I’m reading a wicked review of Alain de Botton’s new book in The New Republic, by Victoria Beale. She explains about “The School of Life”…

The self-declared mission of the School is to provide an enterprise that will “direct you toward a variety of useful ideas … guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console.” The School’s shop has a few lightly stocked book-shelves (Oliver James, Paul Theroux, Italo Calvino, and, of course, the complete de Botton bibliography), while in its downstairs classroom, the School hosts talks that are a mixture of book-promos (“Steven Pinker on Violence and Humanity” to sell copies of The Better Angels of Our Nature), schedule fillers (an eight-week course on “Mindfulness,”), and champagne tastings…

At

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

I didn’t know that South Korea has the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. Somebody has to have that, naturally, but I’m slightly surprised that’s who does. I might have guessed the US does, if anyone had asked – I suppose because of lots of rich people and lots of advertising, lots of emulation and envy of movie stars and fashion models, lots of consumerism and the values that go with it, lots of reactionary bullshit about women floating around – reasons like that. But no, it’s South Korea.

One in five women in Seoul have undergone some kind of procedure. Most popular: Eyelid surgery, to make the eyes “more Western,” and getting your jawbone

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

Nine women shot to death in Kano for attempting to prevent children from getting polio. Nine.

In the first attack in Kano the polio vaccinators were shot dead by gunmen who drove up on a motor tricycle.

Thirty minutes later gunmen targeted a clinic outside Kano city as the vaccinators prepared to start work.

Some Nigerian Muslim leaders have previously opposed polio vaccinations, claiming they could cause infertility.

On Thursday, a controversial Islamic cleric spoke out against the polio vaccination campaign, telling people that new cases of polio were caused by contaminated medicine.

Such opposition is a major reason why Nigeria is one of just three countries where polio is still endemic.

Nine women murdered, and who knows how many … Read the rest

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

Michael Kimmel wrote a great article on the Steubenville gang rape a couple of weeks ago.

As I found in my interviews with more than 400 young men for my book Guyland, in the aftermath of these sorts of events – when high-status high school athletes commit felonies, especially gang rape – they are surrounded and protected by their fathers, their school administrations and their communities. These out-of-control, rapacious thugs are our school’s heroes — “our guys,” as the gang rapists at Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey were called nearly two decades ago. The players themselves hold to a code of silence, the omerta of sexual assault: No one ever rats out a fellow bro. The parents,

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

Nahla Mahmoud went on Channel 4′s 4thought.tv programme to talk about her opinions on ‘What does Sharia Law have to offer Britain’ and found herself the only person out of seven interviewed who was against sharia and for secularism.

My interview has triggered a debate in the Sudanese media, both at home and in the diaspora, from which campaigns have emerged inciting people against me calling me a ‘Kafira’ (infidel) and ‘Murtadda’ (left Islam) . I guess Sudanese government officials have time to watch Channel 4 because the Sudanese Armed Forces’ Facebook page posted my picture declaring me an infidel and apostate. Who knew that my private beliefs could denigrate a country’s government, religion, and armed forces?!

I can’t … Read the rest

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

Guest post by Gen, Uppity Ingrate.

It started with an article by Sisonke Msimang, which I will excerpt rather than quote in full.

I read an article on Thursday morning. It said: “The victim had been sliced open from her stomach to her genitals and dumped.” The radio is full of this story. Full of politicians and posers, trying to outdo one another. Like funeral criers. But it will end, the show. And there will be marches and petitions. There will be statements and rage. But it will happen again. Until we are inured to shock. It will happen again. Until our bones are worn into dust and our teeth crushed into the sand. It will happen and happen.

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

The radical feminists are in your streets!

There are lots. See them all.… Read the rest

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

You know that video that “mykeru” did a couple of days ago? The one that prompted some stranger to tweet at me that I’m an immoral little twat who should get a fucking hobby? It’s now the featured video at A Voice for Men – with my face on it, looking like a nightmare-idiot, because it caught me in mid-blink.

