One subject of one of Helen Lewis’s new gurus podcast is the “race2dinner” pair Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. Remember them? I did a post on them in May 2021. They’re the ones who charge five THOUSAND dollars for you to make or order in a fancy dinner with you (a white woman) and your white women friends where they (Jackson and Rao) tell you how racist you are. Peak social justice, and a nice little earner!

So they’re still doing it, which means there are still rich white women willing to spend five THOUSAND dollars for this treat.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as racism, or that white people shouldn’t confront it, or that white people shouldn’t be urged to examine their own dear selves for racism. It’s that, for one thing, it’s weird to single out white women as if women had all the power in this scenario, and that for another you could do far more useful anti-racist things with that five THOUSAND dollars than give it to a pair of snotty grifters.

The charmers just wrote an article for TIME three weeks ago. The blurb is not entirely forthcoming.

Rao and Jackson are the founders of Race2Dinner, a program that initiates and empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression. Deconstructing Karen, the documentary about Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s work, is out now. They are the authors of White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

Notice something missing? TIME forgot to say that their program empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression among white women. It forgot to say that they single out women for their interrogation and hostility, as if women were the dominant sex.

It also forgot to say that they charge $5K for these dinners (and that the white women pay for the dinners).

You’ll be amazed to learn that Jackson and Rao do the same thing themselves.

In 2019, we decided to host anti-racism events in white women’s dining rooms for one specific reason: To turn the age-old adage, “it’s rude to talk about politics at the dinner table” on its head.

This is what we’ve learned—if you don’t talk about racism, you can’t dismantle it. But it isn’t just over the dinner table that this “niceness” rules.

They do mention the “white women” angle but then they drop it, instead of explaining why they single out white women for their missionary work.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you were eager, frenzied even, to do this work. 

Wrong word. “Frenzied” doesn’t mean “very eager.” The right word would be “desperate”…but maybe they wanted to avoid that one because of the stupid insulting “desperate housewives” franchise. They are of course intimately related to that franchise, but I doubt they want anyone to notice.

A mere two years later, not only is that excitement for anti-racism work gone, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, into a verifiable whitelash against anti-racism work.

If white womanhood is a house, your need to be perfect is the foundation.

But white womanhood isn’t a house, so what’s your point? Why just women???

Being perfect is the key to your happiness, to your success, to your very existence.

Citation?

Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect grades. Perfect nails. Perfect weddings. Perfect bodies. Perfect adoring and supportive wife and mother. Perfect employee and colleague.

This is an extract from their book. It’s embarrassing.

I’ve been listening to this; it’s brilliant. I expect to listen to it all over again and maybe a third time.

It’s still 1962. Nothing has changed. White men still assault Black teenage boys for using the “whites only” pool.

A violent attack by a group of white men on two Black teenagers at a resort pool in South Africa on Christmas Day has sparked widespread outrage, reviving images from the ugly days of apartheid and serving as a stinging reminder of the country’s unresolved racial tensions.

We get that a lot here, too. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for running in a “white neighborhood.”

Cellphone footage of the assault — which the teenagers said started when they were told the pool was for “white people only” — spread widely on social media. It showed scenes that could have been from decades ago, when apartheid-era laws restricted South Africa’s Black majority from using public facilities designated for white people.

A video clip shows one man delivering an open-hand slap to the face of one Black teenager, another graying white man casually holding a cigarette as he tugs the hair of the other Black youth, and one of the men wrapping the taller youth in a head lock and pulling him into the pool, seemingly trying to submerge the teenager’s head underwater.

The boys are brothers and they and their parents were staying at the resort hotel, so they were just as entitled to use the pool as the pasty men.

On Wednesday, the police announced they had arrested and charged three white men: Johan Nel, 33, and Jan Stephanus van der Westhuizen, 47, who appeared in court on assault charges; and a third suspect, 48, whose name was not released and who is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday on a charge of attempted murder. None of the suspects or their lawyers could immediately be reached for comment.

I suppose the third is the one who tried to drown the kid.

Originally a comment by Freemage on In our religion-deferential country.

