New Brunswick (the one in Canada, not the one in New Jersey) has exceptionally harsh restrictions on abortion.

In 1994, the province banned abortions in clinics outside of hospitals. Federal rulings changed that in 1995, but people needing the procedure were forced to pay out of pocket.

Since then, the province’s Morgentaler Clinic saved many from unwanted pregnancies. But following its closure in July, the government’s restrictions on abortion are too tight to accommodate people’s needs. Newly sworn-in premier Brian Gallant has pledged to remove barriers to abortion in the province, but has not yet come through with anything in the way of solid action.

Sounds like Canada’s Texas.

Reproductive Justice NB tried to raise the money to save

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

The New Statesman has an unpleasant piece by Chris Allen that treats all anti-IS Muslims as co-opted if not worse.

First the background, via the BBC:

A fashion designer has created a ‘poppy hijab’ to commemorate the centenary of the first Muslim soldier being awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery.

Tabinda-Kauser Ishaq, a final year student at the University of Arts in London, also hopes the piece of clothing will give Muslim women a new way to mark Remembrance Day.

That would be a very dubious thing if the poppies were meant to commemorate, say, an imperialist massacre or a genocide. But you can remember and mourn the mass slaughter of World War I without endorsing that war itself.… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by nathanaelnerode on In which I surprise them.

I’m a solidly-built, six foot tall white male in my mid forties, and for at least two decades I have had absolutely NO idea what it’s like to be scared walking down a street.

Well, y’know, how shall I put this… I’m a thinly-built, 5 foot 2, “weak” looking, often “effeminate” looking male, and I have ALWAYS known what it’s like to be scared walking down a street.

I’ve been sexually harassed, I’ve been in a hostile environment, I’ve been physically assaulted. This is probably actually fairly common for boys who went through US schools, unfortunately. My threat assessment is turned WAAAAAY up, all the time; I have … Read the rest

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More video of Julian Blanc lecturing a room-full of young men on how to coerce women into having sex.

It’s nauseating to look at, because it’s so inhuman. It’s as if women are food and the men are all ravenously hungry. They just want to eat, that’s all. They don’t want to eat people, they just want food.

They just want to fuck something. For some unfathomable reason, the somethings all have these useless brains perched on top of the part that has the penis-holder, so you can’t just fuck them just like that – you have to “strike up a conversation” and “steer them to where you want to go” and “get them on the bed” and “take … Read the rest

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A friend did some digging and found out who that guy in the “just grab her” video is. He’s PickUpArtist Julian Blanc. Tim Samuels went to Florida for the Daily Mail to listen to him talk. (Cool that his name is actually “White,” isn’t it, given his attitude to Japanese women.)

In a sweltering Miami afternoon, hundreds of guys are sitting in an airless hotel reception room taking notes, hanging on every utterance by the speaker.

They’ve paid up to $3000 to be here – to learn from the master himself.

On the podium at the front isn’t a religious guru. It isn’t a business leader imparting the secrets of getting rich. It’s a guy dressed in jeans and

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The BBC mentioned a petition to free Ghoncheh Ghavami, so here is that petition in case you want to sign it.

Since June 2014 my younger sister is in solitary confinement in Tehran. She was arrested for going to a men’s volleyball match.

Ghoncheh is a British Iranian dual citizen. She was there to watch a game. She was arrested because of a misunderstanding.

Amnesty International has called for an Urgent Action for my sister. Amnesty believes Ghoncheh has been put under psychological pressure and been told she “would not walk out of prison alive.” 

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has said it was “aware of reports” of her imprisonment but its diplomatic powers are limited in Iran. We know

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Iran has sentence a woman to a year in prison for going to a volleyball game.

A British-Iranian woman detained in Iran after trying to watch a men’s volleyball match has been sentenced to a year in prison, her lawyer says.

Ghoncheh Ghavami, 25, was found guilty of spreading anti-regime propaganda, lawyer Alizadeh Tabatabaie said.

Iran banned women from volleyball games in 2012, extending a long-standing ban on football matches.

Doing it one item at a time are they? Football matches, volleyball matches – movies, grocery stores, bus stations, schools, hospitals – until presto all the items are checked and women can’t set foot outside.

Amnesty International has described Ms Ghavami, who is from Shepherd’s Bush in west London,

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Wow, a lecture on how to rape women in Japan. “If you’re a white male, you can do what you want.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=grV1iDns87s… Read the rest

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Kiran Opal has a post on the Jian Ghomeshi Saga, and the ‘Conquest’ of Feminism. She discusses the massive obstacles to reporting sexual assault and the consequent rarity of official reporting.

In most high profile sexual assault and rape cases, if the women (or in the cases of male victims, the men) don’t name names or don’t come out openly and accuse those who they say have assaulted them, they are called liars. If they name names and come out openly and accuse, they are themselves accused of trying to destroy the alleged perpetrator’s career. Here, we don’t hang women for speaking up about being assaulted like they just did with Reyhana Jabbari in Iran, nor do we stone

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Don’t make Baby Ayn cry.