Fabulous. I love being a target.

 … Read the rest

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

The chair of the Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, says the “Muslim patrol” problem will probably get worse.

He compared the Islamist vigilantes to extremists like the far-right Golden Dawn supporters in Greece and right-wing vigilantes in France who ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp.

Countries such as Denmark and Spain have also seen Islamist extremists trying to enforce their own sharia law, he noted.

All were imitating Hitler’s Brownshirts by “enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods,” said Mr Nawaz, who spent years in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group.

What a nightmare.… Read the rest

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

Well this is foul.

One of the self-styled “Muslim patrols” that have been wandering the streets of east London bullying anyone they don’t like posted this one that shows them bullying a man they take to be gay. All the more offensively, they keep mixing “mate” in with their abuse – “you’re a bloody fag mate, get out of it mate, what’s wrong wiv your face mate.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYRl_9QUjk4

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

A post by Jadehawk pointed me to an article from 2011 in the Irish Times, posted by Paddy Doyle.

TWO OF the religious congregations which ran Magdalene laundries in the State set up and continue to run the Dublin-based Ruhama agency, which is funded by the State and works “with women affected by prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation”.

According to its website, the agency receives funding from the Department of Health and the Department of Justice.

Ruhama, which means “renewed life” in Hebrew, is described as “a joint initiative of the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, both of which had a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those

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

One cheerful little item on a horrible day. Larry Moran did a post at Sandwalk about Golden Palace egg rolls.

I’ve taken many friends to the restaurant and recommended it to visitors.
Recently the talk.origins moderator, Dave Greig, sampled the food and pronounced
it tolerable. More recently, I brought lots of food to the hotel at Eschaton
2012 and treated PZ Myers, Veronica Abbas, Chris DiCarlo, and Ophelia Benson.
They all liked the egg rolls. Everyone likes Golden Palace egg rolls.

He did, he did! And we did, and I did. They were goooood.

Thanks, Larry!… Read the rest

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

The headstrong survivors of the Magdalene laundries are threatening to go on a hunger strike if the Irish government doesn’t set up a redress board.

Steven O’Riordain, a representative of the Magdalene Survivors Together, has warned  some women will go on hunger strike if the government does not meet their demands.

“There is a possibility that this will happen. Some of the women have said if they do not get proper redress from a state which was responsible for being abandoned in these institutions. Many of them say they are at that age now where they have nothing to lose if the government fails to set up a scheme that will give some compensation for what happened to them,” he

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

John Walsh on the Irish government and the Magdalene laundries.

These were places where “loose girls” or “fallen women” could be packed off to, girls impregnated by their fathers or uncles or the local priest, girls who were considered too flightly or flirtatious or headstrong to be biddable members of society. They could be put to work all day, washing sheets for the military, fed on bread and dripping, forbidden to speak and offered no way out, or any explanation about why they were imprisoned. Half of them were teenagers, doomed to spend their best years in a workhouse, being humiliated by nuns, told they’d offended God and that their parents didn’t want them.

Prisons. Slavery. For girls who … Read the rest

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

A Catholic bishop says Obama is a negation of Lincoln because Lincoln was all “freedom” and Obama hates freedom.

He has chosen to use the bully pulpit not to call upon us all to be nobler and to embrace each child, regardless of origins and circumstances; rather, he has been a proponent of an expediency that is shameful and criminal in the eyes of Almighty God.

The bishop knows that about the eyes of almighty god how? No how. He doesn’t. He just says he does. He may think he does, or he may pretend he does, but either way, he’s wrong.

In my view, those who voted for President Obama bear the responsibility for a step deeper in the

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

Mother Jones‏@MotherJones

Boy Scouts say they need more time to reconsider ban on gay scouts. Wait, isn’t their motto “be prepared”? http://bit.ly/WubiMp… Read the rest

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