… Read the rest

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Amanda Marcotte nailed it at Comment is Free a couple of days ago.

A man’s right to privacy versus a woman’s right to live free of male violence: these two principles routinely conflict in modern society, with the former winning out most of the time…

This belief that men deserve a veil of privacy that makes it easier to harass, beat, and rape women is so ingrained in our society that it’s difficult to stand back and see how nonsensical it really is.

Most of our stalkers have their veil of privacy. They talk degrading shit about us day in and day out, and none of it ever touches them by so much as a drop. They have complete immunity … Read the rest

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She’s started moving.

“Movement has been witnessed in Malala’s hands and legs which is a positive development,” Maj Gen Bajwa said while giving a briefing on Malala’s health here on Saturday.

He said the doctors have cut down the amount of sedatives being administered to Malala Yousafzai in view of the steady improvement in her health condition. Her condition is satisfactory, he added.

That’s good.

Update: people have been passing this front page of the NY Times around on Twitter all day.

 … Read the rest

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On the wonderful Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics Facebook page the other day, a friend posted a link to an obnoxious sneery article on Racialicious about the Half the Sky PBS series. She was infuriated by it. She was right.

…the PBS film Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women, a well-publicized neo-liberal “odyssey through Asia and Africa” hosted by everyone’s favorite white savior New York Times reporter, Nikolas Kristof.

Well that’s a shitty start. “Neo-liberal”? No. Neo-liberal is libertarian free market gospeller; the film wasn’t about that.  ”White savior”? That’s just offensive.

…in ‘white man’s burden’ style, Kristof even says at one point, “When you have won the lottery of life that there is some obligation some

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She’s still on a ventilator but her vital organs are “intact and working properly.” The swelling in her head has subsided.

Her two schoolmates are doing better.… Read the rest

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Just a quick one. Because he says

I’ve been confirming that I left of my own accord all over the ether, including my farewell post on Ftb, and my Welcome post here, on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

It was Ophelia who decided to let the cat out of the bag several days before I had planned, and posted a piece that insinuated the exact opposite. This left me with a shitload of work to do changing links, redesigning graphics, etc., on a night I planned to spend with my family.

The quick note is just to say that I didn’t know it was a secret. I didn’t know I was letting a cat out of a bag. Part of the … Read the rest

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In a comment by adriana at Stephanie’s.

One interesting fact about this whole affair of rejection of feminism or the word feminism, is that a bunch of atheists (I don’t know how many, but they sure are vocal) think Western women, and especially atheist women in secular democracies, have nothing to complain about. Equality has been reached, according to those people, and misogyny eradicated. Therefore, any complaints of unequal treatment or misogyny are signs of bitchiness, basically.

I hadn’t thought of that before. That’s illuminating.

It certainly seems to fit well with “Dear Muslima” and all the subseqent bullshit that has amounted to amplification of  ”Dear Muslima” – so much amplification that we all feel a bit deaf.

Yeah, … Read the rest

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As you may know, Greta’s father just died. She has a wonderful post about him – a daughter’s biography, I would call it, rather than an obituary.

A small excerpt.

My father used to read to us — me and my brother — from fun, brainy books for kids: The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice in Wonderland. His copy of Alice, the Annotated Alice with annotations by Martin Gardner, is the version I fell in love with, the version I still think of as the classic. I learned the poem “Jabberwocky” by heart when I was in third grade. I got the Jabberwock tattooed on my arm when Ingrid gave me a tattoo for my wedding present. And I

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The CBC’s Doc Zone had an interesting show last night about the sexualization of children. At one point a group of high school girls were talking about the way porn affects boys, and they said it teaches them to treat girls with contempt and call them bitches, sluts, whores, cunts – you know the drill.

If they’re right, that seems a rather depressing sign for the future.… Read the rest

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The German bishops have told German Catholics that if they don’t give the church money they don’t get the sacraments.

Last month, German bishops warned that if members of the Catholic Church don’t pay the country’s church tax, they’ll be denied the sacraments — including baptisms, weddings and funerals.

In increasingly secular Europe, Germany is one of the few countries where the state collects a special levy from tax-registered believers and hands it over to three organized faiths.

Registered Catholics, Protestants and Jews pay a surcharge of up to 9 percent on their income. The Catholic Church alone received some $6.5 billion in 2011.

$6.5 billion! That’s not a bad chunk of change, especially for putting on fancy dress … Read the rest

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A picture Dil Nawaz shared on Facebook.

… Read the rest

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Well that’s funny. All that martyrdom stuff about stepping down was apparently just performance art. I hear that Justin Vacula hasn’t stepped down as chapter co-chair of the Pennsylvania SCA after all. Certainly he’s still listed as such.

Update October 13: now he’s not listed.… Read the rest

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