Oh dear god here we go again.

Sinn Fein is refusing to say if it will hand over to gardai the minutes of a star chamber-style inquiry into 100 cases of suspected sex abuse involving members of the Provisional movement, held in Dublin eight years ago.

The secret investigation flies in the face of repeated denials by Sinn Fein leadership of their knowledge of a culture of sexual abuse within the Republican movement.

I guess Sinn Fein learned from the bishops? And Holy Mother Church?

The 2006 ‘review’ was carried out in the wake of information which emerged in Northern newspapers and the Sunday Independent that a “rape victim” had been summoned to appear before a Provo kangaroo court.

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Again Josh, Official SpokesGay writes a Facebook post that I have to put here.

Had a long conversation with one of my best friends last week. We talked a lot about how different life, sex, love, politics look as we enter middle-age as compared to how it looked to us in the late 80s when we were just coming out.

About the double-edged sword of cultural ghettoization. How the closure of a famed gay bar provokes sadness and outcries about how those young baby fags don’t understand what they’ve lost. And they don’t, but not necessarily for the Very Important Reasons we middle-aged are thinking of.

So gaydar. That way “you can tell” if someone is gay. Maybe he’s a … Read the rest

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The New Republic ran a piece by Ken Silverstein about salary inflation at DC think tanks in February 2013.

Jim DeMint had recently left the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation, going from $174,000 a year to $1.2 million or more.

Once upon a time, the only way for a pol to cash in like that was to leave elected office in order to become a lobbyist—a nice living, but one that carries with it a stigma that would likely kill any future ambitions for high office. By contrast, a gig at Heritage, the main voice of the conservative movement, could be a good launching pad for a potential 2016 presidential bid. Candidate DeMint could run

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You know how I keep expressing astonishment at the way C H Sommers has gone from being an academic to being a shameless hack. It occurred to me to wonder if it’s just a simple matter of being better paid as a hack. Having wondered that, I decided to see if I could compare her salary as an academic to her salary as a hack for the American Enterprise Institute.

The bulk of her teaching career was at Clark University; she was an Associate Professor when she left to be a scholar at AEI. Clark reports the salary for associate profs to be $107,580.

The 990 tax form for the AEI reports some scholars’ salaries but not all.

That lists … Read the rest

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Here’s a good thing. I saw it via Leo Igwe on Facebook: he posted a picture of himself with a young girl who was fundraising for it at the Foundation Beyond Belief conference last July. The good thing is the Kasese Humanist Primary School in Uganda.

The more humanist schools the better, I say.… Read the rest

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Sandy Garossino, a former prosecutor, explains at the Huffington Post Canada how Jian Ghomeshi threw a wrench into his own defense by writing and publishing that Facebook post.

Normally in sexual assault trials, the accused doesn’t have to do anything and all the hassle falls on the complainant. The defense strategy is usually to batter the complainant’s credibility to death while the accused just looks on.

The Jian Ghomeshi trial will be very different.

Apart from the media notoriety and Ghomeshi’s status as a public figure, the most outstanding evidentiary feature of this case is his own widely disseminated statement on Facebook (now removed). This one act, seemingly taken in solitary desperation, radically re-set the trial dynamic by putting Ghomeshi’s

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This will give you nightmares.

David Futrelle at We Hunted the Mammoth collected some “fan art” devoted to Christina Hoff Sommers by her adoring admirers who call her (god I hate this, it’s so fucking twee) “Based Mom.”

GamerGaters sure do love their Based Mom! Christina Hoff Sommers, as you may or may not know, is a libertarian think-tanker who’s been grinding away at feminism for two decades, while still, rather perversely, claiming to be feminist.

Right? Right? That’s exactly what I say. Yes, of course, feminists can be critical about feminism; feminists can separate good feminism from bad feminism; feminists can say some ideas and claims that file themselves under feminism are shitty ideas and claims. But non-stop … Read the rest

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Saying good-bye to Tuğçe Albayrak.

… Read the rest

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I’ve been re-watching Lone Star.

We talked about it last month, and this past week I’ve been re-watching it. There are a lot of threads in it, that weave together throughout the movie, so there’s a lot to keep track of. There are some things I don’t think I caught before.

To remind or inform you of the core story: there was a murderous corrupt sheriff in the Texas border town where the story takes place named Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson). His deputy Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) challenges Wade, and when Wade starts to threaten him, Deeds threatens to expose his corruption. Wade disappears a few hours later (in 1957), and Buddy Deeds is the next sheriff. About … Read the rest

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I saw this via Tehmina Kazi…and I can’t bear it. I can’t stand this one.

The Independent reports:

Thousands of people have joined silent vigils across Germany to pay tribute to a student who was beaten to death after stopping a group of men harassing two women.

Tugce Albayrak, 22, intervened when she heard the women screaming for help in a restaurant toilet in the city of Offenbach on 15 November.

But later, in the car park, she was brutally attacked with a bat by one of the men and left with critical head injuries, theSuddeutsche Zeitung reported.

Her parents made the decision to switch off her life support on Friday after doctors told them she would never

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The whole interview with Chris Boyce is on the CBC website.

There’s one clear discrepancy between his account and that of other people. He says he asked people who worked with Ghomeshi if they had anything more to report, and to tell him about it. The Fifth Estate people (see what I mean about awkward?) polled all those people to ask if Boyce had asked them that and every single one said no, there was nothing like that at all.