This is the kind of thing that first started me questioning my faith. Not the existence of these assholes–I was world-wise enough to know full well that people are people, no matter what granfaloon they belong to. But it was the awful, deadening silence of the mainstream churches when confronted by the undeniable evil of, say, Westboro Baptist Church. Sure, if you mentioned WBC to a practicing Catholic or Methodist, they’d insist that the former didn’t speak for them, and were out of bounds.

But they are never willing to actively do anything about it. Imagine a world where one of those anodyne interfaith councils came out with specific condemnation for Christian Nationalists and their churches for perverting Christian teachings (sure, it’d require cherry picking the text, but that’s nothing new in and of itself). Where all the ‘mainstream’ Christian churches worked together to make sure that any planned rally or march was surrounded and outnumbered by people rebutting their claims to Biblical inspiration. Where they organize a massive boycott of FOX and other outlets pushing the Nat-C narrative. Where they all use those Sunday sermons to make a joint statement to a captive audience of why these scum make Baby Jesus cry.

Meanwhile, in the real world, it took a bunch of motorcycle-riding veterans to call out and undercut the WBC’s hate campaign. I’m sure most of the Patriot Riders identify as Christians, but they were speaking as vets. It forced me to confront the fact that faith doesn’t move mountains–people do, and they do it without help from a divine source. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to realize that “God” wasn’t running anything, it’s always been just us.

The FFRF says don’t gloss over the Christian Nationalist aspect of Trump’s attempted coup.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation regrets that the recently released Jan. 6 House select committee report fails to pinpoint the Christian nationalist motivations behind the Capitol attack.

The committee’s official findings do not adequately illustrate the true nature of the insurrection and its participants, asserts the national state/church watchdog. The rioters, white supremacist Nick Fuentes primary among them, frequently engaged in Christian rituals before and during the assault. The “Jericho Marches,” in which rioters walked around the Capitol in the days prior praying for the results of the election to be overturned and calling for “spiritual warfare,” the chanting of “Christ is king,” banners containing biblical messages and crosses carried by the insurrectionists show strong evidence of Christian nationalism. More prayers at the “Save America” rally organized by Trump before the putsch, prayers and even exorcisms inside the Capitol during the insurrection, as well as the strong Christian nationalist ties by public officials associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement likewise demonstrate its pervasiveness.

But…you know…this is America. There are things we don’t dare say.

“While it’s not surprising in our religion-deferential country that the Christian nationalist underpinnings of the Jan. 6 insurrection were considered too hot to handle by the committee, it’s very disappointing,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Only mentioning Christian nationalism once, and not addressing the problem directly, opens the door for further violence to come.”

Religion-deferential and guns-deferential – what could go wrong?

Now that is solidarity.

Shabnam Nasimi is a former Policy Advisor to the Minister for Afghan Resettlement and the Minister for Refugees.

There are some very bad people in that movement.

Fred is Fred Sargeant and James is James Garvey.

Some bad bad bad people.

Updating to add:

Guy who enslaved women in porn arrested:

The founder of San Diego-based website GirlsDoPorn.com, who had been on the lam for the past three years while facing federal sex trafficking charges, was arrested this week in Spain, the FBI announced Friday.

Michael James Pratt, 40, was arrested Wednesday by Spanish National Police in Madrid, according to a statement from the FBI. Pratt will be held there pending extradition to San Diego.

He was on the FBI ten most wanted list.

The New Zealand native is charged in a 19-count indictment for allegedly running the now-defunct website. Charges against him include sex trafficking, production of child pornography, sex trafficking of a minor, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

Prosecutors allege he and other GirlsDoPorn employees coerced hundreds of women to appear in pornographic videos under false pretenses, with most of the videos filmed in San Diego.

Oh but surely all women want to appear in porn videos – why would anyone bother to coerce them? We’re all sex-positive now.

Prosecutors allege the website’s owners and operators lured unsuspecting young women, and at least one underage girl, with advertisements for clothed modeling gigs. When it was revealed that the job involved filming adult videos, the victims were led to believe the videos they appeared in would be distributed only to private customers living outside of the country, rather than proliferated online, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

…

If the women ever changed their minds about filming or completing the scenes, the defendants threatened to sue them, cancel their flights home or post footage that had already been filmed online, federal prosecutors said.

