Meanwhile, on the South Bank…

I wish to register a complaint! A giant dead parrot has been unveiled in London to mark the Monty Python live show’s TV broadcast:

Via Digital Spy on Facebook… Read the rest

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Josh posted this on Facebook yesterday and I demanded permission to post it here and he gave in.

I don’t like the message, “Trust women to make their healthcare decisions,” many organizations are using. This is not about trust. The idea of “trust” has nothing to do with the anti-choice measures. It’s not that antis don’t “trust” women to “make the best decisions.” This is not an in loco parentis relationship where the antis genuinely have the best interests of their charges at heart.

1. Women are not their charges. 2. They don’t care about women being “trustworthy.” They don’t want women to have options. That’s it.

They want to take the ability away from women to have rights … Read the rest

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Now that’s how to say it. Rebecca Traister at the New Republic on that much-discussed much-disliked (for good reason) about that Esquire piece saying, with immense generosity, that not all 42-year-old women cause projectile vomiting on sight.

I thought the article was a piece of sexist tripe, celebrating a handful of Pilates-toned, famous, white-plus-Maya-Rudolph women as having improved on the apparently dismal aesthetics of previous generations; my primary objections to the piece have been ably laid out by other critics. Chait tweeted that he viewed the piece as a “mostly laudable” sign of progress: a critique not of earlier iterations of 42-year-old womanhood, but rather of the old sexist beauty standards that did not celebrate those

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From the Onion:

LINCOLN, NE—Loudly demanding an immediate statement on the issue, Nebraska voters clamored this week for more information from female politician Elaine Romero, an Omaha businesswoman running in the state’s upcoming gubernatorial primary election, on whether she is, in fact, a mother first. “Elaine Romero has made her stance on the social and economic issues facing Nebraskans abundantly clear, but we will not rest until she states clearly and on the record whether she is a mom first and foremost, and a politician second,” local resident Martin McGlynn said on behalf of 1.9 million restless Nebraskans, all of whom were vehemently pressing for answers on whether the 45-year-old public servant prioritizes her family above all else, considers

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Sometimes there’s a conflict between the majority will and human rights. That’s one reason there’s a need for such things as high courts and international courts: to adjudicate between them.

It can be alarming when legislators seem to be blankly unaware of this. Commonplace, but alarming.

Today in Ireland for instance.

Tanaiste Joan Burton has ruled out an abortion referendum being held in the lifetime of this Government.

Ms Burton was responding to an impassioned plea from Independent TD Catherine Murphy who said many women were suffering needlessly because the law on termination of pregnancy on medical grounds was too restrictive.

Deputy Murphy said the referendum to safeguard the right to life of the unborn child was voted in

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Originally a comment by the philosophical primate on Not Thorita.

I think Lees’ criticism is… just damned silly. Yes, I get the critique of the “another strong woman” nonsense, but the idea behind this move in the comic is that Thor is a particular ROLE — a warrior deity — that a woman can fill as effectively as a man. The quoted passage about “Lady Thor,” “Thorita” and so on (which I’m confident has nothing to do with a transgender Eurovision contestant) is simply writer Jason Aaron explicitly saying that he is NOT going down the route of remaking the character in pink and fluff and ribbons and offensive feminine stereotypes just because said warrior deity is going to … Read the rest

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A French blogger has been fined for writing a harsh restaurant review that got a high Google ranking.

I’m not making it up.

Ms Doudet was sued by the owner of Il Giardino restaurant in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France after she wrote a blogpost entitled “the place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino”.

According to court documents, the review appeared fourth in the results of a Google search for the restaurant. The judge decided that the blog’s title should be changed, so that the phrase: “the place to avoid” was less prominent in the results.

The judge sitting in Bordeaux also pointed out that the harm to the restaurant was exacerbated by the fact that Ms Doudet’s

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So what about THOR?

Paris Lees at the Guardian asks.

Hurrah. Marvel comics have revealed that Thor, the God of Thunder, has become a woman. Not in a transgender way, not in a “When Mr Thor gets back from the summer holidays he will be wearing a dress and called Ms Thor” way. No, Thor is simply a woman now and that’s that. And you needn’t worry about her going all soft and silly. As Jason Aaron, writer of the new Thor series, puts it: “This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR. This is the THOR of the Marvel universe. But it’s unlike any Thor we’ve ever seen before.”

Excuse me?… Read the rest

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Wow. Breaking news – a Federal judge just declared the California death penalty unconstitutional.

