So apparently there’s a thing in the UK called (toe-curlingly) “Movember”? And it’s something about growing moustaches and raising money for charity? I guess? Something like that. Anyway Neil Singh and Arianne Shahvisi tell us in the New Statesman why it’s a bad thing.

For the most part, sponsored activities (day-long silences, sponge-throwing, public waxing) depend on the extreme, the outrageous, the ridiculous. Friends and family are, apparently, only willing to part with money to witness something odd, humorous or downright unpleasant. So what message does Movember convey to those whose moustaches are more-or-less permanent features? With large numbers of minority-ethnic men—for instance Kurds, Indians, Mexicans—sporting moustaches as a cultural or religious signifier, Movember reinforces the “othering” of “foreigners” by the generally clean-shaven, white majority. Imagine a charity event that required its participants to wear dreadlocks or a sari for one month to raise funds—it would rightly be seen as unforgivably racist. What is the difference here? We are not simply considering an arbitrary configuration of facial hair, but one that had particular, imperial connotation to British men of our grandfathers’ generation and currently has a separate cultural valence for men from certain ethnic groups. Moustaches, whether or not “mo-bros” mean theirs to be, are loaded with symbolism. We often wonder how our fathers (both life-long moustached men) must feel each November, when their colleagues’ faces temporarily resemble theirs, and are summarily met with giggles and sponsor-money. No doubt they draw the obvious conclusion, that dovetails with many other experiences of life as an immigrant: there are different rules for white faces.

Um….is this a parody? Did the Staggers inadvertently republish something from the Onion?

I’m told not. I’m told it’s not, repeat not, a joke.

Further, the inclusivity of Movember deserves examination. For one, only men (and even then, only some men) can grow a moustache. The decision to focus on the moustache to raise awareness of men’s health issues might seem like an apposite one (though there’s no obvious relationship between moustaches and cancers), but it reinforces the regressive idea that masculinity is about body chemistry rather than gender identity, and marginalises groups of men who may struggle to grow facial hair, such as trans-men. Ironically, Movember also excludes the very men it is supposed to uplift; many men who have undergone radiotherapy or surgery to treat testicular cancer are rendered “hypogonadal” and are therefore unable to grow facial hair.

And you know what else? Eating lunch marginalizes people who get up too late to eat lunch. Riding a bike marginalizes people whose bums are too skinny to tolerate bicycle seats. Watching birds marginalizes people who prefer to watch tv.

So watch it, chum.

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

Imagine being a neuroscientist, and studying brain scans of murderers to look for psychopathic traits. Imagine doing that and looking at scans of family members for comparison purposes, and then finding one that is way at the extreme edge of what you’re finding in the murderers’ scans. Whoops, the scans got mixed up. The techs check and re-check; nope, no mix. So you peel off the code – and the scan is yours.

That’s what the neuroscientist James Fallon found.

He told his wife and she said, “I’m not surprised.”

He laughed at that. Which is kind of psychopathic itself.

The BBC discussion is slightly odd, because they simply talk about murderer or not murderer. He’s not a murderer, despite having all the alleles for being a psychopath, so what gives? (The answer is environment.)

But murder isn’t all there is, for cryin out loud. There’s cruelty, there’s bullying, there’s manipulation, there’s chronic lying. Professor Fallon isn’t a murderer, good, splendid, but it would have been interesting if the BBC person had asked him why his wife said that, or if he himself in fact thought he was deficient in the empathy department.

I once knew someone who ticked a lot of the psychopathy boxes. I never thought “murderer?” But I thought a lot of things short of that.

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

And then there’s Dinesh D’Souza, with a festive Thanksgiving tweet.

I am thankful this week when I remember that American is big enough and great enough to survive Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House!

Great god almighty. What is wrong with people?

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

I’ve started reading Little Dorrit for the third or fourth time…skim-reading it in places, because I long ago decided that the only way to read Dickens is to jump when you start to get bored, because there’s no denying he gave a wealth of detail and sometimes it’s about something you just don’t need a wealth of detail about. That prison in Marseilles at the beginning for instance – I never will know what that’s there for, because I invariably get bored before I find out so I skip it.

But don’t go thinking it’s inherently boring, or that all of it’s boring, or that it’s boring in proportion to its quantity, or anything like that. The truth is that he was a god damn genius, and he really is doing something with all those words. It’s not slack, it’s not verbiage for the sake of verbiage. It’s detail.