So…yes, it’s all too reminiscent of the way the JREF and DJ Grothe and even James Randi dealt with reports of sexual harassment and even rape. Silencing and lies.

And it’s in the same cause – the protection of popular … Read the rest

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The CBC show The Fifth Estate last night was about…Jian Ghomeshi.

Imagine the awkwardness! Ghomeshi was a CBC star, his show was a CBC show, his bosses were CBC bosses, the institution that fired him was the CBC, the institution that didn’t fire him sooner was the CBC – and there was Gillian Findlay on The Fifth Estate discussing the whole mess.

It makes for a fascinating program, which is frequently squirmy to watch. The Executive Director of CBC radio, Chris Boyce, is deeply uncomfortable to watch. He’s also terribly familiar. There are so many echoes in this whole show, and especially in what Boyce says. Findlay asks him why he didn’t act sooner, and he says with … Read the rest

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The BBC reports that there is probably more slavery in the UK than had been thought.

There could be between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, higher than previous figures, analysis for the Home Office suggests.

Modern slavery victims are said to include women forced into prostitution, “imprisoned” domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.

Make no mistake, that’s true of the US too.

The Home Office has launched a strategy to help tackle slavery.

It said the victims included people trafficked from more than 100 countries – the most prevalent being Albania, Nigeria, Vietnam and Romania – as well as British-born adults and children.

…

Modern slavery minister Karen Bradley told the BBC

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PZ pointed out James Taranto before, way back last February.

Ew.

There is a political panic about sexual assault in the military, which is a genuine problem, but people are – you know – taking it out by trying to convict men whether or not they’re guilty.

…

This seems to be turning into an effort to criminalize male sexuality, much as we see with sexual conduct codes on campus.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=aylxXfw6cTc… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Sea Monster on Guest post: Class and gender in Saudi Arabia.

The human resource thing interests me a lot. I first noticed it at Uni and it then at work. Loud mouth blokes wouldn’t hear a good idea if was uttered by a woman.

If I repeated it (sorry did you just say…) they would hear it.

I’ve mentored two successful projects at work where the winning ideas came from women. One of the projects received industry accolades.

Again when the ideas came from women the blokes never heard them. When I debriefed the team (did anyone notice…) there were ashen faces around the table when they realised the importance of what they had ignored. … Read the rest

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I’m in a looking for sources mood today. I got curious about Sommers’s ridiculous claim that 3d wave intersectional feminism is the intellectual equivalent of creationism. I paid a visit to Google. I discovered a Wall Street Journal editorial by James Taranto January 14, 2013.

He gives a rundown of his inch-deep understanding of evolutionary psychology and his caricature of feminist criticisms of some of it. Then he asks what it all means.

Why would the New York Times, which scoffs at creationism, publish such an intellectually slipshod attack on evolution? Because evolutionary psychology contradicts the feminist dogma that the sexes are created equal, that all differences between men and women (or at least those differences that represent male

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A friend posted this on my Facebook autolink to the AEI post.

[I]n the late 1960s and early 1970s members of the new conservative intelligentsia persuaded both wealthy individuals and some corporate leaders to funnel cash into a conservative intellectual infrastructure. To a large extent this infrastructure consists of think tanks that are set up to resemble academic institutions, but only publish studies that play into a preconceived point of view.

The American Enterprise Institute, although it was founded in 1943, expanded dramatically beginning in 1971, when it began receiving substantial amounts of corporate money and grants from conservative family foundations. The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 with cash from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife. The libertarian Cato

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Ray Rice appealed his indefinite suspension from the NFL and today he won the appeal.

The news does not come as a surprise, as many believed the NFL punished him twice for the same violation, breaking rules established in the collective bargaining agreement. In July, the NFL levied a two-game suspension on the player for a domestic altercation with his then fiancee Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City elevator. But in September, the league decided to suspend Rice indefinitely after TMZ leaked video footage of the running back knocking out his now-wife in the elevator.

It’s not entirely fair to call it a “domestic altercation” when he slammed her to the floor and knocked her unconscious. However mutual the … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Marcus Ranum on No unaccompanied women allowed.

Clearly men are allowed to ogle.

Not really. It’s more like complete separation. When I was in Saudi, in one restaurant, I got up to go to the bathroom and started to walk the wrong way – apparently heading towards the women’s section. I was quickly blocked and herded the right way; apparently it’s a pretty serious offense if you’re a single male and go into the women’s section.

I am not in any way attempting to downplay the general misogyny on display in Saudi. The net effect is totalitarian across all genders; everyone must bend in accordance with the rules cooked up by the parasitic wankers who … Read the rest

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Now for Sourcewatch on the AEI.

Originally set up as a spokesperson for big business and the promotion of free enterprise, the AEI came to major national prominence in the 1970s under the leadership of William Baroody, Sr., during which time it grew from a group of twelve resident “thinkers” to a well-funded organization with 145 resident scholars, 80 adjunct scholars, and a large supporting staff. This period of growth was largely funded by the Howard Pew Freedom Trust.

Follow the link for citations.

In 1986, the Olin and Smith Richardson foundations withdrew their support from AEI because of substantive disagreement with certain of its policies, causing William Baroody, Jr. to resign in the ensuing financial crisis.

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