… Read the rest

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Peter Boghossian is still at it. He’s in the meta phase – anyone who disliked his snide pseudo-questions about Y gay pride is a rigid ideologue so neener neener.

Like this one:

Questioning that one can be proud to be gay is a leftist blasphemy. ‪#‎justbornthatway‬

Like this share:

Eli Bosnick

Peter Boghossian:

Let’s examine how we use words.

The Internet:

YOU HATEFUL SON OF A BITCH!!!!!

I particularly hate this one, where he comes right out and says he’s doing it to taunt and upset:

I’m looking for an entirely new group of ideologues to enrage. What word should I disambiguate next?

A few hours before that he was pretending it was about critical thinking … Read the rest

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I hate outdoor Halloween displays more every year. They haven’t always been a thing – back in the 18th century when I was a kid, there was a carved pumpkin and that was it. You didn’t have every yard full of rotting corpses and that stupid cobweb shit draped all over everything.

But some displays are disgusting in a whole other way. The story at AlterNet is titled Kentucky Woman Doesn’t Find Display Of Black People Hanging From Her Tree Offensive

so that’s how that one is disgusting.

A Halloween display depicting what appears to be a black family hanging from a tree outside of a Kentucky residence has been taken down after people complained about it. The house is

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If you have a goddy hatred of the whole idea of same-sex marriage and you’re seeing hurdle after hurdle fall in defiance of your goddy hatred, what do you do? You go on goddily hating it, of course, but also you make a big fuss about “religious freedom” for people whose jobs entail some kind of involvement with marriage. Hollis Phelps at RD gives an example:

The strategy has fallen instead to “protecting” those whose religious opposition to same-sex marriage may conflict with the law.

That includes public employees whose regular duties include issuing marriage licenses and officiating marriages, such county registers of deeds, magistrates, and their employees. As The Charlotte Observer reported, the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition,

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Alastair Smart at the Telegraph asks a question that I have wondered about many many times – How did we forget William Hazlitt?

Seriously. The guy was a demon writer, and a genuine thinker. He was also interesting to read. How and why did he get so obscure?

Certainly, even by the non-specialist standards of his day, he had a mighty range: a philosopher, journalist, political commentator, grammar theorist, theatre critic, art critic, travel writer, memoirist – not to mention, biographer of Napoleon. Here was a serious thinker, for whom every pursuit fed into life’s deeper questions. His rise coincided with that of Romanticism. Indeed, though our popular image of the movement is dominated by its poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge,

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Tuesday the North Dakota Supreme Court upheld a state law that limits the use of drugs to perform abortions. Yes that’s right, North Dakota, the state that has one count them ONE abortion clinic for a state that’s 70,762 square miles / 183,272 square kilometers in area.

The state’s high court, in a 103-page ruling, reversed a ruling by a district judge last year that found the 2011 law violates the state constitution.

“Beginning tomorrow morning, there will not be any medication abortions in North Dakota,” said David Brown, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is helping North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic in Fargo with its legal challenges.

No pill-based abortions for you, North Dakota sluts! … Read the rest

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Yesterday the pope took a moment to tell us not to underestimate the devil.

Francis described Christian life as a continuous battle against Satan during his homily at morning Mass at the Vatican on Thursday (Oct. 30).

Oh yeah? That’s what it is? All the more reason to be glad I’m not a Christian then.

“This generation, and many others, have been led to believe that the devil is a myth, a figure, an idea, the idea of evil,” the pope told the faithful during Mass at the St. Martha guesthouse where he lives inside the walls of the Vatican.

Yes, Mr Bergoglio, that’s because it is. It’s a supernatural or magical immortal being with superpowers, dreamed up by … Read the rest

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Scott Kaufman watched Christina Hoff Sommers’s latest video, which is nice, because it means I don’t need to.

Sommers says the GamerGate people are “a voice for moderation in today’s fevered debates over sex and gender.”

According to Sommers, GamerGate is merely a group of gamers who either “believe there is too much corruption and cronyism in gaming journalism” or “are weary of cultural critics who evaluate video games through the prism of social justice.”

Why is that a bad way to evaluate video games or any other cultural artifact? Why are we not supposed to think and talk about the ways cultural artifacts shape our thinking about anything and everything, including about kinds of people who are seen … Read the rest

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Iram Ramzan takes on Yvonne Ridley.

[A]ccording to Muslim convert and Respect party activist Yvonne Ridley, the war in Afghanistan was a total failure. On Twitter, she said: “So Taliban undefeated, no career women emerging from rubble & only success story is the rapid growth of opium in Afghanistan.”

While the situation in Afghanistan is far from ideal, there are some good things to have emerged since the western intervention, one of them being the the education of women, which I pointed out to her.

.@yvonneridley in 2000 there were no girls going to school in Afghanistan. In 2012, 36% of pupils were girls. I’d say that’s an achievement

Ridley denied this, saying that there were girls in school

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

In case ya missed it – Anita Sarkeesian on the Colbert Report.

Lots of applause and squeeing.

At the end Colbert kind of dropped the persona.… Read the rest

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