Oh well, they’re probably all Karens.

Free enterprise, free speech, freedom of the press, all labored and brought forth…Fox News. Next up could be President Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson, as the most-watched host of the most-watched cable news network, holds rare influence over not just Republican supporters, but politicians, too. This year Carlson has been unafraid to wield that power, across issues including war, subjugation of continents and testosterone.

That’s what we want to see – another “personality” dragging the world toward a deeper abyss.

On 22 February, Vladimir Putin’s forces were massed on the Ukraine border. As people in the eastern European country braced themselves for war, and as the Russian leader was widely condemned by the international community, Carlson used his Fox News show to launch a spirited defense of the Russian president.

Yeah, Putin! That’s what the world needs more of! Ruthless cynical valueless Strongmen!

“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” Carlson said. “These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is: ‘No.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”

Knock-down argument. The list of things Putin did do is in that famous bottom drawer in the basement under the stack of refrigerators.

As Russian troops poured into the Ukraine, Russian news media picked up clips of Carlson’s defenses of Putin to sell the conflict to Russian citizens, including footage from Carlson’s Tuesday show, during which he poured scorn on international efforts to de-escalate the brewing war.

“Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason,” Carlson had said.

He was every bit as scorching about the mandate to hate Obama, right? Right?

[I]n the months since the conflict began, as Kremlin-backed Russian media have amplified Carlson’s coverage “dozens of times”, Carlson’s apparent sympathy towards Putin hasn’t waned. In December the Fox News host declared Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to be a “dictator” and “a dangerous authoritarian”.

So unlike the great and glorious Donald Trump, right?

This guy is a psychiatrist, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at The University of California San Francisco.

I guess I’m a man then. Short hair, gender-noncommittal T shirts or turtlenecks instead of strappy sundresses, no necklace, no earrings, no lipstick, no perm – zap, I’m a guy.

This adult academic psychiatrist is obsessed with the dopy meaningless cartoon.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Varying beliefs.

Hamline was the first University in Minnesota, founded by the Methodists. They currently emphasize interfaith (including those with no faith) co-existence. When I was thinking of Law School I was seriously contemplating pushing for attending their Mitchell Law School since they place a high value on using the Law as a tool to fight The Man. My son graduated from a charter school sponsored by Hamline, and they emphasized intellectual freedom in education.

So, this comes as a surprise, in one sense, but then when I think about it? Perhaps not so much? I see that so many liberal institutions have taken on fear of offense as a measure of intellectual freedom, that offending would make one “not feel like they belong.”

Note: I don’t think that political correctness, like anything else, has a liberal or conservative origin. Yes, it was mostly liberals who policed language to get people to stop calling Vietnamese-Americans “gooks,” to stop calling Chinese-Americans “chinks,” to stop calling black Americans “niggers,” and so on. But in the 1990’s there was also a push from conservatives claiming that their students felt excluded and uncomfortable in their classes because all the dang perfessers were liberal, and besides real Americans don’t need hyphens. Christians claimed they are persecuted in education by teaching evolution and attempted to get teachers and professors fired for “bias.”

Administrators and Deans probably feel like they are walking some sort of tightrope, and in a culture of zero tolerance don’t want to take any chances. Would terrorists on motorcycles go on a rampage at Hamline like they did at Charlie Hebdo? It’s very unlikely in Minnesota, but in a polite society we don’t want to offend anyone and take chances. Integration into a pluralistic society is a fraught journey, and there is give-and-take.

The taxi drivers Eava mentioned were refusing to provide services from the airport for people who had wine or liquor in their luggage due to the prohibition against drinking. They were also refusing to pick up fares for people with service dogs. The airport sued them for discrimination specified in the ADA act. They lost, and the Imams decreed that they must live in two worlds, the secular world and the Muslim world. It also extended to cashiers at Target Grocery stores who were refusing to scan ham or bacon for their customers.

