Aren’t there?

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

A friend on Facebook recommended this segment of The Newsroom and someone else found the link and I see why the friend recommended it.

The Jeff Daniels character interviews an EPA guy, who says it’s too late.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAbD119ACuA

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

Originally a comment by freedmenspatrol on Guest post: A history lesson on states’ rights.

Kongstad, you’re dead on about neo-confederates and the actual confederates alike. The level of blatant hypocrisy in period texts about the issue gets pretty extreme.

When South Carolina finally staged the counterrevolution that it had threatened in one form or another for decades, they published a list of reasons for it. The document included this complaint:

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

This from the same state that pioneered the theory that states could nullify federal law within their bounds whenever they felt like it. “States’ rights” was always a strategy employed for particular ends, chiefly the protection of slavery, and never an end in itself. Specifically, it was a strategy for preserving slavery in the minority section against a majoritarian threat to its continued existence. When Southerners had control of the national government, as they did almost constantly until March of 1861, they rarely cared much about limiting its power. Quite the opposite, so long as they considered slavery viable within the Union they were quite committed to extending that power.

In 1860, the state of Virginia was actually pursuing a Dred Scott style case that would have put before Roger Taney’s Supreme Court whether such a thing as a free state was even legally possible. They wanted to strike down New York’s law that slaves taken into the state in transit and resident there too long became free. If that went, then slaveholders would have gained the power to hold their human chattels indefinitely within the free states. At that point, the distinction between a free and slave jurisdiction became meaningless. But when Virginia decided that while it would not rush to join South Carolina and the rest for its own sake, it would rush to join the movement against suppressing the Deep South’s counterrevolution. That more or less killed interest in the lawsuit.

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

Huh. Pope Cuddly went to Strasbourg to scold Europe for being too old and ugly.

Jeez. What about Mesopotamia?! What about the Rift Valley?!! Older and much older, so nyah.

Besides, does Mr Cuddly think he’s another Justin Bieber?

Pope Francis has warned that the world sees Europe as “somewhat elderly and haggard” during a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

“Warned”? What does Mr Cuddly expect Europe to do about it? Botox? The knife?

At the European Parliament, he spoke of a need to reinvigorate Europe, describing the continent as a “grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant” and saying it risked “slowly losing its own soul”.

Ooooooooh, that’s harsh. Why doesn’t he just call Europe a witch and be done with it?

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