Like, there’s the bit in chapter 3 where Affery takes Arthur up to the garret room where he’ll sleep for the night, and there’s a very detailed description of what’s in the room and what the room is like. I skipped some, because there was a lot, but I knew if I’d read it it would have been good stuff. That’s how Dickens is. You sort of have to skip in order to keep going, but you know you’re skipping rich writing. But I didn’t skip it all and I was rewarded with a real yell of laughter because at the end of the list of furniture was

…a washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves.

That’s Dickens for you.

Anybody read it? Anybody want to read it along with me?

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

One of the hot social media items this morning is a woman who made a big fuss about a delayed flight because Thanksgiving and a guy who retaliated. The point of the item seems to be that the guy did a great job of schooling the woman. I beg to differ.

Elan Gale Live-Tweets his Feud with Asshole Woman on Flight

This note war on a plane is hilarious. I have no idea who he is but I want to be his friend.

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

Author

franc

0 approved

your@cuntsmellslikegrave.com

In Response To

Dayna Morales may have made it up

Comment

Submitted on 2013/11/29 at 11:53 pm

“Why do people do this?”

Same reason people accuse Shermer of rape. Human degradation masked as social justice. Duh.

The comment doesn’t amount to much. It’s clearly just a pretext for the real point, which is to tell me that my cunt smells like grave.

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

Orac, as he indicated in a comment, has been following the Sarah Hershberger case. He has a very informative post from October 28; very informative and very sad.

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the story of 10 year old Amish girl in northeast Ohio with cancer whose parents, alarmed by the side effects of chemotherapy, had decided to stop the chemotherapy and treat their daughter with folk medicine instead. As a result, alarmed at the likelihood that Sarah Hershberger would suffer and die unnecessarily at a young age, the hospital treating her, Akron Children’s Hospital, went to court. It lost the first round, but earlier this month the original ruling was overturned, and it was ordered that Hershberger undergo chemotherapy to save her life. The odds of her survival with chemotherapy were estimated to be on the order of 85%. Her odds without chemotherapy? About as close to zero as you can imagine.

Given those odds, I take back what I said about their decision being – though wrong – not totally irrational. I didn’t realize her odds with chemo were that good.

Sadly, but not entirely unexpectedly, the Hershbergers have apparently taken their daughter out of the country to avoid chemotherapy. The longer they do that, the more likely it is that their daughter will die a horrible death, and it will be her father Andy Hershberger’s fault. I realize that he has nothing but the best intentions and believes he is doing the best thing for his daughter, but he is wrong, so very wrong. If his decision is not reversed, his daughter will almost certainly pay a very unpleasant price.

It’s a wretched story.

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

Want a Friday after Thanksgiving (in the US) quiz? Here, via Dave Silverman on Facebook, is one called Are you smarter than an atheist? (That’s silly. They don’t mean smarter, they mean better-informed-about-religion. Not the same thing at all.)

I scored 100%. Dave got one wrong; Dave Muscato got 100%.

It’s a bit irritating to take because it uses a separate click to tell you whether you got it right each time so that’s twice as many clicks. But I can’t resist easy quizzes.

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

This seems unlikely to end well.

A 10-year-old Amish girl with leukemia and her parents have left the country to seek alternatives to chemotherapy, according to the family’s attorney.

Sarah Hershberger and her parents oppose chemotherapy, and have been fighting the Akron Children’s Hospital in court after the family stopped Sarah’s treatment. Her parents said the treatments have caused their daughter a great deal of pain, and they’d rather focus on herbal and natural remedies.

It’s odd to make the girl the chief agent by mentioning her first in the first two sentences, as if she left the country and her parents went with her. They took her out of the country. She’s ten.

The Hershbergers left their home in northeast Ohio days before a state appeals court appointed a guardian in October to take over medical decisions from Sarah’s parents. The family members won’t say where they are now, but they have no plans to return to their home anytime soon, according to Thompson.

“Sarah’s condition has gotten a lot better since the family has been pursuing the alternative treatment,” Thompson said.

Sarah had tumors on her neck, chest and kidneys when her parents initially agreed to chemotherapy at Akron Children’s Hospital earlier this year. Her parents said the side effects were terrible, and they wanted to treat Sarah’s leukemia with alternative treatments.

So not straightforward faith healing, but maybe the faith makes the abandonment of arduous treatment seem more reasonable.

“We’ve seen how sick it makes her,” Andy Hershberger, Sarah’s father, told ABC News in August. “Our belief is the natural stuff will do just as much as that stuff if it’s God’s will.”