The prohibition against depictions of the Prophet (PBUH) comes from the commandment against idol worship. I think it’s very strange, myself, because on the one side it elevates Muhammad to godhood, but then they also say there is no god but allah. I often think that the priestly class intentionally makes religion more difficult to live with, makes it impossible not to Sin, so that adherents are constantly calling on priests for forgiveness. Mo money! but also a creation of submission for forgiveness. Religion doesn’t set people free, it calls submission freedom. Jewish scholars will admit this outright, with all the devices that strict Jews setup in their homes to make sure they don’t do any work on the Sabbath. “We do these things as service to G*d because they are hard.”

Turns out it’s illegal to plot to kidnap people.

The ringleader of a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Adam Fox, 39, appeared in front of US District Court Judge Richard Jonker on Tuesday. Earlier this year he was found guilty of planning to abduct Ms Whitmer from her holiday home with other militiamen.

The group targeted the governor in 2020, after she imposed Covid rules early in the pandemic.

I wonder how many of us are alive today because of measures taken to deal with the flu pandemic in 1918.

As well as conspiring to abduct Ms Whitmer, Fox was sentenced for planning to use a weapon of mass destruction to blow up a bridge after the kidnapping, to make it easier to escape.

At the low low price of killing everyone who was on the bridge when it blew up.

I have a little stack of New Yorkers from a Little Free Library (to which they’ll return once I’ve perused them), and the other day I settled down to read what looked like an interesting article by Jill Lepore about a UK writer fella. But…the longer I read the more irritated I got.

You know how there’s a popular magazine style that involves adding a lot of “color” to reporting via details about decor, clothes, food, yadda yadda, so that it’s not just a parade of facts but more like a short story? And for that matter a popular fiction style that does the same thing? And you know how unskilled people can overdo it to the point where you want to throw whatever it is on the floor and stamp on it?

This was that. There were only tiny little bits of reporting on the writer and what he’s written, immediately interrupted by yet another description of his kitchen or going somewhere in his car or the weather or god knows what. It was 80 or 90 percent color with only a tiny fraction left for actually telling us anything.

It starts like this:

Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.

It’s already too much, in my view. Too novel-y, too precious, too much information. That “pink as a peony” made me cringe, long before I’d read enough of the piece to get furious. The woolen slippers, too. Why not describe his underpants? Enough already! I don’t care about his slippers! Get on with it!

She does get on with it, briefly, just long enough to spark my interest, but then promptly goes back to piling on the gossipy backgroundy crap. She should have skipped the interesting part so that we could all just stop reading after a few paragraphs.

For the longest stretch of Herron’s professional life, he worked in London in the legal department of an employment-issues research firm, copy-editing journal articles, handbooks, and case reports about employment discrimination and wrongful termination. Nights, he wrote detective fiction, and even got some published, but no one bought it. Then he had a breakthrough. “People say write what you know,” Herron says. “So I wrote about people who are failures.” Bob Cratchitting away at job-discrimination case reports, Herron came up with the idea of Slough House, a place where M.I.5 puts bad spies out to pasture. “Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people,” one character explains. “So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers.” James Bond they are not.

There it is, the one interesting paragraph in the whole long piece. Most of what we get after that is chatter like:

“Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London….I took a bus from Heathrow to Oxford, a city of sandcastles. Herron and his partner, Jo Howard, picked me up by the side of the road in her black Volvo. I was two hours late. It was raining.

“I’m so sorry we’ve missed the morning,” I said, climbing into the back seat: black, white topstitching.

“Not to worry,” Howard said, pulling into traffic as zippy-fast as a taxi-driver.

She described the back seat of her subject’s partner’s car.

“We’ll pop over to the house for a bit and then head out?” Herron asked, looking back at me, wonderingly, black bushy eyebrows raised, a pair of commas. I’d barged in on what was meant to be a weekend getaway to the Malvern Hills with Howard’s two grown daughters. They had graciously agreed to let me tag along as far as a book event in Herefordshire, after which Herron and I would take a train back to Oxford, and then he’d turn around and train back out to meet Howard for what was left of the weekend. Howard downshifted for power, weaved left, weaved right, leaned into a turn on rain-soaked streets. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972. Maybe Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Who cares?? What is the point of all this?