A federal judge in Orange County ruled Wednesday that California’s death penalty violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, ruled on a petition by death row inmate Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to die nearly two decades ago.

Carney said the state’s death penalty has created long delays and uncertainty for inmates, most of whom will never be executed.

He noted that more than 900 people have been sentenced to death in California since 1978 but only 13 have been executed.

“For the rest, the dysfunctional administration of California’s death penalty system has resulted, and

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Damn, I’ve been neglecting to pay attention to Mars Hill church – which is local to me – and clearly that’s a mistake. It’s been melting down, and people have been spilling truckloads of beans.

There are emerging stories of sensational kangaroo courts and “sex demon” trials, like something out of the Salem witch hunts of the 1600s. Even more devastating to individual members are the ways in which they are shamed, taught to blame themselves and each other when they see problems, and to formally shun people who step out of favor with church leaders. Shunnings, both formal and informal, have caused the outcast to spend years in isolation, cut off from friends, sometimes suffering deep clinical depression,

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Via RH Reality Check… Read the rest

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Did somebody mention sexism in science?

The accused is Dr. Aurelio Galli, whose research deals with dopamine transport and signalling.

At a conference the professor “… required the female graduate students to attend a boat party where the male professors became intoxicated and were allowed to make romantic and sexual advances on the students.”

Then there’s this: The professor “would routinely call her ugly, fat and … a stupid in front of other students.”

The suit alleges he knew the graduate student was a recovering alcoholic and told her he wished she “would start drinking again because she would be more fun,” and that “… she would be less stressed out if she had more sex.”

She would be … Read the rest

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Mathematigal has her views on Feynman and the hero-worship of Feynman and what that hero-worship implies for women in science and mathematics.

She starts with some of the special treatment she has received, such as…

I have had men in academia disparage me to others, and dismiss both my interests and accomplishments as trivial. I regularly deal with comments like “PRO TIP: Mute the video, sit back, and admire the cute girl” regarding my outreach work. I have had jobs (multiple) where I was harassed and propositioned by my own boss.

And then she goes on to explain how Feynman and the cult of Feynman relates to that kind of thing.

Because every time I hear someone in my department

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Have an early morning (well it’s early morning here – I realize this is an eccentric lightly-populated time zone) picture of Jupiter and Io.

… Read the rest

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I’ll have to start following this inquiry into child abuse in the UK. Yesterday’s news was that the judge who was appointed to chair it had stepped down because of conflicts of interest.

May had made clear that as far as she was concerned the inquiry was not being set up to replicate a police investigation into claims of a child sex ring at Westminster. Instead she said its job was to consider whether public bodies such as the NHS, the BBC and non-state institutions such as the churches “had taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse”.

It was widely expected that Butler-Sloss, 80, would convene a panel of legal and child protection experts, and

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Thank you but feminism doesn’t need that kind of help.

A self-styled battalion of the far-right group Britain First has “invaded” a mosque in south London.

The stated aim of the altercation on Sunday was to “demand the removal of sexist signs” outside the Crayford Mosque.

The signs designate separate entrances for men and women, so they can enter for segregated worship as is the custom in most mosques, as well as Orthodox Jewish synagogues and Sikh gurdwaras.

A film of the encounter was posted on Facebook, set to dramatic drumming music and ending with the slogan: “Britain First Defence Force. No fear. No retreat. No surrender.”

All sporting matching black flatcaps, the group of five “activists” marched into

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The Muslim Council of Britain and Diabetes UK got together and put out a pamphlet for diabetics who plan to fast for Ramadan. It’s a little better in some ways than the NHS advice, but it’s still not good. It nowhere says you just shouldn’t fast if you have diabetes, period. It nowhere says you shouldn’t fast if you have diabetes and you don’t have to. It nowhere says fasting is optional.

It opens with

If you are planning on fasting and have diabetes, it is important to speak to
your diabetes healthcare team as early as possible before Ramadan. For some
people with diabetes, fasting can be dangerous or can cause problems to your
health. Your diabetes team

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The New Yorker offers its Nadine Gordimer archive, which is well stocked.

Over the decades, Gordimer wrote dozens of pieces for The New Yorker. Her first, a short story called “A Watcher of the Dead,” was published in 1951.

After that, she continued to publish stories about life in South Africa, with occasional excursions into other genres. In 1954, she published a memoir of her childhood, called “Allusions in a Landscape”; in 1995, she wrote about being a juror at Cannes; and, in 2001, she recalled, in a short, pensive meditation on memory, running into an old friend on a London street.

But it was through her short fiction that Gordimer made her presence felt the

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