Yes see that’s where the problem is – it’s not about belief, and it’s not about god’s will. It’s about comparative prognoses, and the hospital clearly thinks the prognosis is better with chemo.

Maybe when she gets worse the parents will think better of it and bring her back.

Update: post on the subject from last August.

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

Now 99 comments on the Universities UK blog. One of the news ones is a very valuable one from the always-valuable David Colquhoun.

I notice that Nicola Dandridge starts by describing Universities UK as being “the representative organisation for the UK’s universities”.  It is nothing of the sort,  It is the representative organisation for (mostly male) vice-chancellors.  That was obvious from its much more honest previous name “The committee of vice-chancellors and principals”,   That’s the same group that supported high tuition fees.

It isn’t fair to blame Nicola Dandridge,  She’s paid to say whatever words are put in her mouth by her bosses.

The outcry against this iniquitous policy document appears to be just about universal. UUK has made an idiot of itself.  The only way UUK can save any sort of credibility is to retract it at once.  But it is not in the nature of powerful organisations to apologise for mistakes.

Fair point about Dandridge. Still…it is a blog post, with her name on it. That’s not quite the same kind of thing as a press release.

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

The subhead of an article in India Today:

“When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when “the water touches the woman’s private parts, she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and should be punished.”
- Summary of a report titled “The misguided Fatwas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis”, as published in the Al Masry Al Youm.

That item is reported in other places, all apparently from the same source. Even Counterpunch reports it.

One currently ascendant Salafist group in Syria, among more than 1000 others competing for weapons and fighters, is “Daash”. The word is an acronym with its letters standing for “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.”  Daash appeared on the scene here recently, about a year ago and some local observers believe it arrived via Iraq with large amounts of funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey…

…

Some recently reported Salisfist practices spreading in Syria include, but are not limited to the following:

*Females in Daash controlled areas of Aleppo and elsewhere are being prevented from wearing jeans and sweaters and must wear only the Islamic dress Abaya and Barkaa while forbidden from putting on any make-up or now, as of two weeks ago, to even leave their homes without a male escort. Some women in parts of Aleppo and Raqaa now refer to their neighborhoods as Tora Bora, Afghanistan, given the similarities of repression  between Taliban and Salafist treatment of women…

…

*No women’s clothing can be displayed in shop windows. Tailors shops must shut to men in the event of the women’s presence in the shop until she leaves.The Daash militia has long prevented women from seeking medical attention from male Doctors. Recently Daash has put into place prohibitions against women visiting doctors of either sex and it is not permissible for a woman to wear orthodontic devices such as teeth braces because straight teeth might attract men and in any case their bodies are under the stewardship of their husbands or fathers only.

*Daash has proclaimed that women who swim in the sea are in fact committing “adultery” — even if they wear a hijab because as with many other languages, Arabic nouns are gender specific, and “sea” is masculine and when the water touches the woman’s vaginal area she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and must be punished. Daash militias also forbid women from eating certain vegetables or even touching cucumbers, carrots or bananas, due to their phallic imagery, which may tempt women to deviate and it is also unacceptable for women to turn the air conditioning on at home during the absence of their husbands as this could be used as a sign to indicate to neighbors that the woman is at home alone and any of them could commit adultery with her.

You would think they’d have better things to do, wouldn’t you…But for some people there really is nothing better to do than devote your energies and attention and time to thinking up new ways to chivvy and bully and harass a person or set of people.

The Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm in its 11/15/13 edition reported that Daash variety Fatwas regard women as strange creatures created solely for sex. Daash considers the voices of women, their looks and presence outside of their homes an ‘offense” with some Salafists regarding women in general ‘offensive.’”

In other words women are basically just throbbing dripping vaginas that somehow can also walk and talk. What was Allah thinking?

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

Maryam has a perfect graphic.

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

There’s a very good conversation going on the Facebook page for the event Protest Against Universities UK! No to gender apartheid! It’s a conversation between secular liberals and Islamists.

In any case you should know about the event if you’re going to be in or near London on December 10.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Time 5:00pm in UTC
Description
On the occasion of the International Human Rights Day we oppose the legitimisation of forced gender segregation by Universities UK, the body representing the leadership of UK universities.

Universities UK has issued a guidance on external speakers saying that the segregation of the sexes at universities is not discriminatory as long as “both men and women are being treated equally, as they are both being segregated in the same way.” Outrageously, the document has been supported by the National Union of Students.