We get a description of their house.

We get told who went where in the house.

In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door.

And it goes on like that! For pages and pages! What on earth is the point? It reads like a parody, but Herron is a real person who really writes spy novels, so I guess it isn’t. At one point, three or four or five pages in, she mentions a character name and I don’t recognize it, so I scan the paragraph and then the page for the previous mention, can’t find it, scan again, and again and again and again, getting more and more irritated, and finally go back to page one to find a single brief reference. How were we, the readers, supposed to remember that one name through three or four pages of mind-bogglingly dull detail about the sitting room?

Anyway. It baffles me. Why do the New Yorker editors think this is good stuff? Why does Lepore herself think so? Is the ghost of Tom Wolfe messing with them or what?

Adjectives, how do they work?

Let’s try it with “dog.”

This is a brown dog.

This is a small dog.

This is a friendly dog.

This is a rescue dog.

This is a pretend dog.

This is a fake dog.

This is a fantasy dog.

Thus ends today’s lesson on how adjectives work.

The Hamline University student newspaper reports on the showing of images in an art history class a few weeks ago:

Hamline undergraduate students received an email from the Dean of Students on Nov. 7, condemning an unnamed classroom incident as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

That must have been weird. “Hi students. There was a bad bad bad incident. Love, the Dean.”

The Oracle has since learned that the event in question occurred on Oct. 6, when a professor shared two depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in class, while discussing Islamic art. One was a 14th century depiction of the Prophet and the other was a 16th century depiction of the Prophet with veil and halo. 

In other words a professor showed images in a discussion of art history. What else are instructors supposed to do? Nobody has claimed (as far as I’ve seen) that the instructor was discussing Islamic art for no apparent reason and that he was supposed to be teaching Marketing 101. Assuming he was teaching art history or history or comparative religion or similar, what law or rule says he’s not allowed to use images in teaching? Hamline University is not a madrassa so why wouldn’t he shouldn’t he couldn’t he refer to images in doing so?

Why is there an assumption that this is at least rude (at worst all but murderous) to Muslim students? Why should their rules (or Catholic rules or Hindu rules or Lutheran rules) govern teaching at a university?

I tell you what, I don’t think there is any genuine religious outrage here. I think any Muslim students fanatical enough to be horrified by images labeled “Mohammed” in an art history class wouldn’t be at a secular university in the first place. They wouldn’t be in Minnesota in the first place. People that narrow and confined in their thinking aren’t going to run off to a mongrel country like the US, full of people from a whole range of religions, and with a hefty fraction of the citizenry that’s not religious at all.

It’s not real outrage, it’s an excuse to make a big stink and get a lot of attention.

The Oracle goes on:

Within Islam, there are varying beliefs regarding whether the representation of the Prophet Muhammad is acceptable. The majority of those practicing Islam today believe it is forbidden to see and create representations of Prophet Muhammad.

That’s nice, but their beliefs about what is forbidden don’t govern anyone else. It’s like someone who works for Facebook moving over to Twitter and getting into a rage over some Facebook rule that isn’t a rule at Twitter. You’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy.

Aram Wedatalla, a Hamline senior and the president of Muslim Student Association (MSA), was in the class at the time the photos were shared.

“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”

What respect is that though? What images are forbidden in that other community that Wedatalla respectfully keeps out of sight?

Crickets.

Anyway…how do they even know it is an image of Mohammed? Are they thinking all images of Mo are literally actually likenesses of him? Even though they don’t all look alike, to put it mildly?

What makes them think the image in the medieval Persian painting is of Mohammed as opposed to being the artist’s idea of Mohammed?

If I type

:)

and label it Mohammed, does that make it an image of Mohammed? What if I say it’s not that Mohammed but the lovely neighborhood UPS guy who recognizes me from a block away and waves hello?

In short what is the thinking here? If it can be called thinking?

Another academic pushed roughly out the door, this time for purported Islamophobia, because he included an image of Mo in a lecture on Islamic art. Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Michigan Christiane Gruber has the details:

The “Islamophobic incident” catalyzed plenty of administrative commentary and media coverage at the university. Among others, it formed the subject of a second Oracle article, which noted that a faculty member had included in their global survey of art history a session on Islamic art, which offered an optional visual analysis and discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. A student complained about the image’s inclusion in the course and led efforts to press administrators for a response. After that, the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence (AVPIE) declared the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

But it was optional. And part of a discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting. In an art course. So it wasn’t “undeniably” any of those things.

Neither before nor after these declarations was the faculty member given a public platform or forum to explain the classroom lecture and activity. To fill in the gap, on Dec. 6, an essay written by a Hamline professor of religion who teaches Islam explaining the incident along with the historical context and aesthetic value of Islamic images of Muhammad was published on The Oracle’s website. The essay was taken down two days later. One day after that, Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”

Yeah good plan. Also respect for observant Muslim students in the classroom should supersede women’s right to an education – they should all be kicked out of universities and schools just as they are in Afghanistan. Let’s hand everything over to the most fanatical monotheists on the premises and leave it at that.

And then this VP for inclusive excellence – what’s so inclusive about censoring art classes on behalf of the most fanatical monotheists in the room at the expense of everyone else? What’s excellent about it? Unless Hamline University students are 100% fundamentalist Muslims, the VP for inclusive excellence isn’t being all that inclusive.

Gruber continues:

The instructor was released from their spring term teaching at Hamline, and its AVPIE went on the record as stating: “It was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.” In other words, an instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.

Much excellence.

Jerry Coyne comments:

This is absolutely unbelievable, and I’m going to write to Hamline’s Dean objecting to the firing. It’s not though the pictures, innocuous though they were, were sprung on unprepared students. Gruber goes on to discuss the history of depiction of images of Muhammad, and it’s a good and edifying read.  She concludes that the students, given the history of Islamic art, had absolutely no reason to consider showing the paintings in class as an “Islamophobic” incident. That is, she says, an “ultraconservative Muslim view on the subject.”

Why should the ultraconservative view get the last word?

This is the Mo in question:

He looks so very human, and quite lovable.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest…

She will work day and night and does not need rest, boasts Noura, a housewife in Riyadh. Gesturing to the cowering Ugandan maid next to her, who is 23 according to Noura, she adds: “If she does something wrong, you just send her to her room and do not let her out.”

Noura, who clutches gold Gucci sunglasses as she bargains for a price of £3,500 for the maid, is eager for a quick deal when she talks to an undercover Times reporter. “I can take her to your home tonight,” she says. “If you are still unsure, no problem, you can rent her instead . . . But tell me now, because by tomorrow someone else will buy her.”

Noura advertised the domestic worker on Haraj.sa, Saudi Arabia’s largest online marketplace, through which a Times investigation shows that hundreds of domestic workers are being illegally trafficked and sold to the highest bidders.

So Noura isn’t just running an employment agency with a staggeringly high fee?

In Saudi Arabia, which has the third largest migrant population in the world, foreign labourers are able to live and work through the Kafala system, where a Saudi citizen known as the “Kafeel” is legally responsible for the worker and will write up their contracts and the terms of their visa.

In the past year the government said that it had “reformed” the system as part of the 2030 Saudi Vision, a plan heralded as part of its attempt to open the country up to the world. It offered what were supposedly greater freedoms, including allowing workers to open bank accounts, move jobs and leave the country without permission.

Can they also breathe, eat, and use the toilet without permission?

The “new freedoms” don’t apply to domestic workers, farmers and drivers, all four million of them.

Every seller who spoke to The Times admitted they had been withholding their worker’s passports. Two admitted to physically disciplining their workers if they “spoke back”, and dozens said they expected their maids to work day and night without breaks for as little as £5 a day.

This is Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, cradle of Islam. Doesn’t Islam have anything to say about slavery, cruelty, exploitation, mercy, decency, fairness, rights?

The prices vary by ethnic background. Filipino maids sell fastest and for the highest prices, and Ugandan maids are labelled by some Haraj users as “the most stubborn” and “unclean” and selling for the least amount.

Translation: lighter brown maids versus darker brown maids.

Doesn’t Islam have anything to say about that?