We will meet at 5pm to start the protest at 5.30pm.

A list of speakers to follow soon!

Read the call to action here.

A detailed analysis of the document can be found here.

This post by Chris Moos, in particular, has a lot of back and forth.

I have some valuable new friends now thanks to that page.

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

Peter Boghossian said something interesting on Facebook (via Twitter, I take it).

I was just called a radical feminist for opposing gender segregation at universities.

I’d just been talking about someone going by the name Abdullah Ali who commented on the Universities UK blog and blamed “EDL white surpemacists and radical feminists” for their knee-jerk responses to gender segregation, so I was interested, so I commented. But I should have known better, because I got called “cupcake” for my pains. It’s radical feminist of me to take exception to that.

• Ophelia Benson The iERA press release referred to everyone who opposes gender segregation as “radical feminist or EDL”.

  about an hour ago · Like
• 

  N Timothy Aho Nonradical feminists provide cover for their more radical ideologists

  59 minutes ago via mobile · Edited · Like
• 

  Ophelia Benson The label “radical feminists” is thrown around so promiscuously that it has little meaning.

  58 minutes ago · Like · 1
• 

  N Timothy Aho Right. So probably best to avoid the ideology altogether

  52 minutes ago via mobile · Like
• 

  Ophelia Benson Well what “ideology”? If the label has little meaning how can we possibly know what “ideology” we’re talking about?

  48 minutes ago · Like
• 

  N Timothy Aho You’ll figure it out

  44 minutes ago via mobile · Edited · Like
• 

  Ophelia Benson I’ll figure out what you mean? No I won’t. Your mind is your mind. I can’t “figure out” what you mean on the basis of two short comments.

  41 minutes ago · Like

• 
  Ophelia Benson Eh? You “edited” your comment to say something completely different, after I replied to the unedited one? That’s not very reasonable.

  33 minutes ago · Like · 1
• 

  N Timothy Aho @OB- I hope you can find that point of examining gender-related topics without feminist ideology..eg a more objective-seeking social psychology

  29 minutes ago via mobile · Like
• 

  N Timothy Aho Relax cupcake – mods happen

  26 minutes ago via mobile · Edited · Like
• 

  Ophelia Benson I must be a “radical feminist” – I don’t like being called “cupcake” by a condescending stranger.

  25 minutes ago · Like · 1
• 

  N Timothy Aho Radical condescenders are fun

  14 minutes ago via mobile · Like
• 

  Ophelia Benson Actually no, they’re not.

  11 minutes ago · Like
• 

  N Timothy Aho What? I enjoy FTB & Jezebel antics…

  9 minutes ago via mobile · Like

And this is why I’m a radical feminist. (Not in the sense of being a TERF. The older meaning: a feminist who wants to change the culture, not just the laws.) Because I get sick of being unable to have a conversation of that kind without being called “cupcake” or similar. I get sick of being casually automatically insulted just for being a woman by an ill-mannered man.

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

There are now 81 comments on the Universities UK blog post “explaining” UUK’s policy on gender segregation. There is at last one that agrees with and praises the policy.

Abdullah Ali

says:

27 November 2013 at 8:41 pm

I see theres been a quite severe knee-jerk response form the white, Islam-ignorant reactionaries here. Men and women sitting in two equal groups isn’t in any way, shape or form comparable to apartheid in Soth-africa, and as a Muslim I find the comparison insulting and, quite frankly, racist. This may make some of you’re liberal feminist heads explode, but the separation is actually mosstly for the benefit and protection of women! Bet you didnt see THAT coming!   It allows women to feel more safe, it keeps them from having to interact with potential abuser’s, and it keeps a mea from being distracted by the shapely bottom sat in front of him  

I think its great universities are finally allowing freedom of religion!   I support this 100% and I condemn the knee-jerk responses from EDL white surpemacists and radical feminists!

That seems to be UUK’s view, too – that it’s only “radical feminists” who object to gender segregation at public debates, and “normal” people are fine with it. (UUK didn’t say “radical” but it treated the view as radical and marginal.)

Still no response from Nicola Dandridge. There’s no law that says people have to respond to comments on their blogs, but for a public official defending a public policy on a blog, it seems high-handed to ignore the responses.

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

Just for the hell of it, because I happened to see it…some pet-shaming signs.

Source: blippitt.com

Source: dailydawdle.com

Source: dumpaday.com

Source: sillylittlegiggles.com

Source: dumpaday.com

There are a lot more.

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