Valery Shebna, 30, a Kenyan maid, used the helpline for assistance to leave Saudi Arabia without her sponsors’ permission and returned to Nairobi this year. She said the family she lived with for two years in Riyadh beat her every day, refused to let her return home and withheld food as a form of discipline. “I came back emotionally scarred, and without my money, my passport documents, my education certificates. All of that was kept by the couple — my bosses. They didn’t want me to leave.”

Allah is the most merciful.

More from the Reuters report: Kaiser Permanente did a study that reported a very low transition rate, but the study missed some people.

Reuters found two other patients in the region covered by the study who don’t match those characteristics and whom the Kaiser researchers apparently missed. Both have been outspoken about their detransitions.

…

The other patient was Chloe Cole. According to a letter of intent to sue that her lawyers sent to Kaiser in November, Cole was 13 when a Kaiser doctor in 2018 put her on a puberty blocker, followed a few weeks later by testosterone, for her gender-affirming treatment.

At 15, Cole told Reuters, she also wanted top surgery. In an interview, she and her father said the doctors at Kaiser readily agreed, though he wanted to wait until she was older.

“They were so adamant,” he said. He recalled the doctors telling him: “‘At this age, they definitely know what their gender is.’”

Sigh. At that age they “definitely know” a lot of things that they don’t actually know. Do none of these lunatics even remember being 15 ffs???

In June 2020, a Kaiser surgeon performed a mastectomy on Cole, according to the letter of intent to sue. That was a month before her 16th birthday. Less than a year later, Cole said, she began to realize she regretted her surgery and medically transitioning in general after a discussion in school about breastfeeding and pregnancy.

Cole said that when she discussed her decision to detransition with her gender-care specialist at Kaiser, “I could tell that I made her upset that I was so regretful,” Cole said in an interview. Eventually, the doctor offered to recommend a surgeon for breast reconstruction, Cole said, “but that’s something I’ve decided to not go through with.”

Cole has begun speaking out publicly in support of measures to end gender-affirming care for minors, appearing often on conservative media and with politicians who back such bans.

Because the liberal media and politicians are completely on board with the gender ideology, in a way they never were and still aren’t with feminism.

Steve Shivinsky, a spokesman for Kaiser Permanente, declined to comment on the care provided to Cole and Robinson or whether they were included in the study, citing patient privacy.

In a statement, he said Kaiser’s “clinicians are deeply interested in the outcomes of the care we provide and the individual’s state of health and wellbeing before, during and beyond their gender transition.” For adolescents seeking gender-affirming care, he said, “the decision always rests with the patient and their parents and, in every case, we respect the patients’ and their families’ informed decision to choose one form of care over another.”

But it isn’t care. Cutting a girl’s breasts off because she says she feels like a boy isn’t care, it’s crazed reckless brutal mutilation. The decisions to mutilate aren’t “informed,” they’re warped by an ideological fad that has eaten way too many people’s brains.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Their stories have upended his assumptions.

…and any attention they got reinforced to the public the false impression that transgender people were incapable of making sound decisions about their treatment.

Guess what? The impression is not a false one. Deciding to pursue a course of medical treatment that promises something it’s not possible to do is the definition of a decision that is unsound. The falseness is in the claims of those offering such “treatments,” not in the correct perception that a course leading to sterilization and lifelong medical experimentation on your own flesh is not a good or healthy one.

It’s like getting on board a burning plane that is supposed to take you to Oz. You’ll never reach the stated destination, and the trip itself is dangerous and terrifying. Sure you post brave, smiling selfies while you’re in the air, but you’re still going to fall out of the sky before you get to where you’d hoped to because Oz isn’t real; and nobody can take you there. Anyone who says they can is lying, and cannot truly have your best interests at heart.

You left reality when you climbed aboard and took your seat, but nobody on the flight is going to tell you otherwise. There is no safety demonstration from the cabin crew because this plane (though on fire) is never going to crash. Should you have second thoughts, and try to make your way to the emergency exit (or look for a parachute), you will be subjected to threats and abuse, and told that your doubts and fear are going to kill everyone on the flight, and that